Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self in England. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Solo Performances

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Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

Solo Performances Staging the Early Modern Self in England

Edited by

Ute Berns

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover image: Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury, c.1610-14, miniature by Isaac Oliver (c.1565-1617) Powis Castle, Wales, UK /bridgemanart.com Cover design: Pier Post Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-2952-1 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2953-8 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

MANFRED PFISTER Foreword

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UTE BERNS Solo Performances — an Introduction

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1. Authoring and Authority INA SCHABERT The Theatre in the Head: Performances of the Self for the Self by the Self

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ANDREW JAMES JOHNSTON Subjectivity and the Ekphrastic Prerogative: Emilia’s Soliloquy in The Two Noble Kinsmen

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RICHARD WILSON Our Good Will: Shakespeare’s Cameo Performance

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WERNER VON KOPPENFELS Spiritual Self-Fashioning: John Lilburne at the Pillory

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2. Self-Inventions and Pathologies JÜRGEN SCHLAEGER Auto-Dialogues: Performative Creation of Selves

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GÜNTER WALCH The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Hamlet, of Denmark

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MARIA DEL SAPIO GARBERO A Spider in the Eye/I: The Hallucinatory Staging of the Self in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale

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RUI CARVALHO HOMEM Of Idiocy, Moroseness, and Vitriol: Soloists of Rage in Ben Jonson’s Satire

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WOLFGANG G. MÜLLER The Poem as Performance: Self-Definition and Self-Exhibition in John Donne’s Songs and Sonets

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MARGRET FETZER Plays of Self: Theatrical Performativity in Donne

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3. Fashioning Sovereignty ROGER LÜDEKE / ANDREAS MAHLER Stating the Sovereign Self: Polity, Policy, and Politics on the Early Modern Stage

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JERZY LIMON The Monarch as the Solo Performer in Stuart Masque

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RALF HERTEL Turkish Brags and Winning Words: Solo Performances in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great

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Notes on Contributors

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Foreword Manfred Pfister

Of coining of many concepts there is no end, as Ecclesiastes would have it. Indeed, in the face of a frequently lamented terminological overkill in the humanities, the introduction of a further new term needs justification. And, as with pudding, the proof is in the eating, in this case in what one can do with it. Ours, ‘solo performances’, emerged from work in the interdisciplinary research project ‘Cultures of Performance’ at the Free University of Berlin.1 As with all concepts, its uses are heuristic above all; it proves useful precisely to the extent that it can help to open up our eyes to new aspects of cultural representations, performances and interactions, to frame in incisive new ways questions so far underexposed or not thought through, and to integrate under one coherent set of perspectives phenomena previously considered separate and unrelated. For a concept to achieve this, it is less important that it is univocally precise than pregnant (in all the English and German senses of the word). A certain fuzziness in its semantic intension and extension can therefore be an asset rather than a liability, even if that may disturb one’s sense of absolute systematic rigour. It is for this that Friedrich Schlegel, the name-giver and patron of the Free University’s new graduate school for literary studies, might have welcomed a term like solo performance; in its malleability it seems to heed the caveat of one of his epistemological fragments published 1798 in the Athenäum (nr. 53): “It is equally fatal for the human mind to have a system and not to have one. We will, therefore, have to make up our minds to have it both ways and combine the two.”2

1.

2.

The DFG-sponsored Sonderforschungsbereich ‘Kulturen des Performativen’ also generously hosted the conference co-organised by Ute Berns and myself in November 2007 and supported the present publication of its proceedings. Within the same framework, ‘Solo Performances’ was preceded by two Berlin conferences dedicated respectively to ‘Performances of the Sacred’ (2002; ed. by Susanne Rupp and Tobias Döring, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005) and ‘Performing National Identities’ (2006; ed. by Manfred Pfister and Ralf Hertel, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008). ‘Es ist gleich tödlich für den Geist, ein System zu haben und keins zu haben. Er wird sich also wohl entschließen müssen, beides zu verbinden.’ Quoted from Friedrich Schlegel, Schriften und Fragmente, ed. by Ernst Behler (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1956), p. 90; my English translation.

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The lengths to which the notion of solo performance can be taken in the analysis of Early Modern culture in England without losing sight of its prototypical core, the stage soliloquy, is borne out in the variety — and the illuminating convergences — of the essays gathered together here. And it is explored in all its dimensions and meta-theoretical contexts and implications in Ute Berns’ “Introduction”, which goes as far as one can helpfully go towards defining what ‘solo performance’ intends and what the critical uses of the term are when it comes to analysing the complex and dialectical processes in which the Early Modern self emerges and fashions and projects its own sense of identity. No need, therefore, to anticipate this discussion in my foreword; I prefer, rather, to enter it by way of example. It might be helpful, perhaps even illuminating, to take as the prototype of ‘solo-performance’ not the stage soliloquy of the celebrated ‘To be or not to be’-variety, but two much less eloquent or even wordless solo performances staged outside the theatre. Let me take as a first example the public soloperformance of one who, after long years of performing in the theatre and starring in comic improvisations as one of the ‘Principall Actors’ in Shakespeare’s company, left the theatre in 1599 — or was made to leave it by Shakespeare, who, perhaps, found his increasingly soloistic performances increasingly disconcerting — and decided to make the wide world outside the theatre his stage. I am speaking, of course, of Will Kempe, the celebrated clown and successor of Dick Tarlton, and the famous jig or Morris he danced early in 1600 from London to Norwich and wrote up the same year in a pamphlet canvassing his Nine daies vvonder.3 In the frontispiece we see him dancing along in what appears to be a mixture of fool’s motley and gentleman’s gear, accompanied by Thomas Slye, his ‘Taberer’. What is not represented in this image is insisted upon repeatedly in his written account: the crowds of spectators his solo performance drew everywhere on his hundred miles’ marathon feat and which was at places so packed that he was checked in his progress. He writes up his feat, as he says in his preface, because he considers it as ‘somewhat set down worth note’ and to correct slanderous libels by hackwriting ‘Shakerags’ about it. But on why he engaged in it in the first place and why and in which way it should be ‘worth note’ he remains as silent as he was while dancing his jig en route. Is this, thus, an exuberant expression of exuberant feelings, or a spirited performance for performance’s sake, or, more specifically, a publicity stunt to increase his cultural visibility to a spectatorship more inclusive and compre

3.

See William Kempe, Kemps nine daies wonder: Performed in a daunce from London to Norwich (London: Nicholas Ling, 1600).

Foreword

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Illustration 1: Frontispice of Kemps Nine Daies Wonder. Courtesy of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, shelfmark 40 L 62 (12) Art.

hensive than the theatre audience he had left behind? Or was it intended as a carnivalesque subversion of the Queen’s Progresses across England — not very likely in the face of the loyal dedication to Anne Fitton, lady-in-waiting to the ‘most sacred Royall Queene’! — or a patriotic mise en scène of the English countryside and the welcoming hospitality of its inhabitants? We do not know. What is clear, however, is that this solo-performance does not go very far in expressing or projecting a rich subjective interiority, but a long way towards drawing public attention to the performer, who, after all, depends quite materially on that public attention — a kind of Early Modern solo-performance not altogether unfamiliar to us, living in a postmodern culture of performances! I add a second example for such solo-performances outside the theatre, and be it only to explain why we have chosen the image we have chosen for the cover of this book: Isaac Oliver’s fairly small-scale portrait of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (see cover).4 ‘Portrait’ is, perhaps, not the word for it, as Herbert, a self-performer if ever there was one, is quite theatrically staged here — or rather, stages himself quite 4.

Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630, ed. by Karen Hearn (London: Tate Publishing, 1995), 139 (ill. 86).

