Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England



,QWHUQDWLRQDOH)RUVFKXQJHQ]XU $OOJHPHLQHQXQG 9HUJOHLFKHQGHQ/LWHUDWXUZLVVHQVFKDIW

,Q9HUELQGXQJPLW 1RUEHUW %DFKOHLWQHU 8QLYHUVLWlW :LHQ  'LHWULFK %ULHVHPHLVWHU )ULHGULFK 6FKLOOHU8QLYHUVLWlW -HQD )UDQFLV&ODXGRQ8QLYHUVLWp3DULV;,, -RDFKLP.QDSH8QLYHUVLWlW7ELQJHQ .ODXV/H\ -RKDQQHV*XWHQEHUJ8QLYHUVLWlW0DLQ] -RKQ$0F&DUWK\9DQGHUELOW8QLYHUVLW\ $OIUHG1RH 8QLYHUVLWlW:LHQ 0DQIUHG3ILVWHU)UHLH8QLYHUVLWlW%HUOLQ 6YHQ+5RVVHO8QLYHUVLWlW:LHQ KHUDXVJHJHEHQYRQ

$OEHUWR0DUWLQR 8QLYHUVLWlW:LHQ

5HGDNWLRQ(UQVW*UDERYV]NL $QVFKULIWGHU5HGDNWLRQ ,QVWLWXWIU9HUJOHLFKHQGH/LWHUDWXUZLVVHQVFKDIW%HUJJDVVH$:LHQ

Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Edited by

Susanne Rupp and Tobias Döring

$PVWHUGDP1HZ
/H SDSLHU VXU OHTXHO OH SUpVHQW RXYUDJH HVW LPSULPp UHPSOLW OHV SUHVFULSWLRQV GH ³,62  ,QIRUPDWLRQ HW GRFXPHQWDWLRQ  3DSLHU SRXU GRFXPHQWV 3UHVFULSWLRQVSRXUODSHUPDQHQFH´ 7KH SDSHU RQ ZKLFK WKLV ERRN LV SULQWHG PHHWV WKH UHTXLUHPHQWV RI ³ ,62 ,QIRUPDWLRQDQGGRFXPHQWDWLRQ3DSHUIRUGRFXPHQWV5HTXLUHPHQWV IRUSHUPDQHQFH´ 'LH 5HLKH Ä,QWHUQDWLRQDOH )RUVFKXQJHQ ]XU $OOJHPHLQHQ XQG 9HUJOHLFKHQGHQ /LWHUDWXUZLVVHQVFKDIW³ZLUGDEGHP-DKUJHPHLQVDPYRQ(GLWLRQV5RGRSL $PVWHUGDP±1HZ
CONTENTS

TOBIAS DÖRING Introduction ................................................................................................................ 7 PAUL STROHM The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Commemoration and Repetition in Late Medieval Culture ..................................... 33 ANDREW JAMES JOHNSTON The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight................................. 45 THOMAS HEALY Performing the Self: Reformation History and the English Renaissance Lyric....... 65 ANDREAS HÖFELE Stages of Martyrdom: John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments ...................................... 81 ANDREW HADFIELD James VI and I, George Buchanan and the Divine Right of Kings.......................... 95 VERENA OLEJNICZAK LOBSIEN “Transformed in show, but more transformed in mind”: Sidney’s Old Arcadia and the Performance of Perfection ..................................... 105 SUSANNE RUPP Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology.......................... 119 RICHARD WILSON Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries ....................................................... 135 INA SCHABERT The Lady’s Supper: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum as a Female Celebration of the Eucharist ............................................................... 155 IRMGARD MAASSEN Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet ..................................... 169 SABINE SCHÜLTING Tobacco—Sacred and Profane ............................................................................... 189 Notes on Contributors.................................................................................................. 205

This page intentionally left blank

INTRODUCTION by Tobias Döring The Sacred The sacred is generally defined with reference to its opposite. But the available opposition is neither singular nor simple. In semantic terms, the sacred can be opposed to the profane as well as to the secular; in pragmatic terms, it is opposed to specific counterforces, such as the familiar figure of the devil. Recent studies of the sacred and its ways in late medieval and early modern English culture bear this out. Books like The Devil and the Sacred, Sacred and Profane or The Secularization of Early Modern England openly carve out and name their subject in this interplay of opposites, while a volume unambiguously entitled Religion and Culture in Renaissance England still sets out, as the introduction says, to explore the cultural negotiations between sacred and secular domains, such as theatre and theology, classical and Christian, or the body and the soul.1 Thus, when it comes to explorations into notions, forms and functions of the sacred, antithetical constructions are appealing and, in many ways, compelling. Three points should be noted here. First, however plausible and wide-spread they may be, the oppositions so constructed are not generally considered stable. In fact, the studies mentioned all begin by emphasizing the potential doubleness and invertibility of their central terms. An inversion of religion in sacrilege and desecration, John Sommerville argues, is no evidence of secularization because hostility to aspects of religion in medieval England was often expressed in religious terms.2 By the same token, John Cox looks at English stage devils across three centuries as “the last explicit remnant of continuous traditions in staging the sacred”.3 And Helen Wilcox points out that sacred and profane, 1. John Cox, The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Alasdair MacDonald / Richard Todd / Helen Wilcox eds., Sacred and Profane: Secular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British Literature (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996); C. John Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Claire McEachern / Debora Shuger eds., Religion and Culture in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 2. Sommerville (1992), p. 10. 3. Fox (2000), p. 5.

8

Tobias Döring

though “inherently” in opposition to one another, are “inevitably” interconnected as part of human culture and experience, “even at times sharing the same vocabulary”.4 What are we, then, to make of such claims that a key concept like the sacred which no period or culture seems to do without is constantly in danger of colluding, if not actually collapsing, with its opposite?5 Second, we observe that the two most common terms of opposition to the sacred— profane and secular—are not fully synonymous. Both draw a boundary but draw it differently, cutting through spatial as opposed to temporal notions. The resulting difference between these terms may therefore indicate some foregoing difference within. Profane etymologically means ‘outside the temple’ and so derives from rites and acts of worship for which, typically, a special place has been assigned and in some way or other consecrated. Everything placed inside this location must be dedicated to the holy cause, hence comply with its demands. Anything or anyone placed outside is profane, that is to say, they cannot immediately and unmeditated participate in the rites practiced there. At most, they may cross the threshold to the sanctum under strict conditions often regulated in some rite de passage, the physical and formal movement from profane to sacred space.6 In this sense, the sacred is a category of emplacement. As Claude Lévi-Strauss said with regard to holy objects, being in their place is what makes them sacred.7 When opposed to secular, on the other hand, the sacred is a category of eternity. Etymologically this term means ‘of the age or time’, hence of the world. It refers to the basic human habit of structuring the constant flow of time into manageable units, saecula, as well-defined periods with a beginning and the clear sense of an ending—albeit fictionally. “We use fictions”, Frank Kermode argued in his classic study of this process, “to enable the end to confer organization and form on the temporal structure”, a necessary cultural move to furnish ourselves with a sense of orientation and belonging, “an organization that humanizes time by giving it form”.8 Whatever cannot readily be humanized in this way to become part of worldly forms and structure must be recognized as sacred. It transcends the confines of our temporality and so seems to exist outside the plots and fictions that we live by. And yet, the most powerful notions of the sacred may attain their status and attraction in the ways they compel human cultural activity and confront the engagements of history. Nor is the exclusive spatial domain constructed for them ever

4. Helen Wilcox, “Introduction”, in Sacred and Profane: Secular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British Literature, ed. by Alasdair MacDonald / Richard Todd / Helen Wilcox (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996), pp. xi-xiii, at pp. xi-xii. 5. Dietmar Kamper / Christoph Wulf eds., Das Heilige. Seine Spur in der Moderne (Frankfurt a. M.: athenäum, 1987), p. 2. 6. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 20. 7. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Das Wilde Denken, trans. by Hans Naumann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, [1962] 1973), p. 21. 8. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, [1967] 1968), p. 45.

Introduction

9

inviolate. The boundaries which prohibitions and taboos draw around the sacred have always already been transgressed. This brings us to the third issue. Unlike its near cognate holy, which according to a classic argument by Mary Douglas implies wholeness, integrity and purity, the sacred has long been claimed to contain internal divisions and conflicting impulses.9 “To be sacred is to be marked out, set apart and thus to resemble the criminal or outsider”, Terry Eagleton observes in his recent study about the idea of the tragic.10 But the uncanny resemblances he finds go deeper and reach into the very core where the term sacred itself turns out to be riven by semantic difference and puzzling duplicity. It was Sigmund Freud who emphasized, in Moses and Monotheism, that Latin sacer means both ‘consecrated’ and ‘accursed’, both ‘holy’ and ‘damned’.11 The word was originally used to designate something, or someone, we must revere and shun because it, or he, is sanctified and at the same time terrifying. Earlier, in Totem and Taboo, Freud outlined the same constellation of danger, sanctity and terror and, citing Frazer on taboo and magic, related its effects to figures of political authority.12 Rulers must not only be guarded, they must also be guarded against—an ambivalent injunction, which Freud illustrates with reference to the monarchs of early modern England. The royal touch in cure of scrofula called “the king’s evil”, an old healing operation which King James I was eager to revive and which Shakespeare celebrated in Macbeth (4.3.149-160), is a prominent manifestation of the secret as well as sacred powers embodied in the monarchy.13 But although physical contact with its representatives may be beneficial, uncontrolled contagion of their numinous power can easily turn destructive. The “strange virtue” (as Shakespeare’s Malcolm says) of kingship and the sacred remain deeply ambivalent. The point has been noted and incisively explored in central studies like Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer.14 Yet among modern researchers, no one has made more of this ambivalence than René Girard. His investigations into cultural foundations and functions of the sacred proceed on the assumption of a fundamental spread of rampant violence. To him, all cultural and social order founds itself through ritual slaughter, which channels and deflects this endlessly destructive force and so might manage to contain it. The sacred enters this scenario as the authority to which a community must appeal when trying to substitute regular acts of sacrifice for uncontrolled devastation. In his account, the duplicitous or inherently oppositional character of the sacred is the precondition by which it can be used to maintain cultural differentiations—such as the one between legitimate 9. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: ARK Paperbacks, 1966), p. 54. 10. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence. The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 278. 11. Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 1999) vol. 16, p. 230. 12. Freud (1999), vol. 9, pp. 53f. 13. The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt / Walter Cohen / Jean E. Howard / Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997). 14. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

10

Tobias Döring

and criminal violence—and so obscure its own violent roots. As Girard argues with reference to the social anthropology of scapegoating, “because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him—but the victim is sacred only because he is killed”.15 For all their puzzling and irritating circularity, what observations like this emphasize is the same insight into the ambivalent nature of the sacred which has been noted earlier. Indeed, it also concerns the central mystery of Christian rites like the Eucharist sacrifice where it survives in the strange fusion of victimage and victory. In more critical accounts, however, the Girardian idea of archaic violence allegedly inherent in all human culture has been received with caution,16 not least for its political appeal. If sacrifice is seen as the act which brings new social order into being, purified and consecrated through communal bloodshed—such views are part of questionable ideologies and lend themselves to far-reaching political projects. The whole idea of sacred slaughter and the energizing force of suffering may well be viewed in close connection to its place of utterance. In this sense, Eagleton has urged to reconsider the modernist interest in ancient tragedy and suggested that “the road from the plains of Argos to the playing fields of Eton is not as circuitous as one might suspect”.17 The world of slain heroes and risen redeemers he claims is as firmly grounded in the ambience of the Cambridge school of anthropology as in Oxford medievalism, which “values the cultic above the commonplace, the pre-modern over the modern, natural vitality against urban decadence”. To say the least, scholarly research and theories of the sacred are themselves involved in the problematic oppositions they set out to investigate. Still, such approaches to the sacred have nevertheless become productive for their close relation to literature and the mimetic quality of drama. Quite apart from Girard’s own discussions of Greek tragedy or the theatre of envy in Shakespearean plays, his theory itself traces connections between mimesis and the cultural work of violence.18 He describes them as a process by which acts of rivalry and imitation continuously produce mimetic doubles of what they originally oppose. The relevance that this may, or may not, have for his readings of literature is not really an issue here. But its potential relevance for critical engagements with the sacred can hardly be denied. In fact, the emphasis on mimesis leads us to confront the central problem that the sacred, whether in Christian or in pagan cultures, has long been recognized to pose: the problem of representation. In a recent article, Gary Taylor has observed that the question of how to represent divinity or who, if anyone, can act as its representative has preoccupied societies more frequently and with greater force than the more basic and logically prior question of whether

15. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 1. 16. See the critical discussion in Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, ed. Violent Origins. Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan K. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), especially the contribution by Jonathan K. Smith in this volume, pp. 191-205. 17. Eagleton (2002), p. 274. 18. Girard (1977); René Girard, A Theatre of Envy. William Shakespeare (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Introduction

11

a divine being exists at all.19 Doubts more often focus on the ways and means of divine representation than on the modalities of its existence. This is because, Taylor argues, the “divine essence is ex-sense, outside the senses, beyond understanding” and therefore transgressing the spatial and temporal coordinates in which we structure all perception. If communities nevertheless shape themselves around spaces and devices set apart and sacralized, they must find some mimetic substitute for what eludes the human grasp. Unlike divinity, we might add, the sacred entails some sanctifying agent and so it only appears in the company of a priestly class endowed with a peculiar power to consecrate. In this way, churches, priests and rulers no less than, in some cases, writers or artists traditionally participate in giving the sacred a local habitation and, often, voice and name. But whatever rites, images, narratives or religious practices have thus been devised, they raise the same fundamental questions: how can the sacred be presented and yet guarded, claimed yet concealed, staged in public and at the same time kept exclusive? How is it employed to resolve crises in the body politic? And how can authorities resort to it so as to perform their power and, ultimately, legitimize violence? These are the central questions which this multi-authored volume sets out to address. With its focus on exemplary developments from the late fourteenth to the early seventeenth century, our project concerns a period of momentous change in English culture resulting in a questioning and pluralization of notions of the sacred on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Charting a cultural territory that is usually defined by historical, literary and religious studies, the following chapters together aim to establish a more inclusive perspective in order to identify and investigate a fundamental, shared concern: how and to what end performances of the sacred affect, or effect, such social transformations. As a common critical framework in which to place the issues raised here, as our title indicates, all chapters reflect on functions of performance. The present introduction serves to explain the implications of this choice and, in the next section, consider the threshold period of late medieval and early modern England.

Late Medieval and Early Modern Like many genitive constructions, the phrase “performances of the sacred” allows two different readings: the sacred may either be the subject or the object of performance. With the foregoing discussion, the second reading is underlined: the sacred seems to have been constituted through special cultural performances, sanctifying certain places, acts or objects and so make them a special part—integral and yet placed on the threshold— of social experience. In a historical perspective, however, the first reading may be underlined: for believers and practitioners, all such performances must themselves be emanations, if not actual manifestations, of the sacred power and so convey its real presence. 19. Gary Taylor, “Divine [ ]sences”, Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001), 13-30, here p. 13.

12

Tobias Döring

The Christian mystery of the host and its attendant rituals in the traditional church provide a case in point. Besides, they challenge us to think more carefully about questions of change and continuity in England through protestant reforms in the historical period at stake here. For the majority of laymen, encounters with the sacred concentrated on the holy mass and culminated in the moment, often announced with the ringing of a special bell, when the host was raised for all to view.20 The sight of the sacred was the climactic point of the liturgy and, in a sense, of the whole of medieval religious life. With this act and in this moment, the miracle of transubstantiation occurred and the sacramental community newly formed around it. And yet it was obscured. Fully managed by clerical monopoly, the sight of the host was in most churches hidden by the Rood-screen that divided high altar and nave or, during Lent, by a huge veil within the sanctuary area—both of which rather blocked the congregation's visual participation. But here we may find an exemplary case for the complex interplay of concealment and exposure for encounters with the sacred that was outlined earlier. As Eamon Duffy says in his study of traditional religion in England, “both screen and veil were barriers, marking boundaries between the people’s part of the church and the holy of holies, the sacred space”, or as regards the veil, “between different types of time, festive and penitential”.21 These distinctions establish the sense of temporal as well as spatial exclusivity for the sacred, which its opposition to the secular as well as the profane demands. Duffy, though, goes on to argue that these barriers were never stable and in fact enabled constant crossings of the threshold. The symbolic effectiveness of the veil “heightened the value of the spectacle it temporarily concealed”, while the screen was “rather a set of windows” and a “frame for the liturgical drama” that might be penetrated in a two-way process.22 Nor was the spectacle of the raised host the only occasion when the sacred became object and subject of communal performances. What Duffy calls “the sacramental embodiment of social reality” used to take place most evidently with the great Corpus Christi processions, which came to create a spectacular climax in the ecclesiastical year and in the civic life of England.23 But due to their processional character presenting sanctified “symbols in motion” and through their coercive social ordering, stage-managed by special gilds, these processions also came to provide a platform for political tension— and later for religious reformation.24 In his monumental Book of Martyrs, for example, John Foxe would find occasion to retell the story of a curious and apparently insignificant disturbance of the Corpus Christi procession in Smithfield in May 1554. A simple man named John Streate, “a ioyner of Coleman streete”, went about some urgent busi20. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 97. 21. Duffy (1992), p. 111. 22. Ibid., pp. 111f. 23. Ibid., p. 11. 24. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi. The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 288.

Introduction

13

ness and happened to cross the street where the procession passed by. So he chanced to confront the priest under the canopy, who “being belike afraid, and worse feared than hurt, for feare let his Pixe fall downe”.25 Though at once arrested and charged with criminal intent, the joyner protested his complete innocence and was finally confined to Bedlam. Placed among the exemplary stories of the Marian martyrs, whose deeds and gruesome deaths Foxe otherwise recounts with programmatic detail, the story of Streate’s accidental encounter with the sacred host seems somewhat anti-climactic. But this may rather be its point. For it emphatically demonstrates to Foxe’s Elizabethan audience that simple tradesmen may have very different agendas than their ecclesiastical superiors and, in the pursuit of their honest tasks, cannot go out of their way to heed superstitious symbols. Whether or not this anecdote, mentioned also in the diary of Henry Machyn, bears historical scrutiny, its appearance in one of the most influential texts of early modern English culture is remarkable enough.26 It is meant to show here that the joyner’s behaviour follows temporal and spatial orientations at odds with the traditional notions of the sacred and their social performance. Debates on doctrine and the rise of protestant theology have for some time addressed the problem of continuity and discontinuity in the religious practices from late medieval to early modern England.27 As will become clearer in the following chapters, this volume takes a cautious and considered stance, attempting neither to overrate the cultural effects of the Reformation nor to deny its impact. The key question if and how a sense of community might have been enacted differently in pre- and post-Reformation society serves to explain our approach. It would be rash, first of all, to assume that a disturbance like John Streate’s could only have appealed to protestant advocates. Medieval practices of the sacred, concentrated on celebrating the mass or the Corpus Christi feast did not necessarily provide one seamless unity for all believers. Miri Rubin has argued that “ritual, and especially processional ritual, possesses an inherent destabilising element” because the need “to put into linear form social relations which are in their nature fluid and on-going exchanges, induced the choice of arbitrary format, one which necessarily distorts experience”.28 The Corpus Christi rites may be designed to address but do not always manage to contain these underlying contradictions and can therefore “induce tension and rivalry rather than resolve difference into communitas”.29 In the critical perspective developed in our volume, such insights may allow for generalization. Whatever forms and functions are adopted to manifest or manage versions of the sacred, they always aim to build a community of faithful adherents and practitioners. But since their performance like the Corpus Christi feast inhabits public space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, 25. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments [etc.] (London [1563] 1583), p. 1473. 26. Henry Machyn, The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor or London from AD 1550 to 1563, ed. by John Gough Nichols (London: Camden Society, 1848), p. 63. 27. See the contribution by Susanne Rupp in this volume. 28. Rubin (1991), p. 265. 29. Ibid., p. 267.

14

Tobias Döring

play, or sacrilege. When the reformed church later imposed sanctions against this festival—at the same time, remarkably, when the commercial playhouses opened in London—such a move can be considered an attempt to close down a particularly powerful public arena. But the problem of how to maintain the sense of communitas rather grew with the gradual, conflictive, piecemeal and repeated process that we refer to as the English Reformation.30 As the contributions to this book will argue in more detail, all aspects of social life—like the family, the nation, the monarchy, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or even smoking—may here become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of sacred symbols. Chief among these rank the changing performances of kingship, whose rituals and representations assumed some of the previously sacramental force. As part of the shift in cultural emphasis from real presence to royal presence, Richard McCoy argues, the socially integrative powers of the host were transferred to the monarchy to increase its charisma because the mass “as social institution”31 no longer operated in the old way.32 Its age-old and mysterious notion notwithstanding, sacral kingship persisted right through the Tudor and Stuart era and remained, as Debora Shuger says, “a cultural ideal and possibility” at the core of high Christian royalism.33 Other forces were conjoined, such as protestant preachers who addressed the English as the prophets once addressed Israel, in an attempt to single out the imagined community of a chosen nation.34 And yet, even as the new faith found ever more support, the fantasy of an England unified in one sacred cause gave way to nightmares of an England rapidly disintegrating. The publication of the vernacular Bible provides a case in point and, at the same time, further illustration of the constant need to guard, and guard against, manifestations of the sacred. Even when Roman authority was officially abrogated, Tyndale’s pioneering effort in translating and hence publicizing holy scripture was far from unanimously welcomed. The 1541 proclamation ordering the Great Bible to be placed in churches and so made publicly available to all English readers specifically tried to control, if not prevent, any act of individual reading or interpretive debate. Lay subjects were not allowed free access to the sacred word nor encouraged to “take upon them any common disputation, argument, or exposition of the mysteries therein contained”.35 Although the Reformation,

30. See Patrick Collinson, “English Reformations”, in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. by Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 27-43. 31. John Bossy, “The Mass as Social Institution, 1200–1700”, Past and Present 100 (1983) 29-61. 32. Richard McCoy, Alterations of State. Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. x. 33. Debora Kuller Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England. The Sacred and the State in “Measure for Measure” (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), p. 56. 34. Patrick Collinson, “Biblical Rhetoric: The English Nation and National Sentiment in the Prophetic Mode”, in McEachern / Shuger (1997), pp. 15-45. 35. David Scott Kastan, “‘The noyse of the new Bible’: Reform and Reaction in Henrician England”, in McEachern / Shuger (1997), pp. 46-68, here p. 59.

Introduction

15

at this stage of its contested English history, provided an accessible biblical text, the sacred performances it told of had to be kept exclusive. Cases such as this bear evidence of the threatening and increasing pluralization of the sacred, a process gaining in momentum as the sixteenth century went on. This may well lead us, following Robert Weimann's classic account, to suspect an unprecedented crisis and impending loss of stable hermeneutical authority.36 With protestant readings, religious debates, humanist learning and political ambitions all expanding, the forces of disintegration grew in equal measure. As never before in the catholic Middle Ages, so Weimann claimed, the words and signs of holy scriptures were now being appropriated and instrumentalized for diverse and diverging interests and to promote secular projects. This account certainly captures the acute sense of unrest and social instability that prevailed throughout the Tudor era. The claim, however, that this was a radically new development because religious readings had “never before” been instrumentalized in medieval politics, should be reconsidered and, in view of medievalist research, revised. Our present volume, at any rate, intends to widen the historical focus and look at performances of the sacred from the late fourteenth to the seventeenth century, in order to question such notions of medieval ‘otherness’ and instead situate Renaissance developments in relation to earlier hermeneutic conflicts and crises of authority. The instrumentalizing of biblical readings, clearly, was no innovation in the reformation period. Almost two centuries earlier, for example, the dynastic rupture with the deposition and killing of an anointed monarch was accompanied, if not produced, by efforts to construct a language of new legitimation. These consciously resorted to the tropes of biblical prophecy and Christian typology so as to champion sacralizing narratives for the Lancastrian ascendancy. In his comprehensive study of this project, Paul Strohm further shows how the question of the Eucharist was politically installed as a “litmus test of orthodoxy” for early heresy trials, against the alleged Lollard threat, to affect their foregone conclusion.37 Further investigations into uses of the sacred in late medieval politics are undertaken in the following chapters. Together they suggest a far more persistent pressure of debate, division and destabilization in performances of religion throughout medieval and early modern culture than conventional accounts of the English Renaissance as a time of great innovations suggest. In this way, the historical design of our volume not only offers a more comprehensive view of cultural developments, but also serves to question the metahistorical narrative that often defines modernity by setting itself off against ‘pre-modern’ times. Accordingly, the later chapters that take up the story in sixteenth century developments also highlight aspects of continuity across the epochal changes, thus responding to more recent scholarship. For even the most violent gestures of overthrow and rupture, 36. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare und die Macht der Mimesis: Autorität und Repräsentation im elisabethanischen Theater (Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, [1966] 1988), pp. 54-63. 37. Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne. Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 47.

16

Tobias Döring

such as raids of iconoclasm in the reformation heydays, still bear witness to traditional certainties. As Elizabeth Mazzola says, iconoclastic loathing of sacred images clearly invests them with crucial power.38 Likewise, the surprising continuity in English stage appearances of the devil as an oppositional threat to the community, described by Cox, despite momentous change in doctrine and religious practice, also implies a continuous function for performances of the sacred as the binding power of communal bonds.39 At any rate, the discourse of the sacred must be seen as ineluctable. Our secularized habits of thought today may lead us to underestimate the degree to which “religion was culture in early modern England”.40 Indeed, so unquestioningly powerful was this matrix of social existence throughout Tudor and Stuart England that fundamental opposition to it, attractive though it might be to imagine, proved impossible to articulate. Atheism, as a categorical denial of all notions of the sacred, had no voice except as echo of some other voices.41 The constant references to atheist dangers of the time, which we find in religious and political controversies, never converged on a speaking subject that might have answered to such claims. Instead, as Manfred Pfister shows, they condensed in spectres of sedition and subversion that were frequently projected onto stage characters or foreign figures like the notorious “Machiavel”.42 But no English writer of the period ever authorized unbelief and argued for rejections of the sacred. Such notions were just copiously quoted. A discourse without a subject of enununciation, atheism was therefore only cited as the attitude of others, unbelievers beyond the pale of human communitas. It existed, as it were, in quotation marks, perpetuated through report, slander, rumour, hearsay and accusation. Thus, if atheism could not represent itself and had to be represented, it shares a fundamental feature with the sacred. As argued above, the sacred, too, exists as a target of appeal or attribution and as the object of representational, sometimes also instrumentalizing strategies. This common citational character allows only repetition but no original authorization. And this now leads us to consider the critical focus on performance and performativity that the present volume aims to establish for discussions of the sacred.

38. Elizabeth Mazzola, The Pathology of the English Renaissance: Sacred Remains and Holy Ghosts (Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998), p. 106. 39. Fox (2000), p. 102. 40. Clair McEachern, “Introduction”, in McEachern / Shuger (1997), pp. 1-12, here p. 11. 41. For incisive discussions of this issue, see Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. The Religion of Rabelais, trans. by Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) and David Wotton, “Lucien Febvre and the Problem of Unbelief in the Early Modern Period”, Journal of Modern History 60 (1988) 695-730. 42. Manfred Pfister, “Elizabethan Atheism: Discourse Without Subject”, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (West) (Bochum: Kamp, 1991), pp. 59-81, here p. 65.

Introduction

17

Performance and Performative Since its formulation, or perhaps rediscovery, in the 1950s as a productive concept for central concerns in the arts, in literature, ethnography, linguistics and language philosophy, performative has become an extremely powerful and permeable term.43 But its prolific use has never blunted its imperative to reflect on how, and when, saying something interrelates with doing something. Accounts of its astonishing terminological career usually start with John Austin’s Harvard lectures How to do things with words, then lead through the vagaries of debate among and between communication theory, semiotics and poststructuralist philosophy, before culminating in the critical adoption of the term by gender theories and cultural studies in the 1990s.44 The broad historical and thematic spectrum in which performative seems to have proved invaluable has also led to a broadening of its signification. Yet the crucial point for which it is employed remains the same: it lies in shifting our critical attention from texts to acts, from products to processes, and from codes and structures to modes and dynamic strategies. This does not mean that textual, scriptural or conventional ways of meaning making should no longer have a place in cultural analysis. On the contrary, beginning with Austin’s inquiry into formulaic utterances—such as “I take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife”, to cite a ceremony traditionally under full ecclesiastical control—research into performance has often emphasized the constitutive function of a convention, a formula or pre-scripted model that must be cited for the performed act to succeed. It is this notion of citationality, or in the closely allied Derridaen term, the iterability at the core of all performance which has attracted most attention in critical debates, because the constant interplay of script and performance, norm and realization, or model and parody also inserts possibilities for difference and transgression into the practices of subject or gender formation. Because of their resort to institutionalized forms, however, such practices never operate outside the political arena. In his commentary on the Declaration of Independence, for example, Derrida argued that institutions such as states in whose name directives and declaratives will be performed are themselves subject to an inaugurating act founded on violence.45 At the same time, the concept of citationality quite simply describes what goes on in any stage drama whenever an actor delivers a performance based on lines an author wrote before him. In this way, the concept offers a conjunction of reclusive theories of illocution with immediate observations on theatrical performance that has certainly helped to establish so many current uses for the performative approach. In 1959 the 43. See Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Grenzgänge und Tauschhandel. Auf dem Weg zu einer performativen Kultur”, in Performanz. Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaft, ed. by Uwe Wirth (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002), pp. 277-300. 44. John L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. by James O. Urmson (London: Clarendon, 1962). 45. Jacques Derrida, “Unabhängigkeitserklärungen”, trans. by Friedrich Kittler, in Wirth (2002), pp. 121128, here p. 121.

18

Tobias Döring

American ethnographer Milton Singer introduced the key term “cultural performance” to describe what he called “particular instances of cultural organization”, such as weddings, temple festivals, recitations or plays.46 In his diction, then, the term refers not just to theatrical activities but, more generally and incisively, to all occasions and events by which a community finds ways to enact or reiterate the tenets on which it has been founded. This points to the understanding in which we use the term performance here: as an organized and structured event in which something takes place that effects all involved—performers, producers, presenters, participants, spectators, bystanders—even though in different ways and different measure; in its process, social energies are being circulated, forces developed, actions initiated, transformations experienced.47 Related but not fully cognate with it, the term performative is used in the sense derived from Austin’s analysis: to describe the social consequence of verbal acts, utterances which change the way things are. Here is not the place to retell the complex history of these terms nor their proliferations.48 The following paragraphs should rather serve to comment on three points: why this focus has been adopted for our inquiry into the sacred; how its relation to the literary material we draw on should be understood; and in what way it opens a promising perspective on medieval and early modern culture. For each of these points we can just reiterate what one of the first volumes about literary uses of this concept said by way of introduction:49 the focus on performativity and performance should never be a self-sufficient end but always emerge as an active question. The sacred has repeatedly been treated and regarded in close connection with performance. In our historical framework, though, religious rites and ceremonies were often associated with a sense of theatre and spectacle. Even if this association became prominent and polemical in the critical idiom emerging with the Reformation, it also points to underlying links. The affinities, as Louis Montrose remarked, “between the theatrical playing space, the ecclesiastical sacred space, and the charmed circle” are as clear and close as they are suggestive and far reaching.50 But to identify such convergences and 46. Milton Singer, ed., Traditional India. Structure and Change (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1959), p. xiii. 47. See Erika Fischer-Lichte / Jens Roselt, “Attraktion des Augenblicks – Aufführung, Performance, performativ und Performativität als theaterwissenschaftliche Begriffe”, in Theorien des Performativen. Paragrana 10: 1 (2001) 237-253, here pp. 239f. 48. See Marvin Carlson, Performance. A Critical Introduction (London, New York: Routledge, 1996); Erika Fischer-Lichte / Doris Kolesch eds., Kulturen des Performativen. Paragrana 7: 1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998); Erika Fischer-Lichte / Christoph Wulf, eds., Theorien des Performativen. Paragrana 10: 1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001); Wirth (2002). 49. See: “It is in this theoretical surround that the link between performativity and performance in the theatrical sense has become, at last, something more than a pun or an unexamined axiom: it emerges, as in many of the essays collected here, as an active question.” Andrew Parker / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Introduction: Performativity and Performance”, in Performativity and Performance, ed. by Andrew Parker / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (New York, London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 1-18, here p. 8. 50. Louis Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearen Anthropology”, Helios n.s. 7: 2 (1980) 51-74, here p. 62.

Introduction

19

conversions between rituals of communion and stage practice is, in itself, not really saying very much, especially before we can also specify, as Andreas Höfele points out, in what way or direction the process of exchange and borrowing takes place: does theatre feed on religious charisma or must, conversely, forms of sacred worship resort to theatrical means to become efficacious?51 A first step towards a more helpful understanding of this ambiguous alliance lies in acknowledging that the word sacred itself bears witness to the power of performance. Originally a past participle designating something that has been rendered ‘sacred’, the word’s history points to the antecedent social action by which certain words of consecration have singled out a space or object and declared it to be special—a paradigmatic case of the performatives in Austin’s sense. This is why the sacred, as argued in Part I, needs the working of a priestly class who constitute the institutional frame for such speech acts to take place and who control their power. Another step to acknowledge the strong functional connection between the sacred and performance lies in considering Christian doctrines, such as incarnation or transubstantiation, with regard to play acting, impersonation and the physicality of theatrical events. As Michael O’Connell has explained, “theatrical presence is not mere sign but a use of corporeality to ‘body forth’ the fiction it portrays”.52 In this most elementary sense, therefore, theatre follows the incarnational understanding that was realized in the liturgy throughout medieval culture. With the transformation of church ritual into stage drama, but before its integration into more secular domains, the conjunction of religious service with the theatre was a particularly happy, or holy, one.53 Like in classical antiquity, theatre practices in Christian cultures developed from such performances of the sacred. All signs, gestures and paraphernalia of faith could traditionally profit from the sense of sacralizing presence. As a consequence of their different views on modes of corporeality and presence for the sacred, the protestant reformers later took particular issue with this aspect of religion, claiming to purify the church from all associations of its practice with bodies and material objects that were thought to have been sacralized. In his anti-Catholic diatribe against “The Kingdom of Darkness”, for instance, Thomas Hobbes demanded to distinguish between conjuration and consecration: to consecrate something simply means “to change, not the thing Consecrated, but only the use of it, from being Profane and common, to be Holy, and peculiar to Gods service”, rather than “pretend” that its material qualities were changed.54 In the same way, sixteenth-century protestant rhetoric routinely railed against the histrionics of the mass. In the words of Phillip Stubbs, “euen then, is there such censing, and singing, such masking and rynging, such chauncing and roarying, and musicke soundynge, that

51. Andreas Höfele, “‘As farre as doth the mind of man’: Das elisabethanische Theater – ein heiliger Ort, ein unheiliger?”, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (West) (Bochum: Kamp, 1991), pp. 46-80, here p. 51. 52. Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye. Iconoclasm and Theatre in Early-Modern England (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 20. 53. See Muir (1997), p. 69. 54. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: J. M. Dent, 1914 [1651]), p. 335.

20

Tobias Döring

thou wouldest rather thynke it a Satyricall stage playe of fooles consecrated to the Deuil, than a sober seruice of wise man instituted to God”.55 But for all their studious polemics, followers of the reformed faith were just as much engaged in performative projects as their opponents. “At the center of Protestant worship”, O’Connell says, “stands an essentially dramatic performance: the sermon”.56 And because of its essential role in the way to salvation, homiletic delivery mobilized the full repertoire of rhetorical and theatrical devices. Masters in the art of suspense, preachers captivated their audience for hours on end and used special ingenuity in the command and calculated show of physical emotions, such as weeping and crying, which otherwise are the domain, as Hamlet reports (2.2.528-37), of first-rate orators and actors.57 “The voyce of a preacher ought to be the voyce of a cryer”, an Elizabethan doctor of divinity told his congregation in Easter Week, “which shoulde not pipe to make the people daunce, but mourne to make them weep”; for “weeping is more pearcing, & more forcible to perswade God, and euen to wound his hart, then all the eloquence, & all the rhetoricke in the world”.58 But even while this preacher is rejecting rhetoric and theatre as profane or secular pursuits, his own preaching demonstrates how strongly he himself must draw on them for his avowed sacred purpose. This is known as the “performative contradiction”: an evident discrepancy between saying and doing something, which has been of special interest for students of performativity.59 The example illustrates the need to pay attention to self-reflexive moves like this, to contradictory turns, physical inflections or gestures of orality as integral parts of texts and written sources when studying the forms and functions of performance. For the focus on performance is not confined to theatre and drama. It can also be employed when analysing literary texts which are not meant for stage realization but nevertheless fashion themselves in particular ways. Apostrophes, appellative moves, perlocutionary effects, dialogical orientation towards an implied audience, foregrounding the speaking persona, simulating physical presence, corporeality and voice, or displaying self-awareness and self-reflexivity—these are some of the strategies by which written texts engage with the power of performatives.60 Thus, even while our discussions in this volume grant priority to acts over texts, we can still analyse and must acknowledge the acts done with texts, the acts committed to texts or the actions performed through them. This point is raised here to explain how and why the majority of chapters in this book in fact work with a range of literary texts, only in some cases directly related to theatre projects. We neither wish to privilege a purely literary vision of our topic nor to preclude 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

Phillip Stubbes, The Theater of the Popes Monarchie [etc] (London: Thomas Dawson, 1584), p. A2. O’Connell (2000), p. 90. Collinson (1997), p. 32. Thomas Playfere, The Meane in Mourning (London: Iames Roberts, 1595), pp. 14, 18. Wirth (2002), p. 16. See Irmgard Maassen, “Text und/als/in der Performanz in der frühen Neuzeit: Thesen und Überlegungen (mit einem Appendix von Manfred Pfister: Skalierung von Performativität)”, in Fischer-Lichte / Wulf (2001), pp. 285-302, here p. 289.

Introduction

21

other historical or anthropological inquiries into sacred practices. Our more sharply defined view on works of English literature as instances to explore issues of the sacred should rather give evidence of the cultural performances which literary works are shaped by and which they, in turn, help to reshape. But as the chapters will show in greater detail, this does not mean that literature is derivative of some primary event it transcribes. Just as much as performances rely on texts, texts relate to performance. In any case, the textual practices of medieval and early modern England are richly implicated in the social interaction and exchange that qualify performatives. Whether in the case of auricular confession or the exemplary tales of martyrs, in love sonnets, religious lyrics or the courtly pursuit of perfection—to cite only a few of the fields to be explored here—our subsequent readings of literature all follow the traces of performance they display and utilize. With regard to the sacred, however, this project involves a problem, because in religious language such traces are often programmatically concealed. As illustrated in the above quotation from Playfere’s Easter week sermon, the performative power of rhetorical devices is seen as embarrassing, even compromising the sacred purpose it should serve. The oldest theory of how to do things with words, rhetoric has long been awkward to own up to, but especially so where transcendental matters are concerned. In the English Renaissance therefore, Shuger explains at the outset of her study of this problem, “sacred rhetoric is a polemical issue, possibly even a heresy” because, according to its own practitioners, it was not supposed to exist.61 On the other hand, the English Renaissance, as an extended era of transition, cultural pluralization and religious controversy, was a period in which powerful rhetorical manoeuvres were used to establish a performative domain for texts precisely to escape easy control by ecclesiastical or secular authorities. In his reading of the politics of the sacred and the profane in Spenser’s Foure Hymnes, for instance, Jonathan Sawday has shown that the self-concealing strategy of “deniability” was a key mode to acknowledge and at the same time unacknowledge texts as actions that might become inopportune, and so served as a way for Elizabethan courtiers, and even for the Queen herself, to guard against change in the political fortunes.62 To this end, precarious texts like Spenser’s invest in a rhetoric of doubleness and vacillation which implicates their audience, but not their authors, in potential consequences. “In political terms”, Sawday concludes, “they might appear as extraordinary fortuitous performances” precisely because their doctrinal or ideological position remains so elusive.63 But if the political fortuity of performance lies in this kind of equivocation, how then can performance ever become subservient to religion and belief? “Performance kills belief; or rather, acknowledging theatricality kills the credibility of the supernatural.” Greenblatt’s pronouncement, in the context of his study of religious 61. Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric. The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 3. 62. Jonathan Sawday, “Posion and Honey: The Politics of the Sacred and the Profane in Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes (1596)”, in Alasdair MacDonald / Richard Todd / Helen Wilcox (1996), pp. 79-92, here pp. 85f. 63. Ibid., p. 90.

22

Tobias Döring

exorcism and Shakespearean drama, gives further ground to question the relation between acts of faith and acts of stage.64 But his observations on possession, counterfeit demons and what he calls the “performance test” by which they are discovered may not bear generalization. Religious belief is not always and not necessarily the precondition of religious practice; the common and open participation in performances of the sacred may also generate, not only kill, belief—or should, at any rate, suspend the distinction between believers and unbelievers, rendering it insubstantial. The 1559 Act of Uniformity required general church attendance and strict observance to the forms of worship, but with its emphasis on “common and open prayer”—“that prayer which is for other to come unto or hear”—demanded uniformity only when and where it could be witnessed.65 This was, according to Ramie Targoff’s argument, the rationale on which the whole Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer rested.66 Even though it may have failed in edifying congregations, it still constructed a communality of practitioners in the performative gestures of conformity it constituted and regulated. Again, the theatre might have been a helpful model to accommodate such ambiguous moves that cut across our notion of clearly distinguishing illusion from reality or belief from make-believe. For the ability of early audiences “to tolerate inherent ambiguities in theatrical illusion”, Cox reminds us, “is hard to overestimate”.67 Enactments of stage devils are a case in point, not just because their force was put to the test in exorcist trials. Working in the same way as stage miracles, stage devils necessarily involve an actor in a costume and thereby produce “an unavoidable ambiguity at the heart of what the play presents”. Equally unavoidable, the ambiguities at the heart of all performances of the sacred which this introduction has surveyed, finally point to the principle reason why this volume presents the performative as key reference. Performance and performatives embrace, rather than shun, ambiguities and contradictions because their process plays them out. As one of the earliest proponents of the performative in cultural studies said, performance “includes the impulse to be serious and to entertain; to collect meanings and to pass the time; to display symbolic behaviour that actualizes ‘there and then’ and to exist only ‘here and now’; to be oneself and to play at being others”.68 And with this inclusive power to present oppositions instead of levelling them down, performance finally emerges as an appropriate perspective to pose the question of the sacred—precisely because the sacred, as argued at the outset, is so intimately structured, surrounded and defined by opposition. It just remains, as Höfele crit64. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations. The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 109. 65. David Cressy / Lori Anne Ferrell, eds., Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook (London, New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 58. 66. Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer. The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 39. 67. Cox (2000), p. 151. 68. Richard Schechner, Essays on Performance Theory 1970–1976 (New York: Ralph Pine / Drama Books Specialists, 1977), p. 87.

Introduction

23

ically noted in response to Schechner’s claim, to historicize this sweeping statement with regard to concrete cases and specific practices.69 This is what the following chapters, each in its own way, set out to do, with reference to specific texts and contexts.

Outline of Chapters70 The volume opens with a chapter by PAUL STROHM about “Commemoration and Repetition in Late Medieval Culture”, focussing on the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. He begins with the observation that the consecration of the Eucharist host was the principal religious ceremony of late medieval society. But after widespread promulgation and acceptance of the doctrine of transubstantiation in the thirteenth century, this ceremony ceased to be regarded as a simple symbol of Christ’s sacrifice, and was instead viewed as a reiteration of that sacrifice. The host was not just a symbol of Christ’s body, but Christ’s body itself, body and bones, appearances or ‘accidents’ notwithstanding. Like the grail, the philosopher’s stone, and the royal mint, the Eucharist was viewed as a site of uncanny productivity, enjoying a capacity for endless and infinite reproduction. In fact, the main rationale for the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the visible Church of the later middle ages revolved around the administration of the Eucharist’s symbolic surplus. Nonetheless, despite the recruitment of ‘Mass-priests’ and the proliferation of public and private altars and the linkage of recitations of the Mass to the burgeoning purgatorial system, the requirements of eucharistic consecration seemed always to grow. The work of consecration was never, and could never, be done; the task always, and inherently, exceeded the resources available for its accomplishment. Late medieval Christian society may virtually be defined as a society of commemoration through repetition. Strohm therefore explores the extent to which the task of repetition was imaginatively shared out, with unbelievers no less than believers commonly enlisted to meet its demands. This is the case with the Jews of the Croxton Play who, as with other hostdesecrators of popular orthodox imagination, were thought to scheme constantly to possess themselves of consecrated hosts and to re-subject them to the trials experienced by the crucified Christ. Nailing their illicitly-purchased host to a pillar, stabbing at it with knives, confining it to a hot oven, the Croxton Jews invent a ‘new Passion’, re-performing the essential features of the old. Among other explanations for the origin and prompt ubiquity of such anti-Jewish legends in the later Middle Ages is the total mobilization of late medieval society around the task of sacramental repetition. In the face 69. Höfele (1991), p. 48. 70. Most of the chapters collected here were first presented at a conference held under the auspices of the Sonderforschungsbereich “Kulturen des Performativen” at the Freie Universität Berlin in May 2002. The editors would like to acknowledge the generous contributions and comments by all participants on this occasion, especially Bernhard Klein, Jürgen Klein, Michael Neill and Lee Patterson. Manfred Pfister has shaped and shepherded our project from its inception to publication. In the preparation of the manuscript, Kirstin Müller and Frank Gertich have given us unfailing help. To all, our thanks.

24

Tobias Döring

of an unstinting demand for repetition of Christ’s sacrifice, Jews and other aliens were fantastically recruited as paradoxical allies in the task of sacramental reproduction. In response to an over-riding sacramental injunction, the Jewish ‘other’ was imagined as paradoxically ‘same’ in the desire to repeat or reiterate the originary sacrifice of Christ. In the following chapter “The Secret of the Sacred”, ANDREW J. JOHNSTON looks at the secret and the sacred in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This Middle English romance enjoys canonicity unparalleled by any other text of its genre. In its numerological structure, alliterative style and traditional subject matter it epitomizes the ‘Middle Ages’. Yet for all its manifest alterity the text displays a resistance to closure and an obsession with ambiguity not at all typical of the literature modernity tends to designate as ‘medieval’. Nowhere does the poem’s enigmatic nature become more evident than in the scene of Gawain’s confession. After accepting Lady Bertilak’s gift of the Green Girdle and promising to hide it from Sir Bertilak, Gawain confesses to a priest and—according to the narrator’s authoritative statement—emerges with a spotless soul. Given the poem’s specific mix of chivalric and Christian values, Gawain’s breach of his trawthe cannot be requited with a theologically sound absolution. Still, this is precisely what takes place. This contradiction between Gawain’s inner spiritual state and his outward absolution radically changes our perception of the text. Gawain’s spiritually worthless confession foregrounds matters religious in a poem otherwise flaunting its chivalric secularity. In Michel Foucault’s account of the birth of the subject the sacrament of confession, an important late medieval spiritual innovation, plays a central role. By invoking the issue of confession the Gawain-poet emphasizes questions of interiority and subjectivity in a manner jarring both with the poem’s own conspicuous medievalitas and with most metahistorical narratives linking the Middle Ages and modernity. This effect is achieved performatively, by exploiting one of the sacrament’s principal characteristics, i.e. its secrecy. Johnston argues that this secrecy creates the ambiguity preventing Gawain from being charged with committing a false confession. Paradoxically, it also offers us a glimpse of a space of contested interiority within Gawain himself. Yet, even as the narrator highlights this interiority he denies its very existence by insisting on the validity of Gawain’s absolution. Thus, he privileges the power of the priest over the role of the penitent. Simultaneously, the poem alerts us to the psychological necessity of the sinner’s soul-searching and entrusts his soul to the safe-keeping of a church so consistently sacramentalist as to border on the heterodox. In the light of Foucault’s history of the modern subject, the Gawain-poet assumes a stance so self-consciously ‘medieval’ as to amount to a radically anti-modernist critique of interiority itself. Far from being one of English literature’s most medieval texts, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight actually marks the advent of medievalism. The poem’s very resistance to subjectivity and interiority breathes the spirit of modernity. Following from this discussion, THOMAS HEALY in “Performing the Self” explores how that apparently most private of Renaissance literary forms, the lyric, may be witnessed as reflecting Reformation preoccupations about history. As is often overlooked, the English Reformation’s main dynamic was not predicated on issues of theology but

Introduction

25

on its claim to be re-establishing ‘true Catholicism’: a return to the purity of the early Church now believed to be corrupted by Rome. This meant that a reformation of history became a major concern for English scholars because, it was argued, the historical record had been corrupted by a Roman antichrist seeking to deprave the community of true believers. The largest enterprise in this pursuit, John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of these latter and perilous days, touching matters of the Church, which is better known to us as The Book of Martyrs, became the most influential history read in Elizabethan and Stuart England. The chapter examines some of the implications of Foxe’s supernatural superstructure (his predetermined view that secular history was part of a divinely generated unfolding, whose pattern was established in Scripture) with his desire to assemble evidence of individual secular events on largely objective principles. What Foxe conceives, however, is that Satan’s most effective resource is his power of deception. How then does the individual witness of history (whether as immediate participant or as later reader) distinguish truth from harmful fiction? The dilemma is that the more these Reformation historians assemble evidence according to methods based on reason, the more they fear they may be being wilfully mislead by sinister forces. Only divine revelation ultimately can be cited as the verification of the truth of an issue. But here, too, there remains scepticism: might not the very inner certainty the believer feels to be divinely inspired be part of this sinister deception? Healy examines this fear in a number of lyrics by Donne and Vaughan: poems traditionally felt to affirm their narrators’ endeavours to establish belief. What is shown is that, as their poets are aware, the very features of their rhetorical performances—the devices which help create an aura of authenticity—are fundamentally theatrical, operating as much as masks to conceal as vehicles to reveal. Read in the light of the cultural uncertainty writers such as Foxe helped to generate, these poems betray their profound unease about the condition of the self and whether its true nature is open to discovery. In an allied, though distinctly different, reading of this monumental book, ANDREAS HÖFELE then examines “Stages of Martyrdom”. He opens with the observation that, when Mary Tudor succeeded to the English throne in 1553, her government issued a proclamation against preaching, printing and play-acting. But instead of preventing theatrical performance, the enforcement of this royal order actually produced it, as the burning of the Protestants, which began soon after and continued until a week before the queen’s death in 1558, generated a veritable theatre of sacred suffering, whose dangerous potency was further enhanced by the collaborative forces of printing and preaching. This constitutes the basis for Höfele’s investigation of such performances of power and counter-performances of martyrdom, through a close and contextual reading of the strategies enacted by Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. The logic of reversal characteristic of the martyrs’ conduct and self-fashioning becomes apparent in their words and gestures captured and reproduced here in textual and pictorial form. The procedure of divesting, for example, devised to signify ultimate degradation, could be turned into an act of staunch Protestant self-assertion—for instead of signalling loss of status, the removing of the outward accoutrements of Catholic priesthood could be turned into a demonstration against

26

Tobias Döring

Catholic ‘massing-mummery’. The martyrs thus, demonstratively and histrionically, took control over a sacred spectacle intended to exert total control over them. In this way, Höfele argues, the rituals of punishment merge with the sacred and the theatrical in an economy of endlessly fungible signifiers, nowhere more conspicuously manifest than on the stage of martyrdom. Whether intended or not, Foxe’s ‘acts’ therefore signally bear out the theatrical meaning of that term. The chapter concludes by tracing and discussing ways in which these cultural performances of Protestant martyrdom may or may not have been remembered and re-enacted in Shakespearean and Elizabethan drama. In the following chapter ANDREW HADFIELD examines the relationship between James VI and I’s assumption that his authority as monarch was directly sanctioned by God and the rights of his subjects to represent issues that impinged on his prerogative on stage (and elsewhere). While James appears not to have been too concerned if images of kings were reproduced on stage, he was much more eager to intervene when matters of state were discussed or represented by his subjects, especially if there were political consequences. James’s views are in direct contrast to those of his tutor, George Buchanan, a prominent humanist and republican intellectual with a European reputation. Buchanan argued that the function of the monarch was to administer the laws that his or her subjects determined and that he or she could be deposed if they failed in their duties to the people. Buchanan wrote a number of plays—Jephthes, John the Baptist—which showed what happened to bad rulers as a means of warning the monarch to behave properly. The complex and unhappy relationship between James and Buchanan is central to our understanding of the dynamics of kingship in early modern Britain. One key way in which the differences between the two are manifested is in their perception of what could and could not be performed on stage. With a close view to one of the foremost Protestant poets of sixteenth-century England, VERENA OLEJNICZAK LOBSIEN then discusses Sidney’s Old Arcadia for the performance of perfection and the social transformations that this text negotiates, as witnessed in the programmatic title phrase “Transformed in show, but more transformed in mind”. Assuming that the idea of perfection occupies a position of dominance in the Renaissance mind-set and that it is linked intimately to a notion of the sacred which implies an ethically non-indifferent relationship towards transcendence, her chapter offers a critical investigation into, and a testing of, the courtly ideal of perfection-as-performance. In a first step, Castiglione / Hoby’s work is analysed as a text which stages courtliness as perfection. Their Book of the Courtier functions as an aesthetics of ethics which, by foregrounding its neoplatonic foundations in the central concepts of ‘grace’ and ‘sprezzatura’, articulates the demand that perfection be performed as a gesturing towards transcendent beauty. Furthermore, its own textual performance is based on the insight that perfection can never be re-presented, but needs to be imagined, hence has to be adumbrated by strategies of dissimulation. In a second step, the chapter then shows how this duplicitous structure at the heart of courtly performance introduces a potentially self-destructive ambivalence, leading to the ruinous, at any rate, pessimistic, insight that perfection cannot be performed. Sidney’s

Introduction

27

text is presented as striking a precarious balance between these mutually exclusive positions, claiming equal validity for the necessity as well as the impossibility of perfectionas-performance. Exploring dissimulation as the basic principle of courtliness, the Old Arcadia manages to show, simultaneously, the dubious success as well as the glorious failure of courtly artistry. In an exemplary reading of prince Pyrocles’ transformation into the amazon Cleophila, Olejniczak Lobsien suggests how, in Sidney’s version, the performance of perfection results in a web of dissimulation which all but strangles the protagonists. By means of a flawed textual performance, the Old Arcadia points towards a glorious failure which nonetheless manages to ‘figure forth’ the ideal—as unavailable, hence sacred. SUSANNE RUPP, in “Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology”, takes up the issue of perfection and its performance, thereby complementing Lobsien’s discussion of the performance of perfection in relation to the courtly ideal with the theological conceptualisation of perfection in early modern Protestant eschatology. In this chapter Rupp argues that eschatology is subject to considerable developments and changes from the Reformation onwards. Whereas medieval Catholic otherworldliness stressed the ultimate difference between this life and the eternal life to come, Protestant eschatology tends to narrow the gap between these two states of being and describes the difference as “gradual” rather than “specific”. This revaluation of traditional otherworldliness causes a redefinition of the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. The heavenly—and sacred—state of glory is considered to extend into this life on earth by the grace of God, which implies the firm promise of future glorification. The continuity between grace and glory is strongly emphasised and thus generates a sacralization of ordinary life. Life is considered as offering various intersections with the heavenly realm and believers are encouraged to make use of them (Christian community, practises of piety etc.). The sacred is continually being performed and acted out by the believers without the support of authorised mediators, such as priests. In a second step this chapter argues that the reformed theological assumptions also affect the strategies and practises involved in the representations of heaven. The Protestants’ dynamic heaven defies the monumentalising of heaven in the medieval tradition. Heaven is rather conceived in terms of progress and development than in the stasis of perfection. The scarcity of literary representations of heaven in seventeenth-century texts is thus owed to theological presuppositions rather than Protestant iconophobia or the problem of ineffability. It is the notion of heaven as status as experienced in the state of grace, rather than heaven as locus, Protestant authors are mostly interested in. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress epitomises this tendency clearly and offers a genuine Protestant perspective of things to come: His book is primarily concerned about the performance of heaven throughout Christian pilgrimage and when his heroes finally enter the eternal city there is no need to dwell on glorification extensively, since it is already familiar to its recipients. Turning to Shakespearean drama and its cultural significations, RICHARD WILSON then undertakes a reading of Othello for its ambivalent performances of sacred relics.