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theatrically — in a specific situation. Again, as with William Kempe, the selfperformance is speechless but, in contrast to Kempe’s vigorous jig, it is motionless and static. In this pretty piece of Elizabethan medievalising, his performance fuses the role of chivalrous knight, resting on the ground before a tilting match, with that of the Renaissance Neo-Platonic poet-philosopher. It is speechless but not wordless, as the motto on his shield, ‘Magica Sympathia’ quite explicitly refers to one of the key concepts in Cherbury’s philosophical writings, and this is re-inforced by the Neo-Platonic impresa of a heart emerging from wings or flames with sparks. His situation and position — apart from his reclining horizontally, which would not have gone down well on the Elizabethan platform stage — is not unlike that of the speaker of a soliloquy in the theatre, alone or detached from others in the background, sunk deep in introspective contemplation and gazing vaguely towards some unacknowledged spectators. The image invites us to guess at his melancholy mood and thoughts but, at the same time, it makes us aware that the philosophic knight is not merely a melancholic, put performs melancholy and stages himself in his noble posture and costume quite self-consciously as the fashionable melancholy man. And this is not unique with Oliver’s painting of Cherbury’s histrionic solo performance: solo performances always suggest or express and project some internal motivation and at the same time they do that with an eye to an audience they wish to impress with a carefully fashioned self. Our conference was, and our book is, not a solo performance but a series of solo performances in close dialogue with each other and with colleagues worldwide urging a ‘performative turn’ in the humanities. We wish to thank all the contributors who made this dialogical exchange and this volume possible, and we extend our thanks to those participants of the symposium whose contributions, for one reason or another, did not find their way into this volume, but enriched the discussions — Claudia Olk and Susanne Rupp, Ramie Targoff and Michael Wyatt. We would also like to thank Sabine Lange at the Sonderforschungsbereich for her unfailing advice and Ralf Hertel for his support. We are grateful for help with the manuscript to Wiebke Beushausen, Andrea Lebeau and especially to Rebekka Rohleder.

Solo Performances — an Introduction Ute Berns

I In today’s critical discussion, the Early Modern self is a construct both volatile and in flux. Ever since the all too robust Burckhardtian concept of the ‘complete’ Renaissance self has given way to the notion that Early Modern selves were incessantly engaged in complex forms of self-fashioning, has the debate been stimulated by the compelling suggestiveness of this concept.1 The concept of ‘self-fashioning’, without explicitly stating it, describes a process that is performative in nature, and derives much of its power from this particular quality. Yet it is this very quality that has come under increasing pressure from other theoretical orientations in studies of the Early Modern self. Hence, it is to the investigation of the performance quality and performative dimension of Early Modern self-fashioning that this collection of articles intends to give new theoretical edge and analytical precision. The concept of ‘solo performance’ is here deployed to highlight the thrust of this endeavour. Some thirty years ago Stephen Greenblatt sketched his understanding of self-fashioning as a dialectic between a strong (male) will to shape the self, on the one hand, and the social and symbolic patterns and institutional hierarchies that both determine and limit that will’s desire and agency, on the other — ‘[i]f we say that there is a new stress on the executive power of the will, we must say that there is the most sustained and relentless assault upon the will; […]’.2 It was Greenblatt’s impressive combination of an analysis of the process of self-fashioning between the poles of confrontation and submission together with a number of seminal case studies that triggered endorsements, modifications and critiques across a breathtaking range of topics too broad to list here. More particularly, it called forth deconstructive, feminist and cultural materialist accounts of self-fashioning with concomitant shifts in the conception of the self and its relation to the world.3 1. 2. 3.

Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. by S.G.C. Middlemore, with a new introduction by Peter Burke (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 101. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 1. E.g. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body:

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An initial concern with the fashioning of selves as primarily public was complemented, in due course, with a focus on historicised Early Modern notions of interiority and inwardness.4 Some recent studies, furthermore, have rigorously foregrounded the body as a principal site of self-modelling, whether mediated by anatomy theatres or manuals of humoral physiology.5 And even studies which try to move away from the original confrontational notion of self-fashioning, for instance by tracing the importance of the experience of shattered selves for the emergence of Early Modern selves or by exploring more communal forms of shaping selves, remain bound, in some sense or another, to the very notion they seek to resist.6 All the while, this research has been accompanied by a persistent debate on questions of periodisation, concerning especially the exact time and unprecedented uniqueness of the emergence of this self-fashioning self.7 Since it first came into being, the concept of Early Modern self-fashioning and the ways in which it was studied have been informed by the understanding that Early Modern culture displayed itself on a great variety of stages, inside and outside of the theatre. Many studies took due account of the fact that drama was ‘the most widely and variously practised genre in England over the period’, without, however, confining their analyses of self-fashioning to

4.

5.

6.

7.

Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984); Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). E.g. Katherine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995); Elisabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); see also Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). E.g. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Sawday, The Body Emblazoned; David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 1997); see also Schoenfeldt. E.g. Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) and Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). E.g. David Aers, ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”’, in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. by David Aers (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 177–202.

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this genre. 8 For these reasons, research focussing on Early Modern selffashioning seems to gravitate almost naturally towards cultural analyses that theorise and investigate culture primarily as performance and performative practice. Yet this preference for theories of performance and performativity is counteracted by another notable development in studies of the Early Modern self. In consequence of New Historicism’s ‘gradual displacement of “ideology critique” with “discourse analysis”’, studies of Early Modern self-fashioning have also tended to rely heavily on the concept ‘discourse’.9 Irrespective of how ‘discourse’ is theorised — whether in relation to the laws of the archive or as a material force — literary and cultural analyses are prone to turning ‘discourse’ into a disembodied and potentially totalising entity.10 More specifically, there is a danger, in the practice of analysis, of first reifying ‘discourse’ and then deriving a vague ‘discursive construction’ of selves from this reification. After all, the power of discourse does not simply reside in its subjection of a passive subject which it discursively constructs. In pointing this out I am making a plea neither for playing down the force of historically specific discourses nor for reverting to sheer voluntarism. To a great extent the power of discourse resides in the constraints it imposes on a self that acts and speaks under these constraints, yet as we shall see, the concept of ‘constraint’ itself may become reductive and is hence in need of further exploration. It is the aim of this volume to counter the tendency to reify the concept of discourse and to conceptualise the self as passive by connecting more closely the notion of discourse on the one hand, and the notion of agency on the other, through 8.

Quoted from Richard Hillman, Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997), p. 3. 9. Surveying ‘the tangled effects that new historicism has had on the practice of literary history’ Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt maintain that this displacement is one of ‘four specific transformations that [New Historicism] helped to bring about’. Practicing New Historicism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 17. 10. Arguably, Foucault has provided those conceptualisations of discourse that have become most influential in literary and cultural analysis. I here refer to the way in which he relates discourse and the laws of the archive in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002) and to his description of discourse as a materialist force bound up with architectural design, institutional administration, and concrete corporeal practices in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991). Foucault himself refers to speech acts and illocutionary force in his attempt to define the ‘statement’ (énoncé) as the basic unit of discourse. Yet in this context he merely points out that ‘propositions’, ‘sentences’ or ‘speech acts’ all form part of his notion of ‘statement’ but that none of them covers its full range; cf. Archeology of Knowledge, pp. 89–99. For a critique of the Foucauldian and New Historicist ‘discursivisation of history’ see, for instance, Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text, Medieval Cultures, 26 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 150.