28

Tobias Döring

Shakespeare wrote at a time when there could be no more pilgrimages, when the cult of saints and relics survived only in the interior exile spaces of Tudor culture. The chapter therefore proceeds to test Stephen Greenblatt's well-known thesis that theatre took over from religion, substituting for the audiences secular saints for spiritual martyrs. While there are manifest connections in the play with the ritual of Hallowmas, which traditionally included the processional display of relics of the saints, the fact that Shakespeare situated himself so emphatically on “this side idolatry” (in Ben Jonson’s thoughtful phrase) also relates Othello to the context of Jacobean religious politics, and to hopes for Catholic emancipation which, at the time, had never been more contingent on the readiness of the persecuted to relinquish their worship of those bloodstained remainders of their hungry ghosts. As Wilson shows in a careful historical contextualization, the summer of Othello, 1604, was a season of unique opportunity for English Catholics. The king suspended recusancy fines, and in August an embassy from Spain arrived at Somerset House, Queen Anne's palace, which had been vacated for—eventually abortive—toleration talks. Thus, the occasion of this tragedy was a moment when the sacramental question it stages—of “ocular proof” as opposed to “an essence that’s not seen”—had never been more loaded. Performed during this religious crisis, before an audience vigilant to possible allegory, Othello looks back to the era of sectarian wars. But, Wilson argues, the notion of Othello as Protestant propaganda is simply not sufficiently acute. In fact, the play is keyed very closely to the revulsion from Roman tribalism as an apocalyptic mischief expressed by the Catholic loyalists with most to gain from the Spanish negotiations. Registering the disgust of the Catholic gentry with the Jesuit cult of violence, the play centrally engages with the questionable value of a bloody handkerchief and so offers a performative investigation into the cult of relics. And it suggests that the only certainty about relics is that, so long as they exist, their semiotic remainder will be too much. However, it also suggests there is always “more in it” to generate interpretation. So, Othello’s stigma as “the Moor” writes him into an indelible and ceaseless tide of unclean signification, an unstoppable semiotic bleeding that flows from the word Moor, and that marks the drama’s most egregious stage property with connotations that, to original audiences, might have suggested the bloody imprint of the name of Catholic England’s prime hero: Thomas More. With More’s name as an iconic incitement for Catholic ultras and with the preservation of More mementoes as a furious act of symbolic wall-building in the century after his execution, the tragic play around a bloody handkerchief comes to signify the morosity of the “tribe of More” and the morbidity of their cult of death. Othello, then, is read here not as cryptoCatholic performance, but has as a deconstruction of the Romish cause that identifies the tribe of the faithful by the amassing of ever more remains. What happens when a piece of cloth, like a saint’s relic, is passed from church to playhouse, Shakespeare therefore shows, is not that it is desacralized, but that its violence is taken out. The following two chapters widen and, at the same time, sharpen the critical perspective to include issues of gender and their historical performances into discussion of the sacred. INA SCHABERT’s contribution on “The Lady’s Supper” first investigates the female celebration of the Eucharist in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). Aemilia

Introduction

29

Lanyer’s long poem invites a group of English ladies to the feast of the lamb. Both the gesture of invitation and the communion itself are presented as actual social and religious events which are being performed in the process of writing and reading the text. The text thus tries to ‘do’ something within the world of material reality and ritual activity; yet at the same time its social and religious action begins to drift toward the realm of metaphor. It can either be taken as the historical record of a ritual or be read as a poem proper in which, according to Austin, the performative utterance becomes ‘in a peculiar way hollow or void’. Salve Deus, Schabert argues, is a unique document of the transitional period between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. The reinterpretation of the sacrament by Calvinists and English protestants led to a new conception of ritual and language in general. When the host did no longer constitute the ‘Real Presence’ of Christ and became a mere sign, to be attributed a purely spiritual meaning on the side of the believer, the symbol was deprived of substance as well. The ‘metaphysical’ poetry of the early seventeenth century bears witness to this. Lanyer, however, who came from an Italian family and was a member of London’s Italian community of court musicians, conceives her poem as a communal act of feasting, of celebrating the Eucharist in terms of eating heavenly food, of actualizing the divine presence through meditation. She imagines the roles of writer and readers as actors within a divine realm; their status is similar to that of the participants in the medieval passion plays. In addition, the text has a strong feminist impetus. It evokes a female solidarity in Christ and claims women’s superiority before Christ. Through the mystery of Christ’s humanity—a humanity derived exclusively from a woman—female flesh has been sanctified. The performative intensity of the poem thus can be explained by Lanyer's twofold liminal position, between Catholic and Protestant mentalities and between ‘male’ spirituality and ‘female’ closeness to the body. With a focus on a different poetic genre, IRMGARD MAASSEN then discusses religious rhetoric and gender fashioning in the sonnet. Her chapter “Canonized by Love?” proceeds on the assumption that the history of the sonnet in the early modern period can be described as one of increasing secularisation. Where Dante and Petrarch placed their ladies in heaven as symbols of divine perfection designed to guide the worshipping soul towards the contemplation of God, the English poets of the 1580s anglicised and politicised the Petrarchan tradition: Drayton, Daniel and Philip Sidney, among others, adapted the Italian convention to negotiate the political power play and the patronage system of the Elizabethan court, while Spenser found in the Protestant marriage doctrine a way to counteract courtly devotion to the lady by the assertion of masculine dominance. The ‘counter-discourse’ of Petrarchism that became an integral part of the English Petrarchist convention itself, most notably but not exclusively exemplified by Shakespeare and Donne, effected a desecration of the lady that testifies to the complex interplay between self-effacing worship and self-asserting autonomy performed in and through the sonnet.71 A central concern of the sonnets relates to the problem of how to fashion an 71. See Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire. English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

30

Tobias Döring

autonomous subjectivity under the conditions of a courtly system that continued to demand obedient submission to superiors and was still likely to regard open ambition as an act of rebellion against the god-given hierarchy of place. To the extent that the sonnets trope ambition as ‘love’, collapsing social and sexual desires in the manner that characterised the relations of power at the Elizabethan court, these poems complicate the problem posed by the challenge of upward mobility to a fixed hierarchy of rank and degree by that of the hierarchy of genders. The chapter considers sonneteering in this context as a cultural rehearsal strategy, as an opportunity to perform and display the conduct and habitus of the perfect servant. For this purpose, Maassen investigates the role that the topos of the sacred came to play in these covert negotiations of the ambitious servant for social and sexual mastery. Invocations of the sacred are regarded, with Bourdieu, as a strategy of heightened ‘enchantment’ to gloss over the ‘symbolic violence’ underlying the power relations of social systems. Recourse to symbolisations such as love or sanctity help to shore up what Bourdieu calls the ‘collective deception’ necessary to maintain an illusion of equity in basically unequal social and economic relations. In readings of selected sonnets by Drayton, Daniel, Donne, Carew and Mary Wroth this increased mystification can be shown to occur at particularly critical moments, to obliterate the contradictory, disruptive or violent workings of power and to quell dissent. The final chapter by SABINE SCHÜLTING focuses on the early modern controversy on tobacco, which was fuelled by the challenges the ‘Indian weed’ posed to European notions of the sacred. As a sacred plant in most native American cultures, it played a prominent role in a number of ceremonies, it was a sacrifice offered to the spirits and was used for prayer and healing. Its ‘translation’ into Europe required a new positioning within a completely different culture. This led to the secularisation of the plant, but, at the same time, tobacco was also re-sacralized, as for example in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene or John Beaumont’s The Metamorphosis of Tabacco (1602). In contrast to Jordan Goodman and others, who stress that tobacco was easily absorbed ‘because it could find a niche in European cultures of consumption especially as a medicine’, Schülting argues that the cultural encounter with tobacco caused a disruption of European discourses and called for the negotiation and re-inscription of meaning. The transcultural background of the plant induced a specific phenomenon that Jeffrey Knapp has called tobacco’s ‘negativity, its ability to mediate between normally opposed terms— between purging and feeding, high and low, superstition and religion, home and away, heaven and earth’. In the early modern age, tobacco seemed to preclude any definite meaning, origin or nature. To some extent, the debate on tobacco is thus representative of how the ‘discovery’ of America disrupted the European order of things and blurred the dividing lines between the sacred and the profane, between the divine and the demonic, as well as between religion and magic. The question remains as to why smoking elicited what one might call paranoid overreactions. This cannot be answered if the tobacco pamphlets are merely discussed in their colonial context. Instead, Schülting’s chapter sets out to take their line of argument, including both the condemnation and the apotheosis of tobacco, more seriously, as it were,

Introduction

31

and so suggest a different connection between tobacco, the sacred, and the profane, inspired by Georges Bataille’s notion of the sacred. For Bataille, the sacred is principally opposed to the useful, to profit, calculation and rationality. In the early modern controversy on tobacco, smoking is associated with moments of spiritual or quasi-religious ecstasy on the one hand, and ‘pagan’ rites and coarse carousals on the other. Against the background of Bataille’s notion of the sacred, these two forms of intoxication are merely the two sides of the same coin. The early modern smoker performs an excessive act of expenditure, a dissipation of the self, in which the economy of the profane world is suspended. As the representations of both native American and European smokers show, these—individual or collective—‘orgies’ were met with both fascination and abhorrence. Tobacco in the early modern age was, indeed, sacred or, rather, sacer: holy and tabooed, pure and defiled.

This page intentionally left blank

THE CROXTON PLAY OF THE SACRAMENT: COMMEMORATION AND REPETITION IN LATE MEDIEVAL CULTURE by Paul Strohm In The Scapegoat, René Girard argues—persuasively—that a society is always founded on a sacrifice.1 The sacrifice in question is never a product of calculation, but remains mysterious, contradictory, ill-understood. Such is the sacrifice of Christ in relation to late-medieval culture. It represents a fusion of victimage and victory, particularity and universality, humanity and divinity, embodied suffering and theological transcendence. These are impossible contraries, attributes that cannot (but do) inform a single event or inhabit a single place. These attributes came in the course of medieval theological development to be centralized in a single sacrament—that of the Eucharist or the ceremony of the altar—and eventually in a single symbol—the consecrated wafer or Eucharistic host. The religion of the late middle ages was of course highly sacramental, both in relation to the seven official sacraments and to a number of less formalized actions of generally sacramental force. At the heart of sacramentality lay a concept of transformation; the sacrament is ministered in a ritual or ceremony which possesses the power to alter status or identity, even in the absence of apparent or outward change. This holds generally true for ceremonies of vassalage, ordination, marriage, and the like. Yet even among the sacraments, the Eucharistic ceremony was always insisted upon as an exception-within-exceptions, a miracle-among-miracles. The point about sacramental actions is that they do not—cannot—make sense. Their mystery of utter transformation in the semblance of apparent continuity is unsusceptible to rational or causal analysis. And, least susceptible of all is the sacrament of the consecrated host, which breaks every natural or empirical rule. This ceremony not only does not make sense but is not supposed to; it functions precisely as a complete exception, a suspension of rules, a thing like no other. Although there was an extensive medieval theology of the Eucharist (leading to the formalization of the doctrine of transubstantiation in the thirteenth century), the point of this theology was not to ‘explain’ the host, but to 1. René Girard The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (London: Athlone Press, 1986).

34

Paul Strohm

elaborate its mystery. Prior to the formal adoption of the doctrine of transubstantiation in the thirteenth century, and the introduction of its liturgy and feast in England in the first half of the fourteenth century, the Eucharist was a holy symbol, but did not differ in kind from other Christian symbolizations. After the acceptance of transubstantiation as formal belief, a new standard is introduced: the consecrated host is not just a symbol of Christ’s body but is Christ’s body itself, its evident breadness or ‘accidental’ appearance as bread notwithstanding. With this new standard, the exceptionality of the Eucharist within the Christian symbolic was confirmed and guaranteed. Simply put, this is where the Lollards and other proto-protestant heresies went wrong: in continuing to regard the host as a commemorative symbol, rather than as an utter and sense-defying miracle.2 Roger Dymmok, a conservative and pro-Ricardian theologian, affirms this new standard, and the exceptionality of the host, in his refutation of the Lollard contention that the host is symbolically but not materially transformed: I ask, what sensible change do you see in a boy newly baptised, in a man who has confessed, in a body or man who has been confirmed, in consecrated bread, in a man ordained into the priesthood, in marriageable persons bethrothed or joined? All receive a new virtue, except the bread, which simply ceases to exist without any kind of sensible change, and is transubstantiated into the body of Christ.3

Dymmok here offers a chain of sacramental signification, in which inward change is accomplished without alteration of outward appearance. But its ultimate efficacy is located in a single, irrational point: in the Eucharistic bread, which is not only symbolically transformed but obliterated, to assume a completely new substance. And to assume this new identity without external or visible change (change in its ‘accidents’). And to achieve the logically impossible feat of being both symbol and thing symbolized. And to accomplish a miracle of ubiquity in which Christ is materially present in the host and in heaven as well. And to accomplish what Peter Brown calls a ‘miracle of inverted magnitudes’, by which the object around which boundless associations clustered should be tiny and compact.4 The function of this one point of supreme irrationality is, in a Lacanian sense, precisely to be so irrational as to remain outside or exceptional to the signifying chain in which it resides. In its externality, and also in its sheer surplus of meaning, it secures or guarantees the remainder of the system, at once deflecting our incredulity from more ordinary symbolizations and, in its very exorbitance, overbearing and hence ‘quilting’ or fixing 2. For an introductory discussion of this highly complicated matter I suggest Gary Macy, Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) and “The Dogma of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45994), 11-41. On ‘accidents’ see Raymond G. Fontaine, Subsistent Accident in the Philosophy of Saint Thomas and His Predecessors (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press, 1950). For a starting point on Reformation attitudes toward the sacraments see Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), especially pp. 156-167. 3. Roger Dymmok, Liber contra XII Errores et Hereses Lollardorum, ed. by H. S. Cronin (London: Wyclif Society, 1922), p. 130. 4. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 78.

The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Commemoration and Repetition in Late Medieval Culture

35

their more particular meanings.5 Exactly by not making sense, the Eucharist confers a semblance of sense on every other sacramental representation, such as marriage or ordination. It, meanwhile, remains a sealed and veiled mystery, always sought but completely inaccessible, an enigma which functions at once as pure symbol and pure presence, as vacant and as utterly productive place. Among other miraculous aspects of the Eucharist is its uncanny productivity; its capacity for endless and infinite reproduction. This capacity is satirized by Lollards and early Protestants, often in combination with what Miri Rubin has delicately called the ‘question of digestion’.6 Thus, in Foxe, we read of martyr Thomas Brook, who was said to have claimed that “the thing which the priest useth to hold up over his head at mass, is not the natural body of Jesus Christ: for, if that were so, whoso would might have their stomach full of gods, their entrails full of gods.”7 Or one is reminded of fifteenth-century Lollard Margery Baxter’s celebrated vision of thousands of priests eating thousands of hosts and discharging gods into thousands of fetid pots.8 Holding that Christ’s sacrifice was a unique and singular event and happened once only, these reformists differ with, and perhaps miss the point of, the popular belief in the Eucharist as an infinitely iterable ceremony, in which Christ’s passion—sometimes manifested in sightings of blood, infant figures, or miniature Christs at the moment of elevation of the host—is enacted again and again.9 For the power of the sacrament is bound up in its iterability, its susceptibility to repetition. Like those other more frankly imaginary sites so magical in a society of scarcity—the grail, the philosophers’ stone—the Eucharist admits no limit to its bounty. It might be said without much exaggeration that a major rationale for the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the visible Church of the later middle ages revolves about the administration of the Eucharist’s symbolic surplus. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw hosts of mass-priests set to work, altars multiplied within parish churches, and staggered masses performed (enabling the laity to see the greatest number of sacrings within the shortest space of time), installation of private altars and sites of devotion within the homes of the prosperous, elaboration of ties between recitations of the Mass and the 5. On this ‘quilting point’ or point de capiton see Écrits (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 501, 154, and Séminaire 3: Les psychoses (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981), pp. 300-304. For commentary see Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 87-100. His suggestion that the structural role of the point de capiton is to serve as a ‘signifier without the signified’ may be aligned with the medieval sense of the consecrated host as a subject without accident. 6. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 37-38. 7. Josiah Pratt ed., Acts and Monuments, Vol. 5 (London: Religious Tract Society, n.d.), p. 510. 8. Norman Tanner ed., Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428-31, ser. 4, vol. 20 (London: Camden Society, 1977), pp. 44-45. 9. On the demand within later medieval devotional experience for frequent, and staggered, repetitions of the Mass, and open sightlines to elevations of the consecrated host, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 95-105; on miracles of the bleeding child and morsels of flesh, see ibid., pp. 104-107.

36

Paul Strohm

burgeoning purgatorial system.10 Even so, the work of consecration was never, and could never, be done; the task of commemoration always, and inherently, exceeded the resources available for its accomplishment. The Eucharist’s robust plenitude is, in turn, founded on what might be called the problematic circumstances of its productivity. For the Eucharist itself sits at a point of contradiction, a fissure or ‘wound” in the surface of the symbolic. And this is an ‘open’ wound, an uncloseable wound. For in the Crucifixion not only did an irreparable harm, and posed an exceptional affront to orderly causation, but also presented an exceptional challenge to memory and memorialization. It required continual evocation and memorialization without any accompanying possibility that memory could be adequate to its demand. Looking back to Girard but also employing Lacanian terminology, I would describe the Crucifixion as a ‘traumatic kernel’ about which a society organizes itself. I introduce the word ‘trauma’ with some hesitance here, in part because it has been somewhat overused lately; in part because the temptation exists, having affixed such a label, to consider one’s explicatory work at an end and go home; in part because Christ’s crucifixion would hardly seem to satisfy the normal understanding of a trauma as something repressed and hence forgotten. Nothing would seem less forgettable to the medieval Christian than the crucifixion of Christ. Yet, as I have said, the crucifixion presented a constant challenge to adequate rememoration. The persistent sense of the crucifixion as an event that could never be adequately remembered wraps the event in a fear of forgetting, an anxiety that is always in one way or another being forgotten. Taking ‘trauma’ in its sense of an originary and unrecoverable wound, the crucifixion of Christ may be considered a wound or affront to the symbolic, and to the possibility of adequate symbolization—and, therefore, adequate memorialization. Anything but forgotten, the Crucifixion nevertheless remains stubbornly irrecoverable, in the sense that its memorialization is constantly attempted but always and inevitably found ineffectual, belated, or otherwise inadequate to the demand. Having introduced this word, trauma, I want to take another step and introduce a pertinent half-sentence written by trauma’s master-theorist Freud. I mean here not to invoke the whole Freudian system or even his broadest historical claims about trauma or even his specific claims about trauma in the therapeutic relation. I want him here only for the reason I usually want him, as the author of a number of brilliant formalisms, in which particular psychic and linguistic processes are arrested, captured, and tellingly described. In this case, he says several brilliant and interrelated things about trauma. Firstly, about its power to stir, or in fact agitate, the memory. Secondly, about its reliance upon repetition as a substitute for overstressed memory-systems. Thirdly, about resistance as a likely accompaniment to repetition; resistance to repetition, but also resistance as a spur or stimulant to repetition. Summarizing all this, he says that the traumatized subject “repeats instead of remembering, and repeats under the conditions of resistance”.11 10. Duffy (1992), p. 98. 11. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through”, Standard Edition, ed. by J. Strachey, vol. 12 (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), pp. 147-156; quotation at p. 151.

The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Commemoration and Repetition in Late Medieval Culture

37

I want to bring these notions of trauma, resistance, and repetition back to the Eucharist, and say that the service of the altar is precisely a repetition. Presenting an overwhelming challenge to memory and memorialization, the Crucifixion nevertheless enjoins memory’s best substitute, which is repetition, through the miracle of transubstantiation in the consecration of the host. The Lollards and early protestants got into trouble for underestimating this element of repetition, instead treating the Eucharist as a symbolic commemoration rather than a literal, tangible, embodied repetition of the event itself. For, say what one will about simony and lay power and other issues of the Reformation, the most central division between Catholic and Protestant is the issue of Christ’s sacrifice’s iterability. As Foxe was to report, in approving quotation of the words of martyr Frances Rebezies, “I hold your mass for none other, but for a false and counterfeited service […] by which you do annihilate the precious blood of Christ, and his oblation once made of his own body; and you know right well, that the same is sufficient, and ought not to be reiterated.”12 For the Protestant and proto-protestant, the Crucifixion was a unique event, singular and unrepeatable. Whereas for the Catholic sacramentalist, one or another form of iterability is its essential attribute. A kind of shallow Freudianism might describe the ceremony of the altar as a ‘compulsion to repeat’, but I have no inclination to engage in the kind of smart-alec triumphalism over another belief system that such a phrase might imply. My intention is not to suggest that any kind of neurotic ‘compulsion’ is operating here. But I do mean to propose that a particular kind of injunction or ‘demand’ operates in the case of a disturbing event, which is solidified as an article of belief, but which is necessarily inadequately or imperfectly remembered. In such as case, repetition functions as memory’s privileged substitute.13 But, since I am describing late medieval Christian society as generally dedicated to commemoration through repetition, what about the final element of Freud’s comment, which is that the subject ‘repeats under conditions of resistance’? Whence arises resistance, to so apparently consensual an observance? An answer to this dilemma is that resistance arises with the intrusion of actual, or imputed, or imagined disbelief. Applied to our present problem, I would restate Freud’s dictum in this way: the central episode in the creation of Christian belief is most likely to occur in the presence of, or in reaction to, disbelief. This is an obvious enough assertion, a kind of watered-down post-deconstructionist proposition with which we are all thoroughly familiar. But, turning to some 12. Pratt (n.d.),vol. 4, p. 438. 13. Repetition is, in the Freudian system, a form of ‘playful mastery’ over a disturbance. But this account would be incomplete if it took note of mastery alone. At its furthest reach, the imperative to repeat is, of course, neither wholly masterful nor wholly pleasurable, but also represents a more primitive imperative than that of the pleasure principle, a ‘beyond’ of the pleasure principle. This is the more primitive and less affirming ‘beyond’ of the ‘death drive’, and the imperative is to repeat its own mixed and unstable blend of satisfaction and unrest, life and death, in a constantly changeable, ‘hull-and-kernel’ relation. See “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, Standard Edition ed. by Strachey, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), especially pp. 32-35. The host itself, paradoxically, both affirms life and commemorates a death.

38

Paul Strohm

textual examples, I argue that this proposition possesses far-reaching consequences for actual and, especially, for imagined members of potentially disbelieving groups. I want first to look at a couple of rather simple instances, and then at the more complicated Croxton play. In each instance, what I want to emphasize is a commitment to repetition, occurring as a triumph over resistance, a case of internal or external resistance overcome.

The conversion of Cornelius Cloyne In his Chronicon Knighton tells how, at the height of the first wave of anti-Wyclif agitation in 1382, a widely reported miracle occurred.14 An Irish knight (variously named Cloyne, Clone, or Clown) who claimed previously to have shared Wyclif’s conclusion that the sacrament of the altar was material bread, was in church and experienced a miracle upon the elevation of the host: […] on the breaking of the bread the knight looked again, and saw with his own eyes, in the hands of the celebrant friar, true flesh, raw and bloody, divided into three parts. […] Looking at the third part, which was to be dipped into the cup, likewise first saw it white as it had been before, but then saw in the middle of that piece the name of Jesus written in letters of flesh, raw and bloody, which was wonderful to behold.

The next day, testifying at St Paul’s cross, the knight: […] told the whole story in his own words, publicly and openly, in confirmation of our faith, and promised that he would fight and die in that cause, that the sacrament of the altar is the true body of Christ, and not material bread alone, as he had previously believed.

Here we have several crucial strands. The host is flashpoint, attracting violent feelings and quarrels. It possesses its characteristic power to effect repetition—in this case not just rehearsing the sacrifice of Christ in the disguised form of bread, but literally, by manifesting physical evidence of Christ’s suffering. First by the display of blood and flesh, and then by the bloody signature of Jesus, we are shown all that the whiteness of the host conceals. This miracle also occurs in the presence of resistance—in this case, resistance afforded to the doctrine of transubstantiation by Wycliffite theology, which became a matter of public consternation with an Oxford inquiry in 1381 and the Blackfrairs condemnations of 1382 and other associated events described by Knighton. The run-up to Cloyne’s miracle and conversion involves his own purported advocacy of Wycliffite views. His resistance effectively addressed, and overcome, by means of the miracle, his testimony effects the conversion of others and promotes solidarity. Official processions were organized to celebrate the miracle, and to broadcast and solidify its effects. The host is a unifying force—except, of course, that it excludes unbelievers from its vision and its 14. G. H. Martin ed., Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337-1396 (Oxford: Oxford Medieval Texts, 1995), p. 65. Peter McNiven adds the pertinent fact that Clone was a royal pensioner, whose annuity was augmented shortly before this alleged miracle. See Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: The Burning of Badby (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1987), p. 38.

The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Commemoration and Repetition in Late Medieval Culture

39

protective circle, with its knight promising to lead a kind of domestic crusade against those who believe that the consecrated host possesses attributes of bread. Repetition, resistance, conversion, unity, division: these notes will be struck again and again.

Myrc’s narrative of the Devonshire vicar As I have said, the labor of ritual repetition is unceasing. Vast reservoirs of grace are liberated through the ceremony of the altar, but this surplus must be elicited and controlled by an enormously complicated ritual structure. This ritual structure lies within the domain of the visible church and its hierarchy, but its demands are so unstinting and so limitless that they cannot be satisfied by normal activities. The practical consequence was a multiplication of altars and a speedup of Eucharistic production. Simultaneously this demand resulted in an additional phenomenon to which I will now turn: a phenomenon which international corporations currently call ‘outsourcing’—a distribution of responsibility for the reiteration of Christ’s sacrifice out beyond the circle of belief, with unbelievers as well as believers now imagined to accept a share of responsibility. The most rudimentary responsibility of unbelievers remains that of providing the climate of resistance or hostility, within which or against which the act of sacramental repetition is facilitated. But, more ambitiously, the unbeliever is available for enlistment as a participant (however willing or unwilling) in the iteration itself. This motive, along with the others already discussed, is conveniently projected within Myrc’s narrative of the Devonshire vicar.15 This vicar’s mistake was to lose a consecrated host on the way to minister last rites to a dying woman. Realizing his loss, he said, “Dame, I schal feche Godis body and hye me ayen in al that I may.” But he does not exactly seek the host; instead, […] he come by a wythen-tre [wynch-tree], and made thereof a good yerde, and dyde hymself nakyd, and bete hymself als fast as he myght, that the blod ran doune by his sydys, and sayde to hymself thus: “thou foule thef that hast lost thi creature [creator], thou schalt abye.” And when he hade beten hymself thus, then kest he on his clothes and ran furth. He then came upon a pillar of fire, issuing from the lost host, and reaching to heaven, with all the beasts of the field gathered about it. He saue [saw] al the bestys knele on bothe her knes and worschyppyd Godis body, saue one blak hors knelet but on his one kne. He conjured the beast “in the vertu of this body” to explain: Then ansuered he and sayd: “I am a fende of helle and wold not knele on nothyr [neither] kne by wylles, but I am made to do so ayen my wille, for hit is wryten that eche man of Heuen, and erth, and helle schal bowe to him.”

By the power of the host, the vicar banishes the fiend, and returns to shrive the woman. The narrative is multiply determined, in the sense that Christ’s sacrifice is repeated in more than one place: first, in the centrality of the consecrated host to the events of the narrative; second, in the vicar’s own re-enactment of Christ’s suffering. His abrupt and self-inflicted beating may, of course, be seen simply as penitential, but at another level it 15. Mirk’s Festival: A Collection of Homilies, ed. by Theodor Erbe (London: Kegan Paul, 1905), pp. 173-175.

40

Paul Strohm

is a form of imitatio christi, an imitation, with the blood running down his sides, of Christ’s torments in the buffeting and scourging. This repetition, in turn, confers a kind of power—both the power of the “vertu of this body” as the exemplum puts it, but also the power of re-enactment. This power expresses itself as community consensus, as represented by the kneeling beasts of the field. But it also expresses itself as the power to overcome resistance, as represented by the half-kneeling black horse, the fiend of hell. As resistant presence, the fiend has his own role to play, in the triumphal production of Eucharistic power. But, compelled partially to kneel, this fiend is granted an even more ambitious role, which involves actual—if conflicted and partial—participation in the ceremony itself. The reluctant fiend is, in other words, enlisted as a member of the community on account of whom, and for whom, Christ’s sacrifice is repeated.

The Croxton Play of the Sacrament At this point I turn to the main subject of this essay, which is the medieval Jew—whether present or absent, actual or imagined—as a necessary reservoir of unbelief in the efficacy of the Christian sacrament. In the myriad anti-Jewish narrations of the middle ages, the Jew is hailed in, much as Satan is introduced among the Devonshire bishop’s horses: as unbeliever, but also (paradoxically) a participant-unbeliever, enlisted to further the demands of ritual re-observance. The point is that, in the Christian imaginary, Jews are always trying to get hold of consecrated hosts, always subjecting them to torment, always trying to repeat the initial trauma by re-crucifying Christ. Thus the late thirteenth-, early fourteenth-century Dominican Giordano of Pisa on “recrucifixion”: “they [the Jews] also remake Christ’s Passion not only in their hearts but […] they remake it in their souls […]. The other manner in which they remake it is in the sacrament of His body, doing cruel things to it.”16 Although I attempt no unitary explanation for the prevalence of this antiJewish fantasy—which embraces so many strands and motives and which had such unimaginably dire consequences—I do wish to offer one suggestion about its origins. My case in point will be a theatrical representation of host-desecration, the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament.17 In the key episode of this odd play, a rich Jewish merchant and his confederates purchase a consecrated host from a corrupt Christian merchant. Scornful and aggrieved that the Christians “beleve on a cake”, the Jews seem to swing back and forth between a desire for experiment and exposé on the one hand (“this bred I wold might be put in a prefe”—that is, be ‘proved’ or ‘tested’) and a desire for revenge on the other (“thereon wold I be wreke [revenged]”). In other words, they are in the grip of an imperative 16. Cited in Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 141. 17. Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. by Norman Davis, (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 58-89.

The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Commemoration and Repetition in Late Medieval Culture

41

they are themselves unable to articulate or understand. They are, in effect, enlisted as the same kind of tacit or implicit or dumb prophets as the characters of the Old Testament who are found in the retrospective gaze of the New to have prefigured crucial Christian acts. This is the operation of Christian typology, or in Auerbach’s terminology, figuration, in which the significance of an action for its original participants is supplemented by an additional layer of Christian meaning, yet to be revealed.18 And, as in Old Testament figuration, any deficiencies of meaning are likely to occur at the point of origin or enactment, since it is in the eventual fulfillment of the Christian design that the fullness of its meaning is to be revealed. Thus, like such figures of Old Testament typology as Abraham and Sampson and David, who unwittingly pre-enact the puzzling dictates of a meaning yet to be conferred, these Jewish merchants unwittingly re-enact an event of which they are presently unaware, but in which they will come eventually to believe. Once they procure the host, they behave as if fully schooled in all that is expected of them. As summarized in the banns or proclamation preceding the play itself, […] They grevid our Lord gretly on grownd, And put hym to a new passyoun; With daggers gouen him many a greuyos wound; Nayled him to a pyller; with pynsons pluckked hym doune. […] And sythe thay toke that blysed brede so sownde And in a cawdron they ded him boyle. In a clothe full just they yt wounde, And so they ded him sethe in oyle. (p. 59)

And, finally, they confine the host to a hot oven. What is repeated here is not simply the ceremony of consecration—since it is a previously-consecrated host they have already obtained—but rather the ‘prehistory’ of Christ’s torment which the host encloses and conceals. This is a ‘new Passion’ in that it not only regards the host as the body of Christ, but rather re-subjects that body to the torments it experienced previously. Four Jews, for example, wound the host’s extremities with their daggers (repeating the injury of the nails) and then Jonathas, their chief, strikes at its “mydle part”. Thus is the Passion itself recapitulated—“so shall we smite theron woundys five!”—with these new tormentors enacting the roles of the old (pp. 72-73). The host is treated throughout this play as a kind of commodity, available in the first instance for purchase from a corrupted merchant for one hundred pounds—the extreme rate based not on its ‘use-value’ (since the Jews have no idea how to use it without harming themselves) but rather its inflated ‘exchange-value’. The commodity is, after all, as Marx explains, a thing “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”, including properties which, although concealed from view, contribute to its allure.19 Primarily 18. “Figura”, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 11-76. 19. “The Fetishism of Commodities”, in Karl Marx Selected Writings, ed. and trans. by David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 435.

42

Paul Strohm

concealed here, as in the general case of the commodity, is the source of its mystery: the labor which went into its making—the disguised, previous labor which rests at its center and constitutes its primary value (pp. 438-43). Via its own regime of repetition, the ceremony of the Eucharist may be viewed as the continual revocation and release of the salvivic labor represented by the sufferings and death of Christ, with the object of making its benefits available to all. As with bad priests whose sacramental actions still have efficacy, these new tormentors get results. That is, after externalizing the hidden ‘labor’ of Christ’s suffering contained within the communion wafer, they then set out upon a re-enactment of the event which followed the Crucifixion, the triumphant resurrection of Christ’s body from its entombment. First intervenes an episode in which Jonathas is unable to pry his arm from the host he has impiously seized, and the host is then recrucified by nailing it to a post, and Jonathas’ arm is ripped off at the hand when they attempt to free him: “Here shall thay pluke the arme, and the hond shall hang styll with the Sacrament.” (p. 74) Confusion reigns, and intimations of the harrowing of hell may also intervene.20 Then, in a gesture which prepares the ground for re-enactment of the Resurrection itself, they cast Christ’s body (the host) into an oven. As Miri Rubin suggests in the case of another such oven, a pun lies buried here. “The oven-hearth”, as she says, “gestures towards Christ’s own death and rebirth as bread.”21 As in the varied motifs of the medieval ‘mill of the host’, flour and baking and bread are metonymic: first of the consecrated host, and then of Christ’s body as rendered tangible in the ceremony of the consecrated host at the high altar. And Christ, embodied, is in fact ‘reborn’ from this sacred oven. As the stage direction has it: “Here the owyn must ryve asunder and blede owt at the cranys, and an image appere owt with woundys bledying.” (p. 80) Here, the dumbshow repeats the scene of Christ’s body bursting from its sepulchre, to the astonishment of the sleeping soldiers. Now it arises, and addresses the Jews: Oh ye merveylows Jewys, Why ar ye to yowr kyng onkynd, And I so bytterly bowt yow to my blisse? Why fare ye thus fule with yowre frende? (p. 80)

20. Occurring as it does between re-enactments of the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ, this intervening by-play in which Jonathas’ hand is ripped off, and is then boiled down to bare bones in a cauldron, may be viewed as a counterpart to the uproar and despair experienced by the devils in hell upon the occasion of Christ’s appearance to ‘harrow’ out the souls of the prophets and patriarchs. It constitutes an intimation of a complete loss of control of an event over which the Jews had seen themselves, until now, as presiding. On the motif of the sticking hand see also the legend of the impious Fergus, once present in the York mystery cycle: Lucy Toulmin Smith ed., York Plays (New York: Russell and Russell, [1885] 1963), p. xxvii. 21. Rubin (1999), p. 27.

The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Commemoration and Repetition in Late Medieval Culture

43

The form of this address is liturgical—based on the improperia or reproaches directed by the resurrected Christ to his tormentors—and also dramatic, as manifested in similar speeches from the English biblical plays.22 David Bevington describes the Play of the Sacrament as a ‘conversion play’, and Christ’s reproaches are certainly spoken not as an end in themselves but with a motive of conversion and enlargement of the believing community—addressed not only to the Jews within the play but (as in other appearances of this motive) to errant or insufficiently devout members of the predominantly Christian audience.23 If we accept Bevington’s analysis, we need not be entirely surprised that the play ends, unusually, with the conversion of the Jews—rather than, as was more commonly the case, an imagined, reported, or actual antiJewish pogrom. (As an expression of the norm in such cases, one may recall that even Chaucer’s charitable Prioress reports with satisfaction that the offending Jews of her tale, including all those who even knew of the crime, were visited “with torment and with shameful deeth echon”, including drawing by wild horses before they were hung.24) The argument might be made, and has normally been made, that the miraculous restoration of Jonathas’ hand, and the subsequent conversions with which the play ends, constitute a closing affirmation of the communitarian ideal. In this interpretation, the master-sacrament of the Eucharist is seen to offer a forum and solvent for resolution of social difference. Here the host functions as a agent of symbolic integration, serving as a kind of master-signifier—one which reconciles a variety of alternate symbolic structures—historical, commemorative, integrative, hostile, unbelieving, productive, and the like—in a single place, revolving around a single mystery. Whether by conversion (in this play) or by expulsion and punishment (in the majority of host-desecration tales), the sacramental society aspires to become a cleansed and purified society, in which dissent is either re-absorbed or successfully expelled. But the fact of ultimate conversion does not erase or alleviate the play’s prevailing animosity against its Jewish protagonists. In this case, the ripping of Jonathas’ arm from his hand, and then the boiling away of its flesh from its bones in the cauldron, and his exposure to the mock-ministrations of a stage quack called Master Brundyche of Braban, represent amply enough the possibility of offense taken against the Jewish ‘other’. My own reading of this play takes the final conversion as gestural, and proceeds from the necessary role of resistance in the production of sacramental repetition, and the sense in which the imaginary, unconverted Jew is functionally involved as a ‘necessary provocation’. Underpinning this involvement is the surprising and unwarranted Christian assumption that Jews and other pagans and paynims were obsessed with the miracle of the consecrated host, and schemed constantly to lay hands upon it, experiment with it, and experience its unique power. I need 22. As discussed by Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1952). 23. Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 754. 24. “The Prioress’s Tale”, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), ll. 628-34.

44

Paul Strohm

hardly say that such groups actually minimally interested themselves in this rather arcane Christian sacrament, except to the extent that an interest was imputed to them or forced upon them. In her analysis of actual Jewish discussions of the sacrament, Rubin finds only puzzlement and bemusement, no hostility and certainly no participatory inclinations.25 Yet the Christian fantasy of such interest was so persistent that it invites an explanation even beyond the Jew as a necessary marker of resistance. This further explanatory horizon is related to the total mobilization of late medieval society around the task of sacramental repetition. As I have already suggested, a chasm inevitably yawned between the enormity of the demand and the necessarily-inadequate resources available for its accomplishment. In the face of this unstinting demand, the Jew is fantastically recruited, not simply as an adversary, but as a paradoxical ally in the task of sacramental reproduction. Analogously with the importation of guest-workers to satisfy suddenly-spiking productive demands in an industrial society, medieval Christian society imagined an augmentation of its ability to fulfill sacramental injunctions through conscripted labor. In this fantastic scenario, otherwise uninterested or unwilling subjects are imaginatively recruited and assigned supplemental duties in the unending task of sacramental reproduction. In the face of this sacramental injunction, the Jewish ‘other’ is imagined as paradoxically ‘same’ in the desire to repeat or reiterate the originary sacrifice of Christ. ‘Saming’, as described by Naomi Schor, is the process by which we deny to the other the right to her or his difference.26 Whether defined as Jew, Muslim, Paynim, or in some other way, the victim of ‘saming’ is recruited to an alien project under imaginative circumstances beyond redress or control. The conversions which conclude The Play of the Sacrament suggest that, at the end of it all, ‘saming’ need be considered no less coercive than ‘othering’, its apparent opposite.

25. “What Did the Jews Think of the Eucharist?”, Rubin (1999), pp. 93-103. 26. Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

THE SECRET OF THE SACRED CONFESSION AND THE SELF IN SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT by Andrew James Johnston I Middle English chivalric romances tend not to be overly obsessed with religious matters. More often than not religion enters merely in the form of the inevitable hermit who will minister to the spiritual and physical needs of a questing hero lost in the wilds.1 At a superficial glance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight seems to yield up a very similar picture. While the poem delights in its lavish descriptions of aristocratic culture down to its most mundane details,2 matters divine appear to play only a marginal role. Feasting, flirting and hunting dominate the scene. If problems do arise in this world, then they are presented as issues of courtly love and chivalric honour,3 the two being linked in a pattern as finely wrought as the pentangle adorning Gawain’s shield. And, indeed, it is with the five-fold symbolism of the star depicted thereon that we encounter the romance’s most direct discussion of religious themes.4 Yet this discussion is suffused with the values and 1. Derek Pearsall, “Courtesy and Chivalry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: the Order of Shame and the Invention of Embarrassment”, in Derek Brewer / Jonathan Gibson, eds., A Companion to the “Gawain”-Poet (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), p. 352. 2. For a description of how the luxuries depicted in the poem may reflect the dazzling opulence of Richard II’s court see John Bowers, The Politics of Pearl: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 17 f. 3. As David Aers (Faith, Ethics and Church: Writing in England, 1360-1409 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), p. 79) notes, the poem “carefully occludes all contemporary conflicts over the extraction and distribution of ‘lucrum’”. 4. In the poem, the five points of the star signify the five senses, Gawain’s five fingers, Christ’s five wounds, the five joys Mary had from her son, and five virtues that befit a Christian knight, i.e. “fraunchyse” and “felahschyp”, “clannes” and “cortaysye” and “pité”, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ll. 640-55. All quotations from the poem are taken from: Malcolm Andrew / Ronald Waldron, eds., The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1996).

46

Andrew James Johnston

concepts of chivalric society. Not only does the pentangle’s symbolism completely merge the religious and the chivalric, but in so doing it assigns to matters religious a quality bordering on the purely decorative. Thus, aristocratic culture seems wholly to absorb religion and to transform it into but another facet of the glittering pageant of courtly display.5 Still, this is not the whole story. Especially in the third and fourth fits of the poem, religion asserts itself as a cultural force in its own right—though less so through direct discourse than through half-hidden means just as compelling. The religious issue that exercises the poet’s mind so hauntingly in parts three and four of the romance is the sacrament of penance. The reader witnesses four different situations of a confessional kind, only one of them a confession in the strictly religious sense. First, there are Gawain’s secret trysts with Lady Bertilak. Here, the hero assumes a role closely resembling that of a confessee while the lady tempts him in a flirtatious dialogue nearly as soul-searching as that of the confessional.6 Then, after Gawain’s third and last meeting with Lady Bertilak—after accepting from her the Green Girdle and promising not to hand it over to her husband, thus breaking his agreement with Sir Bertilak—he actually confesses to a priest. Although this is the only proper confession from an ecclesiastical point of view, it is dealt with in no more than five lines. Critics have been grappling with this scene for decades and it will form the main concern of this article. Thirdly, we witness Gawain finally facing the Green Knight, i.e. Sir Bertilak, at the Green Chapel, a meeting culminating in Gawain’s being absolved of his sin of failing to surrender the Green Girdle to his host. And fourthly, Gawain returns to Camelot, where he relates his adventures to the court, gives vent to his feelings of shame and imposes upon himself the penance of wearing the Green Girdle for the rest of his life. Whereas only the second of the occasions listed actually involves the sacrament of confession, the other three all evoke the issue of confession through aspects such as their ritualised nature, the soul-searching they depict, or the contrition expressed and the satisfaction provided within them. For all its overt secularity the poem betrays a considerable preoccupation with at least one religious issue, the sacrament of penance. Gawain’s second confession, the one where he actually partakes of the sacrament, is the subject of a long-standing critical debate. Sir Israel Gollancz first found fault with the scene and pronounced Gawain’s confession to be “sacrilegious”, regarding it as the product of an unwitting error committed by the poet.7 John Burrow has repeatedly argued in favour of conscious design. In Burrow’s opinion, Gawain’s confession is invalid.8 And, indeed, the narrator’s statement, unequivocal though it sounds, does seem to cast doubt on Gawain’s honesty: 5. Aers (2000), p. 80. 6. The very manner in which she invades Gawain’s private space behind the curtains of his bed is reminiscent of the secluded encounters of the confessional box—an invention the Middle Ages was not yet familiar with: Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999), p. 30.

The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

47

Þere he schrof hym schyryly and schewed his mysdedez, Of þe more and þe mynne, and merci besechez, And of absolucioun he on þe segge calles; And he asoyled hym surely and sette hym so clene As domezday schulde haf ben diht on the morn.9

What has provoked so many attempts to explain this scene, is the fact that the narrator himself finds nothing amiss with Gawain’s confession—Gawain tells all and, hence, is completely and unconditionally absolved. Nevertheless, readers cannot help but assume that Gawain has suppressed the incident with the girdle and, more importantly, his intention of keeping it. And, from the start, contrary to his compact with Sir Bertilak, according to which Gawain is obliged to hand over anything he receives during the three days he rests at the castle while his host goes hunting, Gawain really does seem to contemplate retaining the girdle that might save his life: Þen kest þe knyht, and hit come to his hert Hit were a juel for þe jopardé þat him jugged were. When he acheued to þe chapel his chek for to fech, Niyh he haf slypped to be vnslayn, þe sleht were noble.10

Gawain accepts the girdle and, at the lady’s request, promises never to tell her husband— thus implicitly declaring his intention of breaking his contract with Sir Bertilak. As soon as the lady has left, Gawain hides the girdle: “Hid hit ful holdely þer he hit eft fonde.”11 Thus, even if Gawain confesses to having accepted the girdle, by concealing from the priest his plan not to deliver up the gift to Sir Bertilak in the evening, he does not offer a full confession and, so, his absolution ought not to be valid. Yet, as far as the narrator is concerned, this does not seem to impair the efficacy of the hero’s supposedly full and unreserved confession.12 According to the narrator, Gawain has been entirely frank about his sins and has, therefore, been rightly “asoyled”. The narrator’s statement must not be passed over lightly, since he claims full authority and throughout the poem his voice remains remarkably confident and stable. Since the text here deploys its aesthetic means in a manner so brilliantly balanced, the terse7. Sir Israel Gollancz, ed., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Early English Text Society, original series no. 210 (London: Oxford University Press, [1940] 1957, n. 1880). The following discussion of this issue will limit itself to a cursory overview of the principal arguments. For a detailed presentation of the various theories put forward see William Vantuono, ed. and trans., “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”: A Dual Language Version (New York: Garland, 1991), n. 1876-84. 8. John Burrow, “The Two Confession Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, Modern Philology 57 (1959), 73-79; John Burrow, A Reading of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 106-110. 9. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ll. 1880-84. 10. Ibid., ll. 1855-58. 11. Ibid., l. 1875. 12. As R. A. Shoaf puts it: “The text strongly suggests that Gawain is in a state of grace at this point”, The Poem as Green Girdle: ‘Commercium’ in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984), p. 17.

48

Andrew James Johnston

ness of the actual confession’s description contrasting so conspicuously with the mounting richness of penitential allusions in the other three scenes, a mere slip by the poet, as Gollancz suggested, does not seem a likely solution to the problem. Readers have, therefore, no choice than either to explain away the contradiction between the narrator’s words and Gawain’s actions, or else to attribute some sort of special significance to the “sacrilegious” confession.

II By and large, critics have dealt with this issue by choosing one of three courses. There are those who simply accuse Gawain of confessing falsely—and pay the price of making the narrator look either unreliable or incompetent. Others defend Gawain against such accusations by flatly denying the existence of any contradiction. A third group concentrates on removing the contradictory character of the confession scene without simultaneously exculpating Gawain.13 The easiest way of clearing Gawain’s name is to assert that his retention of the girdle constitutes, at worst, a breach of the rules of a “parlour game” and, consequently has no greater moral relevance whatever.14 But given the considerable attention the poem pays to the “parlour game” and the tension Lady Bertilak’s advances produce, it is difficult to dismiss the exchange of winnings game as merely trivial. It is here that Gawain’s integrity and his identity are put to the test. A variant of the argument just discussed draws on scholastic theology by declaring the knight’s sin to be merely venial, since Gawain’s lie is what St. Thomas Aquinas would have called a ‘jocose lie’ and bending the rules of the exchange of winnings contest does not merit the kind of gravity powerful enough truly to imperil the hero’s soul.15 Contemporary theologians admonished confessors not to make penitents confess to venial sins or encourage potentially damaging forms of excessive scrupulousness amongst them.16 But, as expressed by the symbol of the pentangle on Gawain’s shield, within the 13. There is a group of scholars who, while acknowledging the problem in general, seek to side-step the theological issues involved by discussing the whole matter in anthropological/historical terms namely as illustrating a movement from a shame culture to a guilt culture. Different versions of this approach are to be found with Derek Pearsall (1997), pp. 357-362; A. C. Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 203 f.; John Burrow, “Honour and Shame in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, in John Burrow, Essays on Medieval Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 119-131. 14. J. R. R. Tolkien / E. V. Gordon, eds., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, second ed.: Norman Davis, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), n. 1882; Andrew / Waldron, eds., (1996), “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, n. 1876-84. 15. Thomas D. Hill, “Gawain’s Jesting Lie: Towards an Interpretation of the Confessional Scene in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, Studia Neophilologica 52 (1980), 279-286. Similarly, R. A. Shoaf argues that Gawain while he confessed must have held the conviction that his keeping the girdle did not represent a misdeed and that Gawain was, therefore, confessing in good faith, R. A. Shoaf (1984), p. 17. 16. Aers (2000), p. 82.

The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

49

thoroughly aristocratic ideology of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the chivalric and the religious merge inextricably and Gawain cannot break his trawthe, i.e. his knightly integrity, without simultaneously committing a sinful act.17 Moreover, though medieval authorities agree that only mortal sins make a Christian liable to eternal damnation and must, therefore, be confessed, there were many different opinions on what exactly distinguished mortal from venial sins and how the distinction was to be applied to specific cases.18 A different argument posits that, at the time of his confession, Gawain had not yet decided to withhold the girdle and that he may still have been planning to hand it over. Thus, the knight’s actions become sinful only at the very moment he gives Sir Bertilak the three kisses without simultaneously surrendering the girdle.19 This interpretation requires us to believe that Gawain changed his mind during the short space of time between his final interview with Lady Bertilak and his confession, that during those brief moments he decided to hand over the Green Girdle, after all. Such a reversal of purpose must have taken place, because, if we are to believe the narrator, when the hero is shown the girdle and informed of its supposed magical properties, the first thing that crosses his mind is how handy this object would be at his encounter with the Green Knight.20 But, more important, like most theories put forward in Gawain’s favour, this one depends on making assumptions on the state of Gawain’s mind and morals which are not supported by the text. The theory rests on speculations about what Gawain may or may not have been thinking while he was in the act of making his confession, or else later in the day. And this is something we simply cannot know because the text omits to tell us. A more sophisticated version of the interpretation just discussed might argue that Gawain’s misdeed consists not in a defective or even disingenuous confession, but rather in his failure to follow up his confession with the indispensable act of satisfaction, satisfactio operis, i. e. the third and final part of the three stages a penitent must go through according to the requirements of the sacrament, the first two being contrition, contritio cordis, and confession, confessio oris. Consequently, Gawain’s confession to having ac17. Burrow (1965), p. 105 f. Another critic, also citing St. Thomas Aquinas, contends that Gawain’s sin is actually considerably diminished by the very seriousness of the situation he finds himself in. Being in fear of his life, Gawain commits a ‘sin of passion’ and not one of ‘malice’. The strength of Gawain’s anxiety thus turns a mortal sin into a venial one; Gerald Morgan, “The Validity of Gawain’s Confession in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, Review of English Studies 36 (1985), 12). 18. Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 145. 19. W. R. J. Barron, “Knighthood on Trial: The Acid Test of Irony”, FMLS (1981), 181-197. For a similar line of argument see Victor Ylverton Haines, The Fortunate Fall of Sir Gawain: The Typology of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (Lanham: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 211 f. 20. Drawing on an analogue from Inferno XXVII Julian Wasserman and Liam O. Purdon have suggested that Gawain may have been doing both at the same time, confessing and still planning to commit the sin he was confessing. Fascinating as the analogue may be, we have too little evidence to firmly support this idea; Julian Wasserman / Liam O. Purdon, “Sir Guido and the Green Light: Confession in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Inferno XXVII”, Neophilologus 84 (2000), pp. 649 ff.

50

Andrew James Johnston

cepted the girdle remains worthless as long as he does not offer satisfaction by giving up the gift to his host. In purely theological terms, this is probably the most persuasive interpretation of the scene, as it succeeds in aligning the sequence of Gawain’s actions to the consecutive elements of the sacrament. Gawain thus invalidates his confession not as he makes it, but retroactively, namely by not giving the satisfaction that needs to follow his confession. This reading does, however, once again depend on the unprovable assumption that Gawain abandoned his plan of keeping the girdle while he was getting dressed or while he was on his way down to the castle’s chapel, i.e. that the hero experiences a major moral crisis within a very short space of time after actually receiving and deciding to keep the girdle. It seems odd that such an important psychomachy should not be disclosed to the readers, especially considering that Gawain’s earlier succumbing to temptation stands before us in all its vividness. Moreover, this theory, too, implies that at some later stage after his confession Gawain broke his honest, albeit newly made commitment to doing what was right and virtuous, that sometime between confessing in the morning and meeting Sir Bertilak in the evening Gawain slid back from his earlier resolve. Whatever their psychological and moral plausibility, these are assumptions the text refuses to underpin. Like so many of its predecessors, this reading ignores the defiant confidence with which the narrator pronounces his protagonist’s soul to be utterly cleansed. Hence, it treats of only that which the story tells us—or, in this case, doesn’t—but neglects the question of how we are told.

III None of these explanations for the apparent contradiction between Gawain’s actions and his supposedly valid confession succeeds in dispelling our doubts. In the final analysis, all endeavours to solve the riddle rely on speculation—speculation about what Gawain said, thought or planned to do at one or another of the potentially important turning points of the narrative. The text itself gives us no more than the basic paradox of a completely absolved Gawain and a Gawain who, literally at the end of the day, sticks to his original decision of keeping the Green Girdle. Thus the poem’s confession scene leads the reader into a maze of conflicting evidence. If the attempts to find a theologically acceptable and/or psychologically plausible explanation for the problem of Gawain’s confession remain ultimately unconvincing, then not least because they all share a common shortcoming. They all betray a striking disregard for the poem’s stubborn insistence on the conspicuous paradoxicality of Gawain’s confession. After all, the uneasiness readers experience with the scene is the product of a carefully contrived, two-pronged strategy, the components of which are the narrator’s staunch refusal to give us the necessary insight into the workings of Gawain’s mind, on the one hand, and the simultaneous assertion of the indubitable validity of the hero’s confession, on the other.

The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

51

For all the romance’s excessive gestures towards closure21—such as its fascination with numerology—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight defies any conclusive answer to the questions it poses. As the scholarly responses discussed above have amply proven, like a demande d’amour, the poem draws its audience into a debate of never-ending moral casuistry.22 In fact, the poem’s overt obsession with closure does much to increase this effect, as it conjures up the unattainable spectre of a final verdict, only to trap us in an interminable circle of argument. Consequently, one might contend that the romance confronts us with a wickedly perfect example of a typically courtly aesthetic.23 Because it is the principles of the demande d’amour that provide the structure for a debate of penitential matters, the sacrament is implicitly subjected to the rules of a game of ritualised sexuality. It is one thing to ask whether the imprisoned Palamon suffers more than the banished Arcite,24 but it is quite another to play this sort of game with the issue of Sir Gawain’s salvation. If this does not come as a shock to the reader, then for two reasons. First, since the demande is never expressed in so many words, it remains almost completely veiled. We find ourselves busily answering a question that has never really been asked. Second, the text consistently blurs the distinctions between the courtly and the religious spheres. During the three bedroom scenes preceding Gawain’s confession the audience has already witnessed an audacious example of chivalric culture appropriating not merely religious but quite specifically penitential discourse. As Karma Lochrie has shown, the love-talk between Lady Bertilak and Sir Gawain collapses the languages of court and confession to a point where they become indistinguishable.25 Could there be more convincing proof

21. A. C. Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 196. 22. A demande d’amour is a game in which ladies and gentlemen debate tricky questions of courtly love posed in such a manner that a definitive answer becomes impossible and the verbal, erotic sparring can, theoretically, continue ad infinitum. For examples, descriptions and interpretations of the demande d’amour and related issues see W. L. Braekmann, ed., The ‘Demaundes off Love’, SCRIPTA: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 7 (Brussels: Research Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1982); Richard Firth Green, “Le Roi Qui Ne Ment and Aristocratic Courtship”, in Keith Busby / Erik Kooper, eds., Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, Selected Papers from the 5th Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, Dalfsen, The Netherlands, 9-16th August 1986, Utrecht Papers in General and Comparative Literature 25 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1988), pp. 211225; Margaret Felberg-Levitt, ed., Les Demandes d’Amour, Inedita & Rara 10 (Montreal: Éditions CERES Montréal, 1995). 23. David Aers has drawn attention to the close proximity of confessional and erotic atmospheres in the poem, (Aers (2000), p. 83), for instance, when Gawain seeks the society of courtly ladies right after his confession. According to Aers “the poet has given us a striking sequence whose juxtapositions offer a powerful image of the way this Church and its sacrament of penance is immersed in, even subordinate to, courtly forms of life and the court’s erotic games”. 24. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Fragment I, ll. 1347-54. 25. Lochrie (1999), pp. 45-48.

52

Andrew James Johnston

of how totally the chivalric swallows the religious in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, of how “Christless”26 the poem’s Christianity has become? Seen in this light, the poem zigzags its way from its ostensibly secular surface to a deeper layer of penitential problems, only to entirely engulf that level by the language and poetics of courtly love. Camelot’s laughing courtiers at the end of the poem would thus signal the ultimate triumph of an aristocratic aesthetic over Christianity’s moral complexities. In the same manner in which the courtiers symbolically invalidate Gawain’s self-imposed penance by collectively adopting the Green Girdle as their new sign, the poem itself annuls the salvational urgency of penance through treating it in a fashion derived from the demande d’amour, a frivolous courtly diversion. So, one could argue, this movement takes place both in terms of different layers of signification and at the level of narrative chronology. Aristocratic form carries the day in its battle against moral content. Inclined as one may feel to surrender to the specifically courtly aesthetics of the romance, one need not become wholly entangled in the web of the poem’s idiosyncratically chivalric brand of moral insolubilia. A second look at the means with which the Gawainpoet achieves his paradoxical effects may provide a new angle to the issue. As mentioned above, the narrator directly deals with religious issues only as long as they come packaged safely within the symbolism of the pentangle, i.e. as long as he can rely on the excessively stylised rigidity of later medieval numerology.27 Not only do the aesthetic effects of numerology link the courtly and the divine in a shared system of signification, they also insulate the religious issues and fix them firmly within the stable setting assigned to them. The situation changes, when religious problems actually become important for the hero’s soul. Then a remarkable narratorial reticence ensues. The narrator begins to convey his meaning mainly through his protagonists’ words or deeds and largely refrains from supplying commentaries on the action or additional information of a kind not to be gleaned immediately from what the characters do or say. With regard to the validity of Gawain’s confession the narrator withholds information as tenaciously as Gawain withholds Lady Bertilak’s girdle. This type of narratorial thrift reaches an early peak at the account of Gawain’s confession, then to be, however, relinquished at once—though only for the briefest of moments. In the confession scene, the narrator’s economy intensifies in as much as he abstains from giving us any clue as to what Gawain actually says, thinks or feels. But by invoking the Day of Judgement in his self-assured, albeit short comment on the state of Gawain’s soul, the narrator dispenses with his newly adopted narratorial thrift. The reference to Doomsday entails a heavy rhetorical stress contrasting markedly with the brevity of the scene: “And he asoyled hym surely and sette hym so clene/ As domezday schulde haf ben diht on the morn.”28 The paradoxical effect of Gawain’s con26. Aers (2000), p. 86 27. For a classic analysis of this problem see Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 240 f. 28. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, l. 1883 f.

The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

53

fession is thus brought about by an equally paradoxical narrative technique pointedly drawing attention to its own strategies of concealment. Placed in the closest possible proximity, the vocal and the restrained set each other off. The result is one of enduring tension. Effective as these rhetorical means are, their impact is considerably enhanced by the specifically performative quality of the scene. What enables the narrator to remain so silent about the exact content of Gawain’s confession while simultaneously making such a vociferous statement about it, is the very issue the scene both depicts and discusses, the sacrament of penance. The brilliance of the narratorial strategy results from the veil of concealment being woven out of the very fabric of what it hides. In the confession scene, the sacrament of penance no longer merely constitutes a central theme of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but provides also the fundamental structure for the poem’s treatment of the problem. It is because the narrator respects one of auricular confession’s most prized conditions, secrecy, that generations of scholars have been caught in a never-ending roundabout of casuistical speculation. According to the rules governing the practice of confession, no third party is entitled to know what Gawain actually confesses to. Obviously, this applies to the reader, too. The narrator respects confessional secrecy, while also drawing attention to the fact that he does. Gawain, we are expressly told, approaches the priest “preuély”.29 Thus, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight confession is performed in the double sense of the word. Not only does the reader witness Gawain’s confession at the level of the romance’s action, but confession—or more precisely, the secrecy that canon law prescribes for the interaction between confessor and confessee—is elevated to the structural principle of one of the poem’s crucial narrative episodes, since it is the confessional secrecy that permits the narrator blandly to make a claim which in the light of the reader’s knowledge and expectations will appear increasingly incredible as the poem progresses. Were it not for the secret as to what Gawain actually confesses, the narrator would inevitably become enmeshed in the same thicket as his critics. He would have to attempt some kind of theologically sound and psychologically plausible explanation of what is going on, and his tone of happy, possibly even defiant confidence would begin to ring very hollow indeed. Otherwise, he would simply get crushed under the growing weight of complex moral intricacies. By adhering strictly to the confidentiality of Gawain’s confession the narrator remains capable of maintaining his paradoxical stance with an air of provocative certitude, thereby ensuring that the desire for closure apparently so characteristic of the poem’s style is thoroughly thwarted. The secrecy of the sacrament is turned into one of the poem’s prime narrative strategies. In order to understand the potential significance of this choice of strategy it is necessary to take a short look not merely at some aspects of the medieval discourse of confession but also at their postmodern uses.

29. Ibid., l. 1877.

54

Andrew James Johnston

IV In 1215 the sacrament of penance became established in the form known to the Gawainpoet more than a century and a half later. Canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council, Omnis utriusque sexus, laid down the structure of the sacrament and imposed on every confirmed Christian the duty of annual oral confession, to be followed by participation at the Eucharist. Because of its importance for the theory and practice of confession, the Fourth Lateran Council features prominently in the grand récit of Western modernity as told, for instance, by Michel Foucault, that supposed arch-enemy of all master narratives.30 According to Foucault the changes imposed by this council introduce the techniques of repression which bring into being the self of modernity, the idea of the modern human being as a “confessing animal”: The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile […].31

By granting the penitent the double role of the “speaking subject” and the “subject of the statement”, the ritual of confession instils in him a novel sense of self and interiority. Hence, Foucault’s history of the subject elevates (later) medieval penitential practices to the origin of the discourse and technology of the modern self.32 Foucault argues that the penitent’s consciousness of an interior self derives from the paradoxical power dynamics between confessor and confessee—the curious hierarchical relationship which puts at a disadvantage the side both permitted and forced to express itself. What makes Foucault’s discussion of confession especially pertinent to the concerns of this study is the manner in which he locates secrecy at the centre of his analysis. The secrecy surrounding the act of confession is instrumental in bringing forth the kind of expression and soul-searching which evokes the new sense of self in the penitent. Due to secrecy, the pleasures of confession take effect and in their turn contribute to shaping the penitent subject.33 30. Foucault’s most vociferous attack on the grands récits is to be found in Donald F. Bouchard / Sherry Simon trans., “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 76-100. 31. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurly (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 61 f. 32. Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), how, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these technologies assume the guise of secular discourses such as medicine, psychiatry, pedagogy and delinquency. 33. Unfortunately, Foucault tends to refer to ‘the confession’ in a transhistorical and metonymical fashion making it difficult to ascertain when he is actually discussing the medieval practice of confession, its underlying principles or a general long-term concept of confession-like discourse typical of modernity. Because of these terminological and chronological ambiguities Foucault’s analysis is prone to invite criticism not always wholly justified.