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the concept of ‘solo performance’, thus reinvigorating the study of an active and embodied Early Modern self. II In our attempt to re-emphasise the performance quality and performative nature of Early Modern self-fashioning the concept of ‘solo performances’ is used as a flexible heuristic device. Precisely because ‘solo performance’ does not claim the status of a well-worn analytical category in studies of the Early Modern self, the concept may help to reframe our perspective on current critical concerns while cutting across several established approaches to the topic of the Early Modern self dear to so many critics. The focus on the self in performance emphasises that theories of performance and performativity will, indeed, provide the general framework for the investigations in this volume. Within this theoretical framework, the stress on the solo self indicates an interest, furthermore, in the self as fashioning itself not only in interactions, but also in enactments — in rehearsing or generating performances that tend to become self-sustaining, complex and self-reflexive. The concept of ‘solo performance’ deployed here encompasses a broad range of interrelated phenomena. They include fully embodied performances of the self in social or theatrical contexts — an inclusion which, among other things, involves revisiting and relocating the stage soliloquy, a crucial issue in previous discussions of the self. Yet solo performances also encompass more mediated performances of the self in journals, letters and religious tracts, thus suggesting interrelations between the different practices, modes and genres in which Early Modern selves were performed and fashioned. Exploiting the so-called ‘performative turn’ as a general framework, the collection draws on a branch of cultural analysis in which culture is theorised and investigated primarily as an embodied performance and an ensemble of performative practices. These are understood to take place not only in theatres or at concerts, but also in courtrooms, churches or streets, at social gatherings as well as in private settings. Objects of study include live performances as well as texts and other cultural artifacts bound up with these performances. With culture conceived in this way, analysis moves beyond the study of texts as representations; as expressing pre-existing meanings or identities. Instead, texts, images and other cultural objects are taken into consideration to the extent that they take part in the performative processes of making meaning and of shaping identities. Broadly speaking, the focus shifts from the question of

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‘what does a text represent or mean?’ to the question of ‘what does a text do?’11 One of the great problems of historical analysis here is, of course, that cultural performances are no longer accessible as embodied acts; unfortunately, we cannot observe Early Modern cultures and selves in bodily performances. Yet we can attempt to read the historical traces we have — be they playscripts, musical scores, paintings, sermons and prayer books, political speeches, descriptions of royal ceremonies etc. — as evidence of such performative practices. These traces, treated as texts in the widest sense, can be understood as scripting or recording performances and simultaneously as generating, guiding and complementing the performative process. The key concepts ‘performance’ and ‘performative’ have emerged in different fields and become ‘travelling concepts’, cutting across various disciplines which in turn have modified the concepts’ meanings in ways specific to their particular disciplinary concerns.12 Any attempt to translate these terms e.g. from English into German or vice versa reveals that usage and meaning can differ between languages even in conditions of seemingly shared theoretical developments. Nor has the large number of issues and interests to which these concepts have been applied been conducive to a consistent usage. Since this is also reflected in the contributions to this volume, it seems appropriate to briefly sketch the core aspects of meaning bound up with the concepts of ‘performance’ and ‘performative’. These aspects are closely related to each other and versions of them re-surface, in one way or another, in all of the following articles, however diverse their theoretical affiliations may otherwise be. ‘Performance’ in its core sense refers to embodied presentations by one or more actor(s) or presenter(s) in front of a corporeally present audience, whether on stage or in any other cultural context. Performances in this prototypical sense, discussed in ethnography, sociology and theatre studies, are enacted bodily, they are ‘live events’. They tend to be framed and thus set off from everyday routines, they are usually scripted though these scripts need not be set down in words, and they can be analysed as processes.13 Especially the performance as process and its liminal character have attracted much atten11. A useful survey covering a wider range of disciplines is available in Uwe Wirth, ed., Performanz: Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2002); James Loxley offers a comparatively narrow account of the theoretical field in Performativity (New York: Routledge, 2007). 12. Cf. Birgit Neumann and Frederik Tygstrup, ‘Travelling Concepts in English Studies’, European Journal of English Studies, 13,1 (2009), 1–12. 13. For a definition and survey see Sandra Umathum, ‘Performance’ in Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie, ed. by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch, and Matthias Warstat (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler 2005), pp. 331–34.

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tion in recent research, since it is the performance as process which is open to chance, to failure, and to change. Though scripted, contextualised, and thus ‘pre-determined’, performances are not, in other words, fully recoverable in determinist or intentionalist categories. While they enact or re-enact cultural forms in the widest sense, due to their volatile nature performances also throw into relief the instability of these forms — their potential for transgression and, ultimately, for change.14 Performances always possess a further ‘performative’ dimension: they bring about a social and material reality and thus constitute facts of the world; they enact, negotiate and potentially transform cultures and selves.15 However, when John Austin first used the term ‘performative’ in this sense, he referred to language only. He argued that this performative or reality-creating dimension, which he eventually re-conceptualised as ‘illocutionary force’, pertains to language when it is performed, i.e. produced as utterance.16 Since Austin’s first discovery of the notion of the performative in speech, there have been many additions to and critiques of his theoretical framework. Yet something that basically all supporters of speech act theory — from its classical to its deconstructive versions — agree on is that within a specified context an utterance never merely says something, but that due to its illocutionary force it also always presents a form of action which affects an addressee or a given state of affairs (e.g. by promising, threatening, baptising etc.).17 Although the specifically performative force of performances — including utterances — varies and is subject to material and discursive constraints, this ‘force’ is 14. The later work of Victor Turner forms a crucial point of reference for the conception of the liminal as a category of transition in cultural performances. See The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Routledge, 1969) and Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976). 15. This dimension of performances was emphasised in ethnographical and sociological writing, e.g. in Turner (see fn. 14); Milton Singer, ed., Traditional India: Structure and Change, (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1959) and Erwin Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, (London: Penguin, 1990 [1959]). Erika Fischer-Lichte discusses performativity in relation to aesthetic performances in The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (Milton Park and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 24–37. 16. How to Do Things With Words, ed. by J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá, 2nd edn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). For Austin, the term ‘performative’ is narrower than that of ‘illocutionary force’. Today, and in my own use here, the term ‘performative’ has become the more general term — a term not restricted to verbal utterances alone. (See also Sybille Krämer and Marco Stahlhut, ‘Das “Performative” als Thema der Sprach- und Kulturphilosophie’, Paragrana, 10, 1 (2001), 35–64.) 17. In addition to Austin, see also John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature event context’ in Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 1–23.

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crucial for understanding how performance contributes to shaping and altering selves and identities.18 In the present context, the self is, after all, considered as a self engaged in self-constituting and self-shaping performative acts.19 Against this theoretical background, the notion of a ‘solo performance’ evokes an immense scope of possible instances, artistic as well as cultural. Solo performances comprise John Dowland’s virtuoso playing of the lute just as much as the sermons John Donne preached in church; James I celebrating his monarchical singularity in royal ceremonies as well as the soliloquies Shakespeare’s characters delivered on empty stages — or not so empty ones — to all but empty theatres. Contemporary clowns like William Kempe, performing before large theatre audiences or jigging before random spectators in the streets, as well as Isaac Oliver’s portraits of highly stylised selves in paintings and miniatures — they all can be discussed as solo performances. Within this range of possible material, however, the contributions in this volume focus on a specific subset, i.e. on solo performances involving speech. (Jerzy Limon’s discussion of a ‘silent solo performer’ in a context replete with language both sung and spoken, forms a borderline case.) This emphasis helps to focus the critical enterprise while highlighting the fact that language is here studied in relation to the constituent features of a performance: the speaker’s corporeality, however mediated in the presentation, the event as a material process, the historical time and place of the performance/utterance, and the actual or potential addressee(s). This approach to language as performance also stresses the performative force of solo speech — its capacity to create psychological, social or political facts and identities, both within the narrow scope of texts and within history and culture. Understood in this way, the concept of solo performance provides a magnifying lens for looking more closely at the relation between self and discursive/material context. This lens enables the critic to conceive — and analyse — on a pragmatic level and in a differentiated manner the way in which the embodied (speech)-acting self, on the one hand, and the discursive frames and material contexts, on the other, can and do actually come together. The concept ‘performance’, because it describes a process, blurs the sharp 18. For a useful distinction between different concepts of ‘performative’ — a ‘weak’, a ‘strong’ and a ‘radical’ concept, cf. Krämer and Stahlhut, pp. 55–56. 19. This perception of the self has been presented forcefully by Judith Butler in ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre Practice, ed. by Sue-Ellen Case (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 270–282. Butler’s later accounts of performative practice, e.g. in Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993) and Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004) draw on Jacques Derrida’s discussion of speech acts in ‘Signature event context’.

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distinctions between discourse as a given force preceding the self, and as a force realised and modified by the self. Thus our merging of the concepts ‘discourse’ and ‘performance’ in the notion of ‘process’ facilitates an understanding of the way that discourse translates into enactment or utterance, and how it can be studied as a material event. If we conceive of utterance not simply as ‘language in performance’, but, more specifically, as ‘discourse in performance’, then we are capable of analysing in a more concrete manner how discourse molds — and in turn is molded by — the speaking self. At the same time, the nature of self-fashioning as a process foregrounded by the concept of solo performance allows for new insights into the intricacies of this process, insights which may deepen our comprehension of the complex relations between agency and determination. The notion of ‘solo performance’ can be applied to eminently public forms of self-fashioning as well as to self-modelling in much more private contexts. It invites critics and readers to compare and connect the fashioning of ‘social selves’ with that of ‘inner selves’, thus further developing fertile approaches in recent studies of Early Modern inwardness and subjectivity. At the same time it is important to note that the concept of (solo) performance does not imply any metaphysics of presence. On the contrary, the definition of solo performance as ‘live encounter’ raises the question, precisely, as to the effect of mediating solo performances in scripts, or in forms of writing not meant for live enactment. What does it mean to speak of writing itself as a ‘solo performance’ — or, for that matter, of reading — and how are performing, writing and reading related? 20 Finally, the concept of ‘solo performance’, when traced not only across literary and social contexts but also pursued in different genres, may also help to sharpen our awareness of those aspects of self-fashioning that could be described as genre-specific. Irrespective of how we conceive of ‘genre’ as an abstract category, the ubiquity of generic conventions impinges on and ultimately shapes all solo speech. III The qualification ‘solo’ in solo performance poses the question as to how the performing self is positioned in relation to others. How does its agency become manifest in relation both towards others and itself? In this respect the notion of a ‘solo performance’ might appear to be a contradiction in terms. 20. This question, too, has a long history in studies of self-fashioning, arguably starting with Greenblatt’s linking of Tyndale’s guide to the inner life in the context of early print culture, with Hamlet’s soliloquies and Montaigne’s essays (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 86–87). Robert Weimann’s Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) would be another example and there are many others.

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After all, performances must, by definition, have an audience or addressee. Some theorists actually insist that the attention or participation of an audience in the performance is a necessary condition for our being permitted to speak of a performance in the first place.21 In other words, the presenter and the audience always co-create the performance, and in this sense performances can never be ‘solo’. Of course, our emphasis on solo performances does not seek to deny this fundamental interactional dimension of performances; solo performances, too, will, indeed, be considered as interactions. The focus on ‘solo’ is meant, rather, to foreground performances and performative acts which display a certain self-generating and self-sustaining power without requiring prompting from outside. This self-initiating, self-structuring power and, often, self-referential dimension of solo performances is here singled out as a field of agency worthy of analysis alongside their interactional or social dimensions. Self-directedness and directedness towards another are both considered as relevant dimensions of the solo performance. With a view to the relation between self and others, the contributions to this volume distinguish and link different forms of solo performances. In Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine, the protagonist’s solo performances take place in front of the most illustrious of audiences; as Ralf Hertel points out, Tamburlaine’s grandiloquent monologues aim both to raise his own person on the political stage and to dwarf those kings and warriors who approach him with offers, requests or threats. Yet solo performances also include those special cases where no such audience is present — as is frequently the case in the stage soliloquy (which, however, involves the theatre audience as unacknowledged audience), or in the writing of a diary. Regarding these latter examples, the definition of ‘performance’ suggests that here the speaking or writing self itself turns into the principal addressee and audience of the performance. The interaction taking place hence involves different aspects of the self and thus, as Ken Frieden observes, a self-division already conceptualised in Plato.22 The self splits into a (speech)-acting/writing and a 21. For Gay McAuley, the spectator needs to be seen as ‘an active participant in whatever is happening’. In her account the performance relies on a ‘performance contract’ meaning that ‘for an activity to be seen as a performance there needs to be a certain intention on the part of the performer and a corresponding awareness’. ‘State of the Art: Performance Studies’, (section ‘Defining Performance’), SemiotiX, 10 (2007), n.p. http://www.semioticon.com/semiotix/ semiotix10/sem-10-05.html [accessed Jan. 5, 2009]. In a similar vein Erika Fischer-Lichte writes, ‘through their physical presence, perception and response, the spectators become coactors that generate the performance by participating in the “play”’; Fischer-Lichte, p. 32. 22. Frieden locates the difference between ‘monologue as dialogue with oneself’ and ‘dialogue with God’ in Plato’s ‘philosophical biography’. Genius and Monologue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985), pp. 15–16.

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listening/observing/reading self, and the performance is emphatically selfdirected. Self-directedness and directedness towards another may overlap, and sometimes they are hard to separate even in the terms of address. When Hamlet first addresses the Ghost, this Ghost is also seen by others and thus presented as external (1.4), whereas in the scene where Hamlet speaks to his mother, this same ghost is visible and audible only to Hamlet (3.4).23 In George Herbert’s poems it is often difficult to ascertain whether the God addressed is to be thought of as external to the speaker or as a voice within the speaking self. And when, within the discourse of Renaissance friendship, someone addresses his or her friend in the common trope of ‘my other self’, self and other are explicitly conflated in a relationship representing ‘one soul in bodies twain’.24 The linking of the concept of solo performance with speech thus problematises the relation between the performing self to itself and to others in a way that invariably recalls and relocates earlier investigations concerned with monological speech and the stage soliloquy in particular. The soliloquy, a highly specific version of the stage monologue, has served as a locus classicus for scholars searching if not for the birth of the individual, subjectivity and interiority in England, then at least for a privileged site of their expression. This is, of course, no accident. As both Raymond Williams and Catherine Belsey have pointed out, the soliloquy, itself a highly artificial dramatic strategy, ‘is the condition of the possibility of presenting on the stage a new conception of the free-standing individual’.25 Yet whereas Wolfgang Clemen links this strategy to ‘an unprecedented understanding of human nature’, Belsey takes issue, precisely, with this concept of ‘human nature’, when she argues that critics tend to project their own unified humanist visions onto this form without historicising its origins and the tensions it conceals.26 More recently, David Hillmann has revisited ‘self-speaking’ under the premise that all ‘subjectivity effects’ in drama are linguistic or semiotic constructs.27 Attending to

23. The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York and London: Norton, 1997). 24. For uses and sources of the Early Modern discourse of friendship, see Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Ute Berns, ‘Interioritätskonstruktionen und Freundschaftsdiskurs bei Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 144 (2008), 148–167. 25. Belsey, p. 43, and Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981), p. 142. 26. Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare’s Soliloquies, trans. by Charity Scott Stokes (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 7. 27. Hillman, Self-Speaking, p. 5. In contrast to Hillman, who treats the soliloquy as linguistic effect, Jonathan Sawday relates it to embodiment and the notion of ‘autopsia’; cf. ‘Self and