The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

55

Foucault’s œuvre contains many provocations for medievalists, but few issues display his problematic stance towards the Middle Ages with such exceptional clarity as his discussion of the sacrament of penance. Lee Patterson has pointed out how the Foucauldian framework casts the Middle Ages in the role of modernity’s all-purpose ‘other’, a place where the carceral society did not yet exist, a prelapsarian world still to be infected by the concept of the modern subject. Much as Foucault may claim to be breaking with the master narratives of Western history, he not only writes a story very similar to the ones he purports to supplant, but also a story whose basic periodisation sounds strikingly familiar.34 Even though his discussion of the sacrament of penance might appear to push back the watershed between the modern subject and its premodern ‘other’ into the thirteenth century,35 Foucault’s nostalgic treatment of the issue confirms many medievalists’ worst suspicions. Primarily interested in medieval confession as a sex-related36 institution, Foucault portrays the Fourth Lateran Council as initiating the repression of a realm of prediscursive sexuality, as putting to an end an age in history that neither knew sexual identities nor sought to discipline the pleasures of the body.37 Ironically, the Fourth Lateran Council’s settlement of the sacrament of penance resulted in an official marginalisation of earlier positions which conceived of confession in terms much closer to Foucault’s. It was before 1215 that many theologians placed greater importance on the sinner’s interior than afterwards. The decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council actually represent an uneasy compromise between two systems of confession which had been competing with each other all through the eleventh and twelfth centuries.38 On the one hand, there was the conservative theory that forgiveness of sin could be 34. Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 56-72; see also Carolyn Dinshaw, “Getting Medieval: Pulp Fiction, Gawain and Foucault”, in Dolores Warwick Frese / Katherine O’Keefe, eds., The Book and the Body (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp. 140 ff. (A revised version of this article appeared in Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 183-206. The revisions are not crucial to the problems discussed in this article.) 35. In his analysis of Gawain’s confessions, Gregory W. Cross (“Secret Rules: Sex, Confession, and Truth in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, Arthuriana 4 (1994), p. 148) enthusiastically supports Foucault’s grand récit of the birth of the modern subject through the secrecy of confession but criticizes the French philosopher for not placing sufficient emphasis on the effects of the Fourth Lateran Council: “While I accept Foucault’s description of such a development in the practice of sacramental confession, I argue that his placement of it in time should be amended. I believe that it is already well underway by the late Middle Ages.” 36. Foucault (1990), vol. I, p. 61. Though sex does, of course, play a prominent role in contemporary catalogues of sin, Innocent III and his advisers appear to have had other, more threatening dangers in mind when they pushed for the establishment of yearly, obligatory confession. Confession was supposed to provide priests with an instrument for exerting stronger control over their parishioners. Originally, Omnis utriusque sexus seems to have been primarily intended to help weed out heresy (Tentler (1977), p. 22). This was, after all, the era when the Cathars had reached the apex of their power. 37. Karma Lochrie (1999), p. 17. 38. Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the “Ancrene Wisse” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 89.

56

Andrew James Johnston

secured only through the efficacy of the priest, however much the sinner may have repented. On the other hand, a concept of confession became popular both amongst the learned and the laity which empowered the individual to be his or her own mediator and thus stressed the prime importance of interior repentance. An influential eleventh-century pseudo-Augustinian treatise, De vera et falsa poenitentia, argued not only in favour of confessing to laymen—a practice quite common during the eleventh and twelfth centuries and dying out in the course of the thirteenth—but emphasized also the sinner’s emotional and interior life. The pseudo-Augustinian author held that the efficacy of penance derived from the shame (erubescentia) and confusion felt by the sinner during the act of expressing his sins aloud. Not surprisingly, this predominantly psychological concept of confession required the priest neither for granting absolution nor for imposing penance. The shame a sinner was aware of during his confession was seen as the principal act of satisfaction demanded by God.39 Within this “contritionist” system the priest assumed a merely supportive function, whereas what really counted were wholly subjective and internal processes nobody but the penitent himself could fathom truly. Given this state of affairs, the Fourth Lateran Council must be seen as embarking on a policy of containment. Even though its decrees do affirm the “contritionist” view of the sacrament, they also place it within a ritual context privileging ecclesiastical power. In the final analysis, two quite contradictory principles were yoked together in an unhappy union which could not but complicate matters both for the institution that provided absolution and for those who sought it.40 Even after 1215, absolution was still generally seen to possess a predominantly declaratory nature. The priest merely showed God’s forgiveness, while the remission of guilt was caused by the penitent’s contrition. Later in the century, St. Thomas Aquinas buttressed the priest’s role by arguing that because the priest’s words “Ego te absolvo”, ‘I absolve thee’, are spoken in the indicative mood, they represent not a mere declaration of divine forgiveness but actually have the power to absolve.41 Consequently, they are indispensable to the efficacy of the sacrament. Though St. Thomas by and large remained a contritionist, he developed yet another line of argument strengthening sacerdotal control over the ritual of confession. Absolution by the priest, he argued, was the only way that the passion of Christ could be applied to the forgiveness of the guilt of sins. Only through the priest could contrition take effect. In cases when a penitent went to Church only feeling contrite without actually being it, i.e. falsely believing in the sufficiently sincere sorrow at his or her own sins—the inadequate state of sorrow called “attrition”— 39. This position fitted well with the general current of ethics during the eleventh and twelfth centuries which saw a move away from external acts towards the intentions that brought about those acts. Abelard considered all acts neutral in themselves (ibid., p. 94 f.). 40. This is not to say that the Fourth Lateran Council intervened arbitrarily in order to strengthen the power of the Church. The long-term history of the sacrament of penance shows that between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries both the position of the priest and the importance of contrition were greatly enhanced; Tentler (1977), p. 16. 41. Lochrie (1999), p. 28.

The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

57

absolution had the capacity of providing the added grace the sinner needed. An imperfectly sorry penitent could, therefore, rely on the power of the confessor to help him overcome the final obstacle to forgiveness. Ultimately, the priest counted for more than the penitent’s interior self.42 Though the penitent’s disposition was a prerequisite for the efficacy of the sacrament, it was not its cause. St. Thomas held that on principle sacramental grace could not derive from the work of the human being receiving the sacrament— ex opere operantis—but was always a product of the ritually performed sacrament—ex opere operato. St. Thomas’s contribution to the debate proved to be crucial in shaping the orthodox position on the sacrament of penance.43 Though the general flow of later medieval spirituality during the fourteenth century increasingly favoured the internal and subjective,44 powerful strands of confessional discourse evolved that were even more conservative than the views proposed by St. Thomas. If contrition was not to be considered valid without subsequent oral confession and priestly absolution, then, many believers drew the converse conclusion, oral confession and priestly absolution brought remission of sins, irrespective of the confessee’s state of mind. To a certain extent, orthodox theologians discussing the sacrament after the Fourth Lateran Council facilitated such popular misconceptions. St. Thomas took a small step in this direction when, as already discussed, he maintained that an imperfectly sorry penitent was nevertheless capable of attaining grace through the sacrament. Duns Scotus radicalised the notion of ex opere operato by abandoning the call for perfect contrition entirely and contending that attrition was to be considered the normal condition under which the sacrament took effect. The words of the priest, the outward sign of forgiveness played the most important role within the working of the sacrament.45 In contrast to the popular views mentioned above, Scotist theory did, however, insist on the necessity of attrition and satisfaction and demanded that there be no obstacles to absolution such as a penitent’s intention to repeat his sins or not to offer satisfaction. Though less influential than Thomism, Duns Scotus’ ideas were to remain in currency throughout the later Middle Ages. They made things easier for the confessee by considerably shifting the balance towards attrition 42. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, too, insists on the necessity of the priest, even though the syntax of the passages appears somewhat ambiguous. Since Middle English did not possess a set of clearly identifiable reflexive pronouns, ll. 1882 and 1883 could be interpreted as though Gawain had “asoyled” himself: “And he asoyled hym surely and sette hym so clene/As domezday schulde haf ben diht on the morn.” Nevertheless, since line 1882 unambiguously states the presence and, by implication, the necessity of the priest, it seems more likely that “he” in line 1883 refers not to the confessee but to the confessor, the last person mentioned in the preceding sentence. 43. Tentler (1977), pp. 24-26. 44. As an example of this development Nicholas Watson (“The Gawain-Poet as a Vernacular Theologian”, in Derek Brewer / Jonathan Gibson eds., A Companion to the Gawain-Poet (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), p. 303) explains how during the first half of the fourteenth century the English mystic Richard Rolle devalues the purely physical aspects of his female reader’s virginity “and assumes that her state in this life and the next depends entirely on how far she is able to transform her interior self so that she can become Christ’s bride not in a formal but a mystical sense”. 45. Tentler (1977), p. 26 f.

58

Andrew James Johnston

and priestly power, they did not, however, resolve the basic contradiction between the inner and the outer that characterises medieval confession. Wide-spread amongst the laity though an excessive emphasis on priestly absolution seems to have been, it was strongly opposed by the dominant voices within the official Church. The Lollards, too, rejected this view and supported a strictly contritionist theory: “wiþouhten schrift of mouþe may a syneful man be saued in many a caas, but wiþouhten veri contricioun of herte mai no syneful man of discrecioun be saued”.46 If, as Lee Patterson claims, confession is “one of the central modes of self-representation available in late-medieval England”,47 it seems equally true that the interiority and subjectivity expressed in confessional terms does not exclusively, perhaps not even primarily, derive from the particular communicative situation that binds confessor and confessee from 1215 onwards. On the contrary, the most self-consciously subjective and interiorised concept of confession cited in this article defines itself through a vehement rejection of that hierarchical mode of secret dialogue. What is more, for obvious reasons, the secrecy provided by a radically contritionist position seems much safer than the one the Church was at pains to preserve.48 Where the interior reigns supreme, the boundary between the interior and the exterior loses its significance, and demands no special protection. To sum up, at the time the Fourth Lateran Council embarked on regulating the theory and practice of confession, medieval Christians were already able to draw on forms of penitential discourse placing a much stronger stress on the sinner’s interior than did the oddly composite construct the Council opted for. Yet at the same time many believers interpreted the rulings of 1215 in a particularly anti-contritionist, conservative fashion according to which the penitent’s actual inner state was of lesser consequence than the basic, ritualised acts of confession and absolution. In this they were to some extent supported by Scotist theory. Instead of overcoming the opposition between the inner and the outer that had implicitly dominated previous debates, the Fourth Lateran Council consolidated that very opposition within a highly contradictory system. Hence, the secrecy required by the orthodox practice of confession must be described as a direct product of that practice’s uneasy mixture of antagonistic aspects. By contrast, due to its excising the priest from the process of confession completely, the Lollard variety of penitential discourse is capable of totally dispensing with injunctions of confidentiality. In other words, the most subjective and interiorised attitudes to confession, attitudes of a kind documented well 46. “Sixteen Points on which the Bishops accuse the Lollards”, in Anne Hudson ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), reprinted with revisions by the author, Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 38 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), Text 2, ll. 69-80. 47. Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 386. 48. Before the confessional box was introduced, the Church was incapable of ensuring the mere outward conditions that made confidentiality possible; Karma Lochrie (1999), p. 30.

The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

59

before 1215, could do without secrecy. Confidentiality gains importance only when there is a clash between the principles of interiority and exteriority, a clash that the later Middle Ages somehow had to deal with since the Fourth Lateran Council had made it ineluctable.

V This clash is one of the chief preoccupations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. By not simply placing secrecy at the centre of his discussion of confession, but by also exploiting it performatively, by turning it into one of the principal sources of the poem’s enigmatic nature, the narrator draws us into the insurmountable tension between the inner and the outer lying at the very base of orthodox penitential praxis.49 He deftly plays with this contradiction as he transforms it into an unspoken demande d’amour. Secrecy both becomes a metaphor for and dramatically stages the paradox of late medieval confession. Were one to view this narrative strategy as simply another means to highlight the tension-ridden nature of contemporary confessional discourse, one might be tempted to read the poem as an attack on the exterior aspects of the sacrament of penance—as a brilliantly performative exposure of confession’s fundamental contradictions, but an exposure flying the colours of an increasingly interiorised spirituality.50 According to such an interpretation, the poem would be showing us, nay enacting, the misuse of priestly authority. The narrator himself would be assuming the role of an irresponsibly anti-contritionist priest who employs a combination of sacerdotal—in this case: narratorial—authority and confessional secrecy in order to declare his confessee free of sin, impossible though this ought to be.51 Such an explanation would give the narratorial voice a decidedly Chaucerian ring—as long, that is, as one does not wish to see the poem as simply witnessing to its specifically aristocratic version of “Christless Christianity”.

49. Mark C. Amodio who sees the poem at the interface between the Middle Ages and modernity notes the tension inherent in Gawain’s confession and also discusses the problem of interiority, but for Amodio, the real tension is between Gawain’s interior self and the sacrament, i.e. between a novel sense of interiority and a traditional sacrament. Interesting though this reading is, it obscures the problems inherent in the sacrament itself; “Tradition, Modernity, and the Emergence of the Self in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts 8 (1995), p. 58. 50. Although he is not chiefly interested in confessional discourse, Britton J. Harwood sees the poem as a critique not only of aristocratic spirituality but also of the mediating “apparatus of the church”. According to this reading, Gawain achieves an immediacy of religious experience that is superior to what “the institutional church” has to offer (“Gawain and the Gift”, PMLA 106 (1991), p. 492). Philippa Hardman interprets the text as an anti-traditionalist attack on contemporary magical and superstitious practices amongst the laity both noble and low-born; “Gawain’s Practice of Piety in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, Medium Aevum 68 (1999), 247-67. 51. After all, not even a staunch Scotist should have granted absolution to Sir Gawain.

60

Andrew James Johnston

Neither of the two last-mentioned solutions sounds entirely satisfactory. After all, the first reading would demote the poem’s courtly aesthetics to a mere instrument in the service of unveiling defective practices of confession. But that implies a critical neglect of the romance’s ostentatious love for all things noble, and, more importantly, a disregard for the unsurpassed courtly elegance with which the narrator delivers the coup de grace of his critique. The idealized world of chivalric romance, its beauty and its modes of expression mean far too much to the narrator to merit a merely ancillary function. The second interpretation—the one featuring a “Christless Christianity”—pays, however, too little attention to the complex artistic effort that has gone into the narrator’s performative masterstroke. The poem’s careful execution of its highly sophisticated strategies precludes a narrator merely trapped in the unavoidable ideological pitfalls of his text. Successful interpretations of the romance must take into account both its specifically courtly sophistication and the analytical rigour through which the poem approaches its religious concerns. Admittedly, this is more easily said than done, since modern readers would not usually expect to find completely intertwined a flamboyant aesthetic assertion of aristocratic cultural superiority and an intellectual perspicacity probing the very depths of penitential discourse. The combination represents, indeed, an improbable alliance. We find this conjunction of cultural modes and intellectual issues perplexing because we are used to viewing courtly sensibilities as fundamentally opposed to the notion of the interior.52 The chivalric aesthetic, one tends to assume, is fascinated with surfaces and abhors the subjective. Both the warrior and the courtier conceive of themselves as parts of hierarchically ordered collectivities and do not possess the sensibilities and the inwardness that mark the modern subject.53 Though we have ceased to accept this cliché as gospel truth, we still find that it has much to recommend itself for. An unreserved endorsement of chivalric culture, as displayed by the poem, should be mutually exclusive with an understanding of the spiritual demands of subjectivity. Furthermore, we find it hard to close the mental gap between the poem’s courtly aesthetic and its complex discussion of interiority because the grands récits we have long been taught to despise prove ineradicable. Automatically, one deems the road to progress to carry none but one-way traffic. By the same token, it seems only natural that those who travel along that road approve of its direction—even if merely subconsciously. Whoever has drunk from the cup of subjectivity will inevitably be drawn towards more and more subtle forms of that subjectivity and will defend them against institutional and traditional encroachments. To modernity in its later stages alone, i.e. to periods not before the age of Romanticism, does one generally ascribe a complex and reflexive awareness of the 52. See, for instance, Lee Patterson’s reading of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale as a contemporary analysis of the manner in which chivalric culture precludes subjectivity;Patterson (1991), pp. 168-179. 53. Norbert Elias is the rare case of a theorist who has sought the origins of subjectivity in the culture of the courtly aristocracy. His main focus is, however, on the seventeenth century; Edmund Jephcott, trans., The Court Society (New York, Pantheon, 1983), especially pp. 214-267.

The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

61

tributes and sacrifices modernity exacts. The pioneers of subjectivity, our master narratives imply, are still too busy liberating and nurturing their interiors to be capable of counting the costs. Consequently, modern critics usually seek spiritual complexity in medieval texts making what appear to be ‘progressive’ statements, i.e. statements leading away from the traditional rituals and institutions of the official Church and towards a more individualised and interiorised spirituality, towards expressions of spirituality as we often find them with the Lollards or with certain mystics. What if Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were taking a radically different stance from the ones we are prone to expect? What if the narrator’s acute insight into the contradictory nature of the sacrament, if his performative marking of the border between the interior and the exterior through the secrecy of confession did not aim at a ‘progressively’ contritionist critique of how the Church channels and represses the penitent’s interior? Then his defiantly aristocratic point of view combined with his incisive dissection of the discursive paradoxicality of confession would logically amount to a heavily anti-contritionist, radically ritualistic take on the issue of penance. In Sir Gawain we witness a subtle discussion of interiority that nevertheless results in a conscious rejection of notions comparable to that of the Western subject. In a way, the poem’s position is akin to the anti-romantic Anglo-Catholicism championed by T. S. Eliot. Between the text’s lines one glimpses a world view not archaically pre-subjective but decidedly anti-subjective, one that presupposes a well-developed sensitivity to interiority and to the dangers and risks connected with the concept. What distinguishes the romance’s exploration of this issue from modernist critiques of the Western humanist subject, is that the poem attacks not in a spirit of gloom and doom but through a festive celebration of chivalric ideals and aesthetics. Granted that this is, indeed, the main ideological thrust of the poem, the other confession scenes appear in a slightly different light. While Gawain’s secret power struggles with Lady Bertilak echo the Foucauldian concept of confessional discourse,54 his confessing to Sir Bertilak, a layman, follows quite a different logic. Gawain expresses his sinfulness to a fellow-aristocrat and the satisfaction that is demanded of the hero is purely physical, a mere nick in his neck that will heal before he has reached Camelot. Ritual and miracle take over where guilt and subjectivity lead only into an intellectual and emotional cul-de-sac. Here, confession to a layman implies no contritionist associations whatever—as it does in De vera et falsa poenitentia—but rather a confident display of the exterior side to confession. The same applies to the courtiers’ laughter at the end of the poem. Collectively and ritually cleansing Gawain, they make a strikingly dismissive comment on the concept of subjectivity—even if Gawain himself, who has quite unmistakably been bitten by the adder of interiority, cannot refrain from once again giving vent to his subjectivity. In 54. For an analysis that reads Gawain’s trysts with the Lady of Hautdesert in this light see Gregory W. Cross, “Secret Rules: Sex, Confession, and Truth in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, Arthuriana 4 (1994) pp. 147-157.

62

Andrew James Johnston

imitation of Gawain, the knights and ladies of Camelot adopt the Green Girdle,55 and, thereby, radically recast the hero’s act of penance.56 However strongly Gawain may believe to be expressing his individual moral experience, his fellow-aristocrats make it clear to him that such a statement can be made only in some exteriorised fashion57—and that the fashion the hero has chosen is perfectly consonant with the forms and conventions of chivalric culture. Whatever Gawain may think or feel, his forms of signification will be assimilated.

VI Sir Gawain and the Green Knight enjoys a keen understanding of subjectivity. The poem betrays an awareness that human beings may be turning, or, indeed, may actually have already turned into something close to Foucault’s “confessing animals”, yet it takes a dim view of the contemporary infatuation with inwardness, pointing out how inescapable the exterior is. The narrator’s ingenious use of confessional secrecy both as a marker for the conflict between the interior and the exterior within penitential discourse and as a narrative device for exploring that conflict, bespeaks a high level of sensitivity to contemporary religious issues, on the one hand, and the way they tie in with more general problems of late medieval culture, on the other. This medieval text acknowledges its own ideological position in a carefully developed and brilliantly performed oppositional stance vis à vis the dominant modernizing trends of late medieval spirituality. Contrary to the contemporary reformist spirit with its “insistence on the priority of the 55. The text seems reluctant to make up its mind with respect to the gender of those henceforth supposed to wear a baldric. The Tolkien / Gordon / Davis edition renders the manuscript faithfully: “ […] and alle þe court als/ Lahen loude þerat, and luflyly acorden/ Þat lordes and ladis þat longed to þe Table,/ Vche burne of þe broþerhede, a bauderyk schulde haue” (Tolkien / Gordon, eds., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ll. 2513-16). Andrew and Waldron accept an emendation suggested by John Burrow and print “ledes” instead of “ladis” in line 2515. William Vantuono suggests an interpretation which cleverly distinguishes between the decision-makers and the actual wearers of the baldric and prints “ladis” (“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”: A Dual Language Version (New York: Garland, 1991), l. 2515 and n. 2505-20). His reading appears to be the most plausible. 56. Though Jill Mann stresses the continuum between the inner and the outer in the poem, where I would rather see an antagonistic relationship, her remarks on the courtiers’ adopting the girdle are particularly pertinent: “Gawain’s ‘prys’ is redefined for the court. And so the value attached to the girdle can be altered yet again. The court’s brilliantly imaginative and tactful reaction empties it of its significance as a badge of shame; they wear such a girdle as an honour”;Stephanie Trigg, ed., “Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, in Medieval English Poetry (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 119-137 (first printed in Essays in Criticism 36 (1986) 294-318), p. 132. 57. The most emphatically Foucauldian interpretation of the poem’s penitential issues comes to the conclusion that the laughing courtiers “are incapable of comprehending the inner turmoil Gawain has experienced as a result of the events at Hautdesert and the Green Chapel”, (Cross (1994), p. 167). In my opinion, they laugh precisely because they are fully capable of grasping the nature of the hero’s experience.

The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

63

inner to the outer, of the meaning to the form, of the spirit to the letter, in every aspect of religious life”,58 Sir Gawain proclaims the superiority of the exterior by high-jacking the supposed safe-guard of interiority, secrecy, and exploiting it as a means of signification. In and through the poem the outer triumphs because it succeeds in ascribing meaning to something that from interiority’s perspective is a mere matter of form, namely the confidentiality that surrounds and protects confession. Especially from a radically contritionist point of view, if at all, secrecy ought to be no more than an accident to the substance of confession,59 so to speak, an outer condition lacking any independent significance. Not so for this poem. Here, because of signifying the impossible paradox of confessional discourse, secrecy assumes a meaning of its own even as it is granted the status of one of the text’s prime formal characteristics. In Sir Gawain, the courtly aesthetic does not erase the contradictions of confession but it redefines the paradox in order to integrate it into its own ideological programme. Hence, the poem’s understanding of confession betrays surprising structural parallels with Michel Foucault’s. In a manner not too dissimilar from Foucault, who argues that secrecy plays a central role in the mechanisms establishing the notion of an interior within the penitent, the romance seems to suggest that, in the final analysis, subjectivity itself may to a certain extent be a product of penitential practices. But in contrast to the French philosopher’s interpretation, the poem focuses on the contradictory character of late medieval confessional discourse. Instead of accepting the contradiction as an inescapable given, the text extols a radically exteriorised and ritualistic style of religion that fits perfectly into the forms of representation favoured by chivalric culture. So self-consciously does the poem stage its anti-subjective endorsement of a courtly spirituality that it is tempting to view Sir Gawain not simply as one of the last and certainly greatest of all Middle English romances, but as one of the first examples of medievalism in English literary history. To put it bluntly, the romance stages a Middle Ages far too much aware of its own mediaevalitas still to be truly ‘medieval’.

58. Lee Patterson, “Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies”, Speculum 76 (2001), p. 669. 59. In strictly Aristotelian terms it is not even that.

This page intentionally left blank

PERFORMING THE SELF: REFORMATION HISTORY AND THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LYRIC by Thomas Healy I In “The Canonisation”, John Donne famously addresses the lyric and history: And if unfit for tombes and hearse Our legend bee, it will be fit for verse; And if no piece of Chronicle wee prove, We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes; As well a well-wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes.1

Donne’s distinction between public and private might be argued as paradigmatic of the Renaissance lyric. Opposing the civic spheres of court, the law and commerce with the confidential world of lovers, the very form of the short lyric appears to emphasize its more intimate scale in contrast to epic or ode. Yet, as these lines reveal, the poets also want it both ways. The “well-wrought urn” is as significant a vehicle to convey ‘legend’ or history as the great public tomb. At the end of the “First Anniversary”, Donne reprimands those who censure a poetic celebration of Elizabeth Drury believing her more worthy of a chronicle: Vouchsafe to call to mind, that God did make A last and lasting piece a song. He spake To Moses to deliver unto all, That song: because he knew they would let fall The Law, the prophets and the history But keep the song still in their memory. (ll.461-466) 1. Herbert J. C. Grierson ed., The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), vol. 1., p. 15, ll. 28-34. All Donne citations to this edition.

66

Thomas Healy

This essay explores some of the relation between Renaissance lyric and history, investigating shared cultural preoccupations in both historiography and lyric poetry in England from the mid-sixteenth to the later seventeenth-centuries, an era that can be characterised as ‘the long Reformation’. Distinctions between public and private spheres were different for this period than for later cultural models, chiefly because the supernatural and natural were imagined as much more intimately linked. The principle of correspondence between natural and supernatural was culturally dominant and, as we have long known, this configured ideas surrounding individual identity and social identity differently from those constructed by Romanticism and its legacies. This essay considers aspects about truth and the self, history and lyric around the issue of forging identity.

II In 1563, John Foxe assembled a huge collection of materials into a book he first titled: Acts and Monuments of these latter and perilous days, touching matters of the Church, but which is better known to us as The Book of Martyrs.2 In expanding editions over a period of some twenty-five years, Foxe attempted to record the persecution of what he felt to be the genuine Catholic Church initially by the Roman Empire and latterly by the Roman Church, which had come in his view to be the false image of a true church, an organisation that had fallen under the control of the Antichrist. Indeed, it is the satanic machinations of the Roman Church’s attempts to deprave and enslave mankind that Foxe sees himself passionately attempting to counter. His primary weapon in this defence is an appeal to history. Foxe believed that attempts to reach a true understanding of what had happened to the Church since its foundation was being subverted by an institution that was continuously misrepresenting this history: [It is] not without cause ‘historia’ in old authors is call the Witness of Times, and Light of Verity, the Life of Memory […] without the knowledge whereof man’s life is blind and may fall into any kind of error; as by manifest experience we have to see in these desolate later time of the church, when the bishops of Rome, under colour of antiquity, have turned truth into heresy, and brought such new-found devices of strange doctrine and religion, as, in the former age of the church, were never heard of before, and all through ignorant times and for lack of true history. (vol. 1, p. 19)

Foxe attempts to reveal this distortion through his own investigations. But for all his endeavours in the archives and in gathering eyewitness testimony to establish accuracy, his inquiry is directed by an unshakeable belief about what history is inevitably leading to. The frontispiece to each edition of the Acts and Monuments from 1570 portrays the Final 2. Gorge Townsend ed., The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, 8 vols (New York: AMS Press, 1965). All citations to this edition. This is the reprint of a Victorian edition and while largely based on the 1570 edition also amends from earlier and later editions. It remains, however, the most accessible modern edition for scholars. See Tom Betteridge, “From Prophetic to Apocalyptic: John Foxe and the Writing of History” in David Loades ed., John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1997).

Performing the Self: Reformation History and the English Renaissance Lyric

67

Coming with Christ dividing the saved from the damned.3 This event is designed to be witnessed omnitemporally: it shows how all moments of history may be seen as prefiguring this last happening. On the left for instance, it depicts recent Protestant martyrs reverentially praising Christ from amidst the flames along with angels and others in paradise; while on its right, it depicts a Roman Catholic mass being celebrated in splendour among scenes of the damned in torment. As this illustrates, history for Foxe and his contemporaries was an unfolding, a story whose end point was known: that culminating event called the Second Coming. Those who suffer persecution from earthly laws by bearing witness to their unshakeable truth will be rewarded, while those who adhere to ceremonies and doctrines that mislead will be damned. From later perspectives it is a suspect type of historical scholarship that so flamboyantly opens by depicting not a past occurrence but a future event. Yet, we should recall Foxe was the widest read and most influential historian in England during the long Reformation. It is easy when reading Foxe to dismiss his claims to be pursuing his investigations objectively (Foxe’s term is ‘indifferently’) when he so obviously has such a fixed sense of where history is leading and what its parameters consist of. But to do so would be to ignore how intertwined the supernatural is with the natural world within the Renaissance imagination, and to disregard how contemporaries experienced history. For Foxe and the majority of his world, the actions represented in the frontispiece held a historical truth that was accepted as firmly as what had happened in the past. The key to the study of this history is the recognition of type and counter-type. Two special points I chiefly commend to the reader, as most requisite and necessary for every Christian man to observe and to note for his experience and profit; as first, the disposition and nature of the world; secondly the nature and condition of the kingdom of Christ; the vanity of the one, and the stableness of the other; the unprosperous and unquiet state of the one, ruled by man’s virtue and wisdom, and the happy success of the other, ever ruled by God’s blessing and providence; the wrath and revenging hand of God on the one, and his mercy on the other. The world I call all such as be without or against Christ, either by ignorance not knowing him or by heathenish life not following him or by violence resisting him. On the other side, the kingdom of Christ in this world I take to be all them which belong to the faith of Christ and here take his part in this world against the world; the number of whom […] be much smaller than the other. (vol. 1, p. 88)

By knowing the history of the earlier Church, we can recognise its pattern in current events and witness accordingly where truth lies. As the passage above indicates, one of the features which distinguishes the ‘World’ from the Kingdom of Christ is its instability and violence against the latter’s stability and prosperity. The Acts and Monuments repeatedly details this through employing one of its continuously repeated oppositions: the martyrs are composed and tranquil when violence is being done against them, it is their persecutors who exhibit rage. Indeed, it is particularly during martyrdom that this opposition is most clearly exhibited. The martyrs become ever more serene as the violence against them intensifies, while their persecutors become ever more irate.

3. See Andreas Höfele, “Stages of Martyrdom: John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments”, in this volume, fig. 1.

68

Thomas Healy

Foxe illustrates this opposition in repeated examples of martyrdom both ancient and modern: [Rawlins White] as he was going to his death, and standing at the stake, he seemed in manner to be altered in nature. For as before he was wont to go stooping, or rather crooked, through the infirmity of age, having a sad countenance and a very feeble complexion, and withal very soft in speech and gesture, now he went and stretched up himself not only bolt upright, but also bore withal a most pleasant and comfortable countenance, not without great courage and audacity both in speech and behaviour […] [The] hairs of his head […] and also of his beard were more inclining to white than to grey, which gave such a show and countenance to his whole person, that he seemed to altogether angelical. (vol. 7, p. 33)

The friends of Thomas Haukes ask for some token: Whereby they might be the more certain, whether the pain of such burning were so great that a man might not therein keep his mind quiet and patient. Which thing he promised them to do; and so secretly between them, it was agreed, that if the rage of the pain were tolerable and might be suffered, then he should lift up his hands above his head towards heaven, before he gave up the ghost. […] [In the flame he continued long] his skin also drawn together […] so that now all men thought certain he had been gone. Suddenly and contrary to all expectation, the blessed servant of God, being mindful of his promise afore made, reached up his hands burning on fire, which was marvellous to behold, over his head to the living God, and with great rejoicing, as it seemed. Struck or clapped them three times together. (vol. 7, pp. 114-115)

While: [Robert Glover] when the time came to his martyrdom, as he was going to the place, and was now come to the sight of the stake, although all the night before praying for strength and courage he could feel none, suddenly he was so mightily replenished with God’s holy comfort and heavenly joys, that he cried out, clapping his hands and saying these words “he is come, he is come” and that with such joy and alacrity, as one seeming rather to be risen from some deadly danger to liberty of life, than as one passing out of the world by any pains of death. Such was the change of the marvellous working of the Lord’s hand upon that good man. (vol. 7, pp. 398-399)

Thus, Foxe proposes a model or type for a performance of the sacred throughout history, one that can readily be witnessed by what he describes as ‘indifferent’ or objective observers; that is—in Foxe’s perspective—those who are not enthralled to the misleading presentations of what he calls ‘monkish’ histories. Foxe is in no respect unique in employing this model of composure and fury. We can see it repeated endlessly in varieties of Reformation and Counter-Reformation materials: from medical tracts conjoining it with humoral theory, to travel narratives, as well as in the visual arts and literature. Indeed, one might argue a distinct aesthetics of representation embedded in it; yet one so ubiquitous that many current readers or viewers of texts or paintings can lose sight of this as imposed pattern. We should not imagine, however, that believing a historical framework based on Scripture resulted in a reductive sectarianism that could confidently separate the godly from the damned. Foxe’s extraordinary accumulation of materials and his attempts to demonstrate how he believes the scriptural historia is played out in secular events causes him constant unease because deception, lying tales, is the main weapon of mankind’s foe Satan.

Performing the Self: Reformation History and the English Renaissance Lyric

69

For Foxe secular history can be understood by exposing how it reflects a biblical pattern that outlines a supernatural struggle: his historical method is to demonstrate an event’s historical accuracy along with its typifying an established model.4 From current critical perspectives a tension might be expected between Foxe’s desire to describe events with a view to iterating their historical distinctiveness while at the same time showing how they participate as patterns in an established narrative. Instead, for Foxe, a pursuit of realistic historical accuracy harmonises and reinforces the dynamism and truth of the type. The distinction that Sidney makes between poetry’s ability to focus on ideals unencumbered by history’s need to present details that cloud such ideals, is one Foxe would certainly have contested. How, though, in Foxe’s scheme can witnesses to history ever be certain that the version they are reading is not a further deceptive act on the part of the satanic master strategist? Even an individual’s assumptions about their own position in this grand narrative may be misconstrued. For all Foxe tries to represent the historical process as open to reasonable inquiry and objective weighing of evidence, he is regularly forced back onto divine revelation to sanction his interpretation. Only a supernatural illumination will clarify the implications of events. Despite his extraordinary recitation of occurrences that seem to conform to scriptural patterns there remains doubt: rational inquiry may mistake, revelation may be forged. We may be most misled when we believe we are most assured: And the number of Christ’s subjects is it which we call the visible church here in earth; which visible church, having in itself a difference of two sorts of people, so is it to be divided into two parts of which the one standeth of such as be of outward profession only, the other of such as be election inwardly are joined to Christ: the first in words and lips seem to honour Christ, and are in the visible church only, but not in the church invisible, and partake the outward sacraments of Christ, but not the inward blessing of Christ […]. And many times it happeneth, that as between the world and the kingdom of Christ there is a continual repugnance, so between these two parts of this visible Church aforesaid, often times groweth great variance and mortal persecution, insomuch that sometimes the true church of Christ hath no greater enemies than those of their own profession and company; as happeneth not only in the time of Christ and his apostles, but also from time to time almost ever since; but especially in these latter days of the church under the persecution of Antichrist and his retinue; as by the reading of these volumes more manifestly hereafter may appear. (vol. 1, p. 88)

There is uncertainty about how to interpret what we are reading. Chastising ‘popish histories’ celebrating Thomas Beckett, for instance, Foxe pours great scorn on accounts of miracles occurring at the spot of Beckett’s murder. But he then admits we may find: Either that if they were true, they were not wrought by God, but by a contrary spirit, of whom Christ our lord giveth us warning in his gospel saying “For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets and shall show great signs and wonders, so, if it were possible to deceive the very elect” (Matt.xxiv) or else we shall find that no such were ever wrought at all, but feigned and forged of idle monks and religious bellies, for the exaltation of their churches and the profit of their pouches. (vol. 2, p. 249)

4. John R. Knott, “John Foxe and the Joy of Suffering”, Sixteenth-Century Journal 27 (1996), 721-734.

70

Thomas Healy

As observed in Foxe’s accounts of Protestant martyrdom cited above, signs are desired to confirm the nature of the martyr’s position. How, though, can either witnesses or even the martyr undergoing the experience be certain of the godly origins of the experience? The terms of the Christian grand narrative may be clear; what is uncertain is the individual’s, the group’s, or the nation’s position within it.

III Dying in 1587, Foxe maintained an insecure optimism that England would emerge as the godly country he believed it was her destiny to become. Sixty years later one of the spurs to the conflict that became the English civil wars was a fear that this destiny was being abandoned. What resulted socially, politically, economically remains famously contested among scholars. But what is notable is how imaginative insecurity around history accelerates. It was one thing to construe sinister external forces or even substantial fifth columnists seeking to undermine the country; it was another when neighbours, communities, even families became split over where truth rested. Further, for the large numbers of the unzealous, an understanding of what even an individual’s identity rested with— what part in the great game the individual was playing—became increasingly clouded. Could a person even believe the history they imagined for themselves? The potential for tragedy could lead to despair. The haunted quality generated by this era’s imaginative uncertainty is given voice by lyric. In these most intimate of literary forms, the dilemma of the self in history is poignantly played out. To illustrate this I want to look in some detail at Henry Vaughan’s poem “Vanity of Spirit” published in 1650.5 Quite spent with thoughts I left my Cell, and lay Where a shrill spring tun’d to the early day. I beg’d here long, and gron’d to know Who gave the Clouds so brave a bow, Who bent the spheres, and circled in Corruption with this glorious Ring; What is his name, and how I might Descry some part of his great light. I summon’d Nature; pierc’d through all her store; Broke up some seales, which none had touch’d before, Her wombe, her bosom, and her head Where all her secrets lay abed I rifled quite; and having past Through all the Creatures, came at last To search my selfe, where I did find Traces, and sounds of a strange kind. Here of this mighty spring I found some drills, With Ecchoes beaten from th’eternal hills; 5. L. C. Martin ed., The Works of Henry Vaughan, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 418.

Performing the Self: Reformation History and the English Renaissance Lyric

71

Weake beames and fires flash’d to my sight, Like a young East, or Moone-shine night, Which show’d me in a nook cast by A peece of much antiquity, With Hyerogliphicks quite dismembered, And broken letters scarce remembered. I tooke them up, and (much Joy’d) went about T’unite those peeces, hoping to find out The mystery; but this neer done, That little light I had was gone: It griev’d me much. At last, said I, Since in these veyls my Ecclips’d Eye May not approach thee (for at night Who can have commerce with the light?) I’le disapparell, and to buy But one half glaunce, most gladly dye.

In its apparent naivety, this poem proffers a child-like questioning in the style of ‘who made the world?’ The narrator runs through a host of familiar investigations about how knowledge of the divine might be attained: contemplation in solitude, inspection of the Book of Nature, self-scrutiny, examination of antiquity’s wisdom and finally recourse to a mystical ‘negative way’ that in this case may actually result in death. In all these, the narrator’s sense of an unnamed figure as the goal of his searching encourages a supposedly more informed readership to supply the answers. Vaughan envisages that his readers will not need to be told who made the rainbow as its origin is there to be read in Scripture as God’s promise to Noah. He is provoking a reader’s uncertainty, too, from the vagueness of his title, “Vanity of Spirit”. Whose vanity? The over-confident reader who may no longer imagine a need for such innocent questioning, or the poetic narrator for undertaking complex investigations when the answers are clearly available in the biblical, God-inspired narrative? Vaughan is drawing attention to a humanity that is too intent on reaching answers through self-generated means of inquiry. There is, though, a more sinister undercurrent present. “Vanity of Spirit” also recalls the first and greatest act of pride by the angel Lucifer. As Milton was later to develop so ably in Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s recurring dangerous questions is ‘can it be sinful pride to seek knowledge?’ Indeed, at points Vaughan’s rhetoric resembles the feigned innocence Milton sometimes employs with Satan. The more we explore Vaughan’s poem the more disturbing its investigations become: the narrator’s exploration of nature is in the language of an assault: raping and despoiling; he finds his illumination is reflected light, the moon or a young East—perhaps the dawn, but recalling, too, that Lucifer is the morning star that flees the light of day; he proposes a commerce of buying and selling with divine light, hinting at a relation that is based on worldly exchange and commodification. In other words, embracing darkness, which the narrator offers as positive, might be understood as confirming him as part of the corruption that the glorious Ring keeps from infecting a heavenly purity. Who was it, too, who circled in corruption with the glorious ring? Does this indicate the godly power that resists corruption or the satanic power

72

Thomas Healy

that provoked the corruption? Imagining himself on a heroic quest for the heavenly, the narrator is unsuspectingly confirming a hellish identity to the observant reader. He embraces death, revealing that his goal is actually the province of darkness rather than light. Vaughan’s poem is hauntingly effective because its rhetorical tone of innocence is so at odds with this sinister undercurrent. It presents a figure who seems to desire the godly, but who may be unwittingly indicating that he actually wants the opposite. A narrator who relates his history so that it is difficult to read: not because it is a calculated deception but because terrifyingly the narrator himself has wholly failed to understand his own nature—what his identity actually is. A narrator who may well discover in his own selfannihilation that his place in the grand narrative of the godly and the damned is other than he imagines.

IV Although it is valid to argue that the menacing undercurrent in Vaughan’s poetry is given particular intensity because of its civil war contexts (think of his haunting “The Charnel House”, for instance), the British events of the mid-seventeenth century were not the only spur to this sense of ominous foreboding that we can find in Vaughan and other contemporaries’ investigations of the self. As indicated, Foxe, too, some 80 years earlier, though a supporter of the use of reason in human inquiry, was gravely concerned about the ability of investigators into historical truth to reach proper conclusions through reliance on their own ‘indifferent’ or objective use of reason in weighing evidence. Yet, by the end of the seventeenth century, in what might be termed the struggle between reason and revelation in most European thinking, reason had come to dominate. The Enlightenment’s embrace of reason and later critical efforts to establish an epistemological teleology within the early modern to show Renaissance anticipations of the Enlightenment has obscured how many Renaissance writers, and particularly the poets, resist a whole-hearted celebration of human reason, remaining sceptical about it as a means to discover the nature of the self, let alone the self in history. From the difficulty of determining a place in history with Foxe and Vaughan, this essay now turns to the work of John Donne to examine some further implications about this unease surrounding humanity’s ability to know our identity. For a writer who shows such interest in what came be to called the ‘new science’ of the Renaissance, John Donne is strikingly sceptical about its benefits. And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no mans wit Can well direct him where to looke for it. And freely men confesse that this worlds spent, When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seeke so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.

Performing the Self: Reformation History and the English Renaissance Lyric

73

’Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; All just supply, and all Relation: Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot, For every man alone thinkes he hath got To be a Phoenix and that then can bee None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee. (“An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary”, ll. 205-218)

For Donne writing these lines about 1611, the new knowledge appears to be that kind which humanity first imbibed when tasting of the tree of knowledge: an understanding that takes us further away from the divine. With his theme centred on the decay of the world in the “First Anniversary”, the demise of traditional orders for understanding as a result of new observations and explorations become a means through which ‘the sun’ is lost. We enter a world of literal as well as spiritual darkness. The dilemma for Donne, as for the historian of Acts and Monuments, is that what we may be witnessing is an illusion of a search for truth, pretence of understanding rather than its actuality. Can earthly knowledge ever be other than what embroils us in what Foxe’s describes as “the unquiet and unprosperous state of the world” rather than the Kingdom of Christ? Of course, because Donne is a master of rhetorical effect and of eloquent argument, he is only too aware that poetic language often has its own momentum. We would be unwise to argue that Donne’s apparent scepticism about the ‘new philosophy’ here is some form of authentic argument the poet would always support. Nevertheless, what is notable in these lines is the way Donne proposes, as Vaughan was later to do, that one of the consequences of new thinking is that it nurtures the ‘ego’, the ‘I’ as a distinct, self-creating and self-supporting entity: For every man alone thinkes he hath got To be a Phoenix and that then can bee None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.

It is worth pausing over Donne’s castigation of a thinking that emphasises the ‘I’ because it appears in vivid contrast to the greatest spokesman of the new philosophy, René Descartes. Writing some twenty-five years later in the mid 1630s, Descartes places the ego as the foundation of a method that seeks to re-examine what we can know and what is true. In his Discours de la Méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences, Descartes iterates his dissatisfaction with existing forms of knowledge. He, too, is worried by doubt about what can be known. But where Foxe and the poets demonstrate uneasiness about how far human reason is an instrument to discover true knowledge, Descartes embraces it. He resolves to seek no other knowledge “than that which I might find within myself”.6 The self becomes the vehicle to approach the whole question of existence:

6. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. by F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 53-54.

74

Thomas Healy I had long ago noticed that, in matters relating to conduct, one needs sometimes to follow, just as if they were absolutely indubitable, opinions one knows to be very unsure. […] but as I wanted to concentrate solely on the search for truth, I thought I ought to do just the opposite, and reject as being absolutely false everything in which I could suppose the slightest reason for doubt, in order to see if there did not remain after that anything in my belief which was entirely indubitable. So because our senses sometimes play us false, I decided to suppose that there was nothing at all which was such as they cause us to imagine it; and because there are men who make mistakes in reasoning, even with the simplest geometrical matters, and make paralogisms, judging that I was as liable to error as anyone else, I rejected as being false all the reasonings I had hitherto accepted as proofs. And finally, considering that all same thoughts that we have when we are awake can also come to us when we are asleep, without any one of them then being true, I resolved to pretend that nothing which had ever entered my mind was any more true than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately afterwards I became aware that, while I decided thus to think that everything was false, it followed necessarily that I who thought thus must be something; and observing that this truth: I think, therefore I am, was so certain and so evident that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were not capable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking. Then examining attentively what I was, and seeing that I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world or place that I was in, but that I could not, for all that, pretend that I did not exist, and that, on the contrary, from the very fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it followed evidently and very certainly that I existed.

In contrast, Donne reveals unease about the self, a fear that he lacks any proper reassurance about identity: For who is sure he hath a Soule, unless It see, and judge, and follow worthiness, And by Deeds praise it? hee who doth not this, May lodge an In-mate soule, but ’tis not his. (“An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary”, ll. 3-6) Thou hast made me, and shall thy worke decay? Repaire me now, for now mine end doth haste, (“Holy Sonnet 1”, ll. 1-2) We thinke that Paradise and Calvary Christs Crosse and Adams tree, stood in one place; Looke Lord, and finde both Adams met in me; As the first Adams sweat surrounds my face, May the last Adams blood my soul embrace. (“Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse”, ll. 21- 25) I am a little world made cunningly Of Elements and an Angelike spright, But black sinne has betraid to endlesse night My worlds both parts, and (oh) both parts must die. (“Holy Sonnets 5”, ll. 1-4)

In each of these instances Donne suggests that his identity, his ‘I’, appears controlled by a power external to him, that even his most fundamental part, his soul, may not actually belong to ‘him’: “For who is sure he hath a Soule, unless/ It see, and judge, and follow worthiness/ […] hee who doth not this,/ May lodge an In-mate soule, but ’tis not his”. The soul, then, can be another’s that is merely housed within him. What the ‘I’ is becomes confused: is it the bodily part, or even what might be called the poetic part formed

Performing the Self: Reformation History and the English Renaissance Lyric

75

in verse? Since the soul housed in a person may apparently be the soul of something else if the person does not “see, and judge and follow worthiness”, does an illusionary identity reside not with some actual self but in a false one created in language? Does Donne’s poetry generate an apparently vigorous, judging and reasoning ‘I’ as a mask, covering for its actual absence, a self that is decayed to the point where it has no distinct identity? One of the solutions Donne offers to this is to forge his identity within pre-existing patterns: to try to make himself both the sinful Adam forced to sweat and labour in the fields as a result of sin, and the second Adam, Christ, whose suffering points towards salvation. “Repaire me now, for my end doth haste”: Donne cleverly exploits the implications of “repair” as both heal or fix and as re-joining. Donne perceives his identity, his ‘I’, dependent on being identified with God. Independence of the ‘I’ as the foundation or first principal through which God may then be discovered—as Descartes was to argue later—is misplaced for Donne. He discovers identity only when wrapped up in another. For Donne, the paradox is that he believes in his being or existence only when the ‘I’ as a unique and distinct thing has disappeared, when it is re-paired with his creator. Arguments about the need to be reunited with another who is actually part of a ‘true’ self, a search for and discovery of identity through locating a missing part of oneself were familiar, drawn from Renaissance neo-Platonism. Donne skilfully exploits these in his Songs and Sonnets as a means to try to secure sex: think of “The Ecstasy” or “The Good Morrow”. The sober issues of theses poems, however—notably their anxieties about dying—are inextricably intertwined with a playful exposure of their narrator’s poetic cleverness in creating the condition where he can extract himself from the responsibilities that attend the sexual relations he promotes. His devotional poems’ rhetorical self-consciousness is employed to more serious effect, however—notwithstanding that it is generally unwise to forge hard distinctions between Donne’s secular and sacred verse. In these sacred poems, of course, the ideal lover is not in question. It is Christ. What becomes a prominent issue for the poet is whether his argument, his imagery, his pleas are only linguistically clever: that they lack truthfulness. For all his fervent attempts to prompt poetically the conditions through which his identity in Christ will be confirmed, Donne is conscious that a linguistic passion or even an extreme reasonableness employed to decipher his position may expose a deficiency, a fundamentally decayed self. In “The Litanie”, Donne prays to the prophets: Those heavenly Poets which did see Thy will, and it express In rhythmique feet, in common pray for mee, That I by them excuse not my excesse In seeking secrets, or poetiquenesse. (ll. 68-72)

In Donne’s secular poetry, the narrator is the active controller of events. He is cajoling, self-ironic, assertive, insistent, plaintive and so forth, but there is rarely a doubt about his mastery of the discourse, even if he deliberately reveals himself as ridiculous (as in, for instance, “The Flea”). In contrast, in his devotional poetry Donne usually reveals

76

Thomas Healy

attempts to gain narrative mastery as dubious. He largely shows himself as passive: he needs his lover Christ to do something towards him, he is unable to act for himself. For example, in “Holy Sonnet 14” Donne presents himself in the role of the impotent victim. He adopts various guises: as prisoner, as a social inferior having been abandoned by his betters, as being effeminate. The poem is striking for its insistence that violence needs to be enacted on him so as to free him—to be saved he must be violated. Gone is the urbane cleverness through which the poet attempts to persuade the lover to willing or unwilling union. The violence reinforces the urgency of the narrator’s need, but it also reinforces the denial of self-will. The confusion about identity becomes even more notable when we recall that this is a psychomachia, an internal conflict within the personality. Donne presents as foreign and hostile aspects of his own self. His desire to single out an aspect of himself as his ‘true identity’, one that can be released from selfcaptivity only emphasises what a strikingly disunited self the narrator is. I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due, Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end, Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend, But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue. Yet dearly’I love you,’and would be loved faine, But am betroth’d unto your enemie: Divorce mee,’untie, or breake that knot againe, Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free, Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee. (“Divine Meditation” 14, ll. 6-14)

In “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward”, Donne attempts to employ a reasonable argument to explain why, on the day when Christ is being crucified in the east, the narrator is riding west. The opening is in the form of a logical proposition that suggests a selfsufficiency is available to the soul because it is a perfect form, a circular sphere, and that it moves by means of its own energy. But the poem rapidly acknowledges that the narrator’s own spherical soul is “subject to foreign motions”. Let mans Soul be a Spheare, and then, in this, The intelligence that moves, devotion is, And as the other Spheares, by being growne Subject to forraigne motions, lose their owne, And being by others hurried every day, Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey: Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit For their first mover, and are whirld by it. (ll. 1-8.)

The poem’s ingenious argument develops around the narrator’s recognition that he is corrupted and tarnished and, thus, unworthy to face Christ directly. He asks, therefore, to be made decorous, to have his deformity amended by Christ’s image being restored in him again. Since this is the day that liturgically commemorates the occasion when Christ’s sacrifice enabled man to be divinely reconciled, it appears a particularly fitting

Performing the Self: Reformation History and the English Renaissance Lyric

77

request. Once again Donne employs a language of violence to stress the strength of the desire. In one sense, this strenuously acknowledging his need for restoration emphasises the narrator’s awareness of Christ’s sacrifice on Good Friday and, thus, his being in sympathy or harmony with the day. Despite the appearance of contrary motion, the narrator is able to conceive himself as subject to Christ. But for all the narrator’s attempt to employ a passionate reasoning to justify his wayward direction, the actuality of his travelling away from Christ is reinforced. Even on this most significant day, a day when above others one might expect the soul its “naturall forme obey”, the narrator finds that other spheres control him. Rather than a means of discovering an identity in Christ, the poem reveals the implication that the intelligence that moves the narrator’s soul is not devotion to the divine but to the world. The poem resists its narrator’s reasoning and, thus, raises a large question about his identity. The poetic argument becomes less a means of fathoming the self, more a vehicle for avoiding recognising its actual nature. “For who is sure he hath a Soule, unless/ It see, and judge, and follow worthiness,/ […] hee who doth not this,/ May lodge an In-mate soule, but ’tis not his”: a horrible conclusion to “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” is that its logic actually suggests Donne’s soul is not ‘his’. This poem is another striking example of ‘vanity of spirit’. In “The Litanie” Donne prays: “Let not the minde be blinder by more light/ Nor Faith by Reason added, lose her sight.”(ll. 62-63). Reason, the property that underpins Descartes’ cogito and that leads to his discovery of identity, is a dangerous thing for Donne. Like Descartes, Donne continuously questions what he can know. His conclusion is that to know he must believe. A credo must confirm his identity, because identity rests with its ultimate creator God: Credo ergo sum, rather than Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. But Does Donne believe? Without belief he realises he confronts an identity that is wholly self-generated, a “little world made cunningly” but “betraid to endlesse night”. Without belief he faces extinction, he is done/Donne. And here is the terrible dilemma for Donne and for the writers of Renaissance devotional lyrics. The arguing, reasoning, exclaiming and doubting that takes place in their poetry may be the performance of belief rather than the possession of belief. They may create narrators we call ‘Donne’ or ‘Vaughan’ or ‘Herbert’ or ‘Marvell’ all of who are acting a series of roles to cover what is absent. There is an astonishing irony here that the poets are only too well aware of. Theirs is a poetry where a distinctive sense of powerful, individual personality is present. Yet, as we also witness, these are personalities that can adopt numerous guises: they are fundamentally rhetorical, theatrical ones. The narrator is an actor performing roles, and this sense of a dramatic inflation of self is what helps make this personality so intense and convincing, just as a well performed part in the theatre or on the screen provides a sense of a heightened reality, an illusion of conviction. What happens when the performance ends? There lingers a fear of an identity that is finished, rendered extinct, or worse betrayed to an endless night of damnation. What remains visible is the linguistic performance, a theatrical identity: one Donne is particularly good at bringing attention to through word play on his name.

78

Thomas Healy

V Milton’s Paradise Lost offers a significant instance of how the rhetorical dilemma about language’s fashioning of the self conjoins with the difficulty of knowing history. Coming at the end of the ‘Long Reformation’ in England, Milton’s epic powerfully illustrates how the perception of a satanic force operating to undermine humanity through deception had crucial implications for the limits of human understanding. For Milton, as for Foxe, the problem of reading or understanding rightly is one that is difficult even for those who believe they are doing so ‘indifferently’, because, as with Adam himself, once a harmony with the divine has been broken, any knowledge generated from human perceptions is suspect. In Paradise Lost, Satan’s self-representation revolves around the potent rhetorical forces that he musters to conceal reality: to himself as much as others. The powerful personality that Satan manifests is based on his divorce from God; but it is an individuality based on illusion, on misrepresenting truth rather than discovering it. The more Satan employs ‘reasoning’ within the poem, the more he reveals his ignorance. His is selfdeception on a heroic scale. In contrast, the unfallen Adam and Eve are portrayed as less highly individualised types: they find their identity not in what makes them impressively distinct but through what joins them to one another and to the divine. In other words, pursuit of a highly individualised personality, celebrating a separate or unique sense of self, may be seen as one of the consequences of the Fall. The more characters seeks to assert individual identity through their own resources, the more they will mistake that ‘true’ identity exists in conforming the will to divine—in Foxe’s vision, participating in the patterns God makes available to his elect. Milton’s view of the Fall exemplifies what Donne’s argued as one of the new philosophy’s disastrous consequences: For every man alone thinkes he hath got To be a Phoenix and that then can bee None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee. (“An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary”, ll. 216-218)

For the sinless Adam reason is fundamentally instinctive or revelatory: he doesn’t learn through experience or deductive analysis; he just knows. His language is not self-deceiving but self-revealing because his ‘reason’ is true, arising directly out of the divine. Yet, as Adam also admits to Raphael over Eve’s beauty: “All higher knowledge in her presence falls”7 and at the moment of Adam’s temptation it is Eve’s material, fleshy aspects that he chooses to establish his identity on: for what thou art is mine Our state cannot be severed, we are one, One flesh; to lose thee were to lose my self. (book IX, ll. 957-959) 7. Alastair Fowler ed., John Milton, Paradise Lost. (London: Longman, 1971), book VIII, l. 551. All citations to this edition.

Performing the Self: Reformation History and the English Renaissance Lyric

79

When the fallen Adam and Eve initially glut themselves on appetite, they believe the knowledge they have gained is not only higher than what they previously possessed but that their understanding of their new condition is based on reason. Adam’s first words to Eve after biting the apple reveal how quickly a rhetorically and logically evasive language masquerading as truth asserts itself in his discourse. Adam’s praise of Eve’s provision of the apple is based around words—exact, elegant, sapience, judicious—commonly used to confirm an activity’s ‘reasonableness’: Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste, And elegant, of sapience no small part, Since to each meaning savour we apply, And palate call judicious; I thee praise Yield to thee, so well this day thou has purveyed. (book IX, ll. 1017-1021)

Milton brilliantly demonstrates that language in the fallen world will be no secure vehicle to discover the truth of self.

VI In this paper I have tried to draw attention to a large problem for what might be termed the performance of the self in history in early modern England. Foxe, as the poets, all share a conviction that nature of the divine should be discoverable: in a proper understanding of catholic continuity, by reading in the book of nature or of Scripture, through processes of rhetorical negotiation. The patterns that confirm truth should be observable. But doubt remains whether we are reading and understanding these patterns properly because the more powerful the performance, the more we may wonder at its authenticity. The repetition of acts of furious persecutors and of tranquil sufferers that Foxe uses to build readers’ convictions in his parallels between English Protestant martyrs and those of the early Church also bring to mind the deception that is the chief instrument of Antichrist and his retinue: “For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets and shall show great signs and wonders, so, if it were possible to deceive the very elect (Matt.xxiv)”. The dilemma of sacred performance, whether of the self or of history, is that it can seem most true when most false.

This page intentionally left blank

STAGES OF MARTYRDOM: JOHN FOXE’S ACTES AND MONUMENTS by Andreas Höfele In the beginning, it seems, the government intended to kill no more than a handful of the most obdurate heretics. The others, it was thought, would let themselves be scared into submission; the others meaning those who had not made their escape to the continent. But things did not go according to plan—if there ever was a clearly conceived plan— and so in just under four years “something like two hundred and seventy-five men and women of all ranks were executed for heresy in the customary manner, an unprecedented number to have suffered for that offence in so brief a time”.1 The customary manner went something like this: At nine of the clock master Hooper was willed to prepare himselfe to be in a readiness, for the time was at hand. […] So he went forward, led betweene the two Sheriffes (as it were a lamb to the place of slaughter). […] When he came to the place appointed where he should die, smilingly he beheld the stake and preparation made for him, which was neere unto the great Elme tree over against the Colledge of Priests, where he was wont to preach. The place rounde about the houses, and the boughes of the tree were replenished with people; and in the chamber over the Colledge gate stoode the Priestes of the Colledge. […] Now when he was at the stake, three irons made to binde him to the stake, were brought: one for his neck, another for his middle, and the third for his legges. But he refusing them said, “Ye have no need thus to trouble your selves: For I doubt not but God will give strength sufficient to abide the extremity of the fire, without bandes” […] Thus being readie, he looked upon all the people, of whom he might be well seene (for he was both tall, and stoode also on a high stoole), and beheld rounde about him: and in every corner there was nothing to be seene but weeping and sorrowful people. […] Anon commandement was given that the fire should be set to and so it was. […] At length it burned about him, but the winde having full strength in that place (it was also a lowering and colde morning) it blew the flame from him, so that he was in a manner no more but touched by the fire. Within a space after, […] a new fire kindled […], and that burned at the neather partes, but had small power above, because of the winde. […] In the time of which fire, even as at the first flame, hee prayed saying mildelie and not very loude (but as one without paines), “O Jesus the sonne of David, have mercie upon mee, and receive my soule!” […] And all this while his neather parts did burne: for the fagots were so fewe, that the flame did not burne stronglie at his upper partes. The thirde fire was kindled within a while after, which was more extreame then the other two: and then the bladders of gunpowder brake, which did him small good, they were so placed, and the winde had such 1. William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963), p. 16.

82

Andreas Höfele power. In the which fire he prayed with somewhat a loud voice, “Lord Jesu have mercie upon me: Lord Jesu have mercie upon me: Lord Jesu receive my spirit!” And these were the last wordes he was heard to utter. But when he was blacke in the mouth, and his tongue swolne, that hee could not speake, yet his lips went till they were shrunke to the gummes: and he knocked his breast with his hands, until one of his arms fell off, and then knocked still with the other, what time the fatte, water, and blood dropped out at his fingers’ ends, untill by renewing of the fire his strength was gone, and his hand did cleave fast in knocking, to the iron upon his breast. So immediatelie, bowing forwards, he yielded up his spirit.2

When Mary Tudor succeeded her half-brother Edward to the English throne in 1553, not even a month had elapsed before her government issued a proclamation against preaching, printing and play-acting. This proclamation alleged that sedition and false rumours have been nourished and maintained in this realme, by the subtletie and malice of some evill disposed persons, which take upon them […] to preach and to interpret the word of God after their owne braine […] and also by playing of enterludes, and printing of false found bookes, […] touching the high pointes and mysteries of christian religion […].3

In view of what has often been represented as an inveterate enmity between stage and pulpit—especially the stage and the Protestant pulpit—the grouping together by the Catholic queen of preaching, play-acting and printing may come as something of a surprise. But in the religious struggles of the English Reformation the collaborative association of the three media was firmly established. Thus a belligerent campaigner for the Protestant cause such as John Bale could acclaim “players, printers, preachers” as “a triple bulwark against the triple crown of the pope”.4 Naturally the Catholic side also recognized and exploited the propaganda potential of the stage, and it is the “disquiet, division, tumultes, and uproars”5 threatening from this quarter which prompted Mary’s predecessor Edward to impose a three-month ban on plays in English in 1549.6 More to my present purpose, however, is a closer look at how the two texts I have quoted—the account of the execution and the royal proclamation—relate to each other. On the face of it, the connection is quite simply this: the royal proclamation defines certain activities as capital crimes. The narrative describes in gruesome detail how such 2. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments […], p. 1371f. Unless stated otherwise, Foxe is quoted from the 1593 edition (London: Peter Short). At the moment of writing, there is no reliable edition available in print; the one by Stephen Reed Cattley (London: Seeley & Burnside, 8 vols, 1836-1839), does not come up to modern scholarly standards. See David Loades, “Introduction: John Foxe and the Editors”, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. by David Loades (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 1-11, and David Loades, “Introduction: The New Edition of the Acts and Monuments: A Progress Report”, in John Foxe: An Historical Perspective, ed. by David Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 1-14. A facsimile of the last edition overseen by Foxe himself is available on CD-ROM: David G. Newcombe, Michael Pidd, eds., Facsimile of John Foxes Book of Martyrs, 1583, Actes and Monuments of Matters Most Speciall and Memorable, Version 1.0, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 3. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, p. 1281. 4. Quoted in Thora Balslev Blatt, The Plays of John Bale (Copenhagen: C. E. D. Gad, 1968), p. 131. 5. W. C. Hazlitt, The English Drama and Stage, under the Tudor and Stuart Princes, 1543-1664. Illustrated by a Series of Documents, Treatises and Poems (Printed for the Roxburghe Library, 1868), p. 8. 6. See Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama (New York: Columbia, 1908), pp. 8-11.

Stages of Martyrdom: John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments

83

crimes were punished. Yet at the same time as it bears out the force of Mary’s proclamation, the narrative runs counter to its express purpose, defeating the royal will whose power it so graphically illustrates. For instead of preventing theatrical performance, the enforcement of the proclamation actually produced it. The burning of Protestants, which began with the execution of John Rogers on February 4th, 1555, and did not cease until a week before the queen’s death in November 1558, generated a veritable theatre of martyrdom, whose dangerous potency was enhanced by the collaborative forces of preaching and printing. The government’s rationale was to create a spectacle of horror which would expose the offenders as arch-villains who deserved no better than to suffer a physical anticipation of hell, and coerce the onlooking crowds into submission. But the spectacle defied containment. Instead of the authorized version of its meaning it adopted the highly persuasive model of martyrdom. Martyrdom provided a role pattern after which those going to execution could fashion their performance of a Christian art of dying. As the report of the burning of Hooper makes clear, the event was pervaded by an acute sense of performance. An estimated 7,000 people were assembled to watch, “for it was market day, and many also came to see his behaviour towards death”.7 Prohibited from speaking by the authorities, Hooper is aware that the spectacle of his tormented body will have to speak for itself. His “look[ing] at the people, of whom he might be well seen” establishes the rapport—the collusion, in the literal sense of ‘playing together’— between actor and audience.8 The words of another martyr, Hugh Latimer, betray a similar sense of performing on a highly exposed stage: “Bee of good comforte, maister Ridley and play the man”, he encouraged his fellow sufferer, “We shall this daie light such a candle, by God’s grace, in Englande, as I trust, shall never bee putte out”.9 As chief actor in the spectacle of his own death Latimer translates that spectacle into a prophetic emblem, a meaningful image to be looked at and understood by his spectators: understood, to be sure, contrary to the intent of those in charge of the execution. The martyr’s performance thus instigates a contest over meaning, an attempt at re-encoding the signifiers of a ritual intended to deprive him of his identity, as well as his life. Part of the contest is verbal, a battle of wits in which the martyr hurls the accusations directed against him back at his accusers. Thus Laurence Saunders, charged “that hee was one of them which marred the Queenes Realme, with false doctrine and heresie”, retorts: “It is not I nor my fellow preachers of Gods truth, that have hurt the Queenes Realme, but it is your selfe, and such as you are, […] which have and do marre the Queenes Realme. I do hold no heresies but the doctrine of God, the blessed Gospell of Christ: that hold I; that believe I; that have I taught; and that will I never revoke.” With that, his Tormentor cried, “Away with him.” and away from him went M. Saunders with a merie courage towards the fire.10

7. Foxe, p. 1371. 8. His prayer ends with the request that he may be up to his part: “strengthen me […] that in the fire I breake not the rules of patience […]” (Foxe, p. 1372). 9. Foxe, p. 1607. 10. Foxe, p. 1362.

84

Andreas Höfele

“Marring the realm”, “heresy”—the redirecting of these key terms of vituperation, which are used by both opponents, illustrates a logic of reversal which characterizes the martyr’s performance throughout. Not only words, but costume and gestures, too, contribute to this effect. The procedure of divesting, for example, which was devised to signify ultimate degradation, could be turned into an act of staunch Protestant self-assertion no less pronounced than Saunders’s “that hold I; that believe I; that have I taught”. The procedure was imposed on those heretics who were members of the clergy and consisted in first dressing them in “all the vestures and ornaments belonging to a Priest […] as though […] they should solemnly execute their office”,11 and then, one by one, taking the priestly garments off again, thus visibly depriving the offenders “of all order, benefitte, and priviledge belonging to the Clergy”.12 But instead of signalling loss of status— even of identity—the removing of the outward accoutrements of Catholic priesthood could be turned into a demonstration against Catholic “massing mummery”,13 as the report of Rowland Taylor’s confrontation with the Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, shows: “Well” (quoth the bishop) “I am come to disgrade you: wherefore put on these vestures.” “No” (quoth Dr. Taylour) “I will not.” “Wilt thou not” saide the bishop? “I shall make thee, ere I go.” Quoth Dr. Taylour, “You shall not by the grace of God.” Then hee charged him upon his obedience to doe it, but hee would not doe it for him. So he willed another to put them upon his backe: and when he was thoroughlie furnished therewith, hee set his handes by his side, walking up and downe, and said, “How saie you, my Lord? am not I a goodly foole? How say you, my masters? If I were in Cheape, should I not have boyes enough to laugh at these apish toyes, and toying trumpery?”14

The martyr demonstratively, and histrionically, takes control over a spectacle which is intended to exert total control over him. This turning of constraint into liberty is arguably the greatest reversal he achieves. Going towards the fire, as we hear of Laurence Saunders, “with a merry courage”, he rises above the power that subjects him to the utmost extremity of forcible compulsion. One way of communicating this achievement is an undaunted gallows-humour. “What, will you make me a Pope?” quipped John Philpot when the officers wanted to carry him across a stretch of muddy road on their way to the stake. “I am content to goe to my journeys end on foote.”15 And Rowland Taylor expertly plays on his audience’s hope for a last-minute recantation by saying that he realizes he has deceived himself and “[is] like to deceive a great many of Hadley of their expectation”.16 When all the bystanders rejoice at this seemingly good news, he promptly unriddles his riddling speech in a vein not dissimilar to that of the grave-diggers’ scene in Hamlet:

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Foxe, p. 1370. Ibid. Foxe, p. 1385. Ibid. Foxe, p. 1661. Foxe, p. 1386.

Stages of Martyrdom: John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments

85

I am as you see a man that has a very great carcase which I thought should have been buried in Hadley Churche yarde, if I hadde died in my bed […]; but herein I see I was deceived: and there are a great number of wormes in Hadley Churchyard, which shoulde have had jollie feeding upon this carrion, which they have looked for manie a day. But nowe I knowe we be deceived, both I and they: for this carcase must bee burnt to ashes.17

In a more serious vein the reversal of constraint into liberty is communicated by gestures; gestures of demonstrative ease, such as Latimer’s “strok[ing] his face with his hands, and as it were bath[ing] them a little in the fire”. In this as in other feats of fortitude, John Rogers, the first of the Marian martyrs committed to the flames, set an example for his successors to emulate: “When [the fire] had taken both upon his legs and shoulders, he, as one feeling no smart, washed his hands in the flame, as though it had been cold water.”18 The very laws of physics itself seem to be held in abeyance by this display of spiritual strength: “And, after lifting up his hands unto heaven, not removing the same until such time as the devouring fire had consumed them—most mildly this happy martyr yielded up his spirit into the hands of his heavenly Father.”19 The visible stage of martyrdom reaches out into the invisible off-stage space above. The staged image of Rogers raising his hands can reveal its full meaning only if the cooperative beholder is prepared to complete the picture by imagining the receiving hands of the heavenly Father. Not only is God coopted as an invisible actor, He also partakes in the spectacle as a second audience, the audience the martyr’s performance is ultimately directed at. If all the world’s a stage, then the stage on which the martyrs act out their last scene becomes a kind of ‘abstract and brief chronicle’ of the theatrum mundi as a whole, its focal point, where the gaze of the onlooking crowd and that of the all-seeing deity converge with singular intenseness. Just as the action on which this dual gaze is trained reveals in singular, and final, plenitude the life of its protagonist, at the same time that life is being annihilated. But while the theatre of martyrdom extends vertically to the heavens above, it is no less crucial to note its horizontal links with other contemporary forms of public spectacle. Executions, bull- and bear-baiting as well as play-acting all share and vary the same basic type of performance space: a theatre-in-the-round, a scaffold, stake or platform surrounded by spectators. This similarity breeds collusion, an ever-ready potential for semantic interference. The staging of one of these kinds of performance is always framed by, always grounded in, an awareness of the others.20 If heretics, like baited bears, were tied to the stake, this would on the one hand signify their demotion below the level of the human. But on the other hand it would also suggest the Christian iconography of the sacrificial lamb of God, turning the stake into a typological analogue of the cross.

17. 18. 19. 20.

Ibid. Foxe (ed. Cattley, see fn. 2), vol. 6, p. 611. Ibid. I have argued this in more detail in “Sackerson the Bear”, REAL 17: Literary History / Cultural History: Force-Fields and Tensions, ed. by Herbert Grabes (Tübingen: Narr, 2001), pp. 161-175.

86

Andreas Höfele

The ritual of punishment merges with the sacred and the theatrical in an economy of endlessly fungible signifiers; nowhere more conspicuous than on the stages of martyrdom. Thus Laurence Saunders, being led to the scene of his death on February 8th , 1555, converts the apparatus of execution into a religious symbol through a performance of manifest theatricality extolling the conversion of death into life: “He […] tooke the stake to which he should be chained, in his arms, and kissed it, saying: ‘Welcome the crosse of Christ, welcome everlasting life.’”21 This and all the other scenes of martyrdom which I have referred to were what we might call—albeit somewhat anachronistically—live events; acts performed by, and most cruelly upon, real human bodies in the physical presence of a body of real spectators. But this is not, of course, how I have cited them, nor how they have come down to us. What I have cited throughout is a text, John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, or to quote the title correctly and in full: Actes and Monuments of these latter and perilous dayes, touching matters of the Church, wherein are comprehended and described the great persecutions & horrible troubles, that haue bene wrought and practised by the Romish Prelates, speciallye in this Realm of England and Scotlande, from the yeare of our Lorde a thousande, unto the tyme now present. The book’s existence testifies to the failure of the policy of deterrence adopted and perpetuated by Queen Mary’s government even after Bishop Gardiner, the chief judicial officer of the Crown, urged that it be abandoned. What the government signally failed to achieve in particular was to cut the lines of communication between incarcerated Protestant leaders such as Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley and their brethren in exile, who had been allowed or even encouraged to leave the country at the time of Mary’s accession. All in all some 800 refugees (a figure which includes family members and retainers) had found shelter in such Protestant centres as Geneva, Frankfort and Strasbourg; cities which were also centres of a thriving printing and publishing industry. The English government proved almost incredibly remiss and inefficient at restricting, let alone preventing, the trafficking of intelligence between Protestants at home and abroad. Scarcely a word of the martyrs—be it spoken during their trials, in private conversation or at the scene of death— seems to have escaped the attention and ready pens of eager sympathizers who circulated their reports among the faithful. The condemned preachers themselves during their sometimes lengthy terms of imprisonment found ways not only to write tracts, epistles and adhortations, but also to smuggle them past their warders and out of the country to some continental printing press. Such is the textual contraband that makes up the core of Foxe’s book, which was begun in exile in Basle in the late 1550s and published in London, a folio of some 1,800 pages, in 1563. As the full title indicates, the present, or rather, recent tribulations of the English Protestants are placed in a much broader historical perspective. While the 1563 edition begins with the story of Wyclif, the much enlarged edition of 1570 opens with a 500-page account of the history of the church from its inception and of English church history prior to Wyclif. The result is a grand récit of captivating clarity and 21. Foxe, p. 1362.

Stages of Martyrdom: John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments

fig. 1

87

88

Andreas Höfele

consistency. History, as the title illustration (fig. 1) makes clear, is conceived as the perennial Manichean struggle between Good and Bad, Jerusalem and Babylon, the true Church and its corrupters, English independence and the tyranny of “the Romishe Prelates”. The title, Acts and Monuments, differentiates the two constitutive elements of the book, at the same time as it marks their interdependence. ‘Acts’ refers to the lives and deaths of the martyrs, the account of their actions. ‘Monuments’ refers to what they have left to posterity, the record of their words. Unlike the saints commemorated in Catholic hagiography, Foxe’s Protestant martyrs leave no physical legacy in the shape of sanctified bones. They do not turn into material relics, enshrined, charismatic objects containing divine presence. Neither do they assume, as Catholic saints do, the power to intercede between man and God.22 It is on their words alone that their continuing significance is founded. Recuperating these words is therefore Foxe’s main object: the preservation and propagation in print of what the Marian government strove to erase along with the martyrs’ bodies. Whilst the judicial proceedings often suppressed the speeches of the accused, in Foxe’s narrative the martyr’s ‘strong word’ typically prevails against his opponents. And quite literally, the martyr always has the last word, speaking as it were even beyond death. Each ‘act’ of dying is followed by textual ‘monuments’: samples of the dead man’s writings. In all this Foxe’s commitment to the Protestant religion of the Word could not be more obvious, a commitment which also vents itself in his frequent attacks on the theatricality of the Catholic service, its rituals and “massing-mummery”. It is all the more remarkable, then, how much his own work relies on effects that can only be described as theatrical as well. Clearly, some account of the martyrs’ sufferings is required in order to enhance the authority of their words. This is what we might describe as the functional correlation between the ‘acts’ and the ‘monuments’. ‘Confessing to the death’ is, after all, what Protestant martyrology is all about. But the vividness of Foxe’s death scenes, their horrendous attention to detail, is well in excess of this basic functional requirement. If the martyrs themselves regarded their public deaths as a performance, their chronicler Foxe heightens that sense of performance through the use of every means of dramatization available to him. Whether intended or not, his ‘acts’ signally bear out the theatrical meaning of that term. Textual representation seeks to literally re-present the events it records, striving to approximate as closely as possible the condition of experiential immediacy, of ‘real presence’. A Calvinist bias against images may not be altogether absent from Foxe’s book, but it clearly does not set the standard by which the book’s own mimetic techniques would be measured. Somewhat puzzlingly, Foxe on the one hand “grants a great deal of space to the Puritan polemic against the reliance on images, quoting one who rails against the ‘sinneful and vaine craft of painting, carving or casting’”;23 22. For a discussion of this difference, see Catharine Randall Coats, (Em)bodying the Word: Textual Resurrections in the Martyrological Narratives of Foxe, Crespin, de Bèze and d’Aubigné (New York et. al.: Lang, 1992), pp. 1-36. 23. Coats (1992), p. 40.

Stages of Martyrdom: John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments

89

fig. 2

yet on the other hand, his own book is “liberally dosed with woodcuts”24—over fifty in the 1563 text, many more in subsequent editions. By no means mere adornments, these pictures, “closely coordinated with the text, [convey] the central message of the text, accessible to all”.25 This may betray, as one critic has suggested, “closer ties to the Catholic tradition of hagiography than [Foxe] would admit”,26 or, in the words of another critic, a

24. Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 175. See also Ruth Samson Luborsky, “The Illustrations: Their Pattern and Plan”, in John Foxe: An Historical Perspective, ed. by David Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 67-84; Margaret Aston / Elizabeth Ingram, “The Iconography of the Acts and Monuments”, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. by David Loades (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 66142. 25. Warren Wooden, John Foxe (Boston: Twayne, 1983), p. iii. 26. Ibid, p. 42.

90

Andreas Höfele

specifically “Anglican affiliation”.27 But it can also be regarded, in more pragmatic terms, as a highly effective adaptation of the strategic alliance between ‘players, printers and preachers’, as advocated by Foxe’s mentor John Bale, to the medium of the book. If Foxe’s “style functioned dramatically to show to his reader, as though it were actually present, the suffering body of the martyr”,28 the woodcuts reinforced the suggestiveness of that dramatic presentation. The single most frequently chosen motif of the illustrations is the actual ‘theatre of martyrdom’; the death scene with the martyr burning, or about to burn, at the stake and a crowd of spectators encircling him. In the picture showing the death of John Hooper (fig. 2), we as readers complete that circle. The impression of a theatre is even stronger in the picture of the burning of Ridley and Latimer, with the Catholic priest, Dr. Smith, haranguing the audience from his provisional pulpit like some allegorical figure of sin in a medieval morality theatre-in-theround (fig. 3).29 “I thought it not to be neglected”, Foxe writes in his introduction, “that the precious monuments of so many matters, and men most meet to be recorded and registered in books, should lie buried by my fault in the pit of oblivion”.30 Foxe’s book, then, might be described as a portable theatre of memory, ready at any time to render the performances of the martyrs vividly present through the deployment of its own performative energies, both literary and pictorial. If Protestants denounced the Catholic Mass as mere theatre, its doctrinal core, transubstantiation, as illusionist trickery, Foxe’s martyrology provided them with a counter-theatre “as appealing to the imagination as the great dramatic rite of propitiation in the Mass had ever been”.31 Foxe displays a peculiar awareness of the materiality of his book. To him, reading is not a quasi disembodied activity of purely intellectual perception but rather to be envisioned as the corporeal co-presence of a reader and a book-as-object, in his particular case, quite a massive, heavy object. He hopes, Foxe says, that people “would carry about with them such monument of martyrs as this is, and lay them always in sight, not only to read, but to follow, and would paint them upon their walls, cups, rings, and gates”.32 It is almost as if Foxe’s sacred book evoked and appropriated, at the same time as it rejects and supplants, the Catholic notion of the relic. The book, like the relic, is conceived as a material object of sacred efficacy. Unlike the relic, however, it deploys that efficacy 27. Coats (1992), p. 40. Though it is debatable whether a specifically Anglican position can be identified at all prior to Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity of 1593. See Patrick McGrath, Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I (London: Blandford, 1967), p. 32. 28. Coats (1992), p. 38. 29. See for example Richard Southern’s reconstruction of the staging of The Castle of Perseverance: Richard Southern, The Medieval Theatre in the Round: A Study of the Staging of the Castle of Perseverance and Related Matters (London: Faber, 1957). 30. Foxe (1563), sig. [B6v]. 31. Haller (1963), p. 50. 32. Foxe (1563), sig [B6v].

Stages of Martyrdom: John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments

91

fig. 3

through the performative energy of the Word as preached and witnessed by the martyrs. Working on the imaginative faculties of its readers, the book, in an amazing travesty of Pentecost, materializes and dispenses its word-born images across “walls, cups, rings and gates”. Not only is there no trace of iconoclastic fervour in this but, quite the reverse, the fervour is all directed precisely towards the generation and spreading of images. In recording the performances of the martyrs, Foxe’s book strives, as far as its medium will allow, towards the condition and impact of theatre. At the same time it foregrounds its own textuality. In the edition of 1570 both tendencies are further reinforced by, on the one hand, additional woodcut illustrations, and on the other, “a much fuller apparatus of titles, sub-titles, running heads, dates, names of reigning kings, and marginal notes supplying both information and comment”.33 But while the latter would generally tend to emphasize the written or textual character of Foxe’s account, a marginal note such as “Bloody murderers” seems more like a spontaneous oral interjection. It is not until Tristram Shandy that we encounter another book which manages to such an extent as Foxe’s the well-nigh paradoxical combination of seeming most ‘written’ at the same time as most ‘spoken’ or indeed ‘speaking’. 33. Haller (1963), p. 129.

92

Andreas Höfele

It is no exaggeration to say that, next to the Geneva bible—another product of the Marian exile—Foxe’s Acts and Monuments was the single most important Elizabethan book. As of 1570, the time of the revolt of the northern earls and the Pope’s bull excommunicating Queen Elizabeth, it was “ordered to be set up along with the Bible for all to read in churches and other public places”.34 In Foxe’s account, the Queen, who is represented as having only narrowly escaped martyrdom herself in her youth, joins ranks with the long line of confessors of the true Faith. Martyrdom thus becomes a national issue, the foundational master narrative of the Elizabethan state, “an unanswerable defence of England’s ideological position in the contemporary struggle of national independence and power”.35 Given such ideological authority as well as the palpable theatrical qualities of the book, one would expect it to have had a considerable impact on the evolving Elizabethan stage; as much as, if not indeed more than, say, Holinshed’s Chronicles. William Haller’s remark that Foxe’s readers “would, before long, be relishing similarly revolting scenes in the theatre”36 clearly suggests continuity between the stages of martyrdom and those of the public playhouses. Yet there is precious little evidence, looking at what was actually performed in these playhouses, of such continuity. A play like The Virgin Martyr (1620) by Dekker and Massinger is a rare exception. More telling, it seems to me, is the teasing absent-presence of one of Foxe’s heroes in Shakespeare’s Henry IV: Sir John Oldcastle, renamed—and known the world over as— Sir John Falstaff. “For Oldcastle died a martyr”, the Epilogue (Part 2) tells us, “and this is not the man”.37 The disclaimer highlights how martyrdom almost—but not quite— makes it into the playhouse: a submerged frame of reference, a theme obliquely hinted at but rarely treated directly. Intimations of martyrdom, for instance, haunt the seedy world of Measure for Measure; a play whose brutally retaliatory source story won whole-hearted approval from no less a luminary than the great Martin Luther himself.38 (But, of course Shakespeare thoroughly rewrote that story.) Isabella, confronted with Angelo’s offer, retorts with an alternative way of sacrificing her body: “What would you do?” he asks, and she answers: As much for my poor brother as myself; That is, were I under the terms of death, The impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies, 34. Ibid., p. 13. If Foxe was set up “for all to read”, this does not mean that the Acts and Monuments were set up in all churches: what it actually meant was that the book was on display in all cathedral churches. 35. Haller (1963), p. 14. 36. Ibid., p. 44. 37. The Oldcastle-Falstaff theme has been widely discussed. See Gary Taylor, “The Fortunes of Oldcastle”, Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), 85-100. David Bevington, “Introduction”, in Henry IV, Part 1, ed. by D. Bevington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 1-110. David Scott Kastan, “Killed with Hard Opinions” in Laurie E. Maguire / Thomas L. Berger, eds., Textual Formations and Reformations (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), pp. 211-227. 38. There is no single source but a whole cluster of similar stories all hingeing on a ruthless enforcement of Old Testament justice. See N. W. Bawcutt, “Introduction”, in Measure for Measure, ed. by N. W. Bawcutt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 12-25.

Stages of Martyrdom: John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments

93

And strip myself to death as to a bed That longing have been sick for […] (2.4.98-103)

Torture turning into glory, death embraced as the ultimate consummation of a pious life—the reference to martyrdom could not be more pronounced (more specifically to Catholic martyrdom perhaps: the turning of blood into rubies would seem to evoke the notion of relics). But Isabella’s confident acceptance of martyrdom is not the vision of death the play most forcefully impresses on us. What sticks in the mind is rather the desperate outcry of her condemned brother Claudio: Ay, but to die, and go we know not where, To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot, This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice, To be imprisoned in the viewless winds And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world, or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling—‘tis too horrible. The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a false paradise To what we fear of death. (3.1.121-135)

The drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, I would dare to rather sweepingly generalize in conclusion, aligns itself more with Claudio’s vision of death than with Isabella’s. While the martyrs’ fortitude could be held up for admiration, it was the doubts rather than the certainties that stirred the imagination.39

39. A study of the more indirect, ‘subterranean’ influence of Foxe on Elizabethan drama would require another paper, which might take Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (“Speak, gentle sister: who hath martyred thee?”—3.3.81) as a starting point.

This page intentionally left blank

JAMES VI AND I, GEORGE BUCHANAN AND THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS by Andrew Hadfield If the monarch was sacred, or divine even, how could he or she perform their role without running the risk of diminishing their authority and showing that they were really simply human after all? And, if this was a problem for the vast number who held certain concepts of kingship, how could anyone dare to imitate the monarch or act their part in public without risking charges of political subversion, blasphemy, or something worse?1 It has been plausibly argued that the English Renaissance theatre did not have the political charge and potential to undermine the supposedly commonplace reactionary views of the authorities.2 They, in turn, usually did not really care what went on in those spaces outside the city walls unless an international scandal beckoned, as it did when A Game at Chess was performed in 1624.3 But it would be quite wrong to conclude that the question of performance did not then matter to the Elizabethan and Jacobean authorities. The relative lack of interest in the commercial theatre is in stark contrast to the vigorous and organised suppression of the mystery plays and other surviving popular drama from before the Reformation because it was seen to constitute a threat to the monarchy’s new role as supreme head of the Church of England.4 In short, the performance of religious drama was perceived as incompatible with the notion of sacred majesty.5 Kings and queens 1. See David Scott Kastan, “Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule”, Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986), 459-475. 2. Paul Yachtin, Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), ch. 1. See also Barbara Freedman, “Elizabethan Protest, Plague, and Plays: Rereading the ‘Documents of Control’”, English Literary Renaissance 26 (1996), 17-45. 3. Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England: Buggeswords (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), ch. 7; Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 187-188. 4. See Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300 to 1660: Vol. 1, 1300-1576 (London: Routledge, 1966), ch. 4. 5. See F. Le Van Baumer, The Early Tudor Theory of Kingship (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), ch. 4; G. R. Elton ed., The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), ch. 1.

96

Andrew Hadfield

were, of course, often reproduced on stage in a variety of history plays in the late 1500s. But, given the nervous historical events that the case of Shakespeare’s Richard II inaugurated—the possible censorship of the deposition scene, the trigger for Essex’s rebellion, the fearful comments of the queen and her sense that she played Richard to Devereux’s Bolingbroke—it is easy to see that those in power felt that the balm could all too easily be washed off the anointed ruler once again.6 The problem of the performance of sacred majesty lies at the heart of one of the key political and personal relationships that determined the form of government existing in early modern Britain, that between James VI of Scotland and his tutor George Buchanan.7 In many ways it is hard to imagine a less harmonious or successful relationship. Buchanan was an irritable aged humanist with proto-republican ideas keen to impress on his young charge the need for the monarch to serve his people well. Buchanan believed that a bad king could be deposed by any of his subjects as long as they could justify their actions, a position that went well beyond the arguments of most monarchomachs whose writings terrified European monarchs in the second half of the sixteenth century. They believed that only those who held public office, the magistrates, had the right to overthrow and kill kings who went against God’s law.8 Buchanan’s fellow Scot, John Knox, whose First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), is more concerned to dismiss the rights of evil queens to reign than to develop theories of resistance, government and representation, argues rather vaguely that only those who elected an idolator have the right to depose her (his target was Mary Tudor who died before the work was published, which meant that Knox was loathed by her younger half-sister, Elizabeth, ever afterwards).9 Even the notorious Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos (1579), the most infamous Huguenot treatise written during the bloody French civil wars of religion, which intimidated monarchs throughout Europe, insisted that private citizens had no right to resist 6. For an overview, see Leeds Barroll, “A New History for Shakespeare and His Time”, Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988), 441-464, at 454-461. 7. For discussion see Roger A. Mason ed., Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pt. 2; Roger A. Mason, “James VI, George Buchanan and The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies”, in Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance Scotland (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1998), pp. 215-241; Jenny Wormald, “James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies: the Scottish Context and the English Translation”, in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. by Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 36-54; J. H. Burns, The Trew Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1996), chs. 6-7., D. Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: Cape, 1956), ch. 2. 8. See Robert M. Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550-1580”, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700, ed. by J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 194-218. Catholic resistance theory was even more widespread and vigorously argued: see J. H. M. Salmon, “Catholic Resistance Theory, Ultramontanism, and the Royalist Response, 1580-1620”, ibid., pp. 219-253. 9. Kingdon, (1990), pp. 197-200; A. N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558-1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 49-59. For Knox’s writings see Roger A. Mason ed. (1994).

James VI and I, George Buchanan and the Divine Right of Kings

97

and that only magistrates had the right and duty to oppose tyrants: “To private individuals it is said: ‘put your sword in its sheath’; but to magistrates: ‘You do not bear the sword in vain’”.10 One of the key themes which binds together Buchanan’s voluminous output, produced throughout his long life, was a moral crusade against bad monarchs who neglected their subjects and usurped powers and rights for themselves which really belonged to others. Most frightening for the young James was Buchanan’s method of instruction which was to bombard the king with a plethora of examples of bad rulers and their subsequent horrible and richly deserved fates. It is hardly surprising that soon before his own death, and some forty years after that of his tutor, James had a horrible dream in which Buchanan appeared, addressed him in verse and predicted that “soon afterwards he would fall into ice, and then into fire, that he would endure frequent pain, and die after two years” (Buchanan’s ghost was a year out).11 Equally, it is hardly surprising that as James developed his own ideas of the importance of the true monarch unfettered by the useless and often harmful political and legal institutions demanded by over-mighty subjects, he should demand that the works of Buchanan be prohibited.12 However, it is far too easy to put the disastrous relationship between the two men down to a personality clash. Although it should be noted that Buchanan taught another student who espoused political ideas diametrically opposed to those of his teacher, Michel de Montaigne, suggesting that he was not a figure who inspired acolytes.13 Buchanan’s desire to impress the need for James to serve the people well stemmed in part from his vision of a virtuous Protestant anti-empire which Northern Europeans could establish as a means of opposing the barbarous cruelty of the Catholic Iberian Empire. Buchanan was not alone in having high hopes for James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots, and the disappointment he had felt at the paths she took meant that he came to see her as a traitor to the cause of proper virtue and government in Europe.14 Mary became the apotheosis of the long line of dreadful Scottish tyrants in Buchanan’s posthumously published History of Scotland, the lamentable story of her crimes against Scotland occupying a huge portion of the total narrative.15 He also wrote a separate treatise outlining her sins, which was widely known throughout Britain, Ane detectioun of the duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes (1571).16 10. George Garnett ed., Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: or, concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and of the people over a prince (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 60. 11. Cited in Roger A. Mason, “George Buchanan, James VI and the Presbyterians”, in Mason ed. (1994), pp. 112-137, at p. 122. 12. James I, Basilikon Doron in The Workes (1616), pp. 137-189, at p. 176. 13. I. P. McFarlane, Buchanan (London: Duckworth, 1981), p. 95. 14. Paul J. McGinnis / Arthur H. Williamson ed., trans., George Buchanan, The Political Poetry (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1995), pp. 27, 274. 15. The history of Scotland written in Latin by George Buchanan; faithfully rendered into English, trans. J. Fraser (London: 1690), vols. 16-20. The work was first published in Latin as Rerum Scoticarum historia (Edinburgh, 1582), and incorporated into Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande (1577, 1580). 16. Published by John Day.

98

Andrew Hadfield

Buchanan clearly hoped that if he worked hard enough on James he could prevent the sins of the mother being visited upon the son, a reason why he was chosen by the Protestant faction in Scotland to return from France and help them make the king in their image.17 Buchanan composed a poem on James’ birth in 1566, “Genethliacon Jacobi Sexti Regis Scotorum” (“A Celebration of the Birth of James VI, King of Scots”), which urged the boy to “promise a golden age and the end of warfare”, to curtail civil war and to make Scotland into a stable country which could serve its people well. Buchanan argued that the example of a virtuous king was the best hope for reform: Imprisonment, punishment, and the executioner’s axe, Do not so animate the soul’s trembling fear of the law As does the reputation for genuine virtue, the character of a king, The glory and respect owing to blameless rule, Convert the souls of subjects to an honourable way of life.18

Buchanan did not live long enough to see the fruits of his tutoring (he died in 1582 when James was sixteen), and, while he would undoubtedly have approved of James’ successful efforts as a peacemaker, and his resistance to Catholicism, it is unlikely that he would have found his pupil’s political views to his taste.19 There are many ways in which the distinctions between Buchanan’s and James’ views of kingship can be characterised. Nevertheless it is clear that issues of the sacred and performance are central to these differences and it is the interrelationship between these two terms that I wish to explore in the remainder of this essay. For Buchanan, politics was a sacred business. He represented virtuous republics as sanctioned by God, sometimes associating them with ancient Israel, sometimes suggesting that as Biblical Israel was ruled by God’s will it was “irrelevant to politics”.20 However, rather than subsuming politics into a broader category of religion, Buchanan had effectively achieved the opposite and placed all religious issues within the rubric of the human and the political. Commentators routinely observe how secular Buchanan’s work is, despite the prevalence of religious language and subjects in his work.21 Having established that the question of virtue is to dominate judgements in both secular and sacred spheres, Buchanan has effectively demystified religious belief and opened up religious issues to the scrutiny of political and social values. If the central question asked is what is good for the people, then the answer can clearly sometimes be that religious concerns can be irrelevant, pernicious or simply inferior to other forms of value. There 17. Willson (1956), ch. 2. 18. George Buchanan, “A Celebration of the Birth of James VI, King of Scots”, lines 25-29, in Political Poetry, p. 154. 19. See W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 20. David Hume of Godscroft, The British Union (De Unione Insulae Britannicae), ed. and trans. by Paul J. McGinnis / Arthur H. Williamson (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 2002), introduction, p. 3. I am grateful to the editors for allowing me to see this important work in advance of publication. 21. Buchanan, Political Poetry, p. 3; Wormald (1991), p. 50; Mason (1998), pp. 222-223.

James VI and I, George Buchanan and the Divine Right of Kings

99

is no special religious virtue which can override all other considerations in Buchanan’s thought. In his most polemical treatise on government, De Jure Regni Apud Scotos (1579), later translated as A Discourse concerning the due privilege of Government in the Kingdom of Scotland (1721), Buchanan explicitly set out his political stall. The dialogue was dedicated to James as a means of helping him detect, and so avoid, the attentions of flatterers at court. The danger of following Buchanan’s advice, I would suggest, is quite the opposite and it would be amazing if a monarch were to have any confidence left at all to make decisions, let alone the energy to expel flatterers, if they stuffed their court with acerbic advisers like Buchanan. Buchanan makes it clear that “kings are not ordained for themselves, but for the people”, firmly rooting the question of sovereignty as a prerogative of the populace not the ruler.22 Buchanan argues that people can elect the king and much of the dialogue, like much of Buchanan’s writings elsewhere, is dedicated to the problem of how to identify and get rid of tyrants (pp. 172-3, 185-7). Kings should be elected representatives of the people (p. 208), and kings who assume the throne through this route will administer the laws better and in the interests of the people (p. 209-10). The king is, in essence, a functionary whose duty it is to make sure that the laws determined by his subjects work properly. In the History of Scotland Buchanan expresses his irritation with the Scots for allowing Kenneth III to assume the throne as a hereditary monarch, and so overthrowing the honourable Scottish tradition of elected monarchy.23 Buchanan makes it clear that he has little sympathy with the devious Kenneth whose aim to promote his own family at the expense of the Scottish people. And he is equally dismayed that the people have effectively made Scotland the same as other European kingdoms. For Buchanan it is a short step from hereditary succession to tyranny because the natural order whereby the people can control the kings who rule them has been inverted and a binding contract broken. The disaster Scotland has brought upon itself cannot be underestimated and the reign of Kenneth III—in other ways a good king, according to Buchanan—marks the turning point in Scottish history that must be reversed if possible: And so the People are to be universally committed into their Power, who have no Power over themselves: insomuch, That those Persons, who are hardly brought to Obey Wise, Prudent and Experienced Kings, are now required to yield Obedience, as it were, to the very shadow of a King: by which means, we willingly precipitate ourselves into those Punishments, which God threatens to Those, who despise and contemn his Holy Majesty, namely, That Children, Male or Female, may Reign over us, whom the Law of nations, and even Nature it self (the Mother of all Laws) hath subjected to the Rule of Others (p. 205). 22. George Buchanan, De Jure Regni Apud Scotos [or a Discourse concerning the due privilege of Government in the Kingdom of Scotland] (1721), p. 181. Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. For fuller discussions of sovereignty in the late sixteenth century see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. 2, passim; Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), vol. 2, passim. 23. Buchanan, History of Scotland, pp. 193-200. For an analysis of Buchanan’s historical scholarship in the history, see Hugh Trevor-Roper, “George Buchanan and the Ancient Scottish Constitution”, English Historical Review Supplement 3 (1966), pp. 1-53.

100

Andrew Hadfield

Buchanan revels in pointing out the paradoxes that the establishment of hereditary kingship has inaugurated: adults are now subject to the rule of children and instability will result from a law that was designed to promote stability (p. 206). Whereas God usually has to punish nations who break his holy laws, here the Scots have done his job for him. God, although himself a ‘Holy Majesty’ does not require those on earth to copy his mode of government. Buchanan uses an arresting metaphor to describe his conception of kingship. He argues that the king is set in the theatre of the world, where all can look at him. His vices can never be kept secret (p. 226). It is as an example on this public stage that the king has his greatest influence for good or evil (p. 231). Moreover, it is not the men and women who are players, but the king observed by the audience of his people who will decide whether they want him to continue in his profession after he has performed for them. Buchanan is also providing an answer to critics of the theatre such as Stephen Gosson and Philip Stubbes, who argued that the stage only taught people how to behave badly.24 Here, the king acting in the theatre of the world has the power to lead his subjects to the sort of virtue and happiness that Sir Philip Sidney felt could be achieved by reading poetry.25 It is not surprising that Buchanan should have used theatrical metaphors given that he was a successful Latin dramatist himself, regarding drama as a useful medium for conveying his ideas to the powerful, and reaching a wider audience.26 Buchanan translated two classical tragedies, Medea and Alcestis, and wrote two Biblical tragedies Jephthes, based on the story of military leader who fought the Ammonites in The Book of Judges 10.6-12.7 and Baptistes, narrating the story of John the Baptist, most probably in the 1540s when he was living in Bordeaux.27 Baptistes is perhaps the most interesting of the two original plays, not least because it demands to be read as a pièce à cléf. It has been argued that John the Baptist should be read as Thomas More and Herod as Henry VIII. Buchanan himself made this claim when he was interrogated by the Inquisition in Portugal in 1552, but, given that he had been forced to flee Paris because of his vigorous and often obscene satires of the Catholic Church, and he was already turning against the authority of the Pope and towards Protestantism, it seems likely that this allegorical reading is more of a blind than an insight.28 However, having to face the prospect of torture would, of course, have given Buchanan every incentive to produce an allegorical explanation of his play which pleased his inter24. See Glynne Wickham et al, eds., English Professional Theatre, 1530-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 157-190. 25. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. by Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, [1965] 1973), p. 109, passim. On Sidney’s connections to Buchanan, see James E. Phillips, “George Buchanan and the Sidney Circle”, Huntington Library Quarterly 12 (1948-9), 23-55. 26. For similar attempts in England, see Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 27. P. Sharratt / P. G. Walsh eds., George Buchanan: Tragedies (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983), introduction, pp. 2-4. Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. 28. James M. Aitken ed., The Trial of George Buchanan before the Lisbon Inquisition, (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1939), pp. 25, 131-134.

James VI and I, George Buchanan and the Divine Right of Kings

101

rogators. It is equally likely that Buchanan was alluding to the martyrdom of John Fisher, who had told Henry that he would suffer the fate of John the Baptist because he felt about Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn the way that John had felt about Herod’s marriage to Herodias. Henry duly obliged and Fisher’s head was duly decapitated in 1535. And, given Buchanan’s obsessive hatred for Mary Queen of Scots, it is possible that the revised version of the play contains a criticism of her refusal to listen to the spokesman of the people, John, after she has murdered her second husband, Lord Darnley (Buchanan, Tragedies, p. 12). Such allusions help point to the topical and political significance of the play. The central point I would want to make about Baptistes is that it follows the main thrust of Buchanan’s writings in subsuming the sacred within the secular. The play opens with the elders, Malchus and Gamaliel, arguing whether the Baptist is an appropriate critic of society or whether his attacks on the corrupt morals of Israel are vitiated and rendered meaningless by his status as an outsider: MAL. So dwelling alone in the lonely crannies of the unfrequented countryside he has beguiled the simple folk with the appearance of stern sanctity. With his shaggy hair, his frame covered with skins, his diet of wild game and deceits of that kind, he has attracted the attention of all. The common folk believe that a new prophet has suddenly been bestowed on the world. And now he has drawn to himself an army of an attendant mob, now the people abandon their cities and look up to him alone; princes cultivate him, kings revere him […] GAM. Can you persuade me that the man who rebukes vices, teaches good manners, and walks first on the path which he enjoins on others is wicked? MAL. Can you persuade me that the man who despises laws, promotes new sects and new rites, attacks with abuse the teachers of the people, and disparages the priests is good? (pp. 135-6).

This passage raises a question that Buchanan discusses elsewhere in De Jure Regni Apud Scotos. There he argues that people who withdraw from society, like Timon of Athens, are suffering from a ‘distemper of mind’ because God likes men to gather together, as Cicero also suggested (pp. 177-9). Malchus clearly wants to cast the Baptist as an outsider who has abandoned society and therefore has nothing to teach it because he is merely a misanthrope. But, as his own words recognise, kings, princes and common people are flocking to hear the Baptist preach. It is society that has left him, not vice versa. Furthermore, it is the widespread support that he receives that justifies the actions of the Baptist, as much as the sanction from God, again indicating Buchanan’s real concerns. Once again, the play’s central target is not the question of the nature of worship, or a particular religious policy or doctrine, but the behaviour of tyrants. Herod could be any one of the bad Scottish kings attacked throughout Buchanan’s History of Scotland. Although Malchus opposes the Baptist in debate because he undermines the fabric of Jewish society, disregarding the words of elders and challenging the rabbis “with impudent words”, the chorus points the audience to the moral that the truth will eventually out and all will be exposed: [A]s for you, stern hypocrites who take delight in wicked gain though manifesting severity on crabbed brow, however much you have hidden your secret crimes from the misapprehensions of the trusting crowd and though the foul dregs of your impious minds are concealed, none the less your conscience gnaws you

102

Andrew Hadfield in secret and finds you guilty. The hidden executioner enclosed within your entrails devours you, scourging you with his grim whip (p. 152).

Malchus then appears on stage and the moral is pointed directly to the king, who has treated his most loyal servant despicably: MAL. No reliable hope lies in the king. By his own base ambition he has betrayed both the state’s cause and his own. In his eagerness to please the people, in his pursuit of the fair wind of favour by an appearance of gentleness, he has striven to consign me to the anger of the common folk, and has sought to compensate for the injuries done to him by exposing me to danger […]

Malchus argues that Herod has used him so that he can be blamed for the execution of the Baptist if the people protest, but take the glory if they approve: “In this way kings mount for their enjoyment shows which exploit the blood of citizens from opposing sides, and sport with the slaughter we inflict on each other” (p. 153). The play reverses the monarch’s cruel use of theatre and subjects Herod and his modern imitators to the theatre of the world as Buchanan suggested was the proper order of things in De Jure Regni Apud Scotos. Although the play concludes with the chorus warning the Israelites of the impending judgement of God who will punish them for their worship of false idols (pp. 162-3), the action has actually exposed the tyranny of the few rather than the sins of the many. Buchanan’s metaphors and comparisons would seem to reveal that his main concern was the eyes of the people. The opening of James’ Trew Law of Free Monarchies does read as if it was designed to refute the views of his old tutor: As there is not a thing so necessarie to be knowne by the people of any land, next the knowledge of their God, as the right knowledge of their alleageance, according to the forme of gouernement established among them, especially in a Monarchie (which forme of gouvernment, as resembling the Diuinitie, approacheth nearest to prefection, as all the learned and wise men from the beginning haue agreed upon; Vunitie being the perfection of all things,) So hath the ignorance, and (which is worse) the seduced opinion of the multitude blinded by them, who thinke themselues able to teach and instruct the ignorants, procured the wrack and ouerthrow of sundry flourishing Common-wealths[.]29

While Buchanan stressed the need for the public to see and understand the nature of government so that they could judge their rulers, James stresses the sacred mystery of kingship as a form of the divine; what for Buchanan leads to bad government, for James, leads to good, and he ends the opening sentence of his treatise berating those who foolishly think they can understand the mysteries of state because in convincing themselves and others that they can, they help to ruin and destroy good government. For James, the king was best understood as God’s deputy on earth to whom he was responsible (pp. 194, 200). Buchanan argued that the king was appointed to administer the laws ordained by the people; James declared in his public document to his son that if the king established good laws himself his subjects would be drawn to virtuous behaviour because “people are naturally inclined to counterfaite (like apes) their princes maners”.30 29. James I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies in Workes, pp. 191-210, at p. 193. Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. 30. James I, Basilikon Doron, p. 155.

James VI and I, George Buchanan and the Divine Right of Kings

103

Both James and Buchanan worked within a paradigm of political argument and imagery, (James makes a great deal of the prince being on display in the opening pages of Basilikon Doron, a passage that can be related to Buchanan’s image of the king being in the theatre of the world) but it is clear that they draw opposite conclusions even when they use the same material. James, as is well documented, was personally uncomfortable with the notion of public display. He was reluctant to touch subjects for the king’s evil, scrofula, because he did not think that he had the power to cure it, the age of miracles being past, and because he “feared that the ritual […] savoured of Roman superstition”.31 He did not stage an accession day tilt until 1624 because of his “distaste for public ritual”.32 And, as is well known to scholars of drama, James was decidedly ambivalent about the value of plays, unlike his queen. He established the King’s Men as his official playing company but does not appear to have enjoyed performances a great deal, appearing spectacularly drunk with his brother-in-law the King of Denmark on one occasion and becoming so bored with one masque that he ordered the players to dance rather than continue their speaking parts.33 It would be a mistake to put this reluctance solely down to shyness or a natural reserve, although James was a noted recluse for much of the time.34 James was more than keen to debate with his subjects on a variety of issues, seeing this as a proper role for the king.35 He was also keen to use certain public events, such as the burning of books he had proscribed, as manifestations of royal power.36 The problem was that the monarchy was too sacred for James to be put on display in a manner that threatened to make it appear as a cheap imitation of the real thing, to make it seem as if the king was playing at being a king. In Debora Shuger’s words: Despite his [James’] acute sense of how kings ‘are as it were set […] upon a public stage in the sight of all’, his understanding of the way in which kings imitate the persons of the Trinity and of the saints is wholly anti-theatrical. The sacral character of the mimesis forbids any disjunction between the royal persona and the royal person; it is essential that the imitation of God be a true likeness, not role-playing, for the obvious reason that the street name for make-believe godliness is hypocrisy, the white devil [my emphasis].37

In his treatise on witchcraft, Daemonologie, James warned that one of the devil’s chief weapons was to produce representations of things that were not real, chimera that misled men and women into a false sense of security in their senses. It is little wonder that the 31. Willson (1956), p. 173. 32. Keith M. Brown, “The Vanishing Emperor: British Kingship and its Decline, 1603-1707”, in Mason ed. (1994) pp. 58-87, at p. 68. 33. Willson (1956), p. 191. On James and his relationship to drama and masques, see Jerzy Limon, The Masque of Stuart Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990). 34. Willson (1956), p. 230; Robert Ashton ed., James I by his Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1969), pp. 63-64. 35. Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, “The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I”, Journal of British Studies 24 (1985), 169-207, p. 189; Wormald (1991). 36. Clegg (2001), ch. 2. 37. Deborah Kuller Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in “Measure for Measure” (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 63. See also Kastan (1986).

104

Andrew Hadfield

devil “may delude our senses”, argued James, “since we see by common proofe, that simple Iugglars wil make an hundreth things seeme both to our eyes and ears otherwayes then they are”.38 For James the link relationship between performance and the work of the devil was uncomfortably close. It was clearly the duty of the king to make sure that he was not responsible for any demonic delusion but that he tried to seem what he was, God’s representative on earth. The one ceremony that did really matter to James was the Coronation oath, because “the oath in the Coronation is the cleerest ciuill and fundamental law whereby the Kinges office is properly defined”.39 Here, the king swore to uphold proper religion, his first priority as ruler, as well as the law in return for the unconditional obedience of his subjects. Once this oath had been performed, James felt that the sacred relationship between monarch and subjects had been explicitly defined and needed no further public endorsement or repetition to establish its further validity. In fact, such displays could only serve to diminish the authority of a king who needed to reaffirm the loyalty of his people. Buchanan and James offer radically different conceptions of the relationship between the monarch and his or her people. For Buchanan, the work of the king is in an endless performance on the world’s stage, exposed to the gaze of his subjects, who have the right to decide whether he serves them well or not. For James, once the Coronation oath has been publicly declared, the sacred hierarchy has been established and cannot be altered. A king may be good or bad, but no one has the right to resist and overthrow him because a “wicked king is sent by God for a curse to his people, and a plague for their sinnes” (Trew Law of Free Monarchies, p. 206). Buchanan could see the theatre as a legitimate means of propagating his political ideas, presumably as a medium or mode of writing no different from any other that he used—history, political dialogue, poetry—precisely because he did not regard monarchy as divinely ordained. When acting as tutor to James Buchanan had “whipped the arse of the Lord’s anointed”, showing that he regarded the king’s private body as no more sacred than his public one.40 For James the theatre had a special and rather dangerous status. Because it involved imitation, it could deceive or delude. Drama could be permitted, of course, and James even occasionally appears to have enjoyed some plays such as George Ruggle’s bawdy comedy Ignoramus, a performance of which put him in a good mood when he visited Cambridge in 1615.41 But the politics of performance could not be permitted to touch the figure of the sacred monarch who had to stand above the play of representation once he had been sworn in. It is intriguing—but probably not very productive in all honesty—to speculate how different conceptions of kingship might have been in Stuart Britain had James not been taught by Buchanan.

38. James I, Daemonologie, in Workes, pp. 91-36, at p. 105. 39. Cited in Burns (1996), p. 235. 40. David Norbrook, “The Emperor’s New Body? Richard II, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Politics of Shakespeare Criticism”, Textual Practice 10 (1996), 329-357, at p. 343. 41. Willson (1956), p. 291.

“TRANSFORMED IN SHOW, BUT MORE TRANSFORMED IN MIND”: SIDNEY’S OLD ARCADIA AND THE PERFORMANCE OF PERFECTION by Verena Olejniczak Lobsien Perfection and the Sacred It would, quite obviously, be futile to try and explain Renaissance mentalities by reference to any single, overruling idea. However, despite the undeniable heterogeneity of symbolic formations in this period, it seems equally clear that there are some which are, in certain areas, more dominant than others. For the second half of the sixteenth century, and in the wake of humanism, this appears to be, above all, the idea of perfection—at least in the fields of so-called ‘high culture’, i.e. learning and its written and spoken products, scholarship and education in a European (sometimes even inter-continental) context, religion, the arts, and the court. Why perfection? And how does this relate to ‘Performances of the Sacred’? For the purposes of my paper, I should like perfection to include more than the notion of human perfectibility—although this is obviously an important cultural consequence of how the Renaissance conceived of it. Studies of humanism—foremost among them Arthur Kinney’s Humanist Poetics1—have for some time drawn our attention to this aspect of the early modern recognition of human plasticity and the optimistic ethics officially associated with it. The hopes for an educational moulding which might result in moral betterment were high; less outspoken, certainly ethically less firmly anchored and less clear in its directions, but equally charged with ambition was the awareness of the potential for individual self-fashioning.2 The reasons for this are complex, and controversy around 1. Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics. Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986). 2. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

106

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

them appears by no means settled. To glance at only a few of the explanatory suggestions that have been made with a view to explaining this early modern emphasis on perfectibility and modes of modelling or, in the language of the time, of ‘fashioning’ the self: the dominance of rhetoric in the educational system, leading to the emergence of a certain type, histrionic or “rhetorical man”;3 religious and confessional reasons; political uncertainty,4 combined with a surplus of highly qualified intellectuals in search of career options;5 a profound revaluation of curiosity, associated with certain aspects of nominalist philosophy, leading to an increased confidence in the ‘inventive’ and ‘creative’ powers of the human mind and the legitimacy of their employment in researching into and altering nature, especially by means of the new science.6 I am hardly adding a new item to this list by calling to mind yet another impulse behind the belief in perfectibility: the enduring, in fact increasing, fascination with neoplatonist thinking7 as articulated by its Florentine protagonists, Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. It is, however, precisely the neoplatonist stress on the human soul’s affinity with the higher, intelligible world, its nostalgia to return to its heavenly origin and its corresponding capacity and innate readiness to re-ascend to where it came from by seeking the proximity—and indeed, identification—with its divine source, which entails a widening of the notion of human perfectibility. With Renaissance neoplatonism in view, this notion needs to be supplemented, if not replaced by a concept which encompasses the idea of an—in the last resort transcendent—perfection. This amounts to nothing less than an insistence on its metaphysical ancestry, regarded as more than a mere backdrop to the Renaissance ‘mindset’. In this perspective, human perfection appears to be not only intimately linked to, but constituted by its longing for divine perfection. In its Renaissance versions, it still retains an opening towards transcendence as the realm of the ‘completely other’. In a sense, this is only another way of stating the obvious: that, while looking forward to certain aspects of modernity, Renaissance perfection preserves roots which reach back even beyond medieval thinking. And it is precisely in this sense that it becomes capable of accommodating the notion of the sacred as well. Obviously, ‘the sacred’ in its turn is anything but a self-explanatory term. In order to understand the linkage of perfection and the sacred in sixteenth-century minds, it ap3. See Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1976); also: Manfred Hinz, Rhetorische Strategien des Hofmannes. Studien zu den italienischen Hofmannstraktaten des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992). 4. See, among others, Greenblatt (1980), also, with different emphasis: R. W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions. Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 5. See Maslen (1997), also: Mike Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism. Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century (Harlow, London: Pearson Education/Longman, 2001). 6. See Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, Erneuerte Ausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). 7. The standard study of neoplatonism from Plotinus to Bruno is still Werner Beierwaltes, Denken des Einen. Studien zur neuplatonischen Philosophie und ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985).

Syndney’s Old Arcadia and the Performance of Perfection

107

pears to be important to make explicit and emphasize some of the systematic aspects of the term, questioning the relevance of others. Opposed to its antonym, “profane”,8 “sacred” refers to the innermost sphere of religion, literally to a space reserved for the divine, marked off from the area of common life. It signifies, besides this sanctum, a metaphorical place. Thresholds have to be crossed in order to enter its realm. The sacred is different, metaphysically speaking: elsewhere, at a distance, because it belongs to God as absolute alterity. It is associated with God’s sovereignty and majesty, with the effects of His power and the aura of His might. God is the source of the sacred.9 The sacred springs from, and is effected by, divine perfection, which may be realized and made palpable, for instance, in the active virtue of a saint. Looked at from the point of view of religious psychology—as in Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige10—the sacred refers to an experience; in Otto’s terms, the experience of the ‘numinous’, which appears in ambivalent guise, as mysterium tremendum as well as fascinans, inspiring awe as well as admiration.11 Now, apart from the fact that there are striking similarities between Otto’s ‘numinous’ and the sublime12 (hence between his view of the sacred and aesthetic experience13), it needs to be pointed out that, in his definition, the sacred is a phenomenon which is, in its primary and as it were archaic occurrence, both irrational and, above all, ethically indifferent. It is neither good nor bad, hence can give rise to equally ‘primitive’ responses.14 This, however, clearly distinguishes the modern construction of the sacred from its Renaissance version. For a sixteenth-century person, it would be inconceivable to think of the sacred as ethically indifferent. For how could this be explained except as emanating from the Highest? And since the Highest and the Best were identical, how could you not feel that to be touched by them self-evidently entailed the highest possible ethical and moral demands? Any encounter with divine alterity as indicated by the term 8. I.e. that which is pro-fanum: outside the sacred space, literally, the common ground before the temple. Interestingly, the german word heilig is derived from an anglo-saxon stem, the germanic *hailagaz, introduced by the anglo-saxon missionaries as a rendering of the latin sanctus—‘that which is separated and marked off from the common for religious reasons’; see art. “Heilig” in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 3, third edition (Tübingen: Mohr, 1959). 9. This is also born out by the Anglican liturgy: He is praised as thrice holy in the Sanctus and, towards the end of the “Order of […] Holy Communion” as prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer, the priest beseeches Him to “sanctify” the “hearts and bodies” of the communicants. 10. First printed 1917; see Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (München: Beck, 1991). 11. Otto then proceeds to break down the complex of the numinous into its ‘moments’, such as ‘majesty’, the corresponding sense (on the part of the experiencing individual) of being a ‘creature’, ‘energy’, ‘otherness’, ‘fascination’, ‘the august’, ‘the tremendous’ etc. 12. He does in fact explicitly link it to “das Erhabene”; see Otto (1991), pp. 56, 82. 13. Which did in fact give rise to criticism on the part of theologians like Paul Tillich;see also art. “Heilig, Heiligkeit” in Joachim Ritter ed., Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 3 (Basel: Schwabe, 1974). 14. Only in a second step does Otto concede a rational and ethical reworking, or as he calls it, ‘schematizing’ ( i.e. in accordance with the demands of institutionalized religion) of what he wishes to construe as an a priori category; see Otto (1991), p. 169 ff.

108

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

‘sacred’ would quite naturally carry normative implications, witness the mystics and saints. It would place you under an obligation not to be evaded: you were called upon actively to imitate Christ; by striving to become like him in goodness, to assimilate your life to a divine format. You might (in fact, quite likely would) never attain to that, but that would not lessen the obligation. It would equal a call to perfection as given voice by Christ himself: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Mat. 5. 48).

Perfection must be performed Still, early modern concepts of perfection were ceasing to be exclusively dependent on the Christian (or: theological) model. Or rather, the degree of explicitness of the model seems to vary together with the foregrounding of some of its elements: the propagators of the paradigms in question could, it appears, draw on certain of its structures and, by combining them with others, enhance the persuasive force of their respective projects. A case in point is the formation of the courtly ideal. I should like to illustrate what I mean by first glancing, very briefly, at Baldassare Castiglione’s treatise Il libro del Cortegiano (1528), widely read all over Europe as a manual of courtly behaviour, and translated in 1561 by Sir Thomas Hoby as The Book of the Courtier.15 The Courtier is, in fact, not a manual at all, but a staging of courtliness in extended conversations among fictive noblemen and -women (based on actual personages), who already practise what they preach. It presents an aesthetic figuration of the courtly as perfection. True, in doing that it draws on the mental habit of imitatio. It does present the figure of the courtier (both in its male and in its female variants) as exemplary, hence as imitabile. But it is open to doubt whether the outlines which emerge from the invented dialogue are to be filled in with Christian colours only. A certain shifting of weights seems to have taken place. Speaking somewhat schematically, it may be said that in their modelling of perfection, Castiglione/Hoby retain the elements of transcendence and potential inattainability of the ideal. They also insist on its ethical implications. In stressing the element of performance, too, they may be said to underline the affinity to (saintly) active virtue in another mode. But (under the technical terms of “grace” and “sprezzatura”) they add a distinctive, indeed dominant and transforming feature to this complex—beauty. This derives from neoplatonist thinking. Neoplatonism is a figurative context certainly present in medieval Christianity; especially in its mystical forms. However, due in particular to the difficult and ambivalent relationship between the material side of beauty, the pleasure inspired by its sensual appreciation on the one hand, and its transcendental 15. The Book of the Courtier From the Italian of Count Baldassare Castiglione: Done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby (see STC 4778-4781), repr. London: David Nutt, 1900 (New York: AMS Press, 1967). I am quoting this edition in what follows as Courtier with page reference. Italian quotations follow the edition by Walter Barberis: Baldesar Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano (Torino: Einaudi, 1998).