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self-speaking in its different historical manifestation in Medieval and Early Modern drama, he takes his cue from Lacan’s close association of language and subjectivity and also from speech act theory.28 While the soliloquy remains an object of study as well as a point of reference and comparison for several contributors to this volume, as an exemplary and privileged form it has been decentred in the articles collected here. This does not mean that previous analyses of the soliloquy and of monological speech have become entirely superseded but rather that these in many ways highly useful earlier interpretations should be reconsidered within a new framework. As Manfred Pfister point out, the Prague school theorist Jan Mukařovský combines a formal and a semantic approach to monological speech, and this distinction offers insights into some of the complexities of solo speech investigated in this volume. Mukařovský first defines the monologue along conventional lines in terms of a communicative situation in which one subject is constantly active and the other constantly passive. In the special case of the soliloquy, moreover, the speaker is either alone on stage, or he thinks that he is alone on the stage, or, through an ‘aside’, disregards the others present on stage. In a dialogue, by contrast, the speaker addresses (an)other speaker(s) on stage. The roles of speaker and addressee are interchangeable and indeed constantly reversed. Mukařovský then, however, advances an analysis which cuts across this neat formal distinction. He defines dialogue in terms of, first, an opposition between ‘I’ and ‘you’, second, of deictic references to the situation the speakers share, and third, of ‘semantic reversals’ due to the change of speakers or speaking positions. This description rests on the basic assumption that dialogue depends on the polarity or tension between ‘several or at least two contextures’ of the speakers involved. 29 In other words, Mukařovský here defines dialogue with reference to the actual opposition and semantic difference between the two speaking positions. And when Mukařovský applies his semantic distinction to dialogues defined in formal terms, it turns out that these dialogues manifest the semantic criteria to a greater or smaller degree, and some do not show them at all. The status of the dramatic chorus, assembling many speakers in one voice, here proves as interesting as that of the soliloquy and its internal divisions. As Manfred Pfister puts it, Mukařovský Selfhood in the Seventeenth Century’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. by Roy Porter, (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 29–48 (pp. 43–44). 28. Hillman, Self-Speaking, p. 15. 29. ‘Contextures’ denote specific context-dependent perspectives: ‘Because the contextures which interpenetrate in this way in a dialogue are different, often even contradictory, sharp semantic reversals occur on the boundaries of the individual replies.’ Jan Mukařovský, ‘Two Studies of Dialogue’, in The Word and Verbal Art: Selected Essays, trans. and ed. by J. Burbank and P. Steiner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 81–115 (p. 88).

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thus invites us to explore both the dialogical in monologue and the monological in dialogue.30 This tension spelt out by Mukařovský between a formal and a semantic conception of the monologue actually recurs in several articles discussing the implications of the concept of the ‘solo performance’, albeit on a different plane. These articles leave behind Mukařovský’s structuralist framework and, while drawing on the concepts and insights from speech act theory, they also move beyond its various idealisations.31 Some contributions explore the question as to whether an ‘oppositional’ conception of ‘self’ and ‘other’, a conception based on ‘difference’, is the only constellation in which self-fashioning takes place. Would it not, for instance, be possible to conceive of selves being shaped by a collective solo performance? Andreas Mahler and Roger Lüdeke, for example, closely study the dialogue of Caesar’s assassins after his death in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Mahler and Lüdeke suggest that the assassins’ performative speech and interaction strive to establish a collective body with a single voice — the solo performance of a collective, yet monological political subject with foundational power. In a similar vein, Jerzy Limon discusses the manifold supernatural agents of the Stuart court masque as actually displaying the superhuman powers of a single solo performer who is present but remains silent — the king himself. Other articles revisit the notion of a self-splitting solo performance, attending to its consequences with a view to the whole, embodied self. Maria Del Sapio investigates the self-splitting, hallucinatory dimension of Leontes’ soliloquies in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Jürgen Schlaeger pursues the solo performance of a self negotiating past and present versions of itself in diary entries. In addition, these and other articles foreground the complexities of the speaking body. More particularly, they highlight the different ways in which corporeality can be bound up with solo speech. For example, Maria Del Sapio argues that in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, the protagonist’s ‘I’ and his ‘eye’, as well as speaking and seeing, are inseparably related to each other. She demonstrates how contemporary scientific and medical accounts of 30. Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 127. I here thank Manfred Pfister for allowing me to draw on his part of the script for our joint introduction to the conference ‘Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self’ in Berlin, November 2007. 31. Speech act theory tends to project rational subjects with clear intentions and pays little attention to the speaker’s corporeality. Striving for formalisation, the description of illocutionary force seeks to reduce the relevant contextual features of the utterance to a minimum, rather than explore their scope. Detailed accounts of the ‘speaking position’ tend to be absent, let alone the impact of discourses involving rank, gender, etc. In its classical version, moreover, the speech unit that is analysed remains restricted to single utterances.

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the eye actually shape the character’s distorted vision of self and others, including his split speech. Roger Lüdeke and Andreas Mahler analyse how the assassins in Julius Caesar attempt to enhance the foundational performative force of their political proclamations by bathing their limbs in Caesar’s blood. And Werner von Koppenfels discusses the maltreated Lilburne who claims that his speech gives voice to the ‘dumb mouths’ of his wounds. However, the contributions also, and prominently, investigate solo speech as a central dimension of the speakers’ agency. Although the solo performer’s actions are scripted and constrained in discursive and material ways, and even though the speech acts may fail for various contextual reasons, this agency is displayed already in the address. The speakers address a potentially broad range of audiences, including either themselves or other individuals. Or they address whole groups — passers-by, paying audiences, or the court. They may even address people who are absent, dead or ghosts, and they address God. However, the complexity of this agency becomes particularly apparent, when solo speech is considered as a speech act, or, more closely, as a series of speech acts — speech acts that may change direction, or question, contradict or undermine each other. Within this series of acts, moreover, solo speech tends to feature feedback loops — though addressing an other, it responds to itself, to its own performative acts. In the course of this process, solo speech may re-position the speaking subject as well as the addressed other, thus reshaping their relationship. Or speech may shift the weight of conflicting voices addressing each other. Individual speech acts may even surprise the speaker on an emotional or intellectual level, thus feeding back into the process of speaking in an unforeseen, unforeseeable and possibly uncontrolled manner. Thus perceived as a process, Early Modern solo speech expresses neither pre-established meanings nor fixed discursive constructions of selves. Rather, this speech turns into a performative and interactive medium in which new selves and new notions of the self can emerge in discourse — in which they can be fashioned and projected for an audience.32 Focussing on solo speech, Jürgen Schlaeger suggests on a very general level that the self-reflexivity foregrounded in the solo speech of Early Modern diaries and journals should be seen not so much as the inward flowering of the individualist subject than as a multiply conditioned reaction to an increasingly complex world. Margaret Fetzer and Wolfgang Müller each argue that John Donne, in his lyrical poetry, exploits with great virtuosity the fact 32. Manfred Pfister discusses a number of these features at greater length in ‘“As an unperfect actor on the stage”: Notes Towards a Definition of Performance and Performativity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, ed. by Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 207–228.

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that solo speech is a process. That virtuosity, however, involves paradoxes and dilemmas, as self-scrutiny turns into self-exhibition and the show of humility into one of mastery. Ina Schabert gives an account of Margaret Cavendish’s complex and self-contained solo performance in her journals, while carefully attending to its different functions. However, the very versatility of solo speech also lends itself to the fashioning of hallucinations, deferrals and projections. In Maria Del Sapio’s analysis, they cloud the solo performances of the jealous king in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. According to Ralf Hertel’s account they beset the dealings with cultural Otherness in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. And Rui Homem traces how solo speech turns into paranoid raving when the character Morose in Jonson’s Epicoene Or The Silent Woman can no longer bear the noise and polyphony of the city life encroaching upon him. Ultimately, solo speech thus also becomes the very form in which the pathologies and even the ‘failure’ of self-fashioning, of individualisation, may be staged. This argument is developed most explicitly in Andrew James Johnston’s contribution, which discusses Emilia’s soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen as an example. Emilia’s speech dramatises her inability to choose between the two kinsmen — a failure that Johnston reads as showcasing her surrender to a powerful discourse of sameness. The concept of solo speech includes aspects of agency that tend to be marginalised in discussions of the soliloquy. One such aspect is the role of narrative — an issue addressed in Günter Walch’s contribution. Revisiting Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Walch makes a point of not turning to its famous soliloquies seen traditionally as the unmediated dramatisations of the character’s self. He is interested, instead, in how these solo performances interact with mediated presentations of the self — with the self narrating itself. Here Walch draws on a rapidly expanding field of research that investigates narrative in drama as relevant both on the story level and as a mode of presentation: Hamlet does not only soliloquise, he also recounts scenes from his childhood at great length and, in the presence of Horatio and the Clown, scenes involving himself and Yorick, the clown. This, too, is solo speech shaping a self. In thus drawing attention to solo speech as narration, or as a form that may mix and merge the dramatic and the narrative mode, Walch’s article could, moreover, be seen to point to the much more important role of narrative self-fashioning in other genres not covered in this volume, such as, for instance, travel literature. IV The self’s agency in solo performances retains complex relations to the concrete place and time of the performance. Solo speech deictically attaches itself to the place and time of its utterance — they become crucial factors in