Syndney’s Old Arcadia and the Performance of Perfection

109

signified, heavenly beauty, on the other, medieval neoplatonist teaching remained suspect from the point of view of strict orthodoxy. It seems to have grown to some prominence only in the late middle ages and the early Renaissance.16 Its presence in Castiglione/Hoby harks back to the writings of Florentine philosophers such as Ficino and Pico. Hence, it is precisely his or her aesthetic appeal which is responsible for the overwhelming and still, in the last resort, otherworldly attractiveness of the courtly person. It is also this, as realized in the aesthetic texture of Castiglione/Hoby’s text (in other words, its textual performance), which forms the basis for its effect, hence its amazing success in Renaissance Europe. The Courtier presents, among other things, an aesthetics of ethics. And it does so in a literary text; that is to say, rather than telling us in so many words, it shows things by making us experience them. In accordance with Renaissance poetics, it leads us to imagine—in Sir Philip Sidney’s words—“what may be and what should be”.17 The phantasy of courtly perfection as unfolded in The Courtier is informed by a view of man as outlined in Pico’s Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486): man, the creature in search of a place, uneasily poised between heaven and earth, balances on the threshold between the world of sense and matter and that of intelligible things, yet yearns to ascend to the highest. Called upon to be his own maker (“plastes et fictor”),18 he appears to be fundamentally keyed towards perfection, driven by an ambition truly ultramundane—as 16. Katharina Münchberg’s discussion of Dante in the context of medieval neoplatonism situates the Divina Commedia at this point of transition between the respective paradigms (“Die Verdammung der Liebenden. Zu einer Urszene ästhetischer Erfahrung (Dante: Commedia, Inferno V)”, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 46/2 (2002), 271-289). Of particular relevance for our discussion is her emphasis on the central point of medieval theological aesthetics, which requires the spiritualization of the material signifier, as put by Suger of St. Denis: “Significata magis significante placent. ” (qu. Münchberg (2002), p. 271). With a similar focus of interest, Hans Robert Jauss, in his essay exploring the unbroken fascination the perfect appears to hold for the imaginary, not only attempts to ground the imaginary in the anthropological need for the perfect and to chart the latter’s transformation from a religious into an aesthetic experience, but also to focus the point at which, parallel to the emergence of the discipline of aesthetics, the ontological priority of the perfect begins to cede to, or better: to undergo a metamorphosis into, the ‘modern’ precedence of the beautiful: “Diese ontologische Vorordnung des Vollkommenen in der Schönheit der Erscheinung umzukehren bezeichnet die Wende, mit der sich in der beginnenden Neuzeit die Ästhetik als autonome ‘Wissenschaft’ emanzipiert hat”; “Das Vollkommene als Faszinosum des Imaginären”, in Dieter Henrich / Wolfgang Iser eds., Funktionen des Fiktiven (München: Fink, 1983), p. 446, see 444. 17. “For these third [ i.e. the third kind of poets, „indeed right poets” (80, 28), V.O.L.] be they which most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be. ” A Defence of Poetry, in K. Duncan-Jones / J. van Dorsten eds, Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 81, 2-6. It is the imagination of perfection which is at stake here; see also ibid., 79, 2: “[…] our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keeps us from reaching unto it”, or 82, 13-15: the “final end” of poetry is “to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of”. 18. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate. Über die Würde des Menschen, ed. by August Buck, trans. by Robert Baumgarten (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990), p. 6.

110

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

Pico puts it: “sacra quaedam ambitio”,19 “a certain holy ambition”.20 In Castiglione, this ambition is not to be realized (if it is to be realized at all) by a soul in isolation, but by a person—endowed with a body—in interaction with others and under their eyes; not in worldless contemplation, but under the conditions of a comparatively specific ‘world’— the court, to be precise: the idealized court of Urbino. The courtier, too, is characterized, above all, by his chameleon-like plasticity. He is a product of self-fashioning; this process is in turn ‘fashioned’, or modelled, by the dynamics of the text. Quite explicitly, the noblemen and -women gathered in Urbino for their conversational “pastime” set themselves “to shape in woordes a good Courtyer” (“formar con parole un perfetto cortegiano”).21 And the courtier is an ideal, possibly an unattainable one;22 as Castiglione/ Hoby puts it in his dedicatory letter, “the Idea or figure conceyved in imagination of […] a perfect Courtier”.23 If this ‘idea or figure’ can in practice only be approximated, in writing, it cannot simply be re-presented. If it is to be communicated at all, the only way is, rhetorically speaking, to make it evident. Put another way: perfection has to be performed, with textual performance adumbrating the actual. Since it is an ideal, not a given, it cannot be treated as a thing available, but has to be imagined.24 Obviously, a set of precepts would be unsuitable for putting the imagination to work in the manner required. That is why The Courtier is neither a manual nor a list of topics (although it was frequently—in fact by Hoby himself25—misread as one). It is not really a portrait either, because the image it might be seen to project is not a stable one. It aims at nothing so much as at a literary performance. It consists of a sequence of dialogues, whose main characteristic is that they tend to remain inconclusive. Debates are hardly ever settled, controversies remain suspended. These talks follow the sceptical, Ciceronian model of disputatio in utramque partem, which gives you both sides of a question, immediately counterbalancing the position just articulated with its opposite. Moving towards their topics metonymically and leisurely unfolding them, these conversations practise discursive mobility, rarely determining things or offering hard-and-fast definitions. Thus they gesture towards perfection, instead of fixing it once and for all. There is 19. Ibid., p. 10. 20. See Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, On Being and the One, Heptaplus, trans. by Charles Glenn Wallis / Paul J. W. Miller / Douglas Carmichael (Indianapolis, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 7. 21. Courtier, p. 42, Il Cortegiano, p. 36. 22. As Hoby puts it in his letter to Lord Hastings: “Cicero an excellent Oratour, in three bookes of an Oratour unto his brother, facioneth such a one as never was, nor yet is like to be: Castilio an excellent Courtier, in thre bookes of a Courtyer unto his deere friende, facioneth such a one as is harde to finde and perhappes unpossible” (Courtier, p. 7). 23. Courtier, pp. 22-23. 24. See also—with a slant towards Wolfgang Iser’s concept of the imaginary—Jauss, “Das Vollkommene als Faszinosum des Imaginären” (1983). 25. See Hoby’s appendix to his translation, offering “A Breef Rehersall of the Chiefe Conditions and Qualities in a Courtier” (followed by a similar compendium for “a Waytyng Gentylwoman”), Courtier, pp. 368-377.

Syndney’s Old Arcadia and the Performance of Perfection

111

no finality. They open and provisionally chart a semiotic space, in which it is possible to deal tentatively, indeed often playfully, with serious ideas. Their textual performance, above all, displays what the courtier is to possess, or rather: to manifest, above all—“a certain grace” (grazia).26 Not only does this term shift ambiguously between a quality and the response intended or called forth by it, between something belonging to the actor and to his or her audience. It is also no coincidence that it carries theological associations—the grace conferred by the prince is an image of that bestowed by the heavenly sovereign. Furthermore, this aura of the sacred appears to be grounded in transcendence taken literally: the ideal courtier is required “to wade in everye thyng a litle farther then other menne, so that he maye bee knowen among all menne for one that is excellente”.27 The courtier belongs to a paradigm different from the ordinary in that he is always ready to excel, to go beyond the limits set by the achievements of others. That there is more than just a tenuous bond, a mere structural analogy between this principle of ‘transcendence in immanence’ and its spiritual archetype, is easily borne out (although I cannot here show it)28 by a glance at Pietro Bembo’s performance of a neoplatonic furor divinus in Book IV, the last book of The Courtier. Here, the ultimate exaltation is presented in courtly perfection—in a genuinely metaphysical cast, yet finally not without a certain irony. It is this ironical, or perhaps better: allegorical, distancing of the claim to excellence, signified by Castiglione’s famous neologism sprezzatura, which is at the heart of ‘graceful’ courtliness. Its structure, too, is that of transcendence, always placing the perfection it evokes at a point just beyond, at one remove. He who strives for grace is to use in every thyng a certain Reckelesness, to cover art withall, and seeme whatsoever he doth and sayeth to do it wythout pain, and (as it were) not myndyng it. […] for in rare matters and wel brought to passe every man knoweth the hardnes of them, so that a redines therin maketh great wonder. […] Therfore that may be said to be a very art that appeereth not to be art, neyther ought a man to put more diligence in any thing then in covering it: for in case it be open, it loseth credit cleane, and maketh a man litle set by.29

The whole point of the performance is that the effort which has gone into it (and which everyone knows to be necessary) remains invisible. This is art concealing itself to appear perfectly natural. One of the central laws of Renaissance aesthetics has thus been ethically reinterpreted, with its product retaining the significant ‘surplus’ of beauty. The courtier’s ‘readiness’ and his “slighte conveyaunce”30 indicate, above all, that there are 26. “The Courtyer therfore, besyde noblenesse of birthe, I wyll have hym to be fortunate in this behalfe, and by nature to have not only a wytte, and a comely shape of persone and countenance, but also a certain grace, and (as they saie) a hewe, that shal make him at the first sight acceptable and lovyng unto who so beholdeth him. And let this be an ornament to frame and accompanye all his actes, and to assure men in his looke, such a one to bee woorthy the companye and favour of every great man.” (Courtier, p. 46). 27. Courtier, p. 54. 28. For a fuller reading of Castiglione see Verena Olejniczak Lobsien / Eckhard Lobsien, Die unsichtbare Imagination, oder: Literarisches Denken im 16. Jahrhundert (München: Fink, 2003). 29. Courtier, p. 59. 30. Ibid.

112

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

no limits to his potential achievement in the service of his prince—what is demonstrated in any particular instance is nothing to what he could do, if he chose. What he performs is his competence to excel universally. This, too, is what he has to convince his public of. What he aims at is, so to speak, perfection on credit. Still, the ideal has to be realized physically. It has to be rendered visible. The courtier’s means to this end, his signifier, is his body. The device or strategy he employs is, rhetorically speaking, dissimulation or allegory, called by Puttenham not without reason the “courtly figure” par excellence.31 But, as I shall now try to show, it is precisely this—potentially duplicitous—drama on two levels, this “translative”32 structure at the heart of courtly perfection which places it at great, perhaps insurmountable, risk.

Perfection cannot be performed Sir Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia,33 called by some a romance, by others a novel, although it is in a sense neither and, in another, more than both, is—among many other things—an exploration of dissimulation. Sidney’s narrative presents a test case for the performance of perfection. And it shows, stunningly, both the dubious success and the glorious failure of courtly artistry. I have chosen the first line of the first of many sonnets with which the text is interspersed as title for this chapter, because it poses the problem rather succinctly. “Transformed in show, but more transformed in mind” outlines the condition prince Pyrocles, one of the heroes of Sidney’s text, finds himself in: in response to having violently fallen in love, he has just disguised himself in a spectacular manner as a woman warrior. Transformed in show, but more transformed in mind, I cease to strive, with double conquest foiled; For (woe is me) my powers all I find With outward force and inward treason spoiled. For from without came to mine eyes the blow, Whereto mine inward thoughts did faintly yield; Both these conspired poor reason’s overthrow; False in myself, thus have I lost the field. 31. George Puttenham, “The Arte of English Poesie”, in Brian Vickers ed., English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), The Third Book, ch. XVIII, p. 247. 32. Ibid.: Puttenham uses this term in the course of his explanation of allegory, which occurs “when we do speak in sense translative, and wrested from the own signification, nevertheless applied to another not altogether contrary but having much convenience with it, as before we said of the metaphor. ” 33. Quoted, in what follows as OA. Page references in the text are to Katherine Duncan-Jones’ edition: Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Syndney’s Old Arcadia and the Performance of Perfection

113

And thus mine eyes are placed still in one sight, And thus my thoughts can think but one thing still; Thus reason to his servants gives his right; Thus is my power transformed to your will. What marvel, then, I take a woman’s hue, Since what I see, think, know, is all but you? (OA, p. 26)

As I shall attempt to show, this cross-dressing goes well beyond a mere conventional questioning of the relationship of outer and inner, ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ (whose identity the first line of the poem seems to protest). To anticipate: this episode not only triggers the plot in addition to representing it emblematically, it helps to articulate the difficulty which inspires the novel as a whole—how to perform perfection. More specifically: how to perform the perfection one possesses and wants others to know one possesses in a situation in which it cannot be shown directly. Does the transformation Pyrocles celebrates while he laments it succeed in turning him into an allegory of his courtly self? And what are the consequences of this (more than) bodily change? A brief recapitulation of the plot of the Old Arcadia seems to be in place at this point in order to situate this scene in its context: In order to prevent the fulfilment of an oracle, Basilius, king of Arcadia, has withdrawn from rule. Together with his virtuous wife Gynecia and their beautiful daughters Pamela and Philoclea, he lives in strict seclusion and pastoral obscurity. However, two young princes, Pyrocles of Macedon and Musidorus of Thessalia, pass through the country and fall in love with the princesses. In order to be near the girls, whom they must not approach openly, they resort to disguising themselves—as Amazon and shepherd respectively. Philoclea finds the Amazon Cleophila ambiguously interesting, but so does her father, who falls prey to an immediate and ludicrous infatuation with the foreign beauty, and her mother, who from the first suspects Cleophila to be a man. Severe complications are the result: While Pyrocles alias Cleophila successfully out-manoeuvres his tenacious lovers Basilius and Gynecia in order to reveal himself to their daughter, to confess his love and, indeed, to consummate it with her, Musidorus, disguised as shepherd Dorus, wins Pamela and contrives to elope with her. Since, however, due to an unfortunate mistake, Basilius is accidentally poisoned and the kingdom of Arcadia is about to topple into anarchy and chaos, the seduction of one princess and the elopement of the other seem to carry dire consequences in their wake. Both couples are caught; Gynecia takes the blame for her husband’s death. After a long trial, she and the princes are sentenced to death. The harsh verdict is pronounced by the righteous Euarchus, ruler of the neighbouring Macedon, Pyrocles’ father and Musidorus’ uncle, who remains resolved to see justice done even after the identities of the princes have been revealed. The executions are about to take place, when Basilius returns to life, recovering from what turns out to have been only a sleeping potion. A happy ending ensues. Despite—or rather, because of—its surprise ending, the story is apt to leave us in some perplexity. Not only do the death sentences appear unnecessarily cruel: their com-

114

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

plete annulment seems equally unjust.34 The validity of Euarchus’ arguments is never questioned. And are the princely morals really above blame? Pyrocles is never in doubt about his right to “enjoy”35 Philoclea, and it is by mere chance that Pamela escapes being raped by Musidorus. And yet, and this is perhaps most irritating, we are never, even in those highly critical moments in which the protagonists reap the fruit of their dissimulation, allowed to doubt their perfection. Even when sentenced to death, the princes are presented as “[…] excellent prisoners who, casting a farewell look one upon the other, represented in their faces as much unappalled constancy as the most excellent courage can deliver in outward graces” (OA, p. 353). They do not only keep up appearances—they act up to what, to all intents and purposes, they are: perfect. We might approach this by saying that what the text portrays, and indeed stages, is successful performance as total failure or, conversely, glorious failure. It shows the glory as well as the cost of courtliness as duplicitous promise of competence. And it manages to do so by circumscribing—in its own, textual, performance—a figure of flawed perfection. This seemingly self-contradictory overall strategy can be observed on all levels of the text. Let us therefore return again to the scene of Pyrocles’ cross-dressing. The staging of this first grand dissimulation is particularly elaborate. Even Musidorus, not yet a lover himself and regarding his friend’s disguise at first with a certain amount of misgiving, cannot help to be impressed, as he helps to invest Pyrocles with his new identity—“[…] so did he find his excellent beauty set out with this new change, like a diamond set in a more advantageous sort” (OA, p. 25). Transformed into an amazon, the youthful prince appears truly and wholly irresistible—indeed, he might become a narcissistic temptation even to himself.36 Not only does he, by turning into Cleophila, assimilate himself anagrammatically to the beloved Philoclea. The narrator also explicitly affirms the hero’s change of gender by accordingly adapting the personal pronoun: In “compassion” with his/her “passion”,37 the amazon is referred to as “she” throughout. As this hermaphrodite person combines masculine strength with feminine graces, martial virtues with winning manners, she appears endowed with supreme and stunning beauty. At first glance, this 34. For the breaking of expectations brought about by this modification of the ‘Heliodorean’ romance pattern and its platonic sub-structure see Jauss, “Das Vollkommene als Faszinosum des Imaginären”, pp. 451, 457 (with reference to the potential effects engendered by a conspicuous lack of poetic justice). I do not, incidentally, (for reasons given below) agree with Jauss’ generalizing conclusion that fictionalization automatically and as it were ‘unwittingly’, entails idealization: “Das Vollkommene ist als Faszinosum des Imaginären ambivalent, weil die Fiktionalisierung der Dinge ihre Idealisierung unwillkürlich mit sich führt, so daß der ästhetische Gegenstand in seiner Vollkommenheit sowohl die Macht des Menschen, sich selbst in seinem Werk zu genießen, als auch seine Ohnmacht widerspiegelt, die unvollkommene Welt anders als durch Idealisierung vollkommen machen zu können.” (p. 460) The point to be made about Sidney’s text is precisely its self-conscious clear-sightedness: it seems to be perfectly aware of what it is attempting to do, and of what renders a naive fictional re-presentation of the ideal impossible. 35. See OA, p. 21. 36. And to his friend, who, by helping to dress him, feels tempted to become a second Pygmalion (see ibid., p. 25). 37. See ibid.

Syndney’s Old Arcadia and the Performance of Perfection

115

metamorphosis seems to ask for a platonic reading. Examined more closely, however, exemplary perfection, consisting of the union of both sexes, as well as assimilation through “heavenly love”38 to the highest beauty as shadowed forth by the beloved,39 are hardly more than gestured towards by the text. Cupid, too, now and then addressed as director of this “very stage-play of love” (OA, p. 49),40 is never granted a truly mythic presence in the text. Conventional platonic topoi of this sort seem to provide at most a semantic scaffolding, a suggestive manner of speaking rather than an underlying system of belief. And yet, on a level other than the thematic, neoplatonism in its courtly guise still seems to function as a structuring force. Pyrocles’ cross-dressing is conspicuous above all because of the sprezzatura with which it is staged: […] his hair (which the young men of Greece ware very long, accounting them most beautiful that had that in fairest quantity) lay upon the upper part of his forehead in locks, some curled and some, as it were, forgotten, with such a careless care, and with an art so hiding art, that he seemed he would lay them for a paragon whether nature simply, or nature helped by cunning, be the more excellent. (OA, p. 24)

And this is only the opening paragraph of the long passage which describes the amazon’s extremely sophisticated outfit: And to begin with his head, thus was he dressed: his hair (which the young men of Greece ware very long, accounting them most beautiful that had that in fairest quantity) lay upon the upper part of his forehead in locks, some curled and some, as it were, forgotten, with such a careless care, and with an art so hiding art, that he seemed he would lay them for a paragon whether nature simply, or nature helped by cunning, be the more excellent. The rest whereof was drawn into a coronet of gold, richly set with pearls, and so joined all over with gold wires, and covered with feathers of divers colours, that it was not unlike a helmet, such a glittering show it bare, and so bravely it was held up from the head. Upon his body he ware a kind of doublet of sky-colour satin, so plated over with plates of massy gold that he seemed armed in it; his sleeves of the same, instead of plates, was covered with purled lace. And such was the nether part of his garment; but that made so full of stuff, and cut after such a fashion that, though the length fell under his ankles, yet in his going one might well perceive the small of his leg which, with the foot, was covered with a little short pair of crimson velvet buskins, in some places open (as the ancient manner was) to show the fairness of the skin. Over all this he ware a certain mantle of like stuff, made in such manner that, coming under his right arm and covering most part of that side, it touched not the left side but upon the top of the shoulder where the two ends met, and were fastened together with a very rich jewel, the device whereof was this: an eagle covered with the feathers of a dove, and yet lying under another dove, in such sort as it seemed the dove preyed upon the eagle, the eagle casting up such a look as though the state he was in liked him, though the pain grieved him. Upon the same side, upon his thigh he ware a sword (such as we now call scimitars), the pommel whereof was so richly set with precious stones as they were sufficient testimony it could be no mean personage that bare it. Such was this Amazons’s attire: and thus did Pyrocles become

38. See ibid., p. 24. 39. See also the following exchange between Cleophila and Musidorus: “‘[…] if I have any beauty, it is the beauty which the imagination of her strikes into my fancies, which in part shines through my face into your eyes.’—‘Truly’, said Musidorus,—‘you are grown a notable philosopher of fancies’.—‘Astronomer’, answered Cleophila, ‘for they are heavenly fancies’” (ibid., p. 25). 40. See also ibid., p. 44: “[…] for so it seemed that love had purposed to make in those solitary woods a perfect demonstration of his unresistible force, to show that no desert place can avoid his dart. He must fly from himself that will shun his evil. ”

116

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien Cleophila - which name for a time hereafter I will use, for I myself feel such compassion of his passion that I find even part of his fear lest his name should be uttered before fit time were for it; which you, fair ladies that vouchsafe to read this, I doubt not will account excusable. (OA, pp. 24-25; my italics, V.O.L)

Its smallest detail is calculated for effect, fusing ‘feminine’ vulnerability with ‘masculine’ armour by exposing parts of the body to view and hiding others, using colours and materials to achieve a maximum of brilliance and allure. Highest artificiality thus appears completely and effortlessly natural. The attractive exterior at the same time serves to conceal the prince’s passionate pursuit and ambiguously to indicate both the heroic and the erotic nature of his endeavour as well as his great gifts and his potentially limitless powers. Thus the hero’s potential for the ideal is displayed in the most persuasive manner imaginable. By showing the perfections of his person to the highest possible effect, his dissimulation communicates the means by concealing the end (to win the princess’ heart). It describes a perfect courtly figure in—allegorically—differing from its ulterior aim. Still, the aesthetic surplus of its signifier may claim to be equivalent to what it intends in that both convey the idea of a transcendent good.41 Both, however, take shape only in the spectator’s (and the reader’s) imagination. This complicated structure is reflected in the imprese worn by the amazon. It is cut in “[…] a very rich jewel, the device whereof was this: an eagle covered with the feathers of a dove, and yet lying under another dove, in such sort as it seemed the dove preyed upon the eagle, the eagle casting up such a look as though the state he was in liked him, though the pain grieved him”(OA, p. 24). Here, the text offers yet another way of understanding the transformation—both “in show” and “in mind”—which Pyrocles has undergone. Again a gendered duplicity is hinted at here, albeit in a slightly sinister manner: The prince’s new subjectivity is figured as ambiguous subjection under the feminine; the hiding of his masculinity appears both painful and pleasing. Above all, the picture emblematically imitates precisely the structure of courtly dissimulation. It suggests that what is shown represents only a fraction of what the performer is really capable of. At any time this eagle may reverse his relationship with the dove. His heroic submission remains a sign of potential for the ideal held in abeyance. But does this eagle ever really soar? The moment of Pyrocles’ glorious victory—the consummation of his love—is one of the darkest moments of the text. It is at this early point in the narrative, with the paradigm of courtly dissimulation being as it were taken to its extreme and anatomized by the princes’ transformations, that Sidney’s relentless testing of the principle of courtliness begins. And it is here that story and discourse begin to diverge dramatically.42 The kind of shadow which falls over the action is hinted at by 41. This is perhaps as far as a secular performance of the sacred is capable of assimilating itself structurally to sacramental ‘performances’ aimed at the real presence of the divine. For a discussion of this distinction with reference to Calderón’s auto sacramental see Joachim Küpper, “Repräsentation und RealPräsenz. Bemerkungen zum auto sacramental (Calderón: Psiquis y Cupido)” in Theatralität und die Krisen der Repräsentation, ed. by Erika Fischer-Lichte (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2001), pp. 83-100. 42. Obviously, this asks for a more detailed reading than can be presented here; for this, see our study on Die unsichtbare Imagination (see note 28).

Syndney’s Old Arcadia and the Performance of Perfection

117

the protagonists themselves, when they lament their fate: “Alas! What further evil hath fortune reserved for us, or what shall be the end of this our tragical pilgrimage? Shipwracks, daily dangers, absence from our country, have at length brought forth this captiving of us within ourselves which hath transformed the one in sex, and the other in state, as much as the uttermost work of changeable fortune can be extended unto” (OA, p. 39). It is of course they themselves who have begun to do “the work of changeable fortune”. Fortuna is as little responsible for their fate as is Cupid. Far from feeling gladdened by the challenge to rise to a new degree of heroism, the princes experience the Arcadian encounter with love as a “captiving of us within ourselves”. And indeed, the web43 of dissimulation which they could not help but spin in their performance of perfection will from now on tighten around them. As the action progresses, we are placed in a position to observe how the protagonists, whose eminence remains beyond doubt throughout, produce, through their perfect self-alteration, the opposite of what courtliness intends. In the end, they are faced with death and ruin. Worst of all, they fail to find grace. And yet the narrative voice never judges or blames them. In giving the words of irrefutable condemnation to the just Euarchus, the narrative has them spoken, indeed articulated at great length, but without having to act upon them in its emplotment of courtliness. Sidney’s Old Arcadia manages to have its cake and eat it. This, I would claim, is part of its literary eminence. The princes are both absolutely right and totally in the wrong. The narrative rescues but does not absolve them. In doing so, it allows us to see both the absolute necessity of attempting the performance of perfection and its unavoidable failure. It leaves us in an aporetic situation. The phantasy of perfection—in contemporary diction: its “counterfeiting”44—must not and cannot be given up. Its attractions are too great. But, as Sidney’s disturbing and deeply melancholy text shows, it is only in failure that the ideal can be ‘figured forth’. It is only by being figured as unattainable and therefore truly unavailable that it retains its sacredness. Perfection cannot be performed. But by transforming this impossibility into a literary performance, Sidney offers us the experience of its transcendent glory in textual immanence.

43. The metaphor is of course Sidney’s own, see the dedication of the Arcadia to his sister, where he compares “this idle work of mine” to a “spider’s web” (OA, p. 3). 44. See Sidney, A Defence of Poetry: “Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it […]—that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and delight." 80.1 in K. Duncan-Jones, ed. (1973).

This page intentionally left blank

PERFORMING HEAVEN: THE STATE OF GRACE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PROTESTANT THEOLOGY by Susanne Rupp In their seminal study Heaven: A History Bernard Lang and Colleen McDannell attempt to describe the differences between various historical concepts of heaven in terms of the binary opposition between ‘theocentricity’ and ‘anthropocentricity’.1 According to their theory, heaven is either constructed around God (as, for example, the theocentric heaven of seventeenth-century Protestantism) and consequently foregrounds such practices as heavenly liturgy and prayer, or it is conceived as an improved earth and emphasises the importance and the needs of human beings (as, for example, the anthropocentric heaven of the Italian Renaissance). But as is often the case with such neat constructions, they fail to do justice to precise historical situations. In the case of seventeenth-century protestant conceptualisations of heaven, an adequate description would have to include both sides of Lang and McDannell’s opposition, since heaven here is, at one and the same time, depicted as both theocentric and anthropocentric. On the one hand, God forms the centre of this heaven. On the other, this heaven is constructed from a human perspective, as becomes evident when—for example—one considers the emphasis put on the community of saints and the permanent bonds formed between human beings on earth. What distinguishes this type of heaven is not so much its theocentric or anthropocentric character, but the interfaces it maintains between human beings, their world, and God. In this chapter I shall argue that Lang and McDannell’s concept fails to take into account a fundamental shift in Protestant eschatology in the seventeenth century. Lang and McDannell rely on the assumption that heaven is a sacred place far beyond human reach and is thus envisioned—in the case of the Protestants—as utterly different and remote. I, however, would like to stress the revaluation of the sacred in relation to the notion of heaven taking place during this period. Both poles of the binary opposition sacred/secular were at issue and were revised as well as redefined. As a result, heaven was no longer primarily considered a place beyond the known confines of space and time, but—and in1. Bernhard Lang / Colleen McDannell, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

120

Susanne Rupp

creasingly so—as a state the beginnings of which could already be experienced in the here and now of this world. The emphasis shifted from heaven perceived as a monument of eternal bliss towards heaven conceived in terms of process and dynamic development. And this is where Lang and McDannell’s preoccupation with the theocentricity and anthropocentricity opposition leads us astray: the texts are not so much concerned with heaven per se, but with its relation to the mundane. While Lang and McDannell’s work is informed by the ahistorical notion that perfection can only be achieved in stasis, I would like to argue that the contemporary evidence rather suggests that perfection is a matter of performance in progress. As far as the contemporary evidence is concerned, it has to be acknowledged that seventeenth-century literature remains strangely tentative about the representation of heaven.2 How can we account for this remarkable absence of heavenly monuments in a society so thoroughly religious as seventeenth-century England? The first explanation that comes to mind is Protestant iconophobia. If we consider Protestant meditational practices (to which we shall return below), however, it becomes apparent that the Protestant disapproval of images did not necessarily include verbal images. The creation of such images is clearly being encouraged in the manuals on the meditatio futurae vitae, which strongly support the verbal and sensual imagination of heaven in meditation. The second point worth considering in this context is the problem of ineffability, which considerably affects the conception of heaven as a sacred place beyond the reach of humans—in this life at least.3 In fact, however, this was not considered an insurmountable obstacle. Protestantism was characterised by a fundamental trust in the expressive capacity of language. Boundaries of effability were acknowledged but did not necessarily lead to silence. The via negativa of medieval mysticism was regarded sceptically and did not make its way into Protestant hermeneutics and poetics. The hermeneutic framework favoured by Protestants was the theory of accommodation, as practised and expounded by John Calvin and repeated over and over again by the English theologians.4 In the first instance, accommodation describes the biblical practice of figurative language. Theolo2. On the rare examples of literary heaven see U. Milo Kaufmann, “Heaven” in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. by David Lyle Jeffrey (Michigan: Grand Rapids, 1992), pp. 337-339. The most prominent literary heaven in seventeenth-century literature is that in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton’s heaven is a prelapsarian heaven though, and thus still open to change and modification. It is not identical with the heaven of the saints after judgement day and is thus of little relevance to our discussion. Actually, the scarcity of literary works indulging in representations of heavenly bliss and glory corresponds to the rarity of scholarly investigations into the subject. While Protestant eschatological innovations, such as the abolition of purgatory, have lately been discussed in some depth, heaven remains a singularly neglected topic. On purgatory, see Jacques le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983); Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 3. On the Biblical notion of ineffability, see 2 Cor. 12, 2-4 4. Stephen D. Benin provides a thourough discussion of the history of accommodation in The Footprints of God: Divine Accommodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology

121

gians claimed that God employed images drawn from human experience that related and were thus suitable to human understanding in order to make himself comprehensible.5 But accommodation was not confined to hermeneutics alone: it also functioned as a category of poetics. God’s own linguistic practice legitimised the use of figurative language in the representation of transcendence. If representational issues were thus not the problem, then theology might prove helpful in accounting for the near absence of texts celebrating heaven and its joys. As I shall argue over the following pages, the lack of literary monuments is to do with a shift in emphasis in Protestant eschatology itself. This development, however, did not affect all aspects of heaven. Early modern theology maintained that heaven is both locus and status at one and the same time. Whereas heaven as locus (the coelum empyreum) remained unaffected by theological—and scientific—developments, heaven conceived as a state gained increasing importance during the period under scrutiny here.6 Heaven—as state— was no longer exclusively located at the end of time and history, but extended, by the grace of God, into contemporary life. This also implied new options for the textual representation of heaven as practised, for example, by John Bunyan in his Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan’s depictions of heaven, differ considerably from those employed by Dante in his Divina Commedia. I shall comment on these important differences at the end of this chapter. The shift in Protestant eschatology has not gone unnoticed and has been described by some scholars as a transformation of medieval otherworldliness into a rapprochement of heaven and earth. While this seems plausible enough, the explanations given to support this argument are somewhat less convincing. One commentator suggests that the increased tendency to experience a foretaste of heaven on earth is grounded in mysticism.7 And yet, when we actually read seventeenth-century protestant theology, we encounter anything but mysticism. Another argument maintains that what we are dealing with here is an interiorisation and psychologisation of heaven and thus a fundamentally modern phenomenon.8 This explanation is not particularly helpful either, since it is based on as5. “For who even of slight intelligence does not understand that, as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ (balbutire) in speaking to us? Thus such forms of speaking (that God hath mouth, ears, eyes, hands and feet) do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate (accommodant) the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend (descendere necesse est) far beneath his loftiness.” Calvin as quoted in Benin (1993), p. 189. 6. Contrary to popular assumptions, the Copernican Revolution did not do much harm to heaven as locus. It remained outside the visible and describeable world. On this topic see, Susanne Rupp, “From Grace to Glory”: Himmelvorstellungen in der Englischen Theologie und Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg: Winter, 2001), pp. 165-194. 7. Bettie Anne Doebler, The Quickening Seed: Death in the Sermons of John Donne, Salzburg Studies in English Literature (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974). 8. Peter Johan Glomset, Revisions of Heaven: The Protestant Re-Evaluation of Otherworldliness from Donne to Milton (Diss. University of Washington, 1992).—The notion of interiorisation has, above all, a tautological flavour in religious discourse, since matters of faith were always considered to belong to the innermost sphere of man.

122

Susanne Rupp

sumptions belonging to the twentieth century without taking early modern theology into account. It is early modern theology itself, however, which offers a perfectly plausible and coherent explanation for the phenomenon described. Instead of following an ahistorical path, then, I shall attempt to reconstruct the historically specific theological basis for the shift in Protestant eschatology by drawing on sources by Anglican and Puritan theologians, in particular Richard Sibbes, Jeremiah Burroughs, and Richard Baxter.9 These theologians all represent the mainstream of Protestant eschatology.10 Reading them will not least also help us to understand to what extent the shift in eschatology affected and engendered social transformations. These social transformations have been studied in depth by the sociologist Max Weber and the philosopher Charles Taylor. Max Weber’s insights into the interdependence of economic practice and Calvinist theology can, by now, be regarded as commonplaces of modern sociology.11 According to Weber, Calvinists, anxious for salvation, were constantly searching the world for signs that would indicate their election, and by applying the characteristic syllogismus pragmaticus, i. e. the deduction from life to salvation, they eventually began to provide the relevant signs, namely wealth, themselves. Economic success was thus theologically justified, and the concept of work became an integral part of theology. The crux of Weber’s theory, however, lies in his assumption that the affirmation of productive life is a reaction to ‘Heilsnot’ (a term with no proper English equivalent). Judging the theological concepts to be discussed further down, however, I would argue that the opposite was the case. It was not worry and anguish about salvation that finally lead to worldly commitment, but religious ‘assurance’ (a term—quite unlike ‘Heilsnot’—generously employed by seventeenth-century theologians) that engendered a turning as well as a commitment to the world. More recently, Charles Taylor, described the “radical affirmation of ordinary life” as the distinctive achievement of the Reformation. This affirmation, which “has become one of the most powerful ideas in modern civilization”,12 is characterized by the notion of the good life being no longer the exclusive domain of the monastic class with their privileged access to the sacred and related practices. What is more, “by denying any special form of life as a privileged locus of the sacred, they [the reformers] were denying the 9. The shared doctrines on eschatology allows us to consider Anglicans and Puritans together. Their main differences concern ecclesiology; see: Ignacio Escribano-Alberça, “Die Eschatologie in der Church of England”, in Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. 4, Fasz. 7d: Protestantische Eschatologie. Von der Reformation bis zur Aufklärung (Freiburg: Herder, 1987), p. 39; William M. Spellman, “Between Death and Judgement: Conflicting Images of Afterlife in Late Seventeenth-Century Eulogies”, Harvard Theological Review, 87:1 (1994), p. 52. 10. Radical Protestants have been well represented in research. Their millennarian theology is, however, primarily concerned with general eschatology, whereas our focus is on individual eschatology. 11. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. by Talcott Parsons (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976). 12. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 14.

Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology

123

very distinction between sacred and profane and hence affirming their interpenetration”.13 When it comes to locating the roots of this “affirmation of ordinary life”, however, Taylor’s assertion of their indebtedness to “Judeo-Christian spirituality” remains a rather unspecific one.14 To a historian or theologian, this category is too broad and general to be of any use. By reading the works of the theologians mentioned above, however, we might be able to be more precise about the motivating force behind this remarkable affirmation. It is not some vague “Judeo-Christian spirituality”, but the Protestant revaluation of eschatology with its emphasis on the rapprochement of present and future and its effects on the relation between the profane and the sacred that centrally informs this attitude. In order to do this Protestant revaluation justice, I shall, over the following pages, reconstruct the early modern theory and practice of grace as a performance of heaven. In a second step, I will attempt to show how the brief glimpses of the life to come can, in turn, help us to trace aspects of thisworldliness in heaven.

The State of Grace Protestantism holds a dynamic concept of the individual and subscribes to an anthropology of becoming rather than being. Individuals are perceived as dynamic and progressing, a notion which finds its appropriate image in the figure of the pilgrim. The ideal Christian is never in a state of stasis, but always on his way, performing his identity. As Thomas Brooks puts it: “The life of a Christian is rather (via than vita) a step towards life, then life”.15 Protestant theology theorizes this development under the doctrine of status. According to this doctrine four or five states are to be distinguished:16 1) the prelapsarian state, status integritatis, 2) the state after the fall, status corruptionis, 3) the life of faith in the state of grace, status gratiae, 4) the state of glorification in heaven, status gloriae, or, after a less successfull life, 5) the state in hell, status damnationis. At first sight, the notion of status seems rather anti-dynamic and in contradiction with the notion of development. But if we stress the continuity between the individual states— as Protestants generally do –, it becomes evident that, in the words of the Divine Richard Sibbes’, “there is no creature in the world so changeable as a Christian”.17 The doctrine of status is complemented by the system of the ordo salutis. Here, four types have to be distinguished: vocatio, justificatio, sanctificatio, and glorificatio. Vocatio is the calling 13. 14. 15. 16.

Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., p. 215. Thomas Brooks, Heaven on Earth (London, 1657), “The Epistle to the Saints”. On the doctrine of status see also: Diane Elizabeth Dreher, The Fourfold Pilgrimage: The Estates of Innocence, Misery, Grace, and Glory in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Washington: University Press of America, 1982). Note that Dreher does not consider the continuity between the individual states. 17. Richard Sibbes, “The Excellency of the Gospel above the Law”, in The Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. by Alexander B. Grosart, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1862-64, repr. 1983), p. 286.

124

Susanne Rupp

to faith by Christ, while justificatio describes the justification by faith; sanctificatio refers to the sanctification of the individual life (an important category in our investigation), and glorificatio, finally, denotes the state of bliss in heaven after judgement day. Reaching the state of grace and experiencing sanctification implies, according to Thomas Brooks, “transforming Knowledge, it is metaphorising [sic] knowledge” and thus turning the believer “into the very likeness of Christ”.18 Processuality is not only described in terms of “transformation” and “metamorphosis”, but is sometimes also explicitly conceived of as an experiment. Here, the “experimentall knowledge” derives “from a spirituall sense and taste of holy and heavenly things”.19 The crucial point about the achieved state of grace and the life of sanctification is that it is defined in terms of being as well as doing, and thus depends on the activity of the practitioner: “Grace is most discernible when it is most in action, and grace is made more and more perfect by acting”. 20 Grace has to be enacted and performed in order to be effective. Accordingly, the theologian Henry Hammond claims that the “grace of regeneration” results in an “operative habit producing, or rather enabling the man to produce several gracious works”.21 The faithful “come to an use of their reason, to a more and more multiplying this habit of grace into holy spiritual acts of Faith and Obedience”.22 Habitus becomes actus, and the spritual acts of the faithful confirm their being in the state of grace. According to the doctrine of status, the state of grace is—ideally—followed by the state of glory. And this is the point where Protestant innovation sets in: the two states are no longer considered as fundamentally different, since the grace of God already implies, according to one of the most fundamental assumptions and tenets of Calvinism, the promise of glorification. But before considering theology’s contribution the to interpenetration and permeability of grace and glory, we first have to turn to the Bible as the starting point for the theologians I propose to discuss. Biblical evidence concerning glorification is scarce and contradictory, especially in the New Testament. The following passage is characteristic of the Bible’s ambivalence on the subject. “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17, 3).23 This passage can be interpreted either as referring to the present or as addressing a future state. A reading focused on the present would emphasise the beginning of eternal life in this 18. Thomas Brooks, Heaven on Earth. Or A Serious Discourse treating a well-grounded Assurance of Mens Everlasting Happiness and Blessedness (London, 1657), p. 296. 19. Ibid., p. 299. 20. Ibid., p. 244. 21. Henry Hammond, “The XV. Sermon”, Sermons Preached by that Emminent, Famous and Great Divine, Henry Hammond, D.D. (London, 1664), p. 254. 22. Ibid., p. 256. 23. Authorized (King James) Version, Standard Text Edition. Further relevant passages: Matth. 3, 2; Luke 17, 21; Eph. 2, 6; Phil. 3, 20 (stressing present salvation); 1. Peter 1, 4; Hebr. 6, 5; Hebr. 10, 34 (future perfection).

Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology

125

world, whereas a future-oriented interpretation would interpret the eternal life described in this passage as a promise the fulfillment of which has yet to be awaited. The first reading accentuates the beginning of glorification in this life, the second postpones glorification until the end of time and thus stresses hope. Generally, English Protestants favour the former approach, since they consider their hope of salvation justified and firmly grounded in God’s promise contained in the famous passage from St Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Moreover, whom he did predestinate, them he also called; and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified” (Rom. 8, 30). Calvin’s definitive and influential commentary on this passage is characteristic of the dialectics of the yet and the not-yet of Protestant eschatology: Glorification in Christ is our hope. We have this only through faith, but nevertheless it is already present and actual for us. Since in this way we already glimpse the inheritance of eternal life, there flows from our vision such an assurance of our glory that our hope may already be considered as a present possession.24

The vocabulary of the new eschatology, with its emphasis on the present, is all here: the hope of glorification may already be conceived as a “present possession” thanks to God’s promise that justification will bring about glorification.25 While Calvin retains a sense of caution in his description of the intense experience of assured hope, other theologians such as Richard Sibbes use stronger words: with God’s promise of salvation, “heaven upon earth” commences.26 For Calvin, it is important that the fundamental opposition between faith in this world and sight in heaven is upheld, yet a new emphasis on continuity and the onset of glorification in this life is clearly discernible in his theology. Even though difference is affirmed, there seems, strictly speaking, no Other in God’s salvation plan: all things relate and the world provides the faithful with interfaces with the world to come. Bearing in mind the ambiguity of the biblical evidence, it was a matter of great concern to theologians to systematise the scriptural evidence and shape it into a coherent theology. And this is the point where the notion of difference, or ‘degree’, comes into play. Jeremiah Burroughs distinguishes between “graduall” and “specificall differences” as far as the differences between the status subiecti, gratiae and gloriae are concerned. The difference between grace and glory is only “graduall”, but “natural” (i.e. fallen) and “regenerate man” are separated by “specificall” difference: [T]he highest degree of glory in heaven is not so different from the lowest degree of grace here, as the lowest degree of grace here is different from the highest excellency of nature; because the difference betweene the highest degree of the glory of heaven from the lowest degree of grace is but a graduall differ24. Quoted in Heinrich Quistorp, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Last Things, trans. Harold Knight (London: Lutterworth, 1955), p. 22. 25. For Calvin, assurance and firm hope for salvation were grounded in the concept of predestination. Many English Protestant theologians, however, did not subscribe to this doctrine. Those who remained unconvinced about predestinarian theology stressed the grace of God as the guarantee for salvation. 26. Richard Sibbes, “The Marriage Feast between Christ and his Church”, in The Works of Richard Sibbes (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1862-4), vol. 2, p. 508.

126

Susanne Rupp ence, but the difference that is betweene the lowest degree of grace, and the highest excellency of nature is a specificall difference.27

Burrough explicates that “eternall life is begun in this world in all that shall be saved” and thus repeats a Calvinist commonplace.28 The elect already experience in this life the beginning of the life to come: “[A] gracious heart knowes in himselfe by that experimentall sweetnesse of the beginning of eternall life that he findes in himself”.29 Both lives have a common substance “for they differ only in degree, the discovery of heavenly things in the gospel here, the priviledges, and graces, and comforts of Gods children, and the consummation of them in heaven”.30 The strong emphasis on the gradual difference raises a problem though: where exactly in the ordo salutis could the beginning glorification be located? Is it part of the sanctificatio or does it belong to glorificatio? Samuel Cradock and John Milton provided solutions to this subtle problem. Cradock stresses continuity between earthly life and the life to come. Thus death is “only an alteration and change of the condition” of body and soul and not their ultimate and irreversible end.31 In order to emphasise this continuity, he develops a terminology that allows him to differentiate between three types of eternal life: 1. The eternal life initital is that which is obtained in this life, and is an earnest of that which is to follow. ´Tis the life of Grace. (John 5, 24; John 3, 36) […] 2. The Partial life eternal is that which belongeth (though to the nobler) yet but to a part of man, namely, to the soul. The Happinesse which the souls of the Saints enjoy between the time of their death, and the last day […] 3. The Perfectional life eternal is that which shall be conferred on the Saints immediately after the blessed reunion of their souls and bodies […]32

While the description of the interim as “partial life initial” and of eternal life as “perfectional life eternal” conforms to traditional eschatology, the “eternal life initial” as a description of the status graciae strikes the reader as a terminological extravaganza. Normally, this first stage of eternal life would be properly subsumed under sanctificatio. The fact that Cradock avoids this, shows how strong the impetus was to construct the closest connection possible between this and the other life. John Milton uses a similar strategy by dressing the connection in neat terminological garments. In his De Doctrina Christiana he distinguishes between two types of glorifi27. 28. 29. 30.

Jeremiah Burroughs, Moses His Choice, with his eye fixed upon Heaven (London, 1641), p. 711. Ibid., p. 365. Ibid., p. 527 Richard Sibbes, “A Glance of Heaven” (1638), in The Works of Richard Sibbes (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1862-4), vol. 4, p. 165. Other images employed to describe the continuity and the shared substance are, for example, the “aurora gloriae” (“For grace is aurora gloriae, the dawning of the beatificall vision”, in “SPIRITUAL OPTICKS: OR A GLASSE discovering the weaknesse and imperfection of a Christians knowledge in this life”, in: Nathaniel Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, with Several Other Treatises (London, 1652), p. 181), and the notion that “Grace is glory in the bud, and glory is grace at the full”; Brooks (1659), p. 3. 31. Samuel Cradock, Knowledge and Practice (London, 1659), p. 583. 32. Ibid., p. 580 f.

Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology

127

cation (since he adheres to the mortalist position, he has no use for a middle stage): glorificatio inchoata and glorificatio perfecta: Glorification is either imperfect [inchoata] or perfect [perfecta]. Imperfect glorification is that state wherein, being justified and adopted by God the Father, we are filled with a consciousness of present grace and excellency, as well as with an expectation of future glory, insomuch that our blessedness is in a manner already begun.33

Glorificatio inchoata has its place in this world and corresponds to Cradock’s “eternal life initial”. This state finds its perfection in the glorificatio perfecta—Cradock’s “perfectional life eternal”. However, the English translation of Milton’s Latin text somewhat misses the point when “glorificatio inchoata” is rendered as “imperfect glorification”. Milton’s “glorificatio inchoata” is a beginning glorification, not an imperfect one. Whereas ‘imperfect’ suggests a deficient mode of existence, ‘beginning’ strikes a much more promising and optimistic note. Milton pushes glorification to its terminological limits. Most contemporary theologians (if not in their preaching, then definitely as far as points of doctrine were concerned) would not have gone as far: for them, glorificatio was exclusively reserved for heaven.34 By definition, Milton’s glorificatio inchoata would have been classified as sanctificatio (in fact, sanctificatio is not treated seperately in his Doctrina). But what were the implications of the firm hope of salvation in this life? How did the status gratiae or the glorificatio inchoata affect the life of the individual? Ideally, the experience of grace would generate assurance, as defined by Milton: Hence assurance of salvation is a certain degree or gradation of faith, whereby a man has a firm persuasion and conviction, founded on the testimony of the Spirit, that if he believe and continue in faith and love, having been justified and adopted, and partly glorified by union and fellowship with Christ and the Father, he will at length most certainly attain to everlasting life and the consummation of glory.35

Assurance is accompanied by “strongest Joy”, “sweetest Comforts” and “the greatest Peace” (ibid.), allowing the faithful a glimpse of heaven: “Assurance is glory in the bud, it is the suburbs of Paradise”.36 Even though assurance plays a prominent role in devotional texts, it should not be overlooked that assurance is a kind of surplus. Whereas grace is essential for salvation, assurance is not.37 But the experience of assurance, conquering 33. John Milton, De Doctrina Christiana, (Lat./Engl.), in The Works of John Milton, ed. by James Holly Hanford / Waldo Hilary Dunn, trans. by Charles R. Sumner, vols. 14-17 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), vol. 16, pp. 64-67. The vexed problem of Milton’s disputed authorship shall not concern us here, since it does not affect the theological content of the work in question. 34. See William Perkins: “The beginning of glorification, is in death, but it is not accomplished and made perfect before the last day of judgement”; William Perkins, A Golden Chaine, or The Description of Theologie, containing the order of the causes of Salvation and Damnation, according to Gods word. A viewe whereof is to be seene in the Table annexed. Written in Latine, trans. by Robert Hill (Cambridge, second edition, 1597), p. 168. 35. Milton (1933), p. 71. 36. Brooks (1659), p. 27. 37. “Though a man cannot be saved without faith, yet he may be saved without assurance”; Brooks (1659), p. 46.

128

Susanne Rupp

all doubt about final salvation, enables the faithful to experience a second heaven here on earth:38 [A]n assured soul lives in Paradise, and walks in Paradise, and works in Paradise, and rests in Paradise; he hath Heaven within him, and Heaven about him, and Heaven over him, all his language is Heaven, heaven, Glory, glory.39

What, then, does the life of sanctification or even assurance look like? “The new Man takes a new course Eph 2.2,3. His Conversation is in Heaven Phil 3.20”, writes Joseph Alleine with reference to the popular notion of “heavenly conversation”.40 Jeremiah Burroughs gives a comprehensive survey of this practice in his Two Treatises (“Of Earthly Mindedness” and “Of Conversing in Heaven, and Walking with God”41). At the beginning of their “conversation in heaven”, the believers have to disengage themselves from the world and fashion themselves as “pilgrims and strangers”, to whom God is “all in all”:42 This is a Heavenly Principle, That God is all in all: that’s a Principle that the Saints are guided by, in Heaven they look upon God to be all in all unto them, so do the Saints here, in what they do, in what they are, in what they enjoy, they act upon this Principle, that it’s God that is all in all.43

While the saints in heaven will experience God rather passively as “all in all”, on earth this experience depends on the activity of the faithful themselves, and the experience of God’s ‘allness’ is communicated by doing, being, enjoying, and acting. The desired communion with God can be found in the practice of ‘heavenly meditation’,44 which enables the believers to transcend the material world as did Moses on Mount Nebo: “Heavenly meditations are as it were mount Nebo, whereby when the heart is raised a little upon the mount, it’s able to see Heaven & behold the glorious things there”.45 In addition, the ‘heavenly conversation’ receives its code of behaviour from heaven itself (i.e. from the Bible), and the community subscribes to practices of piety, such as praising God or keeping the Sabbath, which have their corresponding counterparts in heaven. In the process of leading a heavenly life, the initial denial of the world is revised and transformed into a proper use of the world that affirms and encourages the appreciation of pleasant things on earth “after a heavenly manner”.46 The faithful are dead to the world, which, paradox38. To a certain extent, this side-heaven is even superior to the other heaven: “Yea, in some regards it’s better than Heaven”, because trials in this life give the faithful the opportunity to prove strong and faithful Christians thereby affirming God’s glory. In heaven, however, “God shal not have this kind of glory from thee […]”; Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment (London, 1649), p. 114. 39. Brooks (1659), p. 223. 40. Joseph Alleine, A Sure Guide to Heaven (London, 1688), p. 30. 41. Jeremiah Burroughs, Two Treatises: Of Earthly Mindedness. Of Conversing in Heaven, and walking with God (London, 1649). 42. Ibid., p. 107. 43. Ibid., p. 108. 44. Ibid., p. 111. 45. Ibid., p. 114. 46. Ibid., p. 115.

Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology

129

ically, allows them to make proper use of it. The widespread contemptus mundi goes hand in hand with the “sanctified use of the creature”.47 The world is conceived as a place of activity, not as a place of total withdrawal, and the believers are thus encouraged to engage with it and shape their life on earth according to its heavenly pattern. Practices of piety are of crucial importance in shaping Protestant ‘heavenly conversation’ and a powerful means for performing the sacred.48 Samuel Cradock recommends five practices: “the observation of the Lord’s day”, “hearing the Word”, “singing psalmes”, “religious conference” and “retired holy meditations”.49 These practices both result from grace and, at the same time, intensify it. We will here focus on one of these practices, namely, “retired holy meditation”, or “heavenly meditation”, a particularly popular intermediary between the heavenly and the earthly life.50 Suitable subjects for this type of meditation are the last things or aspects of ordinary life, which are ‘spiritualized’ by being related to eschatological tenets. Meditation enables the faithful to encounter God and gives joy, because “thou wilt then find thy self in the suburbs of heaven, and as it were in a new world; thou wilt then find indeed, that there is sweetness in the work and way of God, and that the life of Christianity is a life of Joy”.51 Not experiencing this joy makes the believers “walk uncomfortably”, “all complaining, and live in sorrows”.52 The actual process of meditation is thus characterized by two contrasting movements: “It begins in the understanding, endeth in the affection; it begins in the brain, descends to the heart; begins on earth, ascends to heaven, not suddenly but by certain stairs and degrees till we come to the highest”.53 The sense representing the ideal mode of perception in meditation is ‘taste’. While seeing belongs to the realm of understanding, tasting relates to the affections. The affective value of meditation is rated highly, since “God’s school is more of affection than understanding”.54 The (fore-)taste of immortality and eternal life in heaven is a ravishing experience, which—in a characteristic Protestant turn to practical issues—again leads to an increase in ‘holinesse’ and proper Christian action:55 [M]editation is not a passion of melancholy, nor a fit of fiery love, nor covetous care, nor sensless dumps, but a serious act of the Spirit in the inwards of the Soul, whose object is spiritual, whose affection is a

47. Burroughs (1649), p. 80. 48. See also Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety. Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 49. Cradock, (1659), p. 301. 50. On the term ‘heavenly meditation’, see Burroughs (1649), p. 111; Richard Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (London, [1649], seventh edition 1658), p. 628. On the genesis of heavenly meditation see Hambrick-Stowe (1988) pp. viii-ix; U. Milo Kaufmann, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Frank Livingston Huntley ed., Bishop Joseph Hall and Protestant Meditation in 17th-Century England (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1981). 51. Baxter, (1649) , p. 622. 52. Ibid., p. 628. 53. Joseph Hall, The Arte of Divine Meditation (1633), ed. by Frank Livingstone Huntley, p. 87. 54. Ibid., p. 72. 55. Cradock (1659), p. 354.

130

Susanne Rupp provoked appetite to practice holy things, a kindling in us of the love of God, a zeal towards his truth, a healing our benummed hearts.56

As to the subjects of meditation, Joseph Hall recommends “those matters in divinity which can most of all work compunction in the heart and most stir us up to devotion”,57 for example “Christ Jesus our Mediator”, “his life, miracles, passion, resurrection”, “certainty of our election”, “paradise”, “inclination to sin”, “sacraments”, “miseries of life”, “death”, “the glory of God’s saints above”, “judgement”, and “hell”. “Thorny and knotty controversies of Heaven” are to be avoided, since they do not contribute to one’s edification and should thus be abandoned in favour of “commonly known and professed” truths.58 While theological subtleties are to be shunned, the sensual imagination of heavenly pleasures is explicitly recommended. The second type of heavenly meditation focuses not on the last things, but on a reading of the book of nature—one of God’s modes of revelation.59 Ordinary life and the world surrounding the faithful are spiritualised and eschatologised by meditation: “Every creature hath the name of God and our final rest written upon it”, writes Richard Baxter in The Saints’ Everlasting Rest.60 God is partly embodied and inscribed in his book of nature, and it is the believer’s task to recover Him from it. Whatsoever the soul of a Christian sees in heaven or earth, it takes occasion thence to think of Christ […] there are some beams of excellency in every creature. There is somewhat of God in every creature. This makes the meditation of the creature to be useful.61

By spiritualising nature and its creatures it is possible to indulge in a foretaste of heaven, which again occasions pleasure and joy, but also the desire to experience the real thing.62 Herein lies the particular quality of heavenly meditation: it satisfies by providing joy, but also intensifies and kindles desire: “[A]nd therefore when we have any sweet feelings we must not rest in them, but remember they are given to encourage us in our way, and to look for fulnesse in another world”.63 Heavenly meditation epitomizes the tendency in Protestant theology to forge a strong union between heaven and earth. Even though the ultimate distinction between life in this world and eternal life is maintained, there is a clear tendency to stress continuity, which also informs the notion and habitus of ‘heavenly conversation’. First and last things are 56. Ezekiel Culverwell, “The Epistle to the Reader”, in Richard Sibbes, Divine Meditations and Holy Contemplations (London, 1658). 57. Hall (1633), p. 84. 58. Baxter (1649), p. 701. 59. On other modes of revelation see Culverwell (1652). 60. Baxter (1649), p. 622. 61. Richard Sibbes, “Bowles Opened; or Expository Sermons on Canticles IV, 16, V, VI”, in The Works of Richard Sibbes (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1862-4), vol. 2, pp. 147 ff. 62. There is not limit to the choice of subjects or objects suitable for meditation. Jospeh Hall’s “Occasional Meditations” cover sublime subjects such as “the sight of the Heavens moving” as well as more mundane aspects of life such as “the Street-cries in London”, “the shutting of One Eye”, “the Stinging of a Wasp” or even “an Arm Benumbed”. 63. Richard Sibbes, Divine Meditations and Holy Contemplations (London, 1658), p. 91.

Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology

131

put in relation to each other, and the boundaries between the familiar and the as yet unfamiliar become increasingly blurred. The sacred can be experienced and performed (the believers’ being in the state of grace sanctifies the objects of their acts) without the mediation of authorised clergy and their privileged access to the realm beyond.

The State of Glory At the beginning of the seventeenth century the stern and rigorous Calvinist theologian Arthur Dent described the relation between the state of grace and the state of glory in the following terms: For the new creature, or new works of grace, can never be fully fashioned in this life: but is alwaies in fashioning. And as our faith and knowledge in this life are unperfeit: so is our regeneration and sanctification.64

Dent draws a clear line between two states of being: the state of grace is conceived as being perpetually “in fashioning” and therefore “unperfeit”. The state of glorification, by contrast, replaces faith with sight, and the Saints are fully fashioned and thus perfect. This fundamental difference between this world and the hereafter is maintained throughout the seventeenth century, although there was—as has been shown above—an increasing emphasis on the merely ‘graduall’ quality of this difference. This foregrounding of the ‘graduall’ affects the imaginative construction of heaven in two important respects: 1) Descriptions of heaven stress the continuity between the life begun on earth and its perfection in heaven. 2) Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the idea of perfection undergoes revision and is complemented by notions of progress. Heaven is primarily the place of the visio Dei. The Saints will see God ‘from face to face’, but not his being in its entirety: there remains a tension between knowledge and secret so that the fundamental difference between God and his creature is maintained. The Saints’ future existence is characterised by a strong sense of identity which depends on the body as well as on the soul. The limitations of the earthly body will be abandoned—the saints are of amazing mobility and free of undignified bodily necessities. Passions and desires are purified and finally conform to higher principles. On the spiritual side, identity is preserved by the function of memory and the practice of sharing these memories with other Saints. Moreover, the heavenly community contributes to the retention of personal identity. This community represents a strange mixture of strict hierarchy and social justice. The hierarchy is determined by the differences between individual members, who enjoy varying degrees of glory according to the degrees of grace formerly experienced on earth. Earthly achievements still count in heaven. In contrast to mundane hierarchies, however, envy is unknown in heaven. By taking into account achievements in the former life, the organisation of life in heaven preserves identity and 64. Arthur Dent, The Plain Mans Path-way to Heaven (London, 1601), p. 15.

132

Susanne Rupp

thus creates strong links between both worlds. These links are further strengthened and intensified by the prospect of a reunion with friends and relatives in heaven. It is this prospect Richard Baxter took delight in during his last days: Being asked by a Person of Quality, whether he had not great joy from his believing Apprehensions of the invisible State, he replied: ‘What else think you Christianity serves for?’ He said, ‘The Consideration of the Deity in his Glory and Greatness was too high for our Thoughts; but the consideration of the Son of God in our Nature, and of the Saints in Heaven, whom he knew and loved, did much sweeten and familiarize Heaven to him.’65

The consolations Baxter derives from God’s promise of salvation are characteristic of his age: it is not contemplation of the incomprehensible God that fills him with joy, but the apprehension of the divine in the realm of the ordinary. And it is not the thought of the visio Dei alone that kindles his desire for heaven, but the incarnation and the hope of reunion with those Saints “whom he knew and loved”. This attitude does not deny the ultimate and specific ‘otherness’ of heaven, but it attests to a longing for a heaven that is not absolutely disconnected from life as we know it. A crucial turning point in the imaginative representation of heaven was reached at the end of the seventeenth century when a concept was gradually introduced into heaven that had hitherto been considered irreconcilable with the notion of heavenly perfection: progress. In 1683, an anonymous pamphlet was published in London; it bore the promising title: The Future State; or, a discourse attempting some display of the happiness in regard to that eternally progressive knowledge, and the consequences of it, which is among the blessed in heaven. The pamphlet defends the notion of progress in heaven— a notion that had somewhat been in the air throughout the latter part of the seventeenth century but had so far never been spelled out.66 There would have been a variety of reasons for such interest in progress in heaven: 1) The revaluation of modern learning and scientific inquiry may have promoted the desire to attribute more dignity to these practices, which could be achieved by conceiving them as carrying on into heaven. There would be no end to learning—a thought that might have been considered quite threatening only a couple of decades earlier—and heaven was envisioned as a university with the final exams deferred until all eternity. 2) Perfection was no longer linked to static conditions, but conceived of as implying progress and the possibility of increase. Like grace before, glory was to be performed and acted out in time rather than simply experienced in a realm beyond the known confines of time and space. 3) For some believers, the notion of progress in heaven might simply have been a handy solution to the problem of heavenly boredom and ennui. Even to seventeenth-century Christians, the prospect of eternal chants of Hallelujah, non-stop praise and other endlessly repeated rituals was probably not all that enticing. Thus, theologians attempted to make heaven appear a little 65. William Bates, “An Account of His Life”, in A Funeral-Sermon For the Reverend, Holy and Excellent Divine, Mr Richard Baxter (London, 1692), pp. 127f. 66. On the notion of progress in paradise, see U. Milo Kaufmann, Paradise in the Age of Milton (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 1978).

Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology

133

more exciting and described it in metaphors which—at first sight—may seem rather out of place. Jeremy Taylor—in his description of heaven—exclaims: “O how great and delightful a theatre shall it be to see God as He is with all His infinite perfections, and the perfections of all creatures, which are eminently contained in the Deity”.67 Commonly, of course, it was the world that was the theatre and not heaven. Heaven was, after all, supposed to be absolutely real and safely outside the categories and practices of feigning, pretence, and simulation. Taylor, however, turns the theatrum-mundi-topos upside down so that the entertaining aspects of the theatre become attractions to be looked forward to in heaven. In a similar vein, Thomas Goodwin writes of the manifold entertainments of a heavenly existence: “As in a Masque there are several shews, which adds to the excellency of it, God hath eternity of time to make all these shewes and representations of himselfe to his children”.68 Such metaphors and similes seek to underline the variety and diversity that is to be expected in heavenly life and thus illustrates the increasingly problematic concepts of a heavenly life imagined as utterly different and ‘other’ than our mundane existence. So much for the heaven of doctrinal works, treatises, and sermons. But what about the rare examples of literary heavens? In the light of our proceeding theological inquiries, the question probably needs to be rephrased somewhat. The number of heavens depends on the perspective: heaven as locus, does indeed meet with little literary attention in the seventeenth century. Heaven as status, however, presents a major concern for many writers, John Bunyan and his Pilgrim’s Progress being one example.69 As the book’s full title indicates, the pilgrimage described by Bunyan has a clear direction: it leads “from this world to that which is to come”. The pilgrims’ destination is the heaven of glorification, yet this heaven is barely depicted. As the pilgrims approach heaven, its glories are the subject of much talk among them; as they come close to the Heavenly Jerusalem, however, the reader loses sight of them and their conversation becomes inaudible. Only the dream-narrator follows their path, observes their transfiguration, and, when the doors of the heavenly city are opened, manages to catch a glimpse of the city itself with its “many men, with Crowns on their heads, Palms in their hands, and golden Harps to sing praises withall”.70 But then the door shuts again—even on him: “And after that, they shut up the Gates: which when I had seen, I wished my self among them”.71 This is all Bunyan (and his narrator) have to say about heaven (in this book at least). In a sense, however, there was no need for him to say more. The presence of heaven throughout the pilgrimage as glorificatio inchoata is the main subject of the book, and The Pilgrim’s Progress provides a guide to the ‘vita coelestis’ in this world. 67. Jeremy Taylor, Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell (London, 1845), p. 73. 68. Thomas Goodwin, The World to Come. Or, the Kindgdome of Christ asserted. In two Expository Lectures on Ephes, 1,21-22 (London, 1655), p. 36. 69. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to Come [1678] ed. by John N. Keeble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 70. Ibid., p. 132. 71. Ibid.

134

Susanne Rupp

Bunyan’s book is symptomatic of the seventeenth-century Protestant eschatological frame of mind. The glorificatio inchoata, rather than the glorificatio perfecta, is the main point of reference. Heaven as place is not lost to sight, but it is no longer the main impetus behind cultural practices. Otherworldliness acquires a different meaning, for last things now come first, and eschatologisation and, alongside it, sacralisation affect all aspects of life. Richard Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest may serve to illustrate this point well: over the course of more than 800 pages, Baxter hardly refers to the everlasting rest. His book—as so many others whose titles allude to eschatological issues—is a treatise on grace rather than on the last things. To a certain extent, heaven has become omnipresent and thus no longer invites monumental representational strategies; rather, it is dissolved into a stream of practices and dynamic processes, that defy traditional approaches and produce new ones. It is in this sense that John Bunyan can be said to have created the English companion piece to Dante’s great vision.

DYED IN MUMMY: OTHELLO AND THE MULBERRIES by Richard Wilson I Bardolatry, so the crypto-Catholic Ben Jonson was quick to point out, was only ever just “this side idolatry”;1 and as Cultural Materialists protest, celebration of Shakespeare has long been “an attenuated form of relic-worship”, centred on prostration before “vatic, totemic images”.2 Not surprisingly, therefore, from the time when his tomb at Stratford first began to acquire aura as a tourist site, critical debate has revolved around the problem of the author’s relationship to canonicity,3 and the question posed by Stephen Greenblatt, of “what happens when a piece of cloth”, such as Cardinal Wolsey’s hat, “is passed from church to playhouse”, and “a consecrated object is reclassified, transferred from a sacred to profane setting, deemed suitable for the stage?”4 For as Graham Holderness observes, it can be no accident that “in the garden of New Place, the house where Shakespeare lived in retirement, the mulberry tree reputed to have been planted by the Bard’s own hand” had acquired, by the early eighteenth century, sufficient sanctity to become the object of a devotional cult. Nor that in 1756 the Reverend Francis Gastrell, the Anglican clergyman who bought the property, claimed to be so exasperated by “the frequent importunities” of the Shakespeare-worshippers, “and so annoyed with the hoary 1. Ben Jonson, Timber, Or Discoveries, 2 vols, ed. by R. S. Walker (Syracuse: Columbia University Press, 1953), vol. 2, pp. 665-666. 2. Graham Holderness, “Bardolatry: or, The Cultural Materialist’s Guide to Stratford-upon-Avon”, in The Shakespeare Myth, ed. by Graham Holderness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 3. 3. See, for example the Thersites-like diatribe against recent research on the dramatist’s recusant associations by Michael Davies, “The Canonisation of the Catholic Shakespeare”, Cahiers Elisabethains, 58 (2000), 31-47, which never discloses the bad faith that is, in fact, revealed in the notes to contributors, where it is stated that the author’s “research interests currently focus on the relationship between Calvinism and English literature, particularly in the drama of William Shakespeare”. 4. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 113.

136

Richard Wilson

and ancient growth obstructing the sunlight and engendering rising damp”, that in an act of truly radical criticism, he had the mulberry chopped down, “whereupon it began, like the wood of the true cross, to increase and multiply into innumerable relics”.5 To Samuel Schoenbaum, the enterprise of Thomas Sharpe—the watchmaker who, knowing “the value of sacred objects”, bought the felled tree and “over forty years carved from it more curios and useful articles than one would expect a single mulberry capable of yielding”—epitomises the Shakespeare industry, since, as he dryly concludes, “in such circumstances, a miracle is not surprising”.6 And Sharpe’s advertisement, swearing “upon the four Evangelists, in presence of Almighty God”, that all his “snuff-boxes, goblets, punch-ladles, toothpicks and tobacco-pipes” were fabricated from “the very Mulberrytree which was planted by the immortal Bard”, did require as much of a leap of faith as medieval Canterbury or modern Stratford.7 So, whether or not the Reverend Gastrell signalled that “Anglican clergy set the seal on the fact he was no child of theirs”, when he cut down the poet’s mulberry, as the Catholic critic Richard Simpson inferred,8 from the earliest days it was recognised that the roots of his plays were entangled with popish religion, and that the canonisation of Shakespeare had somehow supplanted the Christian cult of relics: Honey-tongu’d Shakespeare, when I saw thy issue I swore Apollo got them and none other. Their rosy-tainted features cloth’d in tissue, Some heaven-born goddess said to be their mother: Rose-cheek’d Adonis with his amber tresses; Fair fire-hot Venus charming him to love her; Chaste Lucrece, virgin-like her dresses; Proud lust-stung Tarquin seeking still to prove her; Romeo, Richard; more whose names I know not. Their sugared tongues and power-attractive beauty Say they are Saints, although like Saints they show not, For thousands vow to them subjective duty: They burn in love: thy children, Shakespeare, heat them. Go, woo thy Muse, more nymphish brood beget them.9

Shakespeare wrote at a time when there could be no more pilgrimages, when the cult of saints survived only in “the interior exile spaces of Tudor culture, in the secret underground of a now-illegal Catholicism”, and when holy relics were subject to de5. Holderness (1988), p. 3. 6. Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 159. 7. Quoted in F. E. Halliday, The Cult of Shakespeare (London: Duckworth, 1957), p. 64. The Stratford mulberry is discussed, though without noticing its Elizabethan Catholic symbolism, in Péter Dávidházi, The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare: Literary Reception in Anthropological Perception (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 38-40, 78-79 et passim. 8. Richard Simpson, “What was the Religion of Shakespeare?” The Rambler, 9: 53 (1858), p. 319. 9. John Weever, “Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare”, Epigrams (London: 1599), 4th Week, 22; repr. in Ernst Honigmann ed., John Weever: A Biography of a Literary Associate of Shakespeare and Jonson, together with a photographic facsimile of Weever’s “Epigrams” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 109.

Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries

137

sacralisation, decaying like those snot-stained rags that had once been Becket’s hairshirt, which John Colet “touched with disgust and shrank from kissing”.10 Yet the very first critical comment on his plays, from the Lancashire writer John Weever in 1599, pointedly praises the playwright for “begetting” a new generation of “saints”, whose votaries “burn in love”, rather than sectarian hate. Weever later recorded the fan-worship of Julius Caesar; and his analysis of the emerging Shakespeare cult is a prediction of the Greenblatt thesis: that in these plays theatre took over from religion, substituting for the audiences who “vow to them subjective duty”, secular saints for spiritual martyrs. Shakespeare’s creations are true icons for a post-Reformation society, according to Weever, even if, in slipping from Rome to Romeo, their maker defected, it is implied, from one idolatry to another. So, if his poems are ‘said’ to carry the look of the Virgin—“Some heaven-born goddess”—with their red quartos reminiscent of Roman missals, his plays will live precisely because in them Shakespeare chose the ‘heat’ of the playhouse over the flames of the scaffold stoked by the ‘fire hot’ Queen. Weever’s sonnet “Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare” is confirmation that Shakespeare criticism hinged from the start on the question of religious affiliation, as it purports to be an affidavit, affirmed on the new Bible, the book of the Bard, vouching the plays’ exemption from Catholic influence: “I swore Apollo got them and none other.” Yet Weever’s mock-testimony to the defendant’s devotion to the god of art, “and none other”, contradicts itself by making the plays so canonical that evidence of their apostasy can be sworn upon them. Thus, this deposition, pledged by a protégé of the Catholic aristocracy, itself turns out to be proof of just how much Shakespeare still needed to be defended, in mid-career, from suspicions of Catholic sympathies. With such witnesses, it comes as no surprise that the first recorded purchaser of the Folio, when it was published in 1623, was the ardent collector of martyrs’ relics and Spanish ambassador, Count Gondomar; nor that as early as 1651 there were calls to make the grave of this “true priest elect”—“boldly blasphemed” by “those that seem to preach, but prate”— the object of an annual pilgrimage on the lines of the former devotions at Holywell and Walsingham: Where thy honoured bones do lie Thither every year will I Slowly tread and sadly mourn.11

Shakespeare’s canonicity was seen from earliest days, it seems, in terms of a “popish” pilgrimage, and the more certain Puritans happened to “prate” of the plays as “prelatical 10. Clark Hulse, “Dead Man’s Treasure: The Cult of Thomas More”, in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. by David Lee Miller / Sharon O’Dair / Harold Weber (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 204, 208. 11. Samuel Shepherd, “In Memory of our Famous Shakespeare”, Epigrams Theological, Philosophical and Romantic (London: 1651), Bk 6: 17, pp. 150-154. For Gondomar’s collection of relics of the English martyrs, now partly at Downside Abbey, see Dom Bede Camm, Forgotten Shrines: An Account of Some Old Catholic Halls and Families in England and of Relics and Memorials of the English Martyrs (London: MacDonald & Evans, 1910), pp. 357, 367.

138

Richard Wilson

trash”,12 the more others, such as the young Milton, praised them as substitutes for the “hallow’d relics” in cathedrals, or visualised the dramatist’s own “honour’d bones” transcending “The labour of an age in piled stones”, by becoming enshrined, like the forbidden faith, in “each heart […] And so sepulchr’d, in such pomp […] That kings, for such a tomb should wish to die”. The Works would replace the relics of saints like Edmund the Confessor, according to this theory, and the act of taking their “Delphic lines” to heart would amount to a form of encrypted resistance to those desecrators by whom they were yet “unvalued”. For as the twenty-four-year-old Milton affirmed: “What needs my Shakespeare’ to be buried “Under a stary-pointing pyramid” of an alabaster shrine, like those ruined in the Reformation, when “thou, our fancy of itself bereaving, / Dost make us marble” ourselves?13 And Leonard Digges actually imagined the author of the First Folio risen to “live eternally” on account of his Works, when “that stone is rent” and “Time dissolves thy Stratford Monument”.14 Thus, at a time when reformers were adamant that “There is no analogy between Preachers and Players, Sermons and Players, Theatres and Churches”,15 the idea that critics have rediscovered, that there was indeed a correlation between pilgrimages to shrines and processions to playhouses, had a special attraction for those with a vested interest in supporting the stage as a continuation of suppressed religion by other means, and for those consoling themselves that, in an age of iconoclasm, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme” (Sonnet, 111). The consciousness that, as Louis Montrose argues, experience of plays might provide an alternative to “the ritual practices and popular religious festivities of late medieval Catholic culture”, had a special appeal, that is to say, for those who most needed “a substitute for the metaphysical aid of the medieval church”, because they could not find one in the ceremonies of the Protestant state.16 More specifically, the very notion of a displacement of relics by scripts, or the corpse of an author by the corpus of a work, was bound up, according to Arthur Marotti, with the Catholic discovery, “after relics came under attack, from the late 1530s, when the shrine of Beckett was destroyed and the saint’s bones scattered”, that the object of their worship could become a text, as it already was for Protestants.17 In this hermeneutic, Shakespearean drama could become 12. Mercurius Britannicus, September 2, 1644: see Ernest Sirluck, “Shakespeare and Jonson among the Pamphleteers of the First Civil War: Some Unreported Seventeenth-Century Allusions”, Modern Philology 53 (1955), p. 94. 13. John Milton, “An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatic Poet, W. Shakespeare”, prefixed to the Second Folio of the Works (London, 1632). 14. Leonard Digges, “To the Memory of the Deceased Author, Master William Shakespeare”, prefixed to the First Folio of Shakespeare’s Works (London, 1623). 15. William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633), ed. by Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland, 1974), p. 934. 16. Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 30-31. 17. Arthur Marotti, “Southwell’s Remains: Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern England”, in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, ed. by Cedric Brown / Arthur Marotti (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 53.

Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries

139

not merely the signifier of evacuated religion, “emptied out”, in Greenblatt’s phrase, of its original meaning, like the stains round a voided tomb,18 but a real presence that, for those able, like the popish young Milton, to understand its “Delphic lines”, filled the space formerly occupied by the now vanished remains of the English saints: Relics were, of course, one of the strong markers of difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. In one of the first proclamations of her reign, Queen Elizabeth ordered her clergy, “to the intent that all superstition crept into men’s hearts may vanish […] [to] take away, utterly extinct and destroy all shrines, covering of shrines, tables, candlesticks, rolls of wax, pictures, paintings, and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, walls, glasses, or windows within their churches and houses”. To this day, the centre of the English Church, Canterbury Cathedral, is marked by an absence, the space formerly occupied by the relics and shrine of Thomas a Becket. [Thus] the association of an author’s body with his body of work was more than a witty turn of phrase. It was historically grounded in the cultural conflicts and discourses of early modern England [when] the reverence for relics began to migrate into print culture, where the remains of a person were verbal.19

By installing the Shakespeare canon in the space vacated by relics of canonised saints, therefore, readers like Milton and Weever were not simply attributing Romanist tendencies to the plays. They were locating them just “this side idolatry”, in Jonson’s careful phrase, in the key theological division over the sacramentals of holy bread and water, transubstantiation of wine into blood, and cult of the dead. For these early worshippers of Shakespeare, it was as if his canonisation was a guarantee of the survival of Catholic ceremonial, which only required the minimum concession to the Protestant doctrine of faith. Such a position would be that of the Laudian Church. And it may not be coincidence that the moment when the dramatist achieved establishment status—among those new King’s Men appointed to attend James I as Grooms of the Chamber in the coronation procession on March 4, 1604—was also the time of the genesis of the Shakespearean play which stages the downfall of one who lacks that modicum of faith, unless “his eyes had seen the proof” in a “magic” piece of cloth (Othello, 1.1.28; 3.4.367). The Tragedy Othello the Moor of Venice, which was acted for the court at Whitehall on November 1, All Saints’ Day, 1604, was the first of two dramas, along with The Tempest in 1611, which seem crafted to reflect upon the Hallowmas themes of martyrdom and mourning, and the fact that the Gospel of the day is the Beatitudes, with the King’s personal motto, “Blessed are the peacemakers”, and prayers for those “that suffer persecution”.20 In The Tempest the exiled Prospero turns away from the popish “trumpery” he has kept hidden in his house, and accepts that “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” for oppressions past (4.1.186; 5.1.27-8). But in Othello the freed slave continues to sanctify the “antique token” (5.2.223) inherited from his ancestors, and makes this “handkerchief / Which [he] so loved” (5.2.50-1) into a fetish with which to persecute 18. Greenblatt (1990), p. 126. 19. Marotti (1997), pp. 52-53. 20. Matthew, 5:1; see R. Chris Hassel, Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 167-170. It follows that the interpretation of this essay is incompatible with Ernst Honigmann’s dating of the play to 1601-2: see his Appendix to the Arden 3 edition (London: Nelson, 1999), pp. 344-350.

140

Richard Wilson

the innocent and “rack” himself (340). So, there are manifest connections in these two plays with the rituals of Hallowmas, which traditionally included the processional display of relics of the saints. But the fact that in each one Shakespeare situated himself so emphatically on “this side idolatry” also relates them to the context of Jacobean religious politics, and to hopes for Catholic emancipation which, at the time of Othello, had never been more contingent on the readiness of the persecuted to relinquish their worship of those bloodstained remainders of their hungry ghosts. For a year later, the same feast would be the trigger for the fundamentalists’ Gunpowder Plot.

II The summer of Othello was a season of unique opportunity for English Catholics. The king suspended recusancy fines, and in August an embassy from Spain arrived at Somerset House, Queen Anne’s palace, which had been vacated for negotiations. Crowds lined the Thames, as courtiers, disguised with carnival masks, applauded the Spaniards from gondolas. After decades of war between England and Spain, James’s ambition to be Rex Pacificus, the peacemaker of Europe, promised not only a solution to the continent’s sectarian divisions, but by implication, toleration for English Catholics. Yet fireworks were followed by the game of poker that has been frozen for ever in the different kind of relic retained by the chief English negotiator, Robert Cecil, the group-portrait of the conference attributed to John de Critz. In this painting, old enemies confront each other without exchanging eyes, gazing into air rather than revealing thoughts about the treaty they have signed, which sits on the table before the ever-patient Cecil. In fact, their accord opened Europe to English goods, as quid pro quo for the peace Spain needed, but produced not a word about religious freedom, which Cecil staked against “the central English claim, to trade in the East and West Indies”.21 No wonder the minister’s colleagues look dissatisfied. For his team includes two Catholic fellow-travellers, or ‘schismatics’, Richard Sackville and Charles Blount, and the most conspicuous of all the court Catholics, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton. The Earl, invaluable to the regime as “a Catholic willing to serve any government cause”,22 has a card literally up his sleeve, however, in this picture, which is a paper he half conceals; while opposite, the Spanish ambassador, Juan de Tassis, has not quite withdrawn the offer crushed into his hand. Each engages the viewer as if tempting speculation about business unresolved. What this might have entailed was signalled at the ensuing banquet, when the head of the Spanish delegation, the Duke of Frias, presented the king and queen with goblets packed with pearls, from which he had toasted their healths.23 Though “to some, including the Pope, 21. Linda Levy Peck, Northampton: Patronage and Policy at the Court of James I (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 106. 22. Ibid., p. 105. See Alan Haynes’ description of Northampton, in The Gunpowder Plot: Faith in Rebellion (Stroud: Sutton, 1994), as “a perfect specimen of cultivated aristocratic villainy”, p. 32. 23. G. P. V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant: The Court of King James I (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962), p. 62.

Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries

141

it was abhorrent, the question of buying liberty of conscience” was indeed the subject of the memorandum drafted by Tassis, calculating just how much treasure of the Indies would suffice to purchase a decree.24 So, Howard (who had accepted jewels worth 6,000 felipes and a pension of 3,000 for life) seems to signify through his tantalising gesture with the document that might, or might not, be an edict of toleration, that the consequence for his co-religionist of clinging to relics of the past would truly be the loss of a jewel of great price:25 Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely but too well, Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe. (Othello, 5.2.352-57)

The inconclusive Treaty of London was signed on August 19, 1604, and from August 9 to 27 the King’s Men were paid two shillings a day to wait on the Spanish. We do not know whether they acted at the palace on the Strand, but Park Honan thinks “this unrewarding time” produced in Othello a work self-conscious about the value of an acting troupe.26 Yet someone paid Shakespeare, we could infer, more than all his tribe, as the occasion of his tragedy was a moment when the sacramental question he stages—of “ocular proof” as opposed to “an essence that’s not seen” (3.3.365; 4.1.16)—had never been more loaded or more “base”. For the “pearl of great price” had been the Biblical metaphor adopted by the Jesuit Edmund Campion, in his disguise as a jeweller, for martyrdom.27 In this text, however, the spirit of the treaty seems to dictate that the symbol of the Catholic martyr has been perverted into a sacrifice squandered through loving “not wisely but too well”. So, like the boy “stol’n from an Indian king” as a royal ward in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.1.22), the “base Indian” of Othello’s suicide speech enacts the selfinflicted punishment of those who persist “Indian-like”, as Helena calls her idolatry, “Religious in […] error” (All’s Well, 1.3.188-9). Protestants habitually denigrated Catholics for being “as ignorant of the true god as the Indians of Virginia” in their worship of relics;28 and the flash of the image in Othello caps a series of strikes at the folly of those “As 24. Antonia Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), pp. 78-9. 25. Mark Nicholls, Investigating the Gunpowder Plot (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 149. 26. Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 312. 27. Matthew, 23:45-6; Richard Simpson, Edmund Campion (London: John Hodges, 1896), p. 172 et passim. For recent influential readings of the play in terms of the evidential problem of ‘ocular proof’, see Joel Altman, “‘Preposterous Conclusions’: Eros, Enargeia, and the Composition of Othello”, Representations, 18 (1987), 129S-157; Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), pp. 104-127; and Patricia Parker, “Dilation and Deletion in Othello”, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 54-74. 28. Sir Benjamin Rudyerd in the House of Commons, 1628; see J. E. C. Hill, “The Puritans and the ‘Dark Corners’ of the Land”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 13 (1963), pp. 96-97.

142

Richard Wilson

ignorant as dirt” (5.2.171) which seems so one-sided an “attack on Catholic misunderstandings of the sacraments” that it has been tempting to read the play as “protestant propaganda”, on a par with Samuel Harsnett’s lumping of papists with “the silly Indian nation, that falls down and performs divine adoration to a rag of red cloth”.29 But this is to forget how the metaphor of the pearl must have worked two ways for a Whitehall audience: as a signifier, like pearls stolen from enslaved Indians and paid to Catholic courtiers, of religious freedom, and a token of the sacrifice of the martyrs now to be pawned by their own ‘tribe’. If Shakespeare had taken the offer of toleration brokered by the Earl of the painting without hesitation, he would indeed have written to “make his audience into more committed Protestants”.30 But, in fact, he was living in a society which could adore a Roman rag as well as despise an Indian pearl, and so he wrote a tragedy about someone “Perplexed in the extreme”. Performed during a religious crisis, before an audience vigilant to possible allegory, Othello looks back to the era of sectarian wars, when Catholic resistance would have incited the reprisals relished by Graziano, who reflects that had the old man been alive, his daughter’s death would have made Brabanzio “do a desperate turn, / Yea, curse his better angel from his side, / And fall to reprobance” (214-16). In the morality play of Jacobean politics, however, the “good angel” of Christian love personified by Desdemona was no longer threatened by diehard Puritanism, but by “the blacker devil” (5.2.140) of papist revanchism Othello claims to detect, when he plays the Roman game called mora and reads the future in her palm: “this hand of yours requires / A sequester from liberty; fasting, and prayer, / Much castigation, exercise devout, / For here’s a young and sweating devil here / That commonly rebels”. Even this veteran, it seems, would like to indulge King James’ project, realised in 1611, to ensure that while “hearts of old gave hands […] our new heraldry is hands, not hearts” (3.4.37-45), as he alludes to the badge of a red hand, signifying a baronet, added to arms of Catholic gentry who renounced the violence commemorated in their relics, by subsidising Ulster Protestants. But though a “devout and politically disengaged Catholicism” of the kind imagined by Othello had been valorised through the nun Isabella of Measure for Measure,31 in this tragedy there is no escape from the activism of the ‘young devil’ whose name identifies him with Catholic zealotry, and the pilgrim route to the shrine of Santiago, Saint James of Compostela. In fact, worship of Iago had a particular history for Londoners, as the hand of this saint had been one of those donated by ‘hearts of old’ when it was enshrined at Reading Abbey, which had been the scene of a passionate cult in its own right.32 That “saints have hands 29. Robert Watson, “Othello as Protestant Propaganda”, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. by Claire McEachern / Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 234257; Samuel Harsnett, Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London: 1603), sig. A2v-A3r, quoted ibid., p. 247. 30. Watson (1997), p. 237. 31. Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Professional Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 169. 32. David Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 222.

Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries

143

that pilgrims’ hands do touch” (Romeo, 1.5.96), because so many were preserved,33 was a macabre consideration for Shakespeare, who lent Helena the “zealous fervour” of “Saint Jaques’ pilgrim” (All’s Well, 3.4.4-11), and may have had in mind the “ayeremaining lamps […] Lying with simple shells” at Compostela for the tomb of Thaisa (Pericles, 3.1.61). In Othello, moreover, editors note, Iago is affiliated with the most morbid aspect of Saint James, as defender of Christendom and the slayer of the Moors.34 And it was the cult of the Basque idol as Santiago Matamoros which also inspired his near-namesake and fanatical countryman: the maimed soldier, street-fighter, and Jesuit founder, Inigo de Loyola.35

III “It was a handkerchief, an antique token / My father gave my mother”, Othello insists, that caused his downfall; and if this “recognizance and pledge of love” is invested in this play “with a solemn earnestness— / More than indeed belonged to such a trifle” (223-35), then that is because it is so saturated with the supplementary meaning of its tribal provenance. In an essay on “The Phoenix and the Turtle” and the Sonnets as meditations on the hermeneutics of sacrifice, Richard McCoy has described Shakespeare’s perspective on such relics as “cool and aloof” or “profoundly politique”, yet awed by “the terrible logic of martyrdom”, that death is the truest test of faith. For “the dust and bones of martyrs and implements of their torture and death” are signs that Shakespeare could recognise, according to McCoy, “of a spiritual victory over physical dismemberment and destruction […] They are the antithesis of a momento mori”, having been rescued from the grave and encased in splendour, and it is the lasting capacity of these objects “to stimulate emotion that is the source of their power”.36 But as Othello shows, that emotional supplement could itself be seen as a misrecognition and form of excess. Thus, although we cannot know what will become of Iago’s heart when it has been ripped out by the executioner, for Jesuitical “daws to peck at”, as he predicts (1.1.65), shades of his counterpart, Father Garnet will appear eighteen months later, in Macbeth, when the ghost of the hanged priest enters, in the mind of the Porter, carrying its own entrails and “napkins enough” (2.3.5), to claim responsibility for King Duncan’s death. 33. Among the Elizabethan martyrs whose hands are still preserved are Margaret Clitheroe, Ambrose Barlow and Francis Ingleby. In the seventeenth century the ‘Holy Hand’ of Edmund Arrowsmith became the focus of a major Lancashire cult: see Camm (1910), p. 369, 187-201. 34. See, in particular, Barbara Everett, “Spanish Othello: the Making of Shakespeare’s Moor”, Shakespeare Survey 35 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 103; Francois Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 291; and Watson (1997), p. 237. 35. For Loyola’s Iago-like career and his brawl at the Venice carnival, see David Mitchell, The Jesuits: A History (London: Macdonald, 1980), pp.22-29. 36. Richard McCoy, “Love’s Martyrs: Shakespeare’s Phoenix and the Turtle and the Sacrificial Sonnets”, in McEachern / Shuger (1997), pp. 198, 203-204.

144

Richard Wilson

The scene is a satanic burlesque of the mania after the priest’s execution, when “Garnet’s straw” (an ear of corn supposedly imprinted with his face), napkins stained with his blood, and the silk hose he wore to the scaffold, were “esteemed of more than their weight in gold” by Romanist zealots. “Set upon a pole” on London Bridge, Garnet’s parboiled head became the object of adoration for “citizens flocking thither in their hundreds”, until it was “turned upwards” for the crows.37 So, though Malcolm will have Macbeth’s head “upon a pole” (5.10.26; SD: 5.11.19), its tribal status is as incalculable as that of Garnet’s remains, which Shakespeare imagines desecrated by a drunken clown. The only certainty about relics, the plays suggest, is that so long as they exist their semiotic remainder will be too much, like that of the false ‘miracle’ at St Alban’s shrine in 2HenryVI (2.1); or of the napkins, nails and body parts used by Jesuits in exorcisms to induce demoniacs to “frame themselves, jump and fit unto the priests’ humours, to mop, mow, jest, rave, roar, commend and discommend, upon fitting occasions”,38 in foaming convulsions of the kind suffered by Othello, when in an abreaction (or premonition) of the scaffold, Iago instructs him in the ‘shadowing passion’ of the handkerchief: Handkerchief—confessions—handkerchief. To confess and be hanged for his labour. First to be hanged and then to confess! I tremble at it. Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus! Pish! Noses, ears, and lips! Is’t possible? Confess? Handkerchief? O devil! [He falls down in a trance] (Othello, 4.1.36-41)

“To confess and be hanged”: “It comes o’er my memory”, says Othello of the effect of the spotted handkerchief, “As doth the raven o’er the infectious house, / Boding to all!” (20-2). And although we never learn how his father is supposed to have acquired it before he gave it to his mother, it may be as a result of Jesuitical ‘instruction’ that he contradicts himself when he also claims the “handkerchief / Did an Egyptian to my mother give” (3.4.53-5). For what his “napkin […] light as air” (3.3.325-6) accumulates by this Romany association is the symbolic weight of those “tinctures, stains [and] relics” which, as Caesar’s killers learn, noble “Romans” “press” to retrieve from scenes of martyrdom (Julius, 2.2.89). Othello’s epileptic revolt against his vows is cued, that is to say, by a recollection which must also have come over the memory of the audience, of how “Romans” “go and kiss” a martyr’s body, “And dip their napkins in his sacred blood” (3.2.129). As Gary Wills remarks, Shakespeare’s stage handkerchiefs inevitably carry such ‘Romany’ connotations, as “handkerchiefs were associated with the emptying of all a man’s blood in the savage castrating, disembowelling, and quartering of hanged bodies of traitors”, when because “there could be no containment” of the bloodbath, pious Catholics felt compelled “to dip handkerchiefs and other bits of cloth” in the precious fluid to salvage every drop. Thus, whether or not he witnessed the execution of Jesuits 37. Simpson (1896), p. 247; Philip Caraman, The Lost Paradise: An Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay, 1607-1768 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1975), pp. 439, 443-447. 38. Harsnett (1603), p. 38; quoted in Greenblatt (1990), p. 107.

Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries

145

like Campion, “the picture of people trying to sop up blood for relics with handkerchiefs, or any cloth at hand”, was clearly “napkins enough” for this dramatist, which explains why these ‘trifles’ are made to carry an ‘earnestness’ in his work that would have been suspect to Protestants.39 For what Shakespeare stages is also what appals historians, namely the effluvium of excess meaning from items that look “embarrassingly domestic”, or even, “from a politique angle, tragically absurd”.40 But that this supplement is so surplus to requirement, from such an angle, becomes the motor of the plot, as in episodes like the Forum scene, Jesuitical demagogues wring “gracious drops” from pathetic objects such as “Caesar’s vesture wounded” (Julius, 3.2.188-90). However close he came to those Jesuit exorcists, who trained in a Roman college where “paintings of the torture chamber and scaffold adorned each room”, and at the time of Julius Caesar installed the toga of Loyola at the centre of their cult,41 Shakespeare’s is a drama continuously alive to the fatal ‘Romany’ propensity to sacralise tribal hatred by projecting “confirmations strong / As holy writ’ onto the tissue of “Trifles light as air” (Othello, 3.3.326-8), or “a twist of rotten silk” (Coriolanus, 5.6.98): That handkerchief Did an Egyptian to my mother give. She was a charmer, and could almost read The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it ’Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father Entirely to her love; but if she lost it, Or made a gift of it, my father’s eye Should hold her loathed […] (Othello, 3.4.53-60)

When Orlando sends Rosalind the “bloody napkin” used to stanch his arm after “The lioness had torn some flesh away, / Which all this while had bled”, the questions posed are those that prompt critics of the later play, of “why, and where / This handkerchief was stained” (As You, 4.3.92-6; 145-7). Rosalind faints at “this napkin / Dyed in his blood”, and though we are told that “Many swoon when they do look on blood”, Celia’s instinct that “There is more in it” (153-8) seems apt for a collapse that has the same importance as the unconsciousness into which Othello falls at the thought of his “handkerchief / Spotted with strawberries” (3.3.439). For given the royal status of that lioness, Orlando’s sanguinary keepsake carries an imprint of martyrdom redundant in a comedy, like debris from the Histories. In 3Henry VI, for 39. Gary Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 99-100, where Wills points out that Harsnett ridiculed the Catholic collection of “sops for blood”. 40. Dympna Callaghan, Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), p. 35; McCoy (1997), p. 198. 41. Claire Cross, “An Elizabethan Martyrologist and his Martyr: John Mush and Margaret Clitheroe”, in Martyrs and Martyrologies: Papers read at the 1992 and 1993 meetings of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. by Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 276; Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “The Art of Salvation in Bavaria”, in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, ed. by John O’Malley / Gauvin Bailey / Steven Harris / Frank Kennedy (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999), p. 588.

146

Richard Wilson

instance, Margaret’s savagery is eternalised in the napkin “stained with the blood […] from the bosom” of the child Rutland, who, his father swears, “cannibals / Would not have stained with blood”. But when she gives him this “napkin steeped in harmless blood”, York makes it his comforter in death: “See, ruthless Queen […] This cloth thou dipped’st in blood of my sweet boy, / And I with tears do wash the blood away” (1,4,80-2; 157-9; 2,1,61-2). Much later, the talisman is still treasured by the Yorkists to incite revenge: “present to her, as sometimes Margaret / Did to thy father, steeped in Rutland’s blood, / A handkerchief which, say to her, did drain / The purple sap from her sweet brother’s body” (Richard III, 4.4.260-3). The Marian excess of such “incensing relics” (All’s Well, 5.3.25) is explicit in Love’s Labour’s Lost, with the “dish-clout of Jaquenetta’s” Don Armado “wears next to his heart” as a penance “enjoined him in Rome” (5.2.696-7). But what intrigues feminists is how these “bloody napkins” are all stigmatised as female in this way, coded by the incontinence that soils them with the superflux that gushes as a “crimson river of warm blood” (Titus, 2.4.22) in the despised supplement of menstruation. Thus, Caesar’s corpse, “spouting blood in many pipes / In which so many smiling Romans bathed” (Julius, 2.2.85-6); or Duncan’s, pouring “so much blood” that “all great Neptune’s ocean” will never wash the “damned spot” (Macbeth, 2.2.58; 5.1.30-4), can be attributed to Calphurnia or Lady Macbeth, for what is at stake in this haemorrhaging, Gail Paster remarks, is “anxiety that in bleeding the male body resembles the body of a woman”.42 In the case of Othello, Valerie Wayne connects this misogyny specifically to the Tridentine Catholic fear of married sexual excess.43 So, it is to the point that in a play which features the unfolding of a handkerchief as the signifier of loving “too well”, and which stages the exorbitance of those who fail to fold away the surplus of “napkins enough”, the very names of the protagonist toy with this embarrassing superfluity, as that of one who “Sees and knows more, much more than […] unfolds” (3.3.248), but by cutting his own throat, imagines that he can finally put a “bloody period” (5.2.366) to the swallowing more of Venus: EMILIA: O thou dull Moor, that handkerchief thou speak’st of I found by fortune and did give my husband, For often, with a solemn earnestness – More than indeed belonged to such a trifle – He begged of me to steal’t. (5.2.232-6)

The Renaissance handkerchief has been interpreted as an artefact which both “helped to produce the patriarchal ideology that figured women as ‘leaky,’ and complicated this by 42. Gail Kern Paster, “‘In the spirit of men there is no blood’: Blood as Trope of Gender in Julius Caesar”, in“Julius Caesar”: New Casebook, ed. by Richard Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 153; and “Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy”, in The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 25. 43. Valerie Wayne, “Historical Differences: Misogyny in Othello”, in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. by Valerie Wayne (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1991), pp. 166-167.

Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries

147

transferring ‘leakiness’ to men.44 Thus, with one of Shakespeare’s “bloody napkins” there is always ‘more in it’ to exude signification. So, Othello’s stigma as ‘the Moor’ writes him into an indelible and ceaseless tide of unclean interpretation. And in a riposte to Thomas Rymer’s sarcasm that Othello is “a warning to all wives, that they look well to their linen”, Dympna Callaghan counters that the injunction was of deep significance to a culture that reified sexual control in the ‘ocular proof’ of wedding sheets, and for which Desdemona’s napkin would “constitute a miniature of the nuptial linen, bearing as berries the bloodstains of marital defloration”. This heirloom belongs, that is to say, within the trousseau of uncanny fabrics “produced, preserved, and accumulated over generations’ by female labour, which besides “bed hangings, cushions, towels, and table cloths”, included textiles that were inscriptions of the blood “irreducibly attached to feminity”: such as Veronica’s Veil, the cloth with which the woman cured by Jesus of a flux of blood had wiped his face on the way to Calvary, which became the object of a hysterical cult at St Peter’s in Rome. With that relic, the attribution of male violence to female contamination was inscribed in the bloodstained impress of Christ’s face.45 And in Othello the same gendering of sectarian excess as matriarchal in origin is effected with the unstoppable semiotic bleeding that flows from the word ‘Moor’, and that marks drama’s most egregious stage property with connotations that, to original audiences, might have suggested how there was literally ‘more in it’, in the bloody imprint of the name of Catholic England’s prime hero, memorialised by his female heirs as a pretext for continued resistance: Thomas More, no less. For the idea that Jacobeans would hear in the ‘Moorish’ subtitle and ‘murmuring’ wordplay of Othello an allusion to the man whose name meant ‘increase’, and an analogy paralleling the ‘morosity’ of the ‘dull Moor’ with the ‘moronic’ politics of the ‘tribe of More’, is confirmed by Thomas Docherty’s analysis of the poetry of More’s actual descendant, John Donne, where we are reminded that More’s name became an iconic incitement for Catholic ultras, as a result of the torrent of hagiography that issued, from the day of his execution, with Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (punning on Greek and Latin, morias / morus, for dullard / fool), and with the martyr’s oxymoron, as he bound his eyes with the handkerchief preserved by his daughters, that God would judge whether he was “a foolish wiseman or a wise fool” for “demurring” at the King’s divorce: It has been rightly stressed that Donne was descended from the family of Thomas More […] Might it be also be apposite to suggest that Donne is writing a concealed ‘praise of More’, and, by the slightest of anagrammatical shifts which is startlingly appropriate to the name of More, a praise of Rome, or of Roman 44. Will Fisher, “Handkerchiefs and Early Modern Ideologies of Gender”, Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000), 199-207, esp. pp. 201-3. See also Diana O’Hara, “The Language of Tokens and the Making of Marriage”, Rural History (1992), 1-40; and Stephanie Dickey, “Women Holding Handkerchiefs in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portraits”, Beeld en zeefbeeld in de Nederlandse kuns, 1550-1750 [Image and Self-Image in Netherlandish Art, 1550-1750]: Kunsthistorich Jarrboek, 46, ed. by Reindert Falkenburg / Jan de Jong / Herman Roodenburg / Fritz Scholten (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 1995), pp. 336-340. 45. Dympna Callaghan, “Looking Well to Linens: Women and Cultural Production in Othello and Shakespeare’s England”, in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. by Jean Howard / Scott Shershow (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 57. For the cult of “Veronica’s Veil” see Farmer (1987), p. 422; and E. Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism and Structure of a Love Image (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

148

Richard Wilson Catholicism? […] The ghost of More, as it were, echoes in many ‘more-more-ings’ or murmurings, alerting critics to the ‘impurities’ that reveal residual Roman Catholicism in Donne’s verse […] But in so far as Donne owes a great debt to the name ‘More’ and all its close analogies with ‘Rome’, it becomes clear that Donne’s covert praises of Rome through the name of More, at a time when he was an Anglican preacher […] produces a ‘more’, an excess, which threatens to undo the confessor, [and] approaches the condition of morias, of folly.46

Donne’s uncle, Ellis Heywood, commemorated their ancestor in a drama that played up the polymorphic possibilities of the family name, Il Moro, the title of which implied what one of its characters says, that the phrase memento mori would “put me in mind not of death, but of you, Mr More”.47 But for the apostate Dean of St Paul’s, according to Docherty, the mark of ‘More’ became a signifier of an embarrassment of hermeneutic riches, the moribund surplus and extramural extreme, or foolish supplement, that was the left-over of his Catholic past. And that Shakespeare, as a similar conformist, may have shared this embarrassment over the Italian mora of ultramontane Romanism is suggested by the profuse punning throughout his work on ‘more’ not only as a code for Rome, and the Latin amor, but as “that black word ‘death’” (Romeo, 3.3.27). As one of the Montagues, a family that in Tudor England married into the Mores, Romeo may be expected to carry this morose inheritance, for instance, in a play which stages his “death-marked love” (Pro, 9) via two other connotations of the martyr’s name: the “mural” or wall that divides “two households” (Pro,1; 1.1.12-18); and the ‘demurral’ or delay that makes his heritage so untimely. Thus, it is morbid of Romeo to haunt “the grove of sycamore” (1.1.114), as this moors his story in the Ovidian myth of the tree conflated with this arbor morus: the mulberry, with fruit dyed purple in Pyramus’s blood, whose Latin name, morum, meant that in England it was called the morel, morberry, or more tree. For More had planted a mulberry as his emblem, and so the tale of Thisbe and her “paramour”, who died “tarrying by mulberry shade” (Dream, 4.2.12; 5.1.147), was moralised as a fable of his self-mortifying devotee, the poor soul “sighing by a sycamore tree” of Desdemona’s song, who “murmured her moans […] ‘Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve’” (Othello, 4.3.38-50). The very title of Ovid’s Metamorphoses begged such “a good moral” (Dream, 5.1.120); and all the mortal associations of the mulberry, as the symbol for the self-immolation of the ‘tribe of More’, are explored by Shakespeare in his fooling on the legend in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, recasting the theatre of martyrdom for “Lion, Moonshine, Wall, and Lovers twain” (149). As Patricia 46. Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 198-199, 235, 239. For More’s handkerchief, see Richard Marius, Thomas More (London: Weidenfeld, 1993), p. 514; and for the play on the “wise fool” or “fool of Christ” of 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, see ibid., p. 88, and Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare (London: Gollancz, 1964), pp. 27-34. And for ‘murmuring’ as the Tudor code for political and religious dissent, see also Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), pp. 31-33. 47. Ellis Heywood, Il Moro, ed. by R. L. Deakins, trans. by G. P. Marc’hadour (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 62. See also Dennis Rhodes, “Il Moro: An Italian View of Sir Thomas More”, in England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp, ed. by Edward Chaney / Peter Mack (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), pp. 67-72.

Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries

149

Parker has discovered, this text “goes out of its way to emphasize the links” between the mulberry, the fruit of the martyrs, and the surname More, with mortality, amour, demurral, and immurement;48 but its foolery demeans the “poor knight”, whose coat of arms bore the moor-cock, as a “dainty duck”, and his clandestine cult as the “murmuring”, through chinks in their wall, of those who moan “at Ninny’s tomb” (5.1.198). Evidently, Shakespeare could be as caustic about the “dreadful dole” over the great Catholic ‘Ninny’, Thomas More, as about the daughter of Anne Boleyn he calls old ‘Moonshine’ herself: But stay, O spite! But mark, poor knight, What dreadful dole is here? Eyes, do you see? How can it be? O dainty duck, O dear! Thy mantle good, What, stained with blood? (Dream, 5.1.265-72)

Shakespeare could share the Jesuit gallows joke that the “preyful Princess” would “an hundred make” for every martyr killed, “by adding one more [Roman] ‘l’” (Love’s, 4.2.58). And in a dazzling essay on editing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Parker explores the changes “rung on the name of More” she detects in this text, which by means of “the polysemic and overdetermined pun” morphs Ovid’s tragedy of the paramour and morberry into a comedy about the “drowned field”, “murrion flock”, mudded “morris”, and cheerless “mortals” (2.1.96-101) of the morass after More. In a society where the name of More was interchangeable with the superfluity of Rome, no one could be unaware, Parker argues, that in moralising the mortuary cultivation of the More tree, Shakespeare was fooling with the ‘Moorish’ mourning of the moronic tribe, to demolish the wall separating those who quarrel over the wardship of an Indian (or recusant) boy. Under the sign of Morpheus, god of dreams, Shakespeare’s mural comedy, becomes, on this view, prologue to an entire drama that mocks the self-immurement of those sophomores of St. Omer in the spirit of More, with a mordancy which comes of so much More mourning: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” (3.2.115). From Aaron’s Moorish blackening of “popish tricks and ceremonies” in a moribund Rome (Titus Andronicus, 5.1.76); through the idolatry of the Prince of Morocco (Merchant of Venice, 2.7); to Prospero’s threat to mortice Ariel if “thou more mumur’st” (The Tempest, 1.2.296), Shakespearean theatre is a sustained critique, according to Parker, of the mortgaged relics of the tribe of More. So, when her ‘paramour’ kills himself, nec mora, without pause, at sight of the blood-drenched mantle of a Thisbe who arrives too soon, “the story links amor and mors with mora or mulberries, in a plot that depends on mora or delay”, and “puns on the walls that figure so prominently”, with the ‘murmuring’ of lovers through the mortar, to demur from the prematurity of the martyrs in the politique terms of Sonnet 124: as “fools of 48. Patricia Parker, “What’s in a Name: and More”, Sederi 11 (2002), 101-149, esp. p. 117.

150

Richard Wilson

time”, who died for the goodness perpetuated in their cult, but lived for the treason that blackens their name. The mulberry is notorious for the indelibility and profusion of its juice. So, “now, purple with love’s wound”, the “little western flower” of English Catholicism (Dream, 2.1.167) has been metamorphosed, maugre the Tudor state, in this reading, by the blood of More. As Parker concludes (and James Joyce perceived), “something seems to be at work in such linkages”, and “given the network of contemporary punning on the name of More—so much more extensive than the familiar Moria or ‘Folly’—dismissing such speculations would be unwise”.49

V In his last days in Bohemia before returning to England on his mad crusade, Campion had a vision in a garden at Brno, when “the Blessed Virgin appeared to him in a mulberry tree, and exhibited to him a purple cloth, which he understood to be the sign that he was to shed his blood for religion”.50 The purple cloth, spotted with mulberry juice, had become so manifest a symbol of martyrdom that for the “Morians” who elected to be “God almighty’s fools”51 there could be no stronger proof that “the blood of martyrs shed” was “the plenteous seed of Christ” and “the fruitful liquor” to win England to the Church.52 So, it is significant that in the tragedy the mortal relic which is Desdemona’s “first remembrance of the Moor” (3.3.295) is expressly connected with the More tree, having been woven from silk and therefore produced by worms that fed off the mulberry, which explains why Othello claims that “The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk”. No wonder he maintains that “There is magic in the web of it” (3.4.6771), nor that Emilia and Cassio both immediately want to have “the work ta’en out” (3.3.300; 3.4.174), a task Bianca spurns (4.1.145-50). The text is ambiguous about whether this means the moresca embroidery will be copied, or removed according to the Anglican demand that Catholics ceased “to dye garments in blood”.53 But the strawberry pattern with which it was “spotted” (3.3.440) is again explicitly associated, as Othello rages, with martyrs’ “blood, blood, blood!” (354), by being “dyed in mummy, which the skilful / Conserved of maidens’ hearts” (3.4.72-3). To Bianca, and feminists who see only hymeneal connotations,54 these blood-spots imply “some minx’s token” (4.1.147). But since strawberries were classed as types of ‘morel’ (a word, according to the OED, given to “any dark-complexioned fruit”), the morello stains are equally sug49. Ibid., p. 145; James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 212-216. 50. Simpson (1896), p. 104. 51. Robert Southwell, quoted in Peter Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1973), p. 60: “We, like God almighty’s fools (as some scornfully call us), lay our shoulders under every load”. 52. John Mush and an anonymous tribute to Campion, quoted in Cross (1993), p. 277. 53. Richard Hooker, Complete Works, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1948), vol. 3, p. 527. 54. See, for instance, Lynda Boose, “Othello’s Handkerchief: The Recognizance and Pledge of Love”, English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975), 360-375.

Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries

151

gestive, in contrast to what Cassio calls “vile guesses”, of the murrain harvest sown, as he says, from “the devil’s teeth” (179): a term directed at the Jesuit “hydra”, and the Society’s vaunt that while “dead men bite not”, a martyr “bites with his friends’ teeth”.55 Even Othello admits the fatal cloth was “sewed” by “a sibyl” in a trance of “prophetic fury” (3.4.68-70); and it is this history of crazed Marianism which ties the relic to the celebration of the real More, sacrificed to Venus for decrying the dirty wedding-sheets of the “minx” Boleyn, which centred on his blood-spotted blindfold and hairshirt, venerated by generations of Mores after being salvaged by the kinswomen who dressed his corpse, and entrusted for safe-keeping to the Canonesses of Louvain.56 For as he was himself “the great champion of the cult of the saints and doctrine of Purgatory”,57 preservation of More mementoes became a furious act of symbolic wall-building in the century after his execution, through a mortuary cult which, in the absence of an actual body and a tomb, reconfigured the whole of English Catholicism as, in effect, a morgue: The killers employed by Henry VIII were not so foolish as to leave Thomas More’s body lying in a church. More was beheaded on Tower Hill and his body was buried in the Tower. More’s daughter and foster-daughter bore away his bloodstained shirt […] But with no tomb or shrine there could be no pilgrimages, no public ceremonies. The cult of More developed instead in the privacy of the recusant family. Deprived of a body, a public site, a shrine, the cult centred instead around substitute bodies, metaphors for the body, or even metaphors themselves […]. In this standoff between prohibition and subterfuge, the economy of sacred death was transformed. The realm of icon worship was driven into the interior space of private devotion, enveloped by a new public world of iconoclasm.58

The hallowed relic of Thomas More’s winding-sheet had been bought, hagiographers marvelled, from a linen shop beside the Tower.59 Editors who find that in Othello “domestic affairs get in the way of official duties” in fact define the English Reformation, which turned on opposing treatments of laundry, like bridal sheets and holy shrouds, and the demeaning of the name of More.60 “Is this the noble Moor whom our full senate / Call allin-all sufficient?” (4.1.261-2): the harping on this name “more fair than black” (2.3.289) makes it hard not to see similarities between the blackening of “his Moorship” (1.1.33), as one who has “done the state some service” (5.2.348), and that of the Tudor statesman whose name came to be “begrim’d and black” as itself (3.3.392) through the politics of treason. As Parker observes, “evocations of blackness” and “blackest sins” (2.3.325) connect the smearing of Othello as the “lascivious Moor” (1.1.127), or “lusty Moor” (2.1.283), with “mulberry’s emblematic staining”, while “the white evoked in ‘fair’ Des55. Quoted Simpson (1993), p. 462. 56. The shirt was subsequently transported by the Canonesses to Newton Abbot, where it remains; see Camm (1910), pp. 349-350, 364, 372, 377. 57. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 381. For an account of More and the cult of the dead, see also Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 134-150. 58. Hulse (1994), pp. 190-225, esp. pp. 208, 224-225. 59. E. E. Reynolds, The Field is Won: The Life and Death of Saint Thomas More (London: Burns & Oates, 1968), pp. 379-380. 60. Honigmann (1999), p. 73, n. 2.

152

Richard Wilson

demon (or Bianca) is blackened as the play proceeds”.61 But “the black man” (as Erasmus called ‘the noble More’) had, in fact, himself revelled in his ‘Indian’ negritude, when he claimed descent from the very Moor of Venice, the black Doge, Cristofero Moro—whose arms were spotted with mulberries—on whom Shakespeare based this plot.62 So, in the “echo-chamber” of Othello, Parker argues, the “sick amor” dirge of the “maid called Barbary”, who “died singing it”, hanged, “her head all at one side”, when “he she loved proved mad” (4.3.25-30), cues an infernal chain of associations with Mauretania, Moors, skulls, and death, as the plot carries Desdemona, enthralled to a black amor, into the moraine of night.63 Above More’s empty tomb, in Chelsea church, pilgrims must likewise face the dark humour of his crest: the head of a blackamoor impaled.64 This death’s-head is a reminder that More’s tribe devoutly pickled his actual head in spices, after they rescued it from London Bridge.65 But the question begged by Shakespeare’s rewriting of their story as a drama bound for Hades is why he chose, at the instant of a moratorium, to give a grim riposte to communion with the skull of “the King’s jester”, in the objection that to address the dust of such a “whoreson mad fellow […]’Twere to consider too curiously” (Hamlet, 5.1.162-90). The answer is that there had never been a moment when their addiction to the morphine of mourning would cost the ‘tribe of More’ so much; nor when “the will to see things as they are not”, which T. S. Eliot noted in Othello’s selfpity,66 would be so dependent on more preservatives; like the myrrh in which his putrefying head was mummified, and that trickling from those sightless sockets, must have provided Shakespeare with a final pun, in the ghastly morbidezza of the Moor as: […] one whose subdued eyes Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinable gum. (5.2.357-60)

“Dyed in mummy”, the black tar, rich in myrrh, that “the skilful / Conserved” (3.4.72-3) from embalmed bodies, Othello’s handkerchief comes, with his sob-story, to signify the morosity of the ‘tribe of More’, and morbidity of their cult of death. There is another painting, a counterpart to the record of the Spanish treaty, which corresponds perfectly to the suicidal woe of Shakespeare’s Moor, and helps locate this lachrymosity within the “uneasy but sincere conflict of loyalties” afflicting “the great majority of Catholics” on 61. Parker (2002), pp. 133-134. 62. Ibid., p. 107; Domenico Regi, Vita di Tommasso Moro (Venice, 1675), quoted in G. P. Marc’hadour, “A Name for All Seasons”, in Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More, ed. by R. S. Sylvester / G. P. Marc’hadour (Hamden, Conn.: Anchor Books, 1977), p. 545. See also Moreana, 474-8 (1975), pp. 4 and 72. 63. Parker (2002), pp. 133-135. 64. Notes and Queries, 4th Series, 4 (1869), p. 61; Frank and Majie Padberg, Moreana: Material for the Study of Saint Thomas More (Los Angeles: Loyola University Press, 1964), pp. 246-247. 65. For the migrations of More’s head, see Hulse (1994), pp. 223-225. 66. T. S. Eliot, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca”, in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1953), pp. 130-131.

Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries

153

the eve of the Gunpowder Plot.67 This is the group-portrait of five generations of the Mores commissioned in 1593 by Thomas More II, as an elaboration of the picture of the Chancellor and his family painted by Holbein. In this lugubrious icon, Catherine Belsey observes, the intimacy of Holbein’s sitters, “unaware they are being watched”, is succeeded by the self-dramatising zeal of “the threatened descendants of a Catholic martyr”, who react to persecution by staring defiantly at the viewer, as if humanism gives way to “a declaration of unbroken allegiance” to Rome.68 In Rowland Lockey’s picture, the survivors of the clan are gaunt with grief, and brandish Catholic missals or medals of the hero, in an act of ancestor-worship that “explicitly constitutes the community of faithful as the More family”, and can only be viewed as the signal of Counter-Reformation fervour and political resistance.69 Here then, in the necrophilia of fanatics, was the reaction to peace-making by King James. And it may be that, as Greenblatt writes, “Shakespeare, with his recusant background, education by teachers linked to Campion and Lancashire recusants, felt covert loyalty” to such sectarianism;70 in the same way that More’s kinsman, Donne, who also imaged “the Church’s grisly bric-a-brac” as necromancy, felt the family ties of one whose uncles each “possessed a half of More’s miraculous tooth”.71 This might be why Shakespeare planted a mulberry, and why legend has it that his own heart was buried under a mulberry, in his ancestral grounds at Wroxall Abbey, where Jane and Isabel Shakespeare had been among the last nuns.72 But, just as Donne’s texts can be said to undo More Rome,73 so Othello has to be read as a deconstruction of the Romish ‘cause’ (5.2.1) which identifies the tribe of faith by the amassing of ever more remains. What happens when a piece of cloth, such as a saint’s relic, is passed from church to playhouse, Shakespeare therefore shows, is not so much that it is desacralised, as that its violence is ‘taken out’. No wonder, however, that the critics accuse Othello of self-pity, since it is possible to see here an alibi for the entire Catholic community, in the feminisation of the cult of relics as witchcraft and the demonisation of their purveyor as “a devil in Jesuit habit”.74 For all the excuses that make Macbeth so self-justifying a character were latent in this play of 1604, a year before the Gunpowder Plot would for ever blacken the ‘tribe of More’ with its Roman name of “fool, fool, fool!” (5.2.333).