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the production of meaning and identity, as is highlighted in several articles. Werner von Koppenfels’s analysis of John Lilburne at the pillory presents the most literal and conspicuous case. As von Koppenfels demonstrates, the persecuted Lilburne transforms the pillory to which he has been chained into an ‘oratorial’ machine. He self-consciously avails himself of the location and the publicity it provides, thus appropriating the pillory for an open act of verbal resistance. At the other end of the spectrum we find Jonson’s character Morose, discussed by Homem, who delivers his paranoid diatribes in the most withdrawn place in the house, ensconced under the roof. On a much more oblique plane, Richard Wilson focuses on the liminal space/time of Shakespeare’s prologues and epilogues, addressed to the audience at the beginning and end of the theatre performance. Poised between the possibilities of the stage and the powerful institutions licensing it, between the real and the fictional world, and between the authorial ‘I’ and the collective ‘we’ of the company, these speeches withdraw rather than expose the authorial self — an authorial self they both enable and protect. By contrast Ina Schabert shows that Margaret Cavendish fashioned her authorial self explicitly and with confidence. In her writing, she entertained herself with solo performances devised solely for her own mental theatre — a ‘private stage’ characterised by great autonomy and liberty. As these examples indicate, analyses of solo performances gain from the critic’s close concern with their immediate pragmatics, with the deictic variables ‘I-you-here-now’ narrowly circumscribing any performance. At the same time, performance events always enact and engage the wider discourses and power structures of a specific culture at a given time. Lilburne’s appropriation of the pillory only makes sense when set against contemporary religious discourse — it is this discourse and the institutions enforcing it which fuel the performative power of his resisting speech. Similarly, the precarious position of Shakespeare’s authorial self is circumscribed by a discourse of loyalty, licensing authorities, censorship and severe punishment. And Cavendish’s celebration of the liberty and autonomy of the self’s mental stage needs to be appreciated in the context of contemporary gender relations that rigorously restricted women’s access to actual, material stages in the world. By thus establishing relations between the nitty-gritty of situational pragmatics on the one hand, and the wider historical discourses and material conditions of the speech situation, on the other, the different analyses of solo performances account for specific constellations in which selves are shaped — and give shape to the enactment of discourse. The case of Lilburne is interesting, moreover, because it highlights the potentially liminal character of (solo) performances. What is framed by the authorities as a public performance of punishment and

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humiliation is actually transformed, in the process, into a solo performance of self-assertion. Framing can also become an issue on another level. For instance, some articles touch on the tension between a theatrical and a ritual framing — an opposition that has come under pressure in recent research.33 In this volume Jerzy Limon argues that the king’s solo performance at the core of the Stuart masque should qualify our understanding of the masque. According to Limon the masque should not be considered as theatre, as a spectacle relying on ‘as if’. He discusses it, instead, as a celebration of the king’s superhuman powers granted by God — a performance much closer to ritual or to twentieth-century performance art than to theatre. The ethnographers Ursula Rao and KlausPeter Köpping may help to highlight what is at stake here. In their account ritual performance does not cover up or pretend a reality by representing it, but aims at bringing about ‘another’ reality which, though part of our deceptive reality, needs to be made present in it. The success of these ritual performances, they argue, depends not only on the framing and collective affirmation of the event, but also on the competence and skill of the performers in making this ‘other’ reality emerge. Whether or not the distinction between the theatrical and the ritual dimensions of performances should, ultimately, be upheld, it is clear that the notion of ‘another reality’ related to the sacred must be taken into account. Margaret Fetzer, discussing John Donne’s religious poetry, seems to draw attention to a similar issue when she remarks on the tension between a ‘merely’ theatrical understanding of role playing in the speaker’s impersonation of Christ, and the deep and lasting spiritual transformation he craves for. As I have already mentioned, the articles of this volume do not only address solo performances in the strict sense, i.e. as direct and corporeal encounters between presenters and audiences — performances that may be scripted in playtexts, in poems meant for oral presentation, in guidelines for ceremonies, or in communal knowledge and tradition. The contributions also consider diaries and journals, Lilburne’s religious tract, and even Shakespeare’s signatures as sites of solo performance. This raises a number of interesting points which this volume can, however, only touch upon. In principle, all of the historical texts just mentioned can be read aloud to an audience and thus be corporeally performed, but this is beside the point. The more intriguing question the texts under scrutiny put is that as to how scripting and me-

33. Cf. Klaus-Peter Köpping and Ursula Rao, ‘Die performative Wende: Leben – Ritual – Theater’, Im Rausch des Rituals: Gestaltung und Transformation der Wirklichkeit in körperlicher Performanz (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2008), pp. 1–31.

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diating solo performances further shapes these performances and the selves engaged in them. How does mediation affect the sense of the liveness or ‘performativity’ of the solo performance?34 Or, if we speak of writing as solo performance, how does the shift from speaking to writing affect the performing self and its agency? What is the difference, Richard Wilson asks with Derrida, between Shakespeare penning lines to be spoken with the ink still moist, Shakespeare having the text printed, and Shakespeare as author — though not editor — of the Folio edition? What are the anxieties that beset the experience of this historical shift from the notion of manuscript production to a modern concept of ‘authorship’ strongly informed by print culture? Conversely, one may consider the act of reading as a solo performance, as a process of imagining and thus mentally performing scenes evoked in the text, whether written by the reading self or someone else. Especially in journals and diaries (re-)reading and writing tend to go together. Ina Schabert shows how Margaret Cavendish relishes and self-consciously exploits the difference between watching a scene and creatively modifying it as she re-imagines it in the act of writing — of writing a text she will then revisit and perform in her mental theatre in the act of reading. Indeed, Cavendish shapes herself, in her solo performance, explicitly both as author and audience of her own mental stage. Finally, the articles collected suggest an interdependence of solo performance and genre. The example of Margaret Cavendish reminds us that the very choice of genre is circumscribed by gender and other aspects of the self’s position in Early Modern society. Yet once they are ‘chosen’, genres form the frame in which solo performances acquire their specific shape. The time span of several years covered in some of the Early Modern diaries — to take an obvious example — far exceeds the duration of a stage soliloquy. Together with the relative permanence of the written text the time span covered in the diary hence allows for a reification of past selves hardly possible in a soliloquy. To be sure, the shaping of the self through generic specificity becomes most conspicuous when solo performances in different genres are compared. Yet as Wilson’s analysis of Shakespeare’s prologues and epilogues, or Fetzer’s and Müller’s discussion of Donne’s sonnets amply demonstrate, the form of a

34. For a slightly more formalised approach to performativity mediated in dramatic and narrative presentations cf. Irmgard Maassen, ‘Text und/als/in der Performanz in der Frühen Neuzeit: Thesen und Überlegungen’, with an appendix by Manfred Pfister, Paragrana [Special Issue: Theorien des Performativen. Ed. Christoph Wolf] 10, 1 (2001), 285–302; and Ute Berns ‘The Concept of Performativity in Narratology: Mapping a Field of Investigation’, European Journal of English Studies, 13, 1 (2009), 93–108.