67. Catherine Hibbard, “Early Stuart Catholicism: Revisions and Re-Revisions”, Journal of Modern History 52 (1980), p. 21. 68. Catherine Belsey, “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies”, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. by John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 171. 69. Hulse (1994), p. 213. For Catholic missals as an instrument of Counter-Reformation militancy see Roger Chartier, A History of Private Life: III: The Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 74-75. 70. Greenblatt (2001), p. 254. 71. John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), pp. 44-45. 72. I am grateful to Michael Wood for information about this Warwickshire oral tradition. 73. Docherty (1986), pp. 191-193, 202-203, 235. 74. Etienne Pasquier, The Jesuits’ Catechism (London, 1602), sig. A2r, quoted in Watson (1997), p. 237.

This page intentionally left blank

THE LADY’S SUPPER: AEMILIA LANYER’S SALVE DEUS REX JUDAEORUM AS A FEMALE CELEBRATION OF THE EUCHARIST by Ina Schabert The Abbess bared her breast. She said: this is my body, which was broken and given for you, and this is my blood, which was shed for you. My body and blood gave you life and shall give you life and lead you to life and lead you back into life. I will pour out my riches upon you and give you my treasures and anoint you with my precious oils. Then you will be healed and mended and raised up, and I too shall be made whole and restored. Then each of the nuns came forward and kissed the Abbess’s breast, and let her mouth rest there, as though she was an infant being nursed by her mother. The Abbess in her depravity and wickedness called this a sacrament and the true sacrament of Holy Communion. Michèle Roberts, Flesh & Blood (London: Virago, 1995, p. 135)

Performances of the Sacred by God and Man The context for my reading of Lanyer’s poem is a theology of the performative. If we take performance to mean the acting out of a spiritual reality, translating it into the realm of the body, making it present in a specific, material action, we may then, within the sphere of Christianity, discern two kinds of performances of the sacred, namely those by God and those by human beings. God’s first performance is the Creation. In the beginning was the Word. The world came into being as the objectification of the Divine Word. The creation myth lays stress on the essentially performative, illocutionary quality of God’s language. God’s second performance is the Incarnation. The divine Word becomes flesh, is acted out in the human dimension. Human beings have responded to God’s performances in two contrary ways. On the one hand they attempt to reverse the divine procedure, longing for absolute purity and perfection. They try to transcend the world of things, to re-spiritualize what God has formed, has ‘spoken’ into matter. From the concrete reality, the historical and geographical diversity of the world, they aim to abstract God’s essential meaning. The material

156

Ina Schabert

world is read as God’s book. Similarly, the incarnation, God’s act of assuming human flesh, is interpreted as a purely spiritual mystery. Christ’s body is not to be adored as a presence in the host, much less taken in as food. These attitudes are characteristic of the Reformation, of the Reformers’ approach to life and their conception of the Eucharist. The alternative reaction consists in the imitation of God’s performances. Human beings strive to repeat them on a lower plane. With this intention, the human word is used to act upon the material world, to call things into being. Speech acts tend to be illocutionary, religious ceremony is valued over theological thought. Ritual observances are not, as in the first case, considered as diversions from truely spiritual concerns; on the contrary, they constitute the supreme moments when the divine manifests itself. The incarnation is held in high esteem, both as the basic Christian truth and as a principle of religious life. It is commemorated in actions which testify to the ‘Real Presence’ of the Lord, namely the Eucharist meal and the Corpus Christi procession. This frame of mind corresponds, roughly speaking, to the Roman Catholic mentality. The change from the latter attitude to the former, from imitating God’s performative acts to dissolving them as far as possible into spiritual truths, in other words, the change from ritual to hermeneutics, was one of the basic changes within the culture of Early Modern England. Specialists on the history of the Eucharist—such as Gregory Dix, Malcolm M. Ross, Edward Muir, Maggie Kilgour and Frank Lestringant1—agree on this. To quote Edward Muir: “The process of gaining access to the sacred shifted from experiencing the divine body through sight, touch and ingestion to interpreting the scriptural Word, a process that had wide-ranging implications for the status of ritual as well as for the mentality of lay believers”.2 The controversy over Christ’s words on the bread, hic est enim corpus meus, the question whether the est is to be read as ‘is’ or rather as ‘signifies’, whether Christ is present in the Eucharist or only to be remembered, has been recognized as a contention that concerns the status of language and ritual as such. Where the Protestant party, who opted for a mere representative function of the host, carried the day, the victory was paid for by a widening gap between word and thing, speech and act. As soon as the host no longer constitutes the ‘Real Presence’ of Christ and becomes a mere sign, to be attributed a purely spiritual meaning on the part of the believer, the poetic symbol, too, is deprived of substance and becomes a mere figure of speech. Language loses much of its performative intensity. Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus is a remarkable document of the period of transition. Harking back to the older, Roman Catholic, conception of the Eucharist, it is still closely 1. Gregory Dix, The Shape of Liturgy (1945) (New York: Seabury Press, 1983), Malcolm M. Ross, Poetry and Dogma: The Transformation of Eucharistic Symbols in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954), Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Frank Lestringant, Une sainte horreur, ou le voyage en Eucharistie xvi-xviii siècles (Paris: PUF, 1996), and Edwin Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 2. Muir (1997), p. 150.

The Lady’s Supper: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus as a Female Celebration of the Eucharist

157

bound up with material reality and ritual activity, yet at the same time its social and religious action begins to drift toward the realm of metaphor. It can either be taken as the historical record of a ritual or it can be read as a poem proper in which, as Austin remarked, “a performative utterance will […] be in a peculiar way hollow or void”.

Mary Beth Edelson, “Some Living American Women Artists: Last Supper”, reproduced by permission of the artist

The Women’s Paschal Feast The rite of the Eucharist answers two basic needs. As the iterative enactment of the Christian mysteries of the incarnation, passion and redemption, it connects human existence with the divine. As a corporate act it creates a community and confirms solidarity among human beings. Originally the Eucharist meal was celebrated in the Jewish style as meal with family and friends. In the Middle Ages it came to be transferred into the sacred space of the church and was made to depend upon the presence of a priest who officiated as the representative of Christ. Yet even then the cultural imagination continued to locate the Lord’s Supper within the communal sphere of feasts and formal dinners. Italian artists painted Last Suppers situated in the sumptuousness of Florentine or Venetian palazzi or monasteries;3 in Southern Germany and the Low Countries woodcuts show the group of the twelve apostles sitting at table in the guise of burghers or peasants. Leonardo’s seminal painting of the Cenacolo as a proleptic celebration of the Eucharist 3. Gerhard Neumann (“Geschmack-Theater: Mahlzeit und soziale Inszenierung”, in Geschmacksache (Göttingen: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik, 1996), pp. 35-64) refers to paintings by Antonio Bazzi, named Sodoma (1477-1549) and Paolo Caliari, named Veronese (1528-1588).

158

Ina Schabert

by Christ and his disciples was copied again and again throughout the Renaissance.4 In our time, the painting has been revived for not always serious purposes in advertisements and in pop art.5 In 1972 Mary Beth Edelson, a performance artist from Indiana, created a poster after Leonardo’s model, where the apostles are impersonated by the figures of women painters. Georgia O’ Keeffe in the position of Christ presides over the table. The picture is framed by a multitude of other female heads. According to her own comment, Edelson’s intention was to protest against women’s exclusion from the centres of religious life. Edelson would have been delighted to know that she had a predecessor in Early Modern England. In her long poem entitled Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum published in 1611, Aemilia Lanyer similarly overlays the male-focused religious ceremony with a vision of female bonding and empowerment. She, the female author, introduces herself as celebrating, together with exclusively female guests, a Paschal Feast. The meal she is going to serve is “the sweet lamb of God” (412).6 In line with the analogical reading of the Bible, the Jewish passover seder is projected onto the Eucharist. Twelve ladies of the English aristocracy are invited to the banquet. As in Edelson’s poster, there is a fringe of many other women, summed up by Lanyer as “all virtuous Ladies in general”.7 These are admitted as secondary guests to the feast. The twentieth-century female and feminist Last Supper painting serves to demonstrate the demand for full participation in the life of the church and its institutions for women. The female and feminist Last Supper poem of the early seventeenth century was an even more radical challenge to the clergy. Lanyer does not merely claim, she boldly assumes a priestly office. In the poem Christ is made present—presented, not re-presented—through her own person. When she passes the text on to her readers, she appropriates the role of distributing Holy Communion. “Receive him [i.e. the Saviour] here by my unworthy hand”, she says to the female congregation she has invited (259). This enacting of the Eucharist in the poem is accompanied by a detailed argument to the point that women have a privileged access to the sacred. Against the policy of King James who sought to restrict women’s role in the church, and in the face of tradition, Lanyer claims that it is they who are God’s best and chosen priests.

4. Leo Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper (New York: Zone Books 2001). 5. Neumann gives the examples of a Jeans advertisement by Otto Kern and of Renato Casaro’s “Invitation” which shows Marilyn Monroe as Christ. 6. All references are to the text of Salve Deus in: Diana Purkiss ed., Renaissance Women. The Plays of Elizabeth Cary. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer (London: William Pickering, 1994), pp. 239-326 (line numbers in brackets refer, if not otherwise stated, to the main part of the poem). 7. Title of the complimentary poem, p. 246.

The Lady’s Supper: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus as a Female Celebration of the Eucharist

159

Woman as Head of the Church In fact, she does so in the face of nearly all tradition. The one English precedent was of course Elizabeth, Queen and Head of the Church of England.8 Richard Hooker, in his great defence of the Church of England as constituted under Elizabeth, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie (1594-97), made it quite clear that the offices of King / Queen and Head of the Church had to be thought of as one, in the same way that the English people made up both the State and the Church of England. He argued for “a power of ecclesiastical dominion, communicable, as we think, unto persons not ecclesiastical, and most fit to be restrained unto the Prince or Sovereign commander of the whole body politic”.9 As the body of the people, so the head had to be one. Queen Elizabeth deliberately fashioned herself as both a religious and a secular leader. Her coronation ceremony, adroitly blending together Roman Catholic ritual and Puritan austerity, associated the elevation of the host with the coronation of her person. Thus was suggested an analogy between the Queen’s two bodies and the dual existence of Christ as God incarnated.10 The institution of the Royal Progress, reminiscent of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, was revived by the Queen as well. She also appropriated the cult of the Virgin for her own royal person, and thus, again, made an indirect claim to a supreme position within the Church. Mary, in giving birth to Christ, had become the main human agent in the mystery of the Incarnation and was therefore considered as the type of the priest celebrating mass and showing the host. Thus, while her main theological reformer, Archbishop Cranmer, thoroughly transformed Anglican doctrine according to the teachings of Calvin and explained away the Eucharist as a mere ritual of commemoration,11 the Queen, like many of her subjects, seems to have retained much or at least some of the older, pre-Reformation religious sensibility, although for obvious reasons she would not be outspoken about this. A portrait of the Queen made in 1565, probably intended for a side piece representing a believer in the pose of adoration directed toward a central altar piece that would have shown Christ and / or the Virgin Mary, has a remarkable little Eucharistic poem inscribed on its frame: Christ was the word that spake it: He took the bread and brake it: And what his word did make it: That I believe and take it.12

8. Her official title was ‘Governor of the Faith’, as the Upper House of Parliament had not agreed to the bill which was to confirm her as ‘Supreme Head of Faith’; see Peter Brimacombe, All the Queen’s Men: The World of Elizabeth I (Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 2000), pp. 122-138. 9. Richard Hooker, The Works, 3 vols, ed by John Keble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1836), vol. 1, p. 215. 10. Muir (1997), especially pp. 250-259. 11. See Dix (1983), passim. 12. Quoted by Roy Strong, The Tudor and Stuart Monarchy, 3 vols, vol. 2: Elizabethan (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995), p. 79.

160

Ina Schabert

This seemingly blunt yet noncommittal statement testifies, above all, to the general caution of the Queen in theological matters. The suggestion, however, that the word of Christ was able to make the bread into something else implies scepticism about the hermeneutical efforts of the reformers and a preference for the literal reading of the hic est upon which, after all, her office was substantiated by analogy. Lanyer’s poem has a nostalgic reference to the Queen whose reign had ended eight years before: “So that I live closed up in sorrow’s cell, / Since great Eliza’s favour blest my youth” (“To the Queens Most Excellent Majesty”, 110). Biographical research has found no evidence for a special favour granted to Lanyer by Elizabeth, yet we know that the poet was connected in several ways to Elizabeth’s court. Her father, Baptista Bassano (d. 1576) was musician to the Queen; she herself was mistress to Henry Carey, First Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain of England. When, in 1592, she became pregnant, she was married to another musician to the Queen, Alphonso Lanyer. Thus it is probable that Aemilia Lanyer identified with Elizabethan culture more than with Jacobean modes of thought and feeling. When one of the aristocratic ladies in her poem is praised for a piety that would qualify her for St. Peter’s office, the compliment has a strong Elizabethan flavour.

Performance I: the Social Ritual of the Invitations At the beginning of the Salve Deus, Lanyer invites several aristocratic ladies to the “Paschal feast” of her poem. The invitations are a variation on the traditional complimentary epistles prefixed to published works. As formal greetings and dedications they were meant to establish or strengthen social ties between a writer and his or her addressees, who, as a rule, were persons of high repute and influence. In Lanyer’s text, the complimentary part encroaches upon the main text to an unusual degree: the invitations to the ladies take up one third of the whole (more than 900 lines); the poem itself is introduced and again concluded by more speeches addressed to one of the ladies, namely the main dedicatee and Lanyer’s one-time patron Margaret Countess of Cumberland. These in sum make up another third of the text (10-272 and 1169-1840). Celebrating the exemplary piety of the Countess, they blend with the subject matter of the religious poem proper. The element of ceremony thus pervades the whole work. The writing and reading process is imagined as the act of sharing the poem within a social and religious community. Elizabethan and Jacobean prefatory addresses were offered and received as homage; they were judged not according to the criteria of veracity but those of creative correctness to court etiquette. Lanyer’s idea to give out invitations instead of mere compliments would have been estimated as a creative touch. The individual invitations to the aristocratic ladies were to follow one another according to strict rules of precedence. On the other hand, changes in style and in attributes of praise were required to do justice to the special qualities of every single addressee and to soften the rigours of hierarchical order. Within this code, Lanyer apparently made a fatal mistake by placing the Countess of

The Lady’s Supper: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus as a Female Celebration of the Eucharist

161

Pembroke (with an invitation of 224 lines) before and not after the Countess of Bedford (28 lines of invitation). The blunder may have been responsible for the failure of the poem to establish new bonds of patronage. In Austin’s categories Lanyer’s performative gesture of invitation would have to be classed as a partly ‘unhappy’ utterance. The poet also ignores the fact that the Lady Arabella Stuart fell from grace at Court in 1609 and thus should not be included any more in an invitation to ladies of the highest rank. (Only after Arabella Stuart was imprisoned in 1611, Lanyer withdrew her invitation from at least one copy of the Salve Deus.)13 Lastly, the prominence of Margaret Clifford throughout the poem may have endangered Lanyer’s success with regard to the ladies of higher rank—although Lanyer at times turns this into a compliment for them by establishing the Countess as the chief hostess to the feast the poet has prepared (see “To the Queen’s Majesty”, 79-84). The religious latitude testified by the choice of the poem’s guests is unusual. Perhaps it was protected from criticism by the social prestige of the recipients. Queen Anne, spouse to King James, to whom Lanyer duely directs the first invitation, was known for her Catholic sympathies and even suspected of a secret conversion to the Church of Rome. The Lady Arabella Stuart also had Catholic connections. Susan Bertie, the Countess Dowager of Kent, on the other hand, was an adherent of radical Puritanism, inherited (as the poem does not fail to mention) from her mother Catherine Bertie, Duchess of Suffolk, who with all her family went into exile during the reign of the Catholic Mary. Some ladies, such as the chief addressee, Margaret Countess of Cumberland, were renowned for their piety; others, i.e. Lucy Countess of Bedford and Katherine Howard, Countess of Suffolk, for their wordliness. Lanyer’s religious tolerance and eclecticism can be explained by her family history which brought her into touch with nearly all the varieties of Christian belief practised in the England of her time. Her father was a Venetian, perhaps of Jewish origin and probably a Roman Catholic before he came to the English court. Throughout her life, Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) was connected with the Italian musicians’ community in London.14 This accounts for her Catholic sympathies and the Catholic flair of her poem. That she knew about the continental, mainly Italian cult of the Cenacolo is not unlikely. She was, like her mother, Bassano’s common law wife Margaret Johnson (d.1587), a member of the Church of England. Her husband Alfonso Lanyer came from a family of French Huguenots; biographers differ with regard to his own religion. Yet the nine ladies invited by name have one thing in common. All of them are heroic figures, self-reliant, strong-minded women who set their own will against their husbands and the world. They are, so to speak, the Nine Female Worthies of Lanyer’s time. “I dare 13. For these breaches of court etiquette, see Leeds Barroll, “Looking for Patrons”, in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. by Marshall Grossman (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998), pp. 29-48. 14. On Lanyer’s Italian connections see Pamela Joseph Benson, “To Play the Man: Aemilia Lanyer and the Acquisition of Patronage”, in Opening the Borders: Inclusivity of Early Modern Studies, ed. by Peter C. Herman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), pp. 243-264. According to Benson it is probable that Lanyer herself would also have been a professional musician.

162

Ina Schabert

undertake fame dares not to call any better”, she says (“To the Virtuous Reader”, 9-10). Queen Anne firmly pursued her own political agenda apart from King James. Arabella Stuart married William Seymour, a claimant to the throne, in secret against the King’s will. Susan Bertie is praised for the courage she displayed when she accompanied her mother into exile (a mother who, by the way, is considered to be the model of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi). Mary Countess of Pembroke, the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, was a renowned patron of the arts. So was Lucy Countess of Bedford for a younger generation of poets, after she had carved for herself a powerful position at Court (while her husband was in disgrace). Katherine Howard was known as a strong influence on her husband, the Lord Admiral Thomas Howard. Margaret Clifford famously compensated for humiliating neglect on the part of her husband by devoting her life to piety and patronage. She again backed up her daughter, Anne Clifford, another guest to Lanyer’s party, in her fights against legal harrassment from the male side. (Queen Anne also assisted her in secret, at variance with King James.) Anne Clifford’s strong sense of self is documented in her diary. Mother-daughter relationships are prominent in Lanyer’s poem: the female line is represented in the persons of Queen Anne and Princess Elizabeth, Catherine and Susan Bertie, Margaret and Anne Clifford. The daughters of Katherine Howard are included in Lanyer’s invitation to join the nine adult ladies. On the other hand, husbands, fathers, brothers are rarely mentioned and only in derogatory ways. When, probably on the initiative of Alfonso Lanyer, a special presentation copy of the poem was prepared for Prince Henry, Queen Anne’s son and heir apparent to the throne, the author did not— as would have been expected—supply complimentary verses for him as well. Her Lady’s Supper was for women only. Believing in female solidarity, she might have hoped (not least with regard to her own insecure position) that social degree and religious difference would dissolve in the collective ritual of communion.

The Defense of Women The success of a ritual depends upon the institutional authority of the person who enacts it. A woman who gives out invitations to a Eucharist meal encroaches upon the privileges of the male clergy. Accordingly, a claim to the equality of the sexes—especially equality under God—accompanies, as a kind of running commentary, the action of Lanyer’s poem. “I was appointed to perform this work”, she states at the end of her poem—appointed that is, by divine authority ("To the doubtful reader", 7). In particular, the poem’s title, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum—which turns the sarcastic greeting of the Roman soldiers in the New Testament, ‘Hail, King of the Jews’, into a gesture of adoration—was given to her in a dream vision and thus marks her as a speaker chosen by God. The Latin wording suggests a claim to a priestly position in Roman Catholic terms, whereas the creative reinterpretation of the biblical phrase is in the style of Puritan bible reading. Lanyer goes to some lengths to prove that women are entitled to a full participation in the life of the church, including the priesthood. By putting the emphasis, in her invita-

The Lady’s Supper: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus as a Female Celebration of the Eucharist

163

tion, on the moral strength of women and the importance of the maternal line, some of the theological objections to women in office are indirectly dealt with: the inferiority of the female sex is thus refuted, the principle of patriarchy put in doubt. The contemporary evidence of good and great women is backed up with examples from the Old and New Testaments and supplemented, in defiance of Anglican dogma, with references to female confessors of the Christian faith and female martyrs. Another traditional objection to the point that, as daughters of Eve, all women are prone to sin and therefore unfit for sacerdotal office, is countered with the equally traditional argument that another woman, the Virgin Mary, has long since made more than full amends for the first woman’s mistake. A comparative view of the transgressions of the sexes is inserted which also works in favour of woman: Lanyer’s presentation of the evidence compels us to conclude that men’s crimes against God weigh far heavier than the sin committed by Eve. Eve, as Lanyer argues in a long formal ‘Apology’, can be excused for tasting the apple because she acted in ignorance and with good intentions, whereas Adam had been instructed about the forbidden fruit by God himself. Again, the men of Jerusalem betrayed, condemned, tortured, mocked and crucified Christ although they should have known better. The Jewish women, on the contrary, sided with Christ, warning their men, pitying the divine sufferer and uniting their tears with those of Mary. Lanyer assumes that by their complicity in the killing of Christ men have forfeited for ever the sovereignty granted to them after the Fall—which she calls “Adam’s fall” anyhow (259). “If one weak woman simply did offend, / This sin of yours hath no excuse nor end.” (831-32) In the Biblical narrative of the resurrection, Lanyer sees the female right to ecclesiastical functions doubly confirmed. The scene of the three women coming to the grave on Easter morning with aromatic oils is read as the founding moment of the church, represented by the women imagined as Christ’s “faithful wife” (1291). That the angel commissioned one of them, Mary Magdala, to make known Christ’s resurrection to his disciples (Lanyer has “to the rest of his disciples”!)15 means for her—as for modern feminist theology—that woman has been divinely commissioned to do evangelical work (“To the Virtuous Reader”, 48-49). The culturally female qualities of faith, charity and piety are, according to Lanyer, the central Christian virtues; they qualify exemplary women, such as the Countess of Cumberland, for the highest sacerdotal position: “These are those keys Saint Peter did possess, / Which with a spiritual power are giv’n to thee, / To heal the souls of those that do transgress, / By thy fair virtues”(1369-72), she tells the Countess in a passage which has been interpreted as “the wrenching of control away from the Catholic church”.16

15. "To the Virtuous Reader", p. 49. 16. Catherine Kohane, “‘That Blindest Weakenesse be not over-bold’: Aemilia Lanyer’s Radical Unfolding of the Passion”, English Literary History 64 (1997) 359-389.

164

Ina Schabert

Performance II: the Eucharist Service Lanyer takes care that her guests form a table of twelve. This has been overlooked up to now,17 apparently nobody realized that besides the nine ladies honoured by personalized invitations, the (three) daughters of Lady Catherine Howard are included in the list of guests. The Eucharist is enacted in the spirit of the Cenacolo as the corporate rite of the Bible and early Christian times (and of some Puritan groups in Lanyer’s England), and not as the exclusive sacerdotal act of the late medieval Catholic mass. In the tradition of the analogical reading of the two Testaments and possibly due to the author’s JewishChristian background, the ceremony is imagined in terms of a Paschal feast. In contrast to Protestant and Puritan Eucharist symbolism, the ladies are to take part in a real sacrificial act, the sacrifice of the “pure unspotted Lamb” (319) prepared by the poet. Lanyer unambiguously and scandalously declares that her ritual actualizes the ‘Real Presence’ of Christ: “I present unto you even our Lord Jesus himself”, she tells the Countess of Cumberland (“To the Lady Margaret”, 7). Also, the untimely identification of Christ with a divine kind of food is emphasized. “This precious passover feed upon, O Queen”, she invites Queen Anne (“To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty”, 89-90). The daughters of the Countess of Suffolk are admitted with the words: “On heavenly food let them vouchsafe to feed” (“To the Lady Katherine”, 51). And in a final address to the Countess of Cumberland Lanyer praises the Eucharist as: This lamb of God, who died and was alive, Presenting us the bread of life eternal, His bruised body powerful to revive Our sinking souls, out of the pit infernal; For by this blessed food he did contrive A work of grace, by this his gift external, With heav’ nly manna, food of his elected, To feed their souls, of whom he is respected. (1777-84)

The spiritual, metaphysical meaning of the meal is made quite clear, yet the chain of images leading from lamb to bread to body to food strongly suggests physical reality. The author runs the risk of being accused of the cannibalism attributed to Roman Catholics in the age of the Reformation. Her courage is surprising, considering how reticent contemporary male poets were about the topic.18 What might have protected her is that the communion rite actually performed in the poem’s main part is not that of the host. Mass cannot be enacted in literature. Lanyer changes to the ritual of ‘mental communion’ which has been developed in the Catholic church since the late Middle Ages. Through the methods of meditation, Christ would become a visible presence to the eye of the mind and a palpable presence in the heart. Formal meditation therefore was considered an equivalent of the communion proper. In the 17. The only reading of Salve Deus as a eucharist poem—although in a rather impressionistic way—is Kari Boy McBride, “Sacred Celebration: The Patronage Poems”, in Grossman (1998), pp. 60-82. 18. See Ross (1954).

The Lady’s Supper: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus as a Female Celebration of the Eucharist

165

words of a sixteenth-century treatise: “For so ofte a man is housled [that is, does receive the holy communion] mysticallye and invisibly, as he remembreth devoutly the mysterie of the incarnation of Christ, and his passion, and is thereby kindled into his love”.19 Although a hallmark of the Counter-Reformation, meditation was tolerated in Reformation England and became quite popular. People were in need of a compensation for the lack of emotional and sensuous appeal in Puritanism. As an entirely interiorized ‘communion’, even if enacted in highly sensuous terms, meditation was somewhat of a compromise between Catholic and Protestant doctrines of the Eucharist. A considerable part of Anglican metaphysical poetry can be considered, as L.L. Martz has shown, as the poetry of meditation. Yet whereas most of this poetry consists in intellectualized and individualized forms of meditation, Lanyer’s poem faithfully adheres to the instructions of the Roman Catholic religious manuals. She invokes the incarnation, passion and resurrection according to the gospels. She conveys to her group of women the certainty that they are eyewitnesses and participants in these at once historical and timeless events, by relating them in the present tense, visualizing them in detail, generously inserting deictic pointers such as “now”, “lo, here”, “Lo, madam, here you take a view […]”, and creating dramatic tension by suggesting alternatives to what is decreed to happen (“O noble governor, make thou yet a pause […]”, she addresses Pilate when he is going to send Christ to death, 749). Exclamations and questions inscribe the reader’s participation into the text. Through skilful manipulation of perspective and generous use of emotionally charged language the author makes her female community feel with the Jewish women pitying Christ, makes them condemn the obtuseness and cruelty of his tormentors and empathize with the sufferings of Christ and his mother. In reading her verses, Lanyer’s guests do homage to the Virgin Mary in a formal “Salutation” and turn to Jesus Christ in words of prayer. Of course the poem cannot do entirely without the conventional literary elements of narration and description, yet, forming part of the invocations and prayers and addresses, they are drawn into the over-all gesture of re-enactment. In this process, the imagery of feeding on the lamb is combined and replaced with other images of spiritual communion, which, however, are not less corporeal and sensuous. The ladies celebrating the Eucharist are seen as carrying, Mary-like, Christ under their heart (and thus as redoubling the priestly function of offering the Eucharist to the world).20 They experience Christ as a divine lover in quasi corporeal erotic ways. This, again, is according to Catholic meditation practice: “Take Him, then, into your arms, keep Him there, earnestly look into His face, reverently kiss Him”, advises the widelyknown, late fourteenth-century instruction book Meditations on the Life of Christ.21 Lanyer makes lavish use of her seven-line stanza with its movement from open to closed 19. Spiritual Combat, English version 1530, quoted in L L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 90. 20. This is visualized in the iconographic tradition of the vierges ouvrantes, statues of the Virgin fashioned after the manner of the tabernacle, which open to show Christ inside. 21. Quoted by Martz (1954), p. 74, from an English adaptation of the Meditations (attributed to St. Bonaventure).

166

Ina Schabert

rhymes to draw and redraw the trace of desire. Thus, for example, the poet addresses Lucy, Countess of Bedford: You whose clear judgement far exceeds my skill, Vouchsafe to entertain this dying lover22 The ocean of true grace, whose streams do fill All those with joy that can his love recover; About this ark bright angels hover, Where your fair soul may sure and safely rest When he is sweetly seated in your breast. (“To the Lady Lucy”, 15-21)

The stanza also shows how Lanyer’s language amalgamates the corporeal with the spiritual, how in her lines sexual, maternal, mystical and biblical meanings are projected onto one another. The private eroticism evoked in such moments is reconciled with the character of a communal religious act by biblical images of female solidarity. The ladies are identified with the New Testament virgins who wait on the celestial bridegroom as a group (“To all Virtuous Ladies in generall”, 9-10, “To the Lady Anne”, 9-16). At the beginning of my essay I drew a distinction between an earlier, Roman Catholic imagination which assumes the performative potential of words and a later, puritan way of thought where language serves to abstract spiritual meanings from the physical world. The two contrasting attitudes can also be qualified as culturally male and female. Control of the word has been considered as a male privilege, material culture is taken to be a female mode of creating meaning. The realm of the spirit is attributed to men, that of the body to women. Men typically approach God by studying His word, women try to get in touch with him through acts of the body. In the High Middle Ages, it were mainly the women, the nuns and the female mystics, who expressed a quasi-physical desire for God through images of food and drink and who approached the divine through religious rites of feasting and fasting. The stigmata to which female mystics were especially prone can be considered as a re-incarnation of Christ’s wounded body and thus corresponding to the priest’s act of celebrating the eucharist which was forbidden to women.23 Hildegard von Bingen famously wrote: “Man represents the divinity of the Son of God, and woman his humanity”.24 Woman literally represented the humanity of God because the body of Christ was exclusively formed from the flesh of a woman. For good reasons, therefore, 22. The sexual innuendo of the “dying lover” might refer to the (Continental) Renaissance veneration of the genitalia of Christ as the supreme token of his humanity; see Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion (London: Faber & Faber, 1984). The pun would not have been lost on the Countess of Bedford who admired John Donne’s metaphysical style. 23. See the studies by Caroline Walker Bynum, especially Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) and Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 24. See Caroline Walker Bynum, “And Woman His Humanity”, in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. by Caroline Walker Bynum / Stevan Harrell / Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon, 1986), pp. 257-288.

The Lady’s Supper: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus as a Female Celebration of the Eucharist

167

it is a woman, and a woman with an Italian, Roman Catholic background, to whom we owe the Salve Deus, a poem which is a belated and unique eucharistic performance of the sacred in Reformation England.

This page intentionally left blank

CANONIZED BY LOVE? RELIGIOUS RHETORIC AND GENDER-FASHIONING IN THE SONNET by Irmgard Maassen Performing Love When Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers, first address each other at the Capulet feast, their dialogue shapes itself, famously, into a sonnet: ROMEO [To Juliet] If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this, My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. JULIET Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this, For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss. ROMEO Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer. JULIET ROMEO O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do: They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. JULIET Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake. ROMEO Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged. [Kissing her.] JULIET Then have my lips the sin that they have took. ROMEO Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again. [Kissing her again.] JULIET You kiss by th’ book.1

1. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. by G. Blakemore Evans, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 85, 1.5.92-109.

170

Irmgard Maassen

The emotional intensity of the scene testifies to the performative power of the sonnet; it reflects on the way in which the sonnet’s representational function as a literary text is inextricably intertwined with its pragmatic function as a social strategy in the courtly game of love. The theatrical staging of the sonnet as a medium of love-making emphasises the insufficiency of merely regarding it as the literary repository of, or textual referent to, ardent feelings of desire, and instead highlights its performance value when deployed as a means of erotic seduction. Expert performers, the lovers show themselves in full command of the genre’s repertoire of rhetorical conventions and the speaking positions assigned by its rules. Unlike the sceptic Mercutio, they implicitly accept the validity of the social norms underlying the game of Petrarchism, and are thus able to collude successfully in manipulating each other’s moves. The performance of the shared sonnet thus is the love: As both lovers collaborate to construct rhymes, stanzas and thought, the structural device of interlacing their lines creates a close interdependency and mutual reaffirmation of each speaker’s self-fashioning with the epideictic fashioning of the beloved. This mutuality is made possible, but at the same time visibly constrained by, the conventions of genre and gender. Although Juliet here, by contrast to the customary silence of the sonnet lady, is allowed her own voice to speak, she uses it to confirm the expected female attitude of passive immovability—which, in the final couplet’s witty twist of argument familiar from the stock devices of sonnet love, permits Romeo to obtain his kiss, and enables her to grant, or even, depending on the reading, with equivocal virtue to ask for, a second one.2 The appearance of spontaneous ease, sprezzatura, with which the lovers interact points to a shared habitus that extends to the cultural store of rhetorical figures they share. The religious imagery of the scene, which has Romeo exalt his desire by styling himself as a pilgrim seeking the grace of an adored saint, and Juliet adopt her ascribed saintly part unhesitatingly, is a standard element of Petrarchism; in the pose of Rosaline’s pining suitor, Romeo has already shown himself a master of its tired conceits.3 The game of sonneteering, I would argue, plays a crucial role in early modern habitus formation. To regard the sonnet as a cultural performance constituting emotions and desires rather than merely as a symbolic representation reflecting them derives support from the interrelation of the verbal with the physical in this scene. The theatrical interlocking of word and action throws into relief how the sonnet convention transmutes into an embodied dispo2. It is only within the wider context of the play in which she is assigned an actively desiring role that Juliet’s words in l. 107 can be construed as actually asking for the second kiss. Read on the foil of the predominantly monologic sonnet sequences the lines would more likely be understood as the male poetlover manoeuvring her into a position that enables him to triumphantly turn around the meaning of her chaste words.—For an analysis of the complex ways in which the anticipation of the woman’s resisting and uncontrollable response shapes Elizabethan love poetry, see Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). By contrast to Paul Innes, in Shakespeare and the English Renaissance Sonnet: Verses of Feigning Love (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1997), who emphasises the patriarchal suppression of the feminine at work in the aristocratic sonnet ideology, Bell finds the voices of women echoed and inscribed in male-authored poems. 3. See 1.1.150-229, also 1.2.88: “When the devout religion of mine eye / Maintains such falsehood […]”.

Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet

171

sition that generates not just phrases but structures gestures, affections, and conduct. The conversational game of the sonnet accompanies the physical game of progressing intimacy, aiming to conceal the sexual, ‘sinful’ nature of the action under a more legitimate show of pious devotion, but also prompting the lovers’ moves and commenting on them in a subversively self-conscious manner. The way in which the action in this scene oscillates between linguistic and embodied performance, working to impose the semantics of religious devotion onto the mechanics of sexual attraction, can be seen to epitomise the cultural process of transforming the bodily affect of desire into the discursive concept of love. This transformation is successful because it can exploit the ambiguity of the body, whose signs are always in need of interpretation: the poses denoting love—kneeling, kissing, pledging, idolising, submitting—are indistinguishable from those denoting piety, as both grow out of an early modern habitus of service that conflates the religious and the secular. The verbal pun on holy palmers and palms, for instance, draws on the multiple significations of touching hands, a gesture that can constitute a prayer, a greeting, or a caress, emphasising that the material body’s meaning depends on context and intention. In this case, the figurative language, the sonnet’s textuality, successfully imposes on the erotic interaction, or the sonnet’s performance, a semblance of spirituality that confers enough legitimacy on the love-making to enable it decorously to proceed. But as we shall see, the conflict in the Elizabethan sonnet between spiritual and sexual love, which is for once so satisfactorily smoothed over in Romeo’s and Juliet’s erotic embodiment of the trope of devout pilgrimage, retains its potential for disrupting religious idealisation. The tension between the textual argu ment and the performative power of the body evoked in and stimulated to action by the poem’s rhetoric is never finally resolved. The reassertion of the force of physical desire in the concluding line of Philip Sidney’s “Sonnet 5”, which deploys a similar image of pilgrimage, serves as a reminder of the perpetual failure of Petrarchan sublimation: True, that on earth we are but pilgrims made, And should in soul up to our country move: True, and yet true that I must Stella love.4

Politicising Love The history of the sonnet in the early modern period, a genre Sidney naturally associated with the modes of love and praise,5 has been described as one of increasing secularisa4. Philip Sidney, “Sonnet 5” from Astrophil and Stella, beginning “It is most true, that eyes are form’d to serve / The inward light”, ll. 12-14. Quoted from Sir Philip Sidney, Selected Writings, ed. by Richard Dutton (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1987), p. 31. 5. Philip Sidney, “The Defence of Poesy”, in Selected Writings (1987), pp. 131, 143.

172

Irmgard Maassen

tion.6 If one disregards the extent to which the sonnet remained a favourite form for religious lyric and prayer,7 the narrative may be sketched out as follows: Whereas Dante placed his Beatrice in heaven as a symbol of divine perfection and goodness, designed to lead the worshipping soul up to the contemplation of God, Petrarch’s Laura descended to earth as a creature of flesh and blood only to become the focus of the poet’s reflections on the rivalling claims of passion and spirituality. The English poets of the 1580s anglicised and politicised the Italian sonnet tradition: Drayton, Daniel and Philip Sidney, among others, adapted the Petrarchan convention to negotiate the political power play and patronage system of the Elizabethan court, while Spenser, casting his own bride as the sonneteer’s lady, found in the Protestant marriage doctrine a way to reassert masculine dominance against the courtly devotion that was her due. Donne, finally, as to some extent Shakespeare, explored the counter-discourse8 to Petrarchan adulation, varying their stances so as to undercut the rhetoric of love as deification and praise by the rhetoric of scepticism and libertine sophism,9 thus testifying to the increasing mobility of discursive, and social, positions in the early modern period. Critics in the wake of New Historicism have influentially side-lined the theological and philosophical approaches that used to focus on the Neoplatonic and Christian figurations of love, in particular on the tension between carnal and spiritual knowledge. It has become a critical commonplace to define the determining parameters of the English sonnet production as political instead of religious, pointing out the analogy between sacred and secular encomiastic poetry.10 Courtship of the queen, whose image replaced that of the Virgin Mary after the reformation, has since been taken to govern the pattern of the relationship between the wooing courtier and his lady. Courtly love has come to be interpreted as a socially more acceptable trope for personal ambition, serving to disguise the egotistical desire for a court office, status, or wealth.11 In England, the vogue of the sonnet in the 1580s and ’90s fell into a time when a younger generation of courtiers, brought up in the humanist learning of the English Renaissance and in the expectation that such qual6. See S. K. Heninger, Jr., “Sequences, Systems, Models: Sidney and the Secularization of the Sonnets”, in Poems in their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. by Neil Freistat (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 66-94. For Spenser, see Lisa M. Klein, The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan Sonneteer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), pp. 188-215. 7. For the lady as the Virgin Mary, see, for example, “John Brereley”, Virginalia. Or Spiritvall Sonnets in prayse of the most Glorious Virgin Marie, vpon euerie seuerall Title of her Litanies of Loreto (1632). 8. See Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995). 9. See James S. Baumlin, John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991). 10. See, for example, Louis Adrian Montrose, “Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship”, Renaissance Drama 8 (1977), 3-35; Arthur F. Marotti, “‘Love is not Love’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order”, ELH 49 (1982), 396-428; Ann Rosalind Jones / Peter Stallybrass, “The Politics of Astrophil and Stella”, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 24 (1984), 53-68. 11. See Montrose (1977), p. 26; Marotti (1982), pp. 398f.

Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet

173

ifications would pave the way to advancement and a career, were entering a political system dominated by an aging queen and equally elderly politicians, who had a strong interest in the suppression of any aspirations to upward mobility that might endanger the status quo.12 Ambitions for preferment had to be negotiated, or rather curbed, within a network of courtly allegiances that were still feudal in kind, i.e. that were working through personal and kinship obligations, and were buttressed by a system of allegorical correspondences between the church and the state, and between the natural, the social and the political order which were conceived as strictly hierarchical and increasingly absolutist. This is the recurring problem in the sonnets: How to fashion an individual identity, an autonomous sense of self under the conditions of a social order that continued to demand obedient submission to one’s superiors and was still likely to regard undisguised ambition as an act of rebellion against the god-given hierarchy of place. To the extent that they trope political or economic aspiration as ‘love’, conflating social and sexual desires in the manner that characterised the relations of power at the Elizabethan court, these poems complicate the problem of how to legitimise desire for upward mobility by overwriting the hierarchy of rank and degree with the hierarchy of genders. In this context, I would like to suggest, sonnets served as a stage for the rehearsal and display of the habitus of the perfect servant, constituting an arena for exercising the set of dispositions that marked a man who managed to reconcile status and virtue.13 It is here that they gained their inherently performative value, reinforced by the manner in which they were ‘performed’ in public—by being read or sung aloud, dedicated, exchanged, presented as a courting gift, or displayed to a coterie of readers where they contributed to the formation of group identities. As Bourdieu points out, the habitus involves not just the rational opinions, but the body, the sentiments, perceptions, and value judgments, and thus contains a dimension of embodiment that bears on the realm of the ‘private’ emotions of sexuality and desire.14 My paper assumes that sonnets serve as a medium for the fashioning and enactment of the habitus of genteel service. I am going to look at how this process involves both rank and gender identities, and how the various symbolising systems active in this enterprise are fused into one single figure—the figure of sacred love, which is imbued with all the magic, the ‘symbolic alchemy’ that works to obfuscate or ‘enchant’15 relations of power and exploitation.

12. See Montrose (1977), pp. 4ff. 13. For the ubiquitous nature of the concept of service, see Michael Neill, “Servant Obedience and Master Sins: Shakespeare and the Bonds of Service”, in his Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 13-48. 14. For a related argument in favour of the usefulness of poetry for developing structures of mind and identity, which draws not on Bourdieu but on Jerome McGann’s notion of poetic language as ‘divine action’, see Elizabeth Harris Sagaser, “Shakespeare’s Sweet Leaves: Mourning, Pleasure, and the Triumph of Thought in the Renaissance Love Lyric”, ELH 61 (1994), 1-26, especially 10-11. 15. Pierre Bourdieu, Praktische Vernunft. Zur Theorie des Handelns (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), pp. 169 ff.—For recourse to Bourdieu in reading the ‘symbolic violence’ of servant-master relations as veiled by love in Sidney’s sonnets, see also Jones / Stallybrass (1984).

174

Irmgard Maassen

The concept of ‘love’ in the early modern period was still elastic enough to allow it to be used for private as well as public relationships, and for the negotiation of both sexual and social mastery in the sonnet. ‘Love’ referred as much to the potentially transgressive erotic attraction between sexual partners—a discourse mainly developed in the medium of poetry—as to the dutiful deference owed by persons of all ranks to their respective superiors. The 1564 Catechism of the prominent reformer Thomas Becon, for example,16 includes ‘love’ in its catalogue of reciprocal duties that shape the relations between children and their parents, between spouses, servants and masters, subjects and sovereigns, and between Christians and their God and church. Being mutual, this duty of love works both ways—as indeed Christ’s love to his church is made the central allegory for the husband’s relationship to his wife—though it carries a different meaning for each party. Love as the bond that maintains order and cohesion in society manifests itself first of all in external acts of dutiful obeisance rather than in states of feeling. Neoplatonic theory assigns to love a similar purpose, in defining it as the force that ties the four different spheres of the universe together by making each turn with longing to the one above. Love in this latter sense becomes as much an epistemological concept, a way of knowing through spiritual rather than sensual perception, as an aesthetic concept, which defines beauty as love’s natural object. To the extent that truth and beauty are identified with virtue, it becomes an ethical concept as well. It is in negotiating the tension between love as dutiful submission to the feudal order and love as individual—and individualising—desire that the topos of the sacred comes to play an important role. Invocations of the sacred can be seen as a strategy of heightened ‘enchantment’ to gloss over the ‘symbolic violence’ underlying the power relations of the social system. Recourse to symbolisations such as love or sanctity help to shore up what Bourdieu calls the ‘collective deception’ necessary to maintain an illusion of equity in basically unequal social and economic relations. I am going to discuss how sanctification, as a strategy of increased mystification, occurs at particularly critical moments to obliterate the contradictory, disruptive, or violent workings of power, and to quell dissent. We will see, however, that the literary performance of the sacred, its re-figuration, can also create the opposite effect—namely, by emphasising the embodied nature of rituals, it can actually foreground the violence it seeks to conceal.

16. Thomas Becon, A new catechisme sette forth dialogue-wise in familiar talke betwene the father and the son (1564), part 6: “Of the offyces of all degrees”, extracted in Conduct Literature for Women 15001640, ed. by William StClair / Irmgard Maassen (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), vol. 3, pp. 269327. The paradigm of reciprocal duties appears also in the marriage sermons of the period, for instance William Gouge, Of domesticall duties (1622) and William Whately, A bride-bush (1619), and conduct manuals such as John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A godlie forme of householde government (first printed 1598).

Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet

175

Deifying the patron—Drayton and Daniel Drayton’s sonnets are marked by a highly orthodox use of the stereotype idealisation of Petrarchism, suppressing physical desire to “produce an entire metaphysics of love that removes the material altogether”.17 The operation of complete deification of the lady, unchallenged by any rebellious thoughts on the part of the poet-lover and without the dialectics of contradiction that give Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella such complexity, can perhaps best be observed in Drayton’s “Amour. 26”.18 Here the status of the divine is shifted from the god of love onto the adored lady, investing her with all the power and military prowess of a victorious goddess. Cupid, by comparison, stands dishonoured and defeated. Figuring the god of love rather than the poet-lover as the suffering party of the lady’s ascendancy effects a subtle displacement of the inevitable sense of humiliation her triumph causes. Only the repetition of “rob[be]d” in lines 4 and 14 points to the parallel fates of Cupid and the lover, but the pain of lost honour is all projected onto the god of love, while the poet, thus free to exhibit an unconflicted service mentality, professes himself “happy” in his loss. I read Drayton’s “To the Spheares. Sonet. 23.”19 as an illustration of how to stage masculine submission as ‘natural’ and unproblematic, and thus to fashion oneself as a virtuous servant in compliance with the ruling order: Thou which do’st guide this little world of love, Thy planets mansions heer thou mayst behold, My brow the spheare where Saturne still doth move, Wrinkled with cares; and withered, dry, and cold; Mine eyes the Orbe where Jupiter doth trace, Which gently smile because they looke on thee, Mars in my swarty visage takes his place, Made leane with love, where furious conflicts bee. Sol in my breast with his hote scorching flame, And in my hart alone doth Venus raigne: Mercury my hands the Organs of thy fame, And Luna glides in my fantastick braine; The starry heaven thy prayse by me exprest, Thou the first moover, guiding all the rest.

17. Innes (1997), p. 69. 18. Cupid, dumbe Idoll, peevish Saint of love, / No more shalt thou nor Saint nor Idoll be, / No God art thou, a Goddesse shee doth prove, / Of all thine honour shee hath robbed thee. // Thy Bowe halfe broke, is peec’d with olde desire / Her Bowe is beauty, with ten thousands strings, / Of purest gold, tempred with vertues fire: / The least able to kyll an hoste of Kings. // Thy shafts be spent, and shee (to warre appointed) / Hydes in those christall quivers of her eyes, / More Arrowes with hart-piercing mettel poynted, / Then there be starres at midnight in the skyes. / With these, she steales mens harts for her reliefe, / Yet happy he thats robd of such a thiefe. The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. by J. William Hebel (Oxford: Blackwell,1961), vol. 1, p. 111. 19. From the Sonnets appended to Englands Heroicall Epistles (1599), Works of Drayton, vol. 1, p. 486.

176

Irmgard Maassen

The poem constitutes an attempt to achieve what under the conditions of the Elizabethan courtly society tended to be a contradiction in terms: the perfect alignment of an ambitious self with the existing order. For this purpose, Drayton appropriates the commonplace analogy between the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of man. Within his own “little world of love”, the speaker’s body is reinvented after the model of the planetary spheres. The lady in this system of correspondences is assigned the place of the “first moover”, the divinity ruling over the universe and guaranteeing its existence. As god is the creator on whom all else hinges, so the lady’s being preconditions the existence of the speaker. In that she makes him, and shapes him in such a way as to make his different body parts—there is an echo of the blazon of female beauty here—into organs of her adoration, she is deified, becoming quite literally the fixed point of reference, the raison d’être of the persona of the poet. In turn, his reason for being consists in his singing her praises. There is no open suggestion here, as we will find in Daniel and Carew, that the poet, more than just ‘praising’ her, is in fact creating her. The neatness of the microcosm-macrocosm analogy denies the violence that this inscription of order into the body entails. The denial is belied, however, by the mention of the sphere of Mars in the second half of the second quatrain, “where furious conflicts bee”. Here the violent strain that the body is put under by being regulated in obedience to the dominant ideology makes itself felt. The Petrarchan conceit of despair and hope waging a furious war in the lover is placed ominously at the centre of the poem, contained, but emphatically not resolved in the traditional manner by a progressive move towards sublimation of earthly desires. Instead, only by adopting an allegory of sufficiently vast scale, in fact of universal proportions, can this conflict be safely contained as just a minor turbulence in one of many spheres. Enlarging the scenario of love into cosmic dimensions, with the concomitant deification of the lady, appears necessary to reduce the lover’s conflict to a manageable, unthreatening size. Drayton’s apparently seamless inscription of the desiring poet into a harmonious cosmic order can only work on this grandest of scales, because it minimises the actual contradictions on the social level. It is, in fact, rather the exception among the sonnets. The hyperbolic image reveals the tremendous effort that has to go into what Bourdieu terms the ‘collective deception’ about the symbolic violence that this act of incorporating the proper disposition to deference necessitates. But the hyperbole extends in both directions: while the lady is put in the place of god, the poet becomes the whole universe—not a bad compensation for his secondary role. By drawing his model from astronomy rather than from Neoplatonic philosophy, which had its own elaborate scheme of correspondences between man and the four spheres of the universe, Drayton precludes any resolution of his Martian turmoils by the traditional process of sublimation. There is no conceptual space in this image for a redefinition of love as spiritual, or for pious renunciation in the vein of Dante or Petrarch. For Drayton, as for most of the English sonneteers, this Neoplatonic spiritualization of love was not an option.20 ***

Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet

177

The sonnets of Samuel Daniel, though more insistent in exhibiting his suffering, come close to Drayton’s in their deceptively unproblematic sanctification of the lady, but emphasise the mutuality of the patronage relationship. Daniel’s sonnets to Delia, first published with authority in 1592, after a pirated edition together with Philip Sidney’s sonnets had appeared a year earlier, were dedicated to Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, who was by that time the acknowledged executor of her brother’s literary estate. The Countess of Pembroke was an important source of literary patronage, and Daniel shows himself acutely aware of the advantages that her favour could mean for the advancement of his literary and professional career.21 In this context, Daniel’s sixty sonnets to Delia construct a static relationship of unconditional service of the love-smitten poet to his hard-hearted lady. There is little development or narrative, instead each poem enacts a scene of renewed submission to her irresistible beauty and virtues, ringing the changes on his abject suffering at her cruel immovability, and usually ending in a couplet that, perhaps with a touch of self-complacency, underlines the speaker’s persistence in his hopeless wooing.22 In a sense, this reiteration of the same works as training in a gym works on the muscles: the sonnets build up and exercise the disposition for proper obedience. They do this by mystifying the symbolic violence of the relationship, casting the suffering as a 20. See also Works of Drayton, p. 486, “To the Moone. Sonet. 11”, showing a very similar argument turning on the allegory of the poet’s humours with the four elements.—See Dennis McKeerlin, A Lecture in Love’s Philosophy (Lanham and London: University Press of America, 1984) for an exposition of Leone Ebro’s Dialoghi d’amore with their theory of the correspondence of the spheres of the body to those of the universe, a possible model Drayton does not resort to.—The image of the ‘first mover’, a hyperbole of flattery, was conventional enough, however, to recur in a mundane bid for patronage, another instance of the easy slippage between political and erotic courtships. In September 1616, Thomas Carew addressed a letter to his patron in a desperate attempt to secure his continuing favour which was, due to some misdemeanour on Carew’s part, slipping from him. He expressed his wish to return to his patron’s service, if a suit for a different employment to which he had been sent off by his patron should be unsuccessful, in these terms: “my thoughts of thr. propr. & regular motion not aspiring higher then the orbe of yr. Lps. seruice, this irregulr. being caused by yr. self whoe are my primum mobile, for I euer accounted it honr. enough for me to correre la fortuna del mio Sigre. […]” The Poems of Thomas Carew with his Masque “Coelum Britannicum”, ed. by Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), p. 203. For the full story see Dunlap, pp. xxi-xxix, used by Anthony Low, The Reinvention of Love: Poetry, Politics and Culture from Sidney to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 140-142. 21. See Klein (1998), pp. 136-170 for Daniel’s efforts to be linked with the Sidney name. 22. See Samuel Daniel, To Delia. “Sonnet. XI.”: Teares, vowes, and prayers, winne the hardest hart, / Teares, vowes and prayers haue I spent in vaine; / Teares cannot soften flint, nor vowes conuart, / Prayers preuaile not with a quaint disdaine. // I lose my teares where I haue lost my loue, / I vow my faith, where faith is not regarded; / I pray in vaine, a mercilesse to moue: / So rare a faith ought better be rewarded. // Yet, though I cannot winne her will with teares, / Though my soules Idoll scorneth all my vowes; / Though all my prayers be to so deafe eares, / No fauour though, the cruell faire allowes, // Yet will I weepe, vow, pray to cruell shee: // Flint, frost, disdaine, weares, meltes, and yeeldes we see.—The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel Daniel, ed. by Alexander B. Grosart (New York: Russell & Russell [1885] 1963), vol. 1, p. 44.—All subsequent quotations of Daniel, noted in brackets in the text, are from this edition.

178

Irmgard Maassen

prelude to erotic satisfaction, and sacralising the scene and recipient of service. The pleasure, as in all formulaic genres, lies in the rhetorical variation of the sameness of the pattern, as in “Sonnet. XII.”: My spotlesse loue houers with purest wings, About the Temple of her proudest frame: Where blaze those lights fairest of earthly things, Which cleere our clouded world with brightest flame. M’ambitious thoughts confined in her face, Affect no honor but what she can giue: My hopes doe rest in limits of her grace, I weigh no comfort vnlesse she relieue. For she that can my heart imparadize, Holdes in her fairest hand what dearest is, My fortunes wheeles the circle of her eies, Whose rowling grace deigne once a turne of blis. All my liues sweet consists in her alone, So much I loue the most vunlouing one.

What kind of self is fashioned here? Besides exhibiting the intellectual qualifications of an eligible tutor and author, namely his scholarship, wit, and verbal skill, his taste and decorum, the sonnets simultaneously display the attitude of an eminently employable servant. They show him faithful and loyal, steadfast even in despair, aware of the lady as the source of earthly bounty, but taking pleasure in his subjection, and surrendering fully to her reign: “Yet my soules soueraigne, since I must resigne, / Reigne in my thoughts, my loue and life are thine.” (“Sonnet. XXVII.”, ll. 13-14) There is, particularly when the speaker is shown as dying from the hand of his tyrant lady—“Ladies and Tyrants, neuer laws respect. / Then there I die from whence my life should come, / And by that hand whom such deeds ill become.” (“Sonnet. XXXI.”, ll.12-14)—more than a hint of martyrdom in these self-constructions. Such insistence on his unrelieved suffering heroises his pain, to the extent that the adulation of the lady recedes in importance behind what begins to resemble a self-hallowing exercise. This elevation through suffering—a motif that can be either regarded as Christian or masochist—remains implicit, however. Daniel carefully suppresses any open sanctification of his own submission. A poem in which the speaker compares himself to the Phoenix who perishes from his dedication and gets renewed by it—a much-quoted image of everlasting life through death with its allusion to Christ, perhaps best known through John Donne’s erotic appropriation in the Canonization—is not included in the authorised editions of his poems after 1591.23 Clearly, Daniel’s stance of pining, weeping, and mourning owes much to the literary conventions of melancholia, a mode cultivated at the time as a favourite figure for interiority and individuation. But at the same time, this habitus is reminiscent of the demeanour of sadness propagated by the Puritans as the proper conduct suitable for the godly life. There is an analogy here between the comportment of 23. Klein (1998), p. 145, however, argues that the Phoenix image was too closely associated with Sidney to make it politic to use it.

Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet

179

the ideal servant and that of the faithful Puritan worshipper, as one would, indeed, expect from an ideology in which religious and secular authority were mutually reinforcing. Sanctifying epithets are entirely reserved for his lady. She is likened to Diana surprised by Actaeon in the woods (“Sonnet. V.”), his sacrificed heart sends the “incense of [its] sighs to heauen” (“Sonnet. VIII.”), her eyes are kindled by “celestiall fire” (“Sonnet. LIX.”). The equally conventional swing to the opposite end of adulation, condemnation of her devilish cruelty, is carefully avoided, however. Significantly, a poem in which the lady’s supernatural powers are demonized, so that instead of as a saint she appears as a “slie Inchanter” who “bewitcht” the speaker, only appeared in the unauthorised publication of 1591, but was left out of the later official editions.24 In a context of a real suit for patronage, which called for encomiastic praise above all, it must have appeared unwise to indulge in the anti-Petrarchan conventions of the game. As the comparison of the lady to Diana already indicates, the love Daniel professes in his sonnets is curiously devoid of sexual connotations. Neither Venus nor Cupid invoke and sanctify the pleasures of sensual love here. There is no open suggestion that the lady’s desired favours should be erotic, nor that the poet’s suffering originates in the Petrarchan impossibility to reconcile sexual desire and spiritual love. The class relationship, the male speaker’s relation to his employer and social superior, utterly overrules and subsumes the gender relationship here. Self-assertion for the poet arises out of his professional skill, not from a vision of his sexual mastery. Towards the end of the sequence, the speaker shows signs of covert hostility towards his proud mistress, when he reminds her that her beauty, the source of her power, is ephemeral: “When thou surcharg’d with burthen of thy yeeres, / Shalt bend thy wrinckles homeward to the earth” (“Sonnet. L.”, ll. 9-10). The reference to the passage of time rehumanizes the lady, and initiates a subtle shift of power. The poet begins to assert his mastery over her, by offering, again not an innovative topos at all, to eternize her in his poems. That the established hierarchy of service is in danger of being undermined by the poet’s ascendancy becomes obvious when the mutuality of the patron-servant relationship is made explicit: “These [i.e. these lines] shall intombe those eies, that haue redeem’d / Me from the vulgar, thee from all obscureness.” (“Sonnet XLIIII”, ll. 11-12) But this move towards greater equality is shifted beyond reproach by sacralising its nature; the poet does not just skillfully sing her praises, enhancing her reputation by his “happy pen”, he makes her immortal in quasi-divine manner: “That Grace which doth more then in women thee, / Liues in my lines, and must eternall bee.”(“Sonnet XLV”, l. 8 and ll. 13-14)

24. See sonnet 11, ll. 1 and 7, of the 1591 edition, ascribed to Daniel by Grosart (1963), p. 27.

180

Irmgard Maassen

Deification refused—Sidney Whereas Daniel writes from the position of someone whose suit is ultimately successful—he was, after all, tutor to the Countess of Pembroke’s son, William Herbert—Philip Sidney’s failure to deify his Stella reflects, I would argue, on his position as a failed courtier under Elizabeth. Famously, in the constellation of Astrophil’s illicit infatuation with Stella, a married court lady with a jealous husband, who repulses him, gets robbed of a kiss, but never succumbs to his wooing, Sidney revives the Petrarchan conflict between passion and reason. In the much-quoted sonnet 5 Astrophil pays lip service to the Neoplatonic dichotomy between heaven and earth, spiritual and carnal love, only to assert, in the final turn of argument, the reality of his physical desire against the precepts of religious idealisation: It is most true, that eyes are form’d to serve The inward light: and that the heavenly part Ought to be king, from whose rules who do swerve, Rebels to Nature, strive for their own smart. It is most true, what we call Cupid’s dart, An image is, which for ourselves we carve; And, fools, adore in temple of our heart, Till that good god make church and churchman starve. True, that true Beauty Virtue is indeed, Whereof this beauty can be but a shade, Which elements with mortal mixture breed: True, that on earth we are but pilgrims made, And should in soul up to our country move: True, and yet true that I must Stella love.25

Emphatically, Stella is the opposite pole to what Neoplatonic and Christian philosophy deem as holy, she is adored but not divine—her adoration by Astrophil is an act of challenge to, instead of incorporation of, the conventional framework of belief. On the foil of this canonical view of love, and in rhetorically fruitful tension to it, Sidney’s exploration of carnal desire unfolds. The divide between the lover’s desire and his gratification is internalised, splitting the male self in two, as it tenaciously holds on to something which is not just hopeless, as Daniel courteously construes his lover’s dilemma, but presented as unreasonable and morally wrong. The sonnets display the lover not as predominantly doleful but as furiously arguing, posturing, exhibiting a mobile wit and inventiveness in his self-performance that shows an aptitude for faithful devotion even to undeserving causes.26 What is instead deified is masculine desire. Desire is externalised, projected onto the mythological figure of Cupid, taken from the classical canon that traditionally provided 25. Sidney, Selected Writings, ed.by Dutton (1987), p. 31. See also sonnet 71, ll. 12-14: “So while thy beauty draws the heart to love, / As fast thy Virtue bends that love to good: / ‘But ah,’ Desire still cries, ‘give me some food.’” Ibid., p. 65. 26. See sonnet 61 for the cunning triumph of unreasonableness.

Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet

181

allegory for sensual love which offended Christian morality. Personified as Cupid, sexual desire is sanctified into a divine power that weak mortals are helpless against. Again, the figure of the Anacreontic Cupid is a literary commonplace, but it serves to cast Astrophil as a victim rather than as the wilful perpetrator of his own illicit passion. Cupid, furthermore, is male, and in sonnet 12, we find him figured as Astrophil’s accomplice in the attempt to conquer Stella’s heart. This alignment reproduces the homosocial structures of Renaissance society that work to objectify women.27 Cupid possesses Stella’s body much as a military leader calls the outer fortifications of an embattled city his own: Cupid, because thou shin’st in Stella’s eyes, That from her locks, thy day-nets, none scapes free, That those lips swell, so full of thee they be, That her sweet breath makes oft thy flames to rise, That in her breast thy pap well sugared lies, That her grace gracious makes thy wrongs, that she What words soe’r she speaks persuades for thee, That her clear voice lifts thy fame to the skies. Thou countest Stella thine, like those whose powers Having got up a breach by fighting well, Cry, “Victory, this fair day all is ours.” O no, her heart is such a citadel, So fortified with wit, stor’d with disdain, That to win it, is all the skill and pain.

The conventionally expected move, to be observed in Drayton’s “Amour. 26.” for instance, to conflate Stella with the deity fails; her external charms are explained as the property of the god of love, but her heart, and with it her chastity, remains impenetrable. Her divinity is only superficial, after all, limited to the single attractions of eyes, hair, lips, or breasts. What is more, Stella’s sanctification becomes fundamentally unachievable, as Sidney constructs the argument in such a way that she would, paradoxically, be god-like only if she sinfully succumbed to Astrophil’s wooing. One may detect in this failed or refused deification of the lady a reflection of Sidney’s notorious failure to gain preferment from the queen. Sidney’s aim to be employed in royal service to further the Protestant cause in Europe was thwarted by Elizabeth. When in the penultimate poem of the sequence, sonnet 107, Astrophil begs his “princess” to dismiss him from his lover’s service, so as to enable him to pursue his “great cause”, the parallel to Sidney’s situation is obvious, except that Elizabeth did not comply with Sidney’s wish. It is equally obvious that in this sonnet, as in real life, there is a profound disjunction between the “sovereign” herself and the divine cause she should personify. Service in the highest cause can no longer be troped as service for the lady—in fact, just as the lady is a little less than divine, so courtship in Astrophil and Stella is subtly devalued as a vain pastime. Whatever sonnet 71 may have claimed earlier—“So while thy 27. See Innes (1997), p. 34, for a similar reading of Surrey’s poems as exhibiting the workings of patriarchy.

182

Irmgard Maassen

beauty draws the heart to love, / As fast thy Virtue bends that love to good:”—the seamless assimilation of the lover-poet to the values embodied by his beloved fails. The famous renunciation sonnet,28 though not part of the sequence, is usually read as performing the ultimate divorce of his desire from what the lady, and I would argue the queen, represents. In a letter written to Walsingham from the campaign in the Netherlands a few months before his death, Sidney spells out this refusal to deify the queen/lady: “Her Majesty […] is but a means whom God useth and I am faithfully persuaded that if she shold withdraw her self other springes woold ryse to help this action […]”.29

Deification deflected—Wroth What happens, however, when the silent, elusive lady of the sonnet herself starts to love and speak? Juliet’s stance, as we have seen, was scripted by Shakespeare as a compliant response to the male economy of desire. Yet the dynamics of sexual and social mastery receive a further complication when a woman assumes the role of the Petrarchan poet. Mary Wroth, niece to the Countess of Pembroke and Philip Sidney, became embroiled— or, as her convoluted style suggests, occasionally entangled—in these complexities when she was seeking to lend authority to her own writing by adopting the Sidney literary genres and exploiting the family myth. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the cycle of sonnets appended to her sprawling prose romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (first part printed in 1621), takes up the topics and tropes characteristic of English Petrarchism, evidence at once of the cultural dominance of the Petrarchan paradigm and of its flexibility in accommodating shifting gender positions. There is a telling difference, however. Wroth’s sonnets of love are written around a central absence—the beloved other, in this case the man, does not enter the scene. He is not just temporarily absent, or generally beyond reach as the Petrarchan lady traditionally is; he is left out, never described and, except for the title of the sequence, hardly named or addressed.30 It seems as if the female poet lacks, or refuses to embrace, the authority held out by Petrarchism to give concrete shape to and objectify in verse the desired other.31 Whatever mastery

28. See “Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust,/ And thou my mind aspire to higher things”: No. 11 of Certain Sonnets, in Selected Writings, ed. by Dutton (1987), p. 168. 29. Quoted in Montrose (1977), p. 33. 30. As Ann Rosalind Jones points out, “no proximity meant no threat to chastity”, see her “Designing Women: The Self as Spectacle in Mary Wroth and Veronica Franco”, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. by Naomi J. Miller / Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), pp. 135-153, here p. 144. 31. See Elizabeth Hanson, “Boredom and Whoredom: Reading Renaissance Women’s Sonnet Sequences”, The Yale Journal of Criticism 10, 1 (1997), 165-191, for a reading of the gaps and obscurities in Wroth’s sonnets as a result of the woman poet’s refusal to install the female desiring subject in a social context governed by gender codes.

Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet

183

Wroth assumes under the Petrarchan paradigm, it does not extend over the image of the beloved man. In Wroth’s poems, therefore, the topos of the sacred is reserved for other purposes than the deification of the man. Any exaltation of him would result in duplicating the woman’s subjection which was only too real in social life. Active courting by the woman, or encomiastic rhetoric, is avoided in these poems, as it would offend against the code of female modesty. For the woman, other than for Sidney’s Astrophil, there is no promise of mastery through sexual conquest: outside marriage it would be dishonouring, while inside marriage it would lead to her subordination as a wife. Instead of singing praises to the man, Wroth turns her attention in on herself, fashioning through her poetry a female subjectivity32 made, and made heroical, through the act of loving. As sonnet 6 from the “Crown of Sonnets dedicated to Love”, the centrepiece of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, claims, love […] doth inrich the witts, and make you see That in your self, which you knew nott before, Forcing you to admire such guifts showld bee Hid from your knowledg, yett in you the store[.]33

It is love itself, conceived as an external power, that is deified in Wroth’s sonnets. Sonnet 13 explicitly dedicates the “Crown” to the “Great King of Love” who is invested with the epithets of the good and wise ruler, so as to transform the playful Cupid of tradition into a Christ-like figure of majesty: Free from all fogs butt shining faire, and cleere Wise in all good, and innosent in ill Wher holly friendship is esteemed deere With truth in love, and justice in our will, In love thes titles only have theyr fill Of hapy lyfe maintainer, and the meere Defence of right, the punnisher of skill, And fraude; from whence directions doth apeere, To thee then lord commander of all harts, Ruller of owr affections kinde, and just Great King of Love, my soule from fained smarts Or thought of change I offer to your trust This crowne, my self, and all that I have more Except my hart which you beestow’d beefore. ([P89])

By substituting the god of love for the beloved man, and transposing the scenario of courtship from a private setting to an allegorical Court of Love steeped in an outmoded 32. See also Nona Fienberg, “Mary Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity”, in Miller / Waller (1991), pp. 175-190. 33. Numbered as [P82] in The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. by Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), p. 130.—All subsequent quotations of Wroth are from this edition, identified in brackets in the text by Roberts’ system of enumeration.

184

Irmgard Maassen

feudal tradition, Wroth manages to elide the problem that the norm of feminine obedience poses to the aristocratic woman. The female poet-lover subjects herself only to love itself, figured as the regal sovereign, in compliance with the requirements of feudal service, but not to the individual man who, as the final couplet stresses, may possess her heart but is not given possession of her self. By declaring a divided loyalty to both the deified power of love and her actual lover, she restricts the power of each. In effect, although the Pamphilia of the sonnets plays the game of courtly love, accepting the sexual submission assigned to the woman within its structures, she circumvents the act of social submission to any concrete lover.34 A comparison of the scene of love’s inception illustrates this displacement further. The first poem in Wroth’s sequence figures the beginning of love as the effect of a direct intervention of Venus and Cupid rather than of the sight of the beloved man: in a dream, the speaker observes Venus and Cupid planting a burning heart into her breast. All sensual element in the moment of falling in love, such as seeing, or being seen by, the beloved, is erased, so that this love emerges as pure and objectless. While Astrophil’s love of Stella follows sight—“I saw and liked” (Sonnet 2)—and his Cupid resides in Stella’s eyes (Sonnet 12), Pamphilia’s love is kindled by the sole agency of the god of love stepping in as a substitute for the absent lover. It is fitting that what causes suffering to Wroth’s speaker is the invisibility of the beloved rather than his cold disdain, the standard prerogative of the Petrarchan lady, as is illustrated by the sonnet “Like to the Indians, scorched with the sun”, where the loving woman’s sacrifice, startlingly compared to the worship of the cruel sun-god by black-skinned ‘Indians’, is hidden, unvalued, offered to an unseen and unseeing ‘saint’.35 What the poems display, in a paradoxical performance of concealment, is the secrecy of Pamphilia’s love.36 In part this secrecy may be a reflection of the autobiographical experience underlying the romance and the poems; Wroth, after she was widowed, bore two illegitimate children to her cousin, the 3rd Earl of Pembroke, and lost her position at the court of Queen Anne. Secrecy, hiding the truth from the prying eyes of the court, makes 34. For Wroth’s evasion in the Urania of social institutions such as marriage in favour of an exploration of an autonomous female self, see Maureen Quilligan, “The Constant Subject: Instability and Female Authority in Wroth’s Urania Poems”, in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and SeventeenthCentury English Poetry, ed. by Elizabeth D. Harvey / Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 307-335, here p. 321. 35. Like to the Indians, scorched with the sunne, / The sunn which they doe as theyr God adore / Soe ame I us’d by love, for ever more / I worship him, less favors have I wunn, // Better are they who thus to blacknes runn, / And soe can only whitenes want deplore / Then I who pale, and white ame with griefs store, / Nor can have hope, but to see hopes undunn; // Beesids theyr sacrifies receavd’s in sight / Of theyr chose sainte: Mine hid as worthles rite; / Grant me to see wher I my offrings give, // Then lett mee weare the marke of Cupids might / In hart as they in skin of Phoebus light / Nott ceasing offrings to love while I Live. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus [P25] in Roberts (1983), p. 99. 36. For the sonnets staging a withdrawal from circulation and publicity see Jeff Masten, “‘Shall I turne blabb?’ Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets”, in Miller / Waller (1991), pp. 67-87.

Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet

185

a recurring theme in her writing; it serves to defend the loving woman against reproach since by her steadfast, heroically silent suffering, she deflects charges of immorality. If active female love is transgressive, this ostentatious lack of ostentation, this performance of deference to proper feminine modesty is designed to redeem it. The other central virtue Pamphilia cultivates is constancy.37 In opposition to the dominant view of woman as weak and fickle, Wroth constructs constancy as a female virtue that contrasts positively with the unfaithfulness shown by Amphilanthus. Constancy, a masculine virtue also deemed the precondition of good government, is in fact made the fundament of her selffashioning. Constancy in love affords the woman an opportunity for proving herself heroical, in accordance with the aristocratic ethos of the romance genre. Her sonnet sequence ends on this note, in an apostrophe to herself: “And thus leave off, what’s past showes you can love, / Now lett your constancy your honor prove”. ([P103], ll. 13-14) For a woman, lacking an outlet for her ambition in politics or a public office, the habitus of faithful service, acquired in the exercise of love, turns back on itself and fashions a self wholly dedicated to this love alone. Love becomes an aim in itself, a means for female self-invention and self-improvement entirely independent of an object. This love no longer lends itself to an allegorical reading, it is not a mystification of social ambition, but just sexual love. This explains why Wroth, when she deifies love, is preoccupied with the struggle for preeminence between Cupid and Venus, who in the medieval Court of Love tradition signify spiritual and sensual love respectively. She needs to make sure that her love conforms to morality by appearing cleansed of all carnal aspects. In Sonnet 9 of the “Crown”, the ‘monster’ lust is torn from the Court of Love and the order of reason like a misbegotten child—a distressing image if read on the biographical foil of Wroth’s own two children born out of wedlock: Butt wher they may returne with honor’s grace Wher Venus follyes can no harbour winn Butt chased ar as worthles of the face Or stile of love who has lasiviouse binn. Oure harts ar subject to her sunn; wher sinn Never did dwell, or rest one minutes space; What faults hee hath, in her, did still begin, And from her brest hee suckd his fleeting pace, If lust bee counted love t’is faulcely nam’d By wikednes a fayrer gloss to sett Upon that vice, which els makes men asham’d In the owne frase to warrant butt begett

37. For a different reading of constancy in what she sees as Pamphilia’s move from earthly love to love of God, see Elaine V. Beilin, “‘The Onely Perfect Vertue’: Constancy in Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus”, Spenser Studies 2 (1981), 229-245. For the ‘heroics of constancy’, see also Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 163-169.

186

Irmgard Maassen This childe for love, who ought l4ike monster borne Bee from the court of Love, and reason torne. ([P85])

Sonnet 9, through its dense construction and syntactical obscurity, stages an intriguing conflation of Venus and Cupid with the Madonna and Child. The ambiguity sets in at exactly the moment, line 8, when the physical reality of the body comes into play among the abstractions predominant in the poem. Wroth evokes not the adored body of the beloved, but the suckling child at his mother’s breast. What reads as an intrinsically ‘feminine’ image of the nursing mother tips over from connotations of holy motherhood to fear of corrupting an infant by the milk of a dissolute wet-nurse. The rhetoric of the poem oscillates between these two poles of virtue and sin, of the Madonna and Venus, mutually calling each other into question and destabilising the dichotomy between saint and whore on which early modern constructions of femininity are predicated. The explicit message, to cast out sin and carnality from the ideal court of love, is thus undermined by a tantalising ambiguity that here pertains to one of the most sacred images in Christendom.

Deification revoked—Carew With Daniel we encountered an incipient sense of the reciprocity of patronage, of the way in which the subservient role of the poet as client can be made to yield a potential for empowerment—his professional skill is elevated into a source of his quasi divine power to eternize the patron in poetry. A more advanced stage of the poet’s ascendancy is exemplified by my final example, Thomas Carew. Carew was one of the Cavalier poets at the court of Charles I, well versed in French and Italian literature, and with a reputation for wit and unreformed libertinage. He is perhaps best known for his poems to Celia that rework some of the deifying conventions, if not the form, of the Elizabethan sonnet. His “Ingratefull beauty threatned” radically inverts the hierarchy between the poet and his adored lady by proposing that it is really the poet who confers favours, and revealing her assumed divinity as merely the effect of his rhetoric: Know Celia, (since thou art so proud,) ‘Twas I that gave thee thy renowne: […] That killing power is none of thine, I gave it to thy voyce, and eyes: Thy sweets, thy graces, all are mine; Thou art my starre, shin’st in my skies; Then dart not from thy borrowed sphere Lightning on him, that fixt thee there. Tempt me with such affrights no more, Lest what I made, I uncreate; […]38 38. From Poems. By Thomas Carevv Esquire (London 1640), reprinted in Dunlap (1949), pp. 17-18.

Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet

187

Carew here lays bare the implicit logic of Petrarchan poetics, showing that the lady’s power, her very existence, is of the male poet’s making. He poses as her creator, while her power to reject him, rather than stimulating the sweet pain of disdained love, is cast as a vexing habit of pride that, if overdone, jeopardises her illusory sovereignty. This repudiation of the Petrarchan stereotype becomes possible only with the demystification of desire as an extraneous force of divine origin inflicted on the submissive poet-lover. Rather, in tune with a new age of growing individualism and declining feudal structures, it pivots on the self-deifying admission that the poet is himself master over, and creator of, his own desires and their objects. In “Good counsell to a young Maid” the image of love as pilgrimage, so successfully appropriated by Romeo and Juliet, receives a twist that undermines the entire project of sanctifying service: When you the Sun-burnt Pilgrim see Fainting with thirst, hast to the springs, Marke how at first with bended knee He courts the crystall Nimphe, and flings His body to the earth, where He Prostrate adores the flowing Deitie. But when his sweaty face is drencht In her coole waves, when from her sweet Bosome, his burning thirst is quencht; Then marke how with disdainfull feet He kicks her banks, and from the place That thus refresht him, moves with sullen pace. So shalt thou be despis’d, faire Maid, When by the sated lover tasted; […]39

The poem exploits the surplus of meaning inherent in embodied performance: The body regulated in the discipline of worship—as Drayton and Daniel fashioned the body of the suitor—sheds its allegorical vestment, and, being styled as ‘natural’, becomes virtually indistinguishable from the body engaged in the rapacious quenching of its carnal desires. The act of worship, by virtue of a set of shared gestures, metamorphoses into the act of greedily taking possession. Anthony Low40 places Carew’s writings in the context of a growing commercialisation of service, which privileged social mobility, here evoked in the moving on of the sated pilgrim/client to some new employer. That service is indeed labour rather than love is suggested by the graphic symptoms of the body; neither the conventional tears nor genteel paleness mark the physiognomy of the pilgrim, but sweat, and desire is troped not as a burning heart, but as burning thirst. Following convention, the social difference in the patron-client relationship is obliterated by Carew’s overwriting it with sexual difference, but instead of an idealising courtship the poem depicts a scene which allows the “pilgrim” undisguisedly to assert his mastery over the adored 39. Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. by Dunlap, p. 25. 40. Low (1993), pp. 132-157.

188

Irmgard Maassen

and desired deity in an unsublimated act of sexual consummation / consumption. In the context of a market economy which legitimises individualism, worship has become openly strategic, and no longer pretends to provide a permanent discipline of service in which to ground the social hierarchy. Adoration lasts only for so long until an ambition or a need is satisfied. Carew in this poem, by privileging the performative dimension of the body, effectively deconstructs the homology between secular and religious submission which underpinned the political ideology of the late Tudor and early Stuart period. He dismantles the allegorical frame of reference, which is textual insofar as it depends on a foregone knowledge of what something means—it has already been laid down that the monarch is in relation to his subjects as Christ to the church or as patron to client. Instead he liberates the material signifier, the visual spectacle of adoration, from preconceived meanings, thus letting the prostrate body of the pilgrim re-acquire a polysemy in the performance of its ritual of worship that makes it, at least potentially, the source of resistance to ideological inscriptions. Although the power of the performative to subvert the textual is often regarded as liberating, it is in fact always circumscribed by the limited range of alternative discourses on which a re-signification of the body’s performance can draw. “Good counsell to a young Maid” illustrates this, because it is obvious that the performing body of Carew’s pilgrim, though repudiating a religious reading, is not divested of all ideological inscriptions. Instead, his is a body that ‘naturally’ enacts mastery in the act of sexual intercourse; it is styled as a predatory agent in the gender struggle. Rather than purging the body of all textual meaning, Carew merely substitutes the libertine frame of reference for the religious one, a move that reflects the endless contest of ideologies in which performances of texts and bodies take on their momentary meanings. In either scenario a “faire Maid”, as Juliet’s seductive pretence of chaste saintliness showed her to be fully aware, stands in danger of being dishonoured. The liberation from the religious mystification of social and sexual hierarchies, or so our reading of Carew’s poem suggests, only ushers in a new ‘naturalisation’ of these hierarchies. On the evidence of this poem, Carew may thus be seen to stand on the threshold of a new scientific era, which requires a habitus favouring individual achievement over submissive service, and finds authority in a now secularised nature as much for definitions of gender and class difference as for those of ‘love’.

TOBACCO—SACRED AND PROFANE by Sabine Schülting Shortly before Christopher Marlowe’s death, the informer Richard Baines sent a note to the Privy Council, accusing Marlowe, or, rather, “on[e] Christopher Marly”, of a “Damnable Judgment of Religion, and scorn of gods word”. Among the eighteen blasphemous quotations ascribed to Marlowe, two refer to his love for tobacco. Marlowe is not merely identified as an incorrigible smoker, but his addiction is also closely linked with both atheistic and ‘sodomitical’ inclinations. According to Baines, Marlowe was convinced, first, that “all they that loue not Tobacco & Boies were fools”, and, secondly, that “if Christ would haue instituted the sacrament with more Ceremonial Reverence it would haue bin in more admiration, that it would haue bin much better being administered in a Tobacco pipe”.1 In the early modern age, smoking, ‘sodomy’ and blasphemy seem to have gone hand in hand. In one of the most famous pamphlets against smoking, King James’s A Counterblast to Tobacco (1604), similar parallels are drawn.2 James’s attack against the American plant, which was introduced into Europe in the mid-sixteenth century, is based on the argument that the smoker imitates “these beastly Indians, slaues to the Spaniards, refuse to the world, and as yet aliens from the holy Couenant of God”.3 For James, the “Indian weed”4 metonymically represents all the vices which the early modern colonial discourse ascribed to native American societies: unbridled sexuality, a lack of culture, ignorance of economic value, and devil worship. “Why doe we not as well imitate them in walking naked as they doe?”, James writes, “in preferring glasses, feathers, and such toyes, to golde and precious stones, as they do? yea why do 1. Richard Baines, “Richard Baines to the Privy Council”, facsimile and transcription in In Search of Christopher Marlowe: A Pictorial Biography, ed. by A. D. Wraight (London: Macdonald & Co., 1965), pp. 308-309. 2. James I, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, [London, 1604] facs. repr. (Amsterdam, New York: Da Capo Press, 1969). 3. James I (1604), B2r. 4. Two Broad-Sides Against Tobacco: The First given by King James of Famous Memory; His Counterblast to Tobacco. The Second Transcribed out of that learned Physician Dr. Everard Maynwaringe, His Treatise of the Scurvy […] ed. by J. H. Hancock (London: 1672), p. 30.

190

Sabine Schülting

we not denie God and adore the Deuill, as they doe?”5 In James’s pamphlet, smoking is analogous to ‘going native’. This association of tobacco and Europe’s ‘savage others’ also fuelled pictorial representations of smokers, as the frontispiece of Richard Brathwait’s The Smoking Age, or, The man in the mist: with The life and death of Tobacco (1617) vividly demonstrates. The picture shows a tobacco shop with several bottles and pipes as well as the statuette of a smoking ‘blackamoor’ on the counter. In the back room of the shop, behind an open curtain, three smokers are sitting at a table. Three scrolls issuing from their pipes contain an implicit warning against smoking, which links the English smokers to the African. The Latin text—“qui color albus erat” / “quantum mutatus ab illo” / “Anglus in Aethiopeum”—can be translated as “How much changed from white are these Englishmen transformed into Ethiopians”.6 In an age when the human body was regarded as a microcosm in which the whole creation was figured, smoking signified not just the conscious impairment of one’s own good health. The metamorphosis of the smoker’s body was merely the outward inscription of a more serious decay: the loss of culture and religion. Consequently, in John Deacon’s Tobacco Tortured, tobacco is said to have detrimental effects on the natural body, and—by analogy—also on the body politic, the economic body and the ecclesiastical body. In his “Epistle Dedicatorie”, Deacon explains that he has “purposely (although yet synecdochically) censured all those […] most foule and shamefull disorders vnder the onely name of Tobacco fumes”.7 In early modern Europe, tobacco and the sacred are irreconcilable. Or are they? Both King James and John Deacon represent merely one fraction in the long controversy on tobacco, which was initiated in 1602 by the publication of an antitobacco pamphlet entitled Work for Chimny-sweepers and in which the economic, political, religious and medicinal aspects of tobacco were discussed.8 The participants in this dispute agreed on hardly anything but tobacco’s humoral character—“hot and drie in the seconde degree”—as it had been decided upon by the Spanish doctor Nicolas Monardes.9 Anti-tobacco pamphleteers like Philaretes strongly disputed the wide-spread belief in the beneficial qualities of the plant and warned against tobacco’s detrimental effects on man’s humours. Early sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish and Portuguese explorers had been the first to describe the medicinal use of tobacco among the indigenous population of South America. In the second half of the century, and particularly after 1570, the belief in tobacco as a universal panacea was gradually 5. James I (1604), B2r. 6. Jerome E. Brooks, ed. Tobacco: Its History Illustrated by the Books, Manuscripts and Engravings in the Library of George Arents, Jr., 5 vols (New York: The Rosenbach Company, 1937), vol. 2, p. 37. 7. John Deacon, Tobacco Tortured, or, The Filthie Fume of Tobacco Refined […], [London, 1616] facs. repr. (Amsterdam, New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), n. pag. 8. See Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London, New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 76-78. 9. Nicolas Monardes, Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde, [London: 1577] facs. repr. (Amsterdam, New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 34v.

Tobacco – Sacred and Profane

191

established all over Europe.10 Monardes’s treatise on American herbs, which was published in 1577 in an English translation under the title Ioyfull Newes out of the newe founde worlde, was widely read and it “became the textbook for English physicians who promptly accepted tobacco as the greatest panacea ever known to man”.11 Tobacco, Monardes maintains, heals wounds, carbuncles and chilblains, it kills worms, and cures all kinds of colds, headaches, tooth aches, rheumatism, menstruation disorders and diseases of the kidney.12 The Italian physician Leonardo Fioravanti, a supporter of Monardes’s nicotian therapies, claimed that “everyone should make use of tobacco, since it is the plant which has been revealed in this century for human health through the goodness of God”.13 In a similar vein, William Barclay wrote that “God honoured America and blessed it by this wonderful and sacred plant”.14 Even in the third book of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, tobacco figures as a “diuine” plant which helps Belphoebe to heal Timias’s severe wounds. Spenser seems to have been familiar with Monardes’s and/or Fioravanti’s nicotian therapies since he gives a detailed description of how to prepare the medicine and apply it to the wound:15 The soueraigne weede betwixt two marbles plaine She pownded small, and did in peeces bruze, And then atweene her lilly handes twaine, Into his wound the iuyce thereof did scruze, And round about, as she could well it vze, The flesh therewith she suppled and did steepe, T’abate all spasme, and soke the swelling bruze, And after hauing searcht the intuse deepe, She with her scarfe did bind the wound from cold to keepe. (3.5.33)

In the English tobacco debate, which was to continue until the mid-seventeenth century, tobacco was being negotiated—not only economically but also discursively. I do not agree with Jordan Goodman and others, who have stressed that tobacco was easily absorbed “because it could find a niche in European cultures of consumption especially as a medicine”.16 Instead, it is my contention that tobacco’s introduction into Europe implied a ‘translation’ into a different culture where it had been unknown prior to the colonisation of America. The cultural encounter with the “Indian weed” caused a disruption 10. Grace G. Stewart, “A History of the Medicinal Use of Tobacco 1492-1860”, Medical History: The Official Journal of the British Society for the History of Medicine 11 (1967), 228-268, at pp. 231-235 11. Stewart (1967), p. 236. 12. Monardes (1577), 35r-37r. 13. Quoted in Goodman (1993), p. 77. 14. Quoted in Alexander von Gernet, “Nicotian Dreams: The Prehistory and Early History of Tobacco in Eastern North America”, in Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology, ed. by Jordan Goodman / Paul E. Lovejoy / Andrew Sherratt (London, New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 67-87, at p. 77. 15. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. by A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), 3.5.32. 16. Jordan Goodman, “Webs of Drug Dependence: Towards a Political History of Tobacco”, in Ashes to Ashes: The History of Smoking and Health, ed. by S. Lock / L. A. Reynolds / E. M. Tansey (Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 5-40, at p. 6.

192

Sabine Schülting

of European discourses and called for the negotiation and re-inscription of meaning. This included the problem of tobacco’s position in the divine order. Was it a gift of God or rather a devilish poison? Was it sacred or profane?—This chapter seeks to disentangle the web of arguments in the controversy, focussing specifically on the contradictory relationships between tobacco and the sacred. I shall argue that tobacco’s removal from its original function in native American performances of the sacred led not only to its reification and commodification in Western cultures but, paradoxically, also to its concurrent re-sacralisation.

Tobacco—Sacred, Pagan, or Profane As a sacred plant in many native American cultures, tobacco played a prominent role in diverse shamanistic ceremonies; it was a sacrifice offered to the spirits and it was also used for prayer and healing. For advocates of tobacco like Monardes, this fact presented a considerable obstacle to promoting the weed in Europe. Nevertheless, he describes the native American rites in detail: […] he [the chief priest] toke certaine leaues of the Tabaco, and caste theim into the fire, and did receiue the smoke of them at his mouthe, and at his nose with a Cane, and in takyng of it, he fell doune vppon the grounde, as a dedde manne, and remainyng so, according to the quantitie of the smoke that he had taken, and when the hearbe had doen his woorke, he did reuiue and awake, and gaue theim their aunsweres, accordyng to the visions, and illusions whiche he sawe, whiles he was rapte of the same maner, and he did interprete to them, as to hym semed beste, or as the Deuill had counsailed hym, giuyng theim continually doubtfull aunsweres, in such sorte, that how soeuer it fell out, thei might saie that it was the same, whiche was declared, and the aunswere that thei made.17

Although comparable descriptions of ‘savage’ performances and ecstatic dances proliferate in early modern travel writing, the general association of native American cultures with devil worship is counterproductive to Monardes’s intentions. He faces the problem that the colonial, religious and medical discourses make conflicting demands on his text. By representing tobacco as a ‘devilish’ plant, Monardes runs the danger of subverting his primary aim, i.e., to stress the virtues of tobacco. He tries to circumnavigate this problem by associating only the shamans with the devil and explaining their “visions” and “illusions” as devilish inspiration and shamanistic make-believe. In other words, Monardes maintains that the problem does not consist in tobacco’s qualities as such but, rather, in the specific role tobacco plays in native American rites where the devil employs it for his own ends: And as the Deuill is a deceiuer, and hath the knowledge of the vertue of Hearbes, he did shewe them the vertue of this Hearbe, that by the meanes thereof, thei might see their imaginations, and visions, that he hath represented to theim, and by that meanes doeth deceiue them.18

17. Monardes (1577), 39r. 18. Ibid.

194

Sabine Schülting mouthe, and it dooeth happen vnto theim, as vnto our Indians, liyng as though thei were dedde three or fower howers; and after thei doe remaine lightened, without any wearinesse, for to laboure againe […].20

On the other hand, Monardes maintains that their main motive for smoking lies in their addiction to tobacco since they enjoy the “drunkenness” it induces. Many Indians, he writes, “for their pastyme, doe take the smoke of the Tabaco, for to make theim selues drunke withall, and to see the visions, and thinges that doe represent to them, wherein thei dooe delight […].”21 This inclination to intoxication is identified as a general characteristic among “barbarous people”,22 who all seem to be familiar with hallucinogenic drugs, be it opium, alcohol or tobacco. In contrast to earlier writers on the uses of tobacco in native American societies, Monardes completely ignores the importance of tobacco in shamanistic healing rites as well as the fact that it was reserved for special ceremonies. This omission becomes the precondition for differentiating between American and European motives for and forms of tobacco consumption. Whereas native Americans are primarily associated with tobacco’s hallucinogenic effects and their frequent exploitation in ‘pagan’ performances, Europeans do not seem to be tempted by these ‘misdemeanours’ but, rather, employ the plant for therapeutic reasons only. In order to familiarise his European readers with tobacco and to defend it against its critics, Monardes colonises it not only by de-sacralising it and ‘cleansing’ it of its ‘pagan’ and ‘uncivilised’ attributes, but also by dissociating it from the performances of a different culture.

Tobacco and the Profane Monardes’s plea that tobacco be used only medicinally was, of course, not particularly successful. When his book was published in English, smoking was still a relatively new ‘vice’. It was not before 1565 that tobacco was first introduced into England by Sir John Hawkins and his crew. Particularly after 1590, the habit of smoking became very popular in England. According to Jeffrey Knapp, more than 16,000 pounds of tobacco were officially imported into England in 1603, while additionally a considerable amount of tobacco was smuggled into the country.23 Prior to 1610 when “John Rolfe imported

20. 21. 22. 23.

Monardes (1577), 40r. Ibid., 39r. Ibid., 40r. Jeffrey Knapp, “Elizabethan Tobacco”, Representations 21 (1988), 26-66, at p. 27. Knapp has published a slightly different version of his essay as a chapter of his An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). Although Knapp also discusses “Divine Tobacco”, which is also the title of this chapter, he analyses the debate on tobacco primarily in the context of early modern English economy, colonialism and the specific problems of Queen Elizabeth’s reign.

Tobacco – Sacred and Profane

195

Trinidadian seeds to Virginia”,24 the tobacco which was consumed in England was mainly of Spanish origin. In pamphlets, literary texts and paintings, tobacco frequently functions as the mark of profane existence, which either points to the primacy of a realm of the sacred or signifies the smoker’s total immersion in worldly affairs and desires. In Thomas Jenner’s 1626 poem about the “Indian weed”, tobacco serves as an allegory of earthly existence in general.25 Its fleeting nature, its destiny to be burned to ashes, reminds the smoker of his/her own mortality: The Indian Weed withered quite, Green at Noon, cut down at Night; Shews Thy decay, all Flesh is hay: Thus think, then drink Tobacco. The Pipe that is so lilly-white, Shews Thee to be a mortal Wight, And even such gone with a touch: Thus think, then drink Tobacco. And when the Smoke ascends on high, Think thou behold’st the Vanity Of worldly stuff, gone with a puff: Thus think, then drink Tobacco. And when the Pipe grows foul within, Think on thy Soul defil’d with Sin, And then the Fire it doth require: Thus think, then drink Tobacco. The Ashes that are left behind May serve to put thee still in mind, That unto Dust return thou must: Thus think, then drink Tobacco.26

As a memento mori, tobacco underscores the transitory nature of the human body, i.e. the inevitable laws of earthly existence. Jenner’s poem is quoted in Two Broad-Sides Against Tobacco, an anti-tobacco pamphlet published in 1672. Here, a postscript is added: “Answered by Gorge Withers thus / Thus think, drink no Tobacco.” This addition transforms the text into a warning against smoking and a condemnation of the smoker as the epitome of human vanity and hubris. The smoker is representative of the human being who merely seeks to satisfy his (or her) immediate physical desires. In these representations, Monardes’s distinction between American and European forms of tobacco consumption collapses. For King James, both native American and European smokers are guilty of

24. Knapp (1988), p. 34. 25. Ibid., p. 61 n. 71. 26. Quoted in Two Broad-Sides (1672), p. 30.

196

Sabine Schülting

“sinnefull and shamefull lust”, of “the sinne of drunkennesse”, of “a great vanitie” and “a great contempt of Gods good giftes”.27 This association of tobacco with the mere physical aspect of human existence, (wo)man’s28 body and its carnal cravings, becomes particularly obvious in Ben Jonson’s comedy Bartholomew Fair.29 Ale and tobacco, which are sold at Ursula’s booth, are examples of the “yearly enormities of this Fair” (2.1.36) Justice Overdo seeks to discover and to suppress. They form the basic props to a “heterotopia”,30 embedded in a social space which radically reverses its norms and replaces them by human follies. Fat Ursula, selling ale, tobacco, pigs, and sensual pleasures, stands at the centre of the fair, metonymically representing its carnivalesque anarchy. Tobacco is not identified as the sole cause of this merry pandemonium but it certainly is its indispensable constituent. Similar scenarios are portrayed in numerous Dutch and Flemish genre paintings of the midseventeenth century, which show peasants or other lower class people revelling, playing cards, drinking and smoking. Frequently, pipes function as phallic symbols, which underscore the erotic tensions between the figures represented.31 In these representations of smokers, cultural and/or social deviation is enacted, against which European (high) culture can (re-)construct its own norms and normality. For some decades around 1600, then, tobacco was anything but a stable signifier. Stripped from its function in native American cultures, it was introduced into Europe, first as a medicine, but soon as a drug and, thus, a highly profitable commodity. However, this did not lead to the immediate rejection of other, rather incompatible, meanings: tobacco as a sacred plant or a devilish drug, a memento mori or the mark of coarse materiality. It appears to have been impossible to determine the essence of tobacco once and for all. Early modern tobacco was a cultural hybrid whose transcultural background induced a specific phenomenon that Jeffrey Knapp has called tobacco’s “negativity, its ability to mediate between normally opposed terms—between purging and feeding, high and low, superstition and religion, home and away, heaven and earth”.32

27. James I. (1604), Crv, C4r, Dv. 28. Although in the early modern age smoking seems to have been (considered) a masculine rather than a feminine habit and a number of literary texts point to women’s aversion to tobacco, there is little evidence of any gender-specific prohibition of smoking. Cf. Craig Rustici, “The Smoking Girl: Tobacco and the Representation of Mary Frith”, Studies in Philology 96 (1999), 159-179, at p. 163. In the logic of Galenic humoral medicine, which regarded women as cold and moist, this would not have made much sense. See Jordan Goodman, “Webs of Drug Dependence: Towards a Political History of Tobacco”, in Ashes to Ashes: The History of Smoking and Health, ed. by S. Lock / L. A. Reynolds / E. M. Tansey (Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 5-40. 29. Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, [1614], in Ben Jonson: Five Plays, ed. by G. A. Wilkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 483-604. 30. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics 16 (1986), 22-27. 31. See Simon Schama, Überfluß und schöner Schein: Zur Kultur der Niederlande im Goldenen Zeitalter, trans. by Elisabeth Nowak, (München: Kindler, 1988), p. 224. 32. Knapp (1988), p. 51.

Tobacco – Sacred and Profane

197

This semantic instability is closely linked with an immense discursive productivity attributed to tobacco smoke. John Beaumont’s mock panegyric The Metamorphosis of Tobacco (1602) begins with an invocation of the weed as the poet’s muse: Infume my braine, make my soules powers subtile, Giue nimble cadence to my harsher stile: Inspire me with thy flame, which doth excell The purest streames of the Castalian well […].33

In William Vaughan’s The Spirit of Detraction, Coniured and Convicted (1611), tobacco figures as a different kind of muse, stimulating most prolific and blasphemous forms of storytelling: […] but for the most part our Caualeers and Gentles of the first head sucke in the smoakie vapour of TOBACCO, because they might counterfeit themselues giddy or drunken (for it is no shame to be drunke with TOBACCO) […] Then they faine themselues so long rauished as it were in an exstasie: vntil after a thorough perambulation of their barren wits […] they haue coined some strange accident worthy the rehersall among their boone companions. Then as thou they started out of an heauenly traunce […] Hauing their throats wel washtt with dreggish drugs; They recount tales of ROBIN-HOOD, of RHODOMONTING rouers, of DONZEL DEL PHOEBO, of a new ANTI-CHRIST borne in BABYLON, of lying wonders, blazing out most blasphemous newes, how that the DIUELL appeared at such a time with lightning and THUNDRING Maiestie […].34

As romances, legends, and blasphemies, the stories which are alluded to are set apart from the profanity of everyday reality. According to Vaughan, smoking causes ecstasy, intoxication and fantasy, hence a dissolution of both the rational self and the symbolic order. Tobacco is associated with an exuberant theatricality and narrative productivity. It forms part of a counterculture whose symbolic surplus cannot be contained. Smoking is constructed as the catalyst of these cultural performances which resemble the shamanistic rites of the native Americans since—at least for the European non-smoker— they are irrational, illegible and non-referential. This indeterminacy of performances initiated or accompanied by tobacco also characterises Mary Frith, alias Moll Cutpurse—a cross-dresser, bawd, trader in stolen goods, and probably the first female smoker in England. In her anonymously published (auto-)biography, The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith, Commonly Called Moll Cutpurse (1662), ‘she’ reports that she “was mightily taken with this vanity because of its affected singularity, and no woman before me ever smoked any, though I had a great many to follow my example”.35 The editor introduces her as a “hermaphrodite” and a “living description and portraiture of a schism and separa33. John Beaumont, The Metamorphosis of Tabacco, [London 1602], facs. repr. (Amsterdam, New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), B1v. 34. Quoted in Sarah Augusta Dickson, ed., Tobacco: A Catalogue of the Books, Manuscripts and Engravings Acquired since 1942 in the Arents Tobacco Collection at the New York Public Library from 1507 to the Present, 5 vols (New York: The New York Public Library, 1958), vol. 4, p. 158. 35. The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith Commonly called Moll Cutpurse [1662]. With a Facsimile of the Original Edition, ed. by E. Randall / S. Nakayama (New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1993), p. 28.

198

Sabine Schülting

tion”.36 Blurring binary oppositions, Moll is a puzzle which calls for interpretation.37 Like Ursula in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Moll Cutpurse also represents a deviant economy which questions the logic of early capitalism as it keeps material objects, money and prostitutes in constant circulation. Whereas tobacco in the texts about Mary Frith as well as in Jonson’s play is merely one attribute of a different economy, in many other texts the “Indian weed” is constructed as the main reason for England’s precarious financial situation. Not only did early modern tobacco cause epistemological uncertainties, it also seemed to induce an economic chaos and the destruction of English wealth. In 1620, Edward Bennett, in A Treatise Touching the Inconveniences that Tobacco Hath Brought into this Land, maintains that “[t]he main decay of Trade, and the chiefe cause that hindreth the importation of Bullion out of Spaine is Tobacco, for there is consumed by all computation, yearely in this Land, three hundred thousand weight […].”38 He criticises the various decrees issued by King James as not far-reaching enough even though they had severely curtailed the import of Spanish tobacco by supporting Virginian tobacco instead. Bennett calls for a general prohibition of tobacco, arguing: Now if this Weede were prohibited, all men would stand vpon the orderly saile of their goods, & not sell vnder 10 or 12. Per Cent. outward, as formerly they haue done, when little Tobacco came out of Spaine, and the most part of our returnes would be in Bullion […]. Then who would not rather bring home ready money then goods, for which hee is vncertaine when to haue Money. This is the use of the French and Dutch-men, which maketh their Countries so aboundant in Siluer, for no Countrey is so smoakt as ours. In so much, that both Spaniards & al other Nations say tauntingly to vs, when they see al our goods landed (to vse their owne words) Que todo esso se pagtaa con humo; that al that will be paid in smoak; Now our gracious Soueraigne, knowing it to be a vitious and most pernituious weede laid great impositions on it, thereby to hinder the importation; But that brings the more damage to this State, for (except it be prohibited) our people will buy it whatsoeuer it cost, and the more it doth cost the more is our losse […].39

The import of tobacco by Spanish merchants thus represented the epitome of the economic problems which had started with the ‘discovery’ of America and the concurrent importation of American gold and silver into Europe. The anti-tobacco pamphlets thus contained the quintessence of England’s economic fears “by dramatizing the exchange in a way never before possible: whenever an Englishman lit his pipe, he could be seen to 36. The Life and Death […] [1662], p. 7, p. 3. 37. See Elfi Bettinger, “Crime in Drag: Kleidertausch und Rechtsbruch im England der frühen Neuzeit am Beispiel von Mary Frith alias Moll Cutpurse”, in Maskeraden: Geschlechterdifferenz in der literarischen Inszenierung, ed. by Elfi Bettinger / Julika Funk (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995), pp. 61-81. 38. Edward Bennett, A Treatise Touching the Inconveniences that Tobacco Hath Brought into this Land. (n.p. 1620), n. pag. 39. Bennett (n.p. 1620), n. pag. The solutions suggested by Bennett (1620) and Deacon (1616) were radical and in their relentlessness certainly not representative of English early modern economics in general. Whereas Bennett advocated the total prohibition of tobacco, Deacon proposed the avoidance of any traffic with other nations whatsoever. At the basis of this debate lies, of course, the belief in a ‘true’ value of material objects, which was unerringly laid down in the order to the world. The basic tenets of mercantilism—the role of the market, the relation between supply and demand in the formation of prices—were developed not before the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Tobacco – Sacred and Profane

199

demonstrate unequivocally how ‘the Treasure of this land is vented for smoke’.”40 For the early modern economist, tobacco was always paid for too dearly since smoke was clearly less valuable than gold and silver. The English smoker thus repeated the native American’s principle error of exchanging gold for worthless beads. Even worse, he spent all his money on smoke, that is, on nothing. In Deacon’s Tobacco Tortured, it is regarded as “a superfluous waste, for any man of great place, to paddle forth yearely one hundred pounds at least, for an hundred gallons of filthy fumes”.41 The smoker’s waste of both personal and national wealth was closely linked with his idleness, his waste of time, so that he was reprehensible not only of a financial offence but also of the deadly sin of sloth: is it not exceedingly hurtfull to the publike good of our countrey, that any such able persons should be so carelessly permitted to […] leade an idle life and loytring life; to lose their precious times; to abandon their ancient trades; to neglect their charges; to consume their patrimonies; to lauish forth their worldly preferments; to waste their whole wealth; & so to procure such needlesse waste vpon themselues and all theirs, as they must be enforced perforce, either to beg their bread, or to be maintained vpon publike charge at the least: to the vntimely imbeazilling of their present prouision, and the preposterous vndermining of publike good?42

Tobacco and the Sacred Rather than enlarging on the economic losses or gains brought about by the European tobacco trade and its consumption in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I should like to take this short excursion into early modern economy as the starting point for proposing a different connection between tobacco, the sacred, and the profane, which is inspired by Georges Bataille’s notion of the sacred. A recurrent theme in Bataille’s works is the “Notion of Expenditure”, which is contrasted with the “Principle of Classical Utility”.43 Bataille refers to Marcel Mauss’s investigations into the circulation of gifts in ‘archaic’ societies, which is not based on a (capitalistic) principle of appropriation but, rather, on its contrary: loss and destruction.44 In contrast to Mauss’s focus on the reciprocity of gifts, however, Bataille is primarily interested in setting up ‘potlatch’ and similar forms of economic expenditure as the antithesis to the idea of productivity, accumulation and preservation.45 He maintains that unproductive expenditure is a basic feature of human existence and constitutes a “real need of society” beyond the mere satisfaction of physical needs.46 40. 41. 42. 43.

Knapp (1988), p. 37. Deacon (1616), p. 62. Ibid., p. 90. George Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 116. 44. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London/New York: Routledge, 2000). 45. See Gerd Bergfleth, Theorie der Verschwendung: Einführung in Georges Batailles Antiökonomie (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, second edition, 1985), p. 13. 46. Bataille (1985) p. 117.

200

Sabine Schülting

Bataille posits a close connection between expenditure and the sacred by arguing that “sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things”.47 In his Theory of Religion, he develops this idea in more detail. He argues that the sacred is not dependent on a specific religion but that it is the very quality which distinguishes human existence from what he calls the “immanence” of the animal. In contrast to the animal, which is “in the world like water in water”,48 the human being has separated him- or herself from the world of objects by the development of tools. In the profane world, which is determined by the principles of utility and rationality, plants, animals, and even the human body have all come to resemble material objects. Strictly speaking, there is no sacred world before the existence of a profane world (and vice versa), or, in the words of Bataille, the profane world is “the residuum of the birth of the divine world”.49 In the sacrificial act, the reified bodies, animals or things are drawn “out of the world of utility and […] [restored] to that of unintelligible caprice”.50 In this way, the individual (the sacrificer) separates him- or herself from the profane world, momentarily re-establishing “the intimacy of the divine world”.51 The sacred, then, is not a permanent quality of an object or an animal, but a characteristic which the object only acquires in the performance of the sacrificial act when it ceases to be a mere object. The sacrifice thus leads to an excessive expenditure and the ephemeral suspension of the laws of the profane world: “the nature of the sacred […] is perhaps the most ungraspable thing that has been produced between men: the sacred is only a privileged moment of communal unity, a moment of the convulsive communication of what is ordinarily stifled”.52 Although the individual yearns for the intimacy of the sacred world, the sacred has an ambiguous quality since “it appears vertiginously dangerous for that clear and profane world where mankind situates its privileged domain”.53 This ambivalence is already indicated by the two meanings of the Latin word sacer—holy, sacred, or consecrated, on the one hand, and tabooed on the other. Particularly in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, Batatille argues, the excessive and potentially destabilising nature of the sacred has been rationalised, so that the divine has become a means of sanctioning the profane. Intimacy can thus only be a mundane experience. In his review of Philippe de Félice’s Poisons sacrés (1936), Bataille adopts Félice’s description of intoxication as a kind of mystic state and argues that there is only a gradual difference between an intoxication induced by alcohol, opium or other drugs, and a spiritual ecstasy since they all represent a dissolution of the self, of rationality and ‘the real’:

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Ibid., p. 119. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion , trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 24. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 44. Bataille (1985), p. 242. Bataille (1992), p. 36.

Tobacco – Sacred and Profane

201

L’ivresse de l’alcool, celles de l’opium et des autres toxiques ne peuvent être regardées comme distinctes d’une ivresse mentale, se passant des recours matériels. […] L’ivresse en général définit le domaine de la religion, qu’il est juste de lier au dépassement de soi, au saut par-delà la limite du réel.54

Re-reading the tobacco controversy with Bataille can, perhaps, solve some of the paradoxes mentioned before. Thomas Hariot’s representation of Algonquian smoking ceremonies is a good case in point. In the passage on the rites surrounding the natives’ consumption of tobacco, the Europeans’ general belief in their cultural superiority is thoroughly shaken. They cannot make sense of the ceremony they are witnessing: This Vppówoc [i.e. tobacco] is of so precious estimation amongest them, that they thinke their gods are maruelously delighted therwith: Wherupon sometime they make hallowed fires & cast some of the pouder therein for a sacrifice […]: but all done with strange gestures, stamping, sometime dauncing, clapping of hands, holding vp of hands, & staring vp into the heauens, vttering therewithal and chattering strange words & noises.55

Jeffrey Knapp points to the difficulties Hariot has in “placing tobacco in his colonial argument”.56 In similar situations, other travel writers condemned the ‘false’ beliefs of the ‘Indians’, contrasting them with English customs and boasting of having taken advantage of the natives’ superstition. Hariot, however, only incidentally mentions that the travellers have adopted this custom from the Indians: We ourselues during the time we were there vsed to suck it after their maner, as also since our returne, & haue found manie rare and wonderful experiments of the vertues thereof; of which the relation woulde require a volume by it selfe: the vse of it by so manie of late, men & women of great calling as else, and some learned Phisitions also, is sufficient witnes.57

To some extent only, Hariot’s favourable judgement of tobacco is legitimised by reference to other Europeans who share his high estimation of the plant but remain anonymous. Hariot’s own reaction, however, which is merely described as “rare” and “wonderful”, requiring “a volume by it selfe”, is irritatingly vague. Tobacco in Hariot’s account causes a discursive rupture and initiates an indeterminate postponement of representation—the elusive promise of “a volume by it selfe”. The smoking ceremony, which remains incommensurable and non-representable, enchants the European observer, it is wonder-ful, stupefying and contagious at the same time.58 The performance thus shows all the qualities Bataille ascribes to the sacrificial feast, in which the order of the profane world disintegrates in one moment of rapture. A native American performance of the sacred absorbs 54. “Inebriation by alcohol, opium or other toxics cannot be regarded as distinct from an inebriation of the mind, which dispenses with material aids. […] Inebriation in general defines the domain of religion, which is rightly connected with surpassing the limitations of the self and leaping over the boundaries of the real.” (My translation). Georges Bataille, “L’ivresse des tavernes et la religion”, in Œuvres Complets (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), vol. 11, pp. 322-331, at p. 325. 55. Thomas Hariot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, [London 1588], facs. repr. (Amsterdam, New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), C3v. 56. Knapp (1988), p. 35. 57. Hariot (1588), C3v. 58. See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 14.

202

Sabine Schülting

the European observers, who are not only incapable of giving a rational explanation of the experience, but also feel tempted to imitate the performance back at home. Although tobacco is thus taken out of its original cultural context, which endows it with its sacred quality in the first place, the repetition of the performance—i.e., smoking—seems to enable Hariot to both memorise and re-enact the numinous experience—or, in Bataille’s terminology, the intimacy—of the first encounter. Apparently it is thus not only the cultural context, but also the mnemonic effect of a ritualised performance which establishes a dividing line between the sacred and the profane. Tobacco’s removal from a sacred context and its concurrent reification and commodification is thus paralleled by its simultaneous re-sacralisation. One could even go so far as to say that the expenditure of the smoker is an inevitable by-product of the transformation of tobacco into a commodity in early capitalism. However, the early modern smoker also represents a radical departure from the developing bourgeois form of economy, which—according to Bataille—is characterised by a notion of a “restrained”, “rational” or even “hidden” expenditure. “The hatred of expenditure”, he concludes, “is the raison d’être of and the justification for the bourgeoisie; it is at the same time the principle of its horrifying hypocrisy”.59 The ‘re-sacralisation’ of tobacco in English culture I have been referring to does thus not imply that tobacco was introduced into Christian religion. On the contrary, in Work for Chimney Sweepers, Philaretes warns that a priest smoking tobacco “dead sleeping falls / Flat on the ground”;60 and in 1588 the Roman College of Cardinals declared “forbidden under penalty of eternal damnation for priests, about to administer the sacraments, either to that the smoke of sayri, or tobacco, into the mouth, or the powder of tobacco into the nose, even under the guise of medicine, before the service of the Mass”.61 When I refer to a ‘re-sacralisation’ of tobacco in early modern England, I mean a structural analogy between smoking and sacrificial acts, in which the laws of the profane world are suspended. Smoking—(allegedly) inducing the dissolution of subjectivity and a destruction of wealth—is diametrically opposed to an economy of profit, which, paradoxically, was increasingly dependent on tobacco—at least in the Virginia colony after 1610. In pro-tobacco pamphlets, this indifference to economic interests becomes the basis of a mystical transgression of material existence. Deliberately referring this ecstatic experience to native American rites, Roger Marbecke, in his Defense of Tabacco (1602), regards tobacco as a means of separating mind and body, of clearing the mind from earthly concerns and helping it “exercise her heavenly gifts”: For take but Monardus his own tale: and by him it should seem; that in the taking of Tobacco they [the priests] were drawn up: and separated from all gross, and earthly cogitations, and as it were carried up to a more pure and clear region, of fine conceits & actions of the mind, in so much, as they were able thereby to see visions, as you say: & able likewise to make wise & sharp answers, much like as those men are 59. Bataille (1985), pp. 124-125. 60. Philaretes, Work for Chimny-sweepers: Or A Warning for Tabacconists. Describing the pernicious vse of Tabacco, no lesse pleasant then profitable for all sorts to reade (London: Bushell, 1602), B1r. 61. Quoted in Knapp (1988), p. 47.

Tobacco – Sacred and Profane

203

wont to do, who being cast into trances, and ecstasies, as we are wont to call it, have the power and gift thereby, to see more wonders, and high mystical matters, then all they can do, whose brains, & cogitations, are oppressed with the thick and foggy vapors, of gross, and earthly substances. […] But being used to clear the brains, and thereby making the mind more able, to come to herself, and the better to exercise her heavenly gifts, and virtues; me think, as I have said, I see more cause why we should think it to be a rare gift imparted unto man, by the goodness of God, than to be an invention of the devil.62

Marbecke’s Defense of Tobacco links smoking with moments of spiritual or quasireligious ecstasy on the one hand, and ‘pagan’ rites and coarse carousals on the other. Against the background of Bataille’s Theory of Religion, these two forms of intoxication are merely the two sides of one coin: they are performances of the sacred. Marlowe’s alleged suggestion that the sacrament be administered in a tobacco pipe is thus perhaps not as absurd as it might seem. The early modern smoker performs an excessive act of expenditure, a dissipation of the self, in which the economy of the profane world is suspended. As the representations of both native American smoking ceremonies and the feasts of the peasants show, these—individual or collective—performances are met with both fascination and abhorrence. Smoking is, indeed, sacer: holy and tabooed, pure and filthy.

62. Ibid., pp. 43-44.

This page intentionally left blank

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TOBIAS DÖRING teaches literature and cultural studies at the English department of the Freie Universität Berlin. His most recently completed project concerns performances of mourning in Shakespearean theatre. Book publications include: Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition (2002), and Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food (co-edited with Susanne Mühleisen and Markus Heide, 2003). ANDREW HADFIELD is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His most recent books are Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (2003), and Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (2003). He is currently working on a monograph on Shakespeare and Republicanism which will be published in 2005. THOMAS HEALY is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has published books on Crashaw, Marlowe and on theory and Renaissance literature. He has co-edited The Arnold Anthology of British and Irish Literature in English (with Robert Clark), Literature and the English Civil War (with Jonathan Sawday) and the Longman Critical Reader on Marvell. He is completing a study on sectarianism in early modern English poetry. He is a founding member of the London Renaissance Seminar. ANDREAS HÖFELE is Professor of English at the University of Munich. His publications include books on Shakespeare's stagecraft, late nineteenth-century parody (Parodie und Literarischer Wandel, 1986) and on Malcom Lowry, as well as articles on Renaissance and twentieth-century themes. He has also published five novels, one of which (Der Spitzel,1997) fictionalizes the career of Christopher Marlowe. ANDREW JAMES JOHNSTON is Professor of Old and Middle English literature at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is the author of Clerks and Courtiers: Chaucer, Late Middle English Literature and the State Formation Process (2001) and has co-edited a volume on cultural contacts between the English-speaking and the Romance cultures. He has published essays on Chaucer, the Middle Ages in film, and Brecht. His current project is a book-length study entitled Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello. VERENA OLEJNICZAK LOBSIEN is Professor of English Literature at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is author of Wirkungsstrukturen in ausgewählten Texten T. S. Eliots und Virginia Woolfs (1987), Subjektivität als Dialog (1994), Skeptische Phantasie (1999), and Die unsichtbare Imagination (2003, with Eckhard Lobsien). She has published articles on modern and early modern literature and literary theory. Her research is

206

Notes on Contributors

currently focussed on early modern literature and culture, in particular Renaissance transformations of classical antiquity. IRMGARD MAASSEN has taught English literature in Berlin and elsewhere. As a Fellow of the interdisciplinary research project on performative cultures at the Freie Universität Berlin she has worked on early modern performances of love and mourning. She has published on women's literature, performative theory, and early modern family ideology, and has co-edited books on contemporary women's fiction and on intermediality as well as an anthology of early modern conduct texts for women. SUSANNE RUPP is Researcher in English Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has published a study on seventeenth-century protestant eschatology, “From Grace to Glory”: Himmelsvorstellungen in der englischen Theologie und Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts (2001), and just completed a monograph on Tudor vocal music, Die Macht der Lieder: Studien zur weltlichen Vokalmusik der Tudorzeit. INA SCHABERT is Professor of English Literature at the University of Munich. She is editor of the Shakespeare Jahrbuch (since 1999) and the Shakespeare Handbuch (2000). Her most recent monograph is Englische Literaturgeschichte aus der Sicht der Geschlechterforschung (1997), which offers a survey of English literature from 1590 to 1900 in the perspective of gender studies. She is currently completing the second volume covering the twentieth century. SABINE SCHÜLTING is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has published Wilde Frauen, fremde Welten: Kolonisierungsgeschichten aus Amerika (1997), a study of early modern travel literature. Other publications include articles on film, gender studies, early modern and nineteenth-century English literature and culture. She is currently working on a book-length study on urban poverty in Victorian England. PAUL STROHM is now Ransford Professor of Medieval Literature at Columbia University, having previously taught at Indiana University and the University of Oxford. He has published England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399-1422 (1998). His next book is The Language of Practical Politics between Chaucer and Shakespeare, to be published in spring 2005 by Notre Dame University Press. RICHARD WILSON is Professor of Renaissance Studies and Director of the Shakespeare Programme at the University of Lancaster. He is the author of Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (1993) and Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (2004). He has co-edited Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare (2003, 2 vols.).