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genre and its cultural location by themselves constrain — and enable — solo performance. The investigation of solo performances in this volume aims to give centre stage to the embodied self, as it acts and speaks under the material, discursive and generic constraints of Early Modern culture. The contributions highlight, moreover, that it is misleading to conceive of ‘constraints’ merely in the negative — as a purely limiting factor in the process of fashioning early Early Modern selves and subjectivity. Rather, the articles trace how the self, in the process of performance, may turn constraint into challenge, and imposed strictures into the source of resistance and creativity, thus both re-iterating and modifying the discourse it performs. Moreover, the articles explore how the different forms of scripting, recording and imagining performances — in specific genres — shape the way in which these selves conceive of themselves. And as they attend to these forms of mediation, the contributors invite reflection, ultimately, on how this mediation shapes our own mental performance as we try to imagine the Early Modern — and our own (post-)modern — self in performance. Bibliography Aers, David, ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”’, in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. by David Aers (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 177–202. Austin, John, How to Do Things With Words, ed. by J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá, 2nd edn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984). Belsey, Catherine, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Berns, Ute, ‘Interioritätskonstruktionen und Freundschaftsdiskurs bei Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 144 (2008), 148–167. —‚ ‘The Concept of Performativity in Narratology: Mapping a Field of Investigation’, European Journal of English Studies, 13, 1 (2009), 93–108. Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. by S.G.C. Middlemore, with a new introduction by Peter Burke (London: Penguin, 2004). Butler, Judith, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. by SueEllen Case (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 270–282. —, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993). —, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). Clemen, Wolfgang, Shakespeare’s Soliloquies, trans. by Charity Scott Stokes (London: Routledge, 2005). Derrida, Jacques, ‘Signature event context’, in Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 1–23.

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Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (Milton Park and New York: Routledge, 2008). Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002). —, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan. (London: Penguin, 1991). Frieden, Ken, Genius and Monologue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001). Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Goffman, Erwin, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, (London: Penguin, 1990 [1959]). Hanson, Elisabeth, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Hillman, Richard, Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997). Hillman, David and Carla Mazzio, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). Kempe, William, Kemp’s nine daies wonder, performed in a daunce from London to Norwich, with an introduction and notes by Alexander Dyce (London: 1840). Krämer, Sybille and Marco Stahlhut, ‘Das “Performative” als Thema der Sprach- und Kulturphilosophie’, Paragrana, 10, 1 (2001), 35–64. Loxley, James, Performativity (New York: Routledge, 2007). Maassen, Irmgard, ‘Text und/als/in der Performanz in der Frühen Neuzeit: Thesen und Überlegungen’, with an appendix by Manfred Pfister, Paragrana, Special Issue: Theorien des Performativen, ed. by Christoph Wolf, 10, 1 (2001), 285–302. Maus, Katherine Eisaman, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995). McAuley, Gay, ‘State of the Art: Performance Studies’, SemiotiX, 10 (2007), n.p., http://www.semioticon.com/semiotix/semiotix10/sem-10-05.html [accessed Jan. 5, 2009]. Marshall, Cynthia, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Mukařovský, Jan, ‘Two Studies of Dialogue’ in The Word and Verbal Art: Selected Essays, trans. and ed. by J. Burbank and P. Steiner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 81–115. Neumann, Birgit and Frederik Tygstrup, ‘Travelling Concepts in English Studies’, European Journal of English Studies, 13,1 (2009), 1–12. Paster, Gail Kern, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Pfister, Manfred, ‘“As an unperfect actor on the stage”: Notes Towards a Definition of Performance and Performativity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, ed. by Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 207–228. —, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Rao, Ursula and Klaus-Peter Köpping, ‘Die performative Wende: Leben – Ritual – Theater’, Im Rausch des Rituals: Gestaltung und Transformation der Wirklichkeit in körperlicher Performanz (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2008), pp. 1–31.

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Sawday, Jonathan, ‘Self and Selfhood in the Seventeenth Century’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. by Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 29–48. —, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). Searle, John R, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Schoenfeldt, Michael, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Shakespeare, William, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York and London: Norton, 1997). Shannon, Laurie, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002). Singer, Milton, ed., Traditional India: Structure and Change (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1959). Strohm, Paul, Theory and the Premodern Text, Medieval Cultures, 26 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Targoff, Ramie, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Routledge, 1969). —, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976). Umathum, Sandra, ‘Performance’ in Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie, ed. by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch, and Matthias Warstat (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2005), pp. 331–34. Weimann, Robert, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Williams, Raymond, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981). Wirth, Uwe, ed., Performanz: Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2002).

1. Authoring and Authority

The Theatre in the Head Performances of the Self for the Self by the Self Ina Schabert Works of art come into being as solo-performances of the author’s imagination. The process can be doubled by a similar imaginary performance presented within a work, a performance that takes place in the head of its main character or its narrator. In such cases, the first level of authorreader communication by means of a fiction is temporarily suspended in favour of a second level of self-communication between a fictional person and the dramatic entertainment offered by his or her own thoughts and feelings. Structurally, the doubling corresponds to the phenomenon of the play within the play. This sophisticated kind of self-reflexiveness is usually attributed to romantic and more frequently to postmodern writers. Indeed, historians of the self find that the self-reflexive self does not emerge before the later 18th century. When we come across declarations of absolute inwardness in Elizabethan poetry, they usually turn out to be mental theatricals staged not for the self but for the sake of the beloved, the reader, or an all-knowing God. A darker, deathly mood of solipsism, however, is developed in Richard II’s prison monologue. For Milton and for Fulke Greville the idea of a self-sufficient self is a mark of satanic verses. The poet Margaret Cavendish, on the contrary, considers self-sufficiency as a virtue. She discovers the solo-performance of the self and for the self as a lasting antidote to her isolated condition. Starting with single mental scenes acted out by her thoughts for the entertainment of her person, she ends up, in The Blazing World, with an ambitious program of imaginary world-making, again for her own pleasure.

The fictional text is always already the document of a performance staging the author’s self. By means of words and images the author acts out a scenario designed in his or her mind. In order to emphasise this kind of theatricality peculiar to fiction, the term ‘scenography’ has been coined which defines literature as a writing down of mental scenes.1 In my essay I shall follow up the idea of literature as the staging of scenes in the mind to solipsistic extremes. My title ‘Performances of the Self for the Self by the Self’ refers to cases where, within the fictional text as such, another imaginary performance is being staged merely for the benefit of the author’s or narrator’s own person. Structurally, the constellation corresponds to the better-known doubling device of the play within the play. In both cases, the first level, that of a communication between author and audience by means of a fictional world, is suspended in favour of a second level constituted by another imaginative creation meant for another audience. In the play within the play, this is a public 1.

See Szenographien: Theatralität als Kategorie der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by Gerhard Neumann, Caroline Pross, and Gerald Wildgruber (Freiburg: Rombach, 2000), especially Neumann’s introduction.

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on the stage, whereas the theatre in the head has as its sole spectator the person in whose mind the performance takes place. It is a separate performance because, like the play within the play, it has a setting and a cast of its own. The dramatis personae within the protagonist’s head are metaphorical actors such as thoughts, fancies, and emotions. The performance is crucial for the person’s sense of selfhood. I Let me give an example of this. It is taken from the Sociable Letters of Margaret Cavendish and refers to the Cavendishs’ exile in the Dutch town of Antwerp in the early 1650’s. The epistolary framework of the text is a pure convention, the addressee a mere fiction, used as a pretext for writing short pieces of various kinds. ‘[T]he truth is, they are rather Scenes than Letters’, she remarks in the Preface.2 A commendatory poem emphasises the solipsistic character of the paradoxically-called Sociable Letters: ‘This lady only to her self she Writes / And all her Letters to her self Indites.’3 I quote Letter 192 (nearly) in full: Madam, Although I am as Unwilling to stir from the Fire-side this Cold Weather, as Criminals are to go to their Execution, […] yet my Husbands Perswasion, which is as Powerful on me, as the Powerfullest Authority of States to particular Persons, Forced me out of the City, as without the Walls, to see Men Slide upon the Frozen Moat, or River, which Runs, or rather Stands about the City Walls, as a Trench and Security thereof; and I being Warm Inclosed in a Mantle, and Easily Seated in my Coach, began to take some Pleasure to see them Slide upon the Ice, insomuch as I wished I could, and might Slide as they did, but yet I would Slide as one of the Skilfullest, and most Practiced, and with a Security the Ice was so Firm as not to Break; but since I neither had the Agility, Art, Courage, nor Liberty, I returned Home very well Pleased with the Sight, and being alone to my self, I found I had a River, Lake, or Moat Frozen in my Brain, into a Smooth, Glassy Ice, whereupon divers of my Thoughts were Sliding, of which, some Slid Fearfully, others as if they had been Drunk, having much ado to keep on their Incorporeal Legs, and some Slid quite off their Feet, and Fell on the Cold, Hard Ice, whereof some Sliding upon Imaginary Shoes, with the Imaginary Fall were tossed up into the Air of my Brain, yet most of my Thoughts Slid with a good Grace and Agility, as with a Swift, and Flying Motion. But after I had sat by the Fire-side some time, the Imaginary Ice began to Melt, and my Thoughts Prudently Retired, or Removed, for fear

2. 3.

Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters (1664), ed. by James Fitzmaurice (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), p. 8. ‘Upon Her Excellency the Authoress’, ll. 1–2, ibid., p. 10.

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of Drowning in the Imaginary River in my Brain. And so leaving this Imagination, I profess my self really, Madam, Your faithful Friend and Servant.4

Within Cavendish’s literary solo-performance of the semi-fictional or fictional ‘Letter’, a solo-performance of the imagination unfolds. In the skating scene she plays the role of the passive and envious onlooker at a pastime in which she is unable to take part; in the scene she imagines, however, her own thoughts are the nimble actors of the show — a show which by virtue of its daring, its variety and the dramatic quality of the finale, exceeds that of the skaters in its entertainment value. The solitary self is able by itself to more than compensate for the person’s lack of physical skill; its activity fully makes up for its solitary condition. Cavendish’s theatre in the head is not, as might seem at first sight, a mimetic theatre. The observations made in the outer world are not simply replayed in the mind; this is what happens during the writing of the first part of the text. In the second half of the long sentence, the skating scene serves as a model, a metaphor for something else, namely the adventure of thinking. The movements of the narrator’s thoughts on the surface of a brain which for a short time is hard and clear are like the figures performed by the skaters on the ice. Cavendish is no longer interested in winter sports but fascinated by the processes going on within herself, the fluidity, mobility, multiplicity and simultaneity of her thoughts, the miracle of inspiration and its precariousness. Her mind here does not function as the storehouse of memories — we are told nothing about the subject matter of her meditation — but rather as the creator of original figures of thought. The passage does not so much anticipate Locke’s epistemology with its sequence of sensations and reflections; rather, it points forward to Shelley’s self-reflexive poetics:5 for him, ‘the mind in creation is a fading coal’; for her, the mind in creation is a show which eventually dissolves again in the watery brain.6 The quasi-corporeal existence of the actors in Cavendish’s head is due to her materialist philosophy. She considers spiritual life as a rarified version of

4. 5.

6.

Cavendish, Sociable Letters, Letter 192, p. 203. In accordance with the theoretical literature, I use ‘reflection’ and ‘reflective’ with reference to a mental act that gives back or reproduces an object; ‘reflexion’ and ‘reflexive’, on the other hand, refer to the gesture of the mind turning back upon itself. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in English Critical Texts: 16th Century to 20th Century, ed. by D.J. Enright and Ernst de Chickera (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 250.

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materiality.7 Therefore, she visualizes her mind as a landscape with a frozen river and a sky, and attributes to her skating thoughts imaginary legs and feet and shoes. Her belief in an intimate connection between mind and matter is also demonstrated by links of cause and effect: the change from the cold outside to the cosy fireside is said to act as a stimulant on her mind, whereas the continuing warmth of the room proves fatal to her inspiration. All thought, for her, is physically generated. II The little scene, narrated with the mixture of boasting and comical selfdeprecation characteristic of Cavendish’s autobiographical fictions, appears as something irregular when viewed in historical perspective. According to historians of ideas the self-enclosed, ‘self-reflexive’ subject emerged as a normative pattern only in the course of the 18th century. They agree that Early Modern subjectivity, by contrast, was defined by and constituted within social and religious contexts that both contain and transcend the individual. The self could only be conceived as an embedded self. Michael Schoenfeldt, in his book on Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (1999), explains this self in Foucauldian terms as the result of a disciplinary process: the person emerged in the course of mutually constitutive processes of social and devotional subject formation. Montaigne’s essays which have been read by some as an early intimation of the self-contained individual, are interpreted in these studies as indicating a new awareness of the possibility of ‘private thought’, yet at the same time voicing a deep mistrust against this kind of subjectivity which Montaigne calls fantasie privée. The ‘private’, associated with the older meaning of privation, is considered by him as unstable and unreliable unless brought into line with religious and political systems of order. Charles Taylor, who — as the subtitle of his study Sources of the Self (1989) indicates — is more interested in ‘The Making of the Modern Identity’ than in premodern conceptions of selfhood, emphasises the importance of St. Augustine’s Confessions as an early positive model for inwardness. (The Confessions were translated into English in 1620.) Yet Taylor concedes that, unlike modern self-reflexiveness, Augustine’s retreat into the self is a movement leading from the interior to the superior, from the human mind to its creator. That is, radical inwardness ends up by reaffirming the self’s embeddedness within religious contexts. Similarly, Descartes’s philosophical claim to the 7.

Cf. Philosophical Letters (London: s.n., 1664), p. 12: ‘in my opinion, Nature is material, and not any thing in Nature, what belongs to her, is immaterial; but whatsoever is Immaterial, is Supernatural’.

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self-sufficiency of the thinking mind is justified by the mind’s relation to God. Timothy Reiss, in his in-depth study of ancient and Early Modern varieties of self-consciousness, Mirages of the Selfe (2003), concludes that the modern ‘idea that a private, self-reflexive subject could think, act and exist in isolation has no tradition behind it’.8 The Early Modern self, confirms Jerrold Seigel in his comprehensive overview on The Idea of the Self (2005), was constituted by bodily self-awareness and by its relations to the world outside the self, that is, by the social and religious dimensions of selfhood, and not by self-reflexion. III Historians of ideas warn us against reading our own conceptions of selfreflexiveness and autonomous personhood back into earlier periods. Yet as human character did not change abruptly in or about December, 1910, the human self did not change completely in or about 1750. Literary historians find — and the contributions of this book confirm and enlarge their findings — that a dimension of self-reflexive inwardness begins to unfold already in Renaissance drama and poetry. Anne Ferry, anticipating Paul Oppenheimer’s suggestion that the birth of the modern mind in Western Europe was connected with the invention of the sonnet, traces an ‘inward language’ in poems by Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare and Donne. Sometimes we can observe that this language develops into fully-fashioned inward scenes of self-dramatisation. Thomas Nashe in his preface to Astrophel and Stella foregrounds the theatrical character of Sidney’s sonnet sequence, calling it a ‘Theatre of Pleasure’ where ‘the tragicommody of loue is performed by starlight’.9 ‘Since I left you mine eye is in my mind’, finds the poet-lover in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 113, and the images of the outer world fade before those created by wishful thinking.10 In the absence of the beloved person, introspection thrives and produces full-blown scenarios of the imagination, with the poet-lover as his own fascinated spectator. Thus, for example, in Astrophel 49, the course of love is experienced as the taming of a horse: ‘[…] by strange worke I prove / […] a horse to Love’. The ‘I’ who undergoes the process is at the same time enjoying it as an onlooker, amused at the absurdity of its metamorphosis and delighted

8.

Timothy Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 471. 9. Thomas Nashe, ‘Somewhat to reade for them that list’, in The Works (1904), ed. by Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols (Repr. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958) III, 329–33 (p. 329). 10. All quotes from Shakespeare are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: Norton, 1997).

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with the smooth efficiency of the ‘manège’.11 Michael Drayton’s first sonnet cycle with the self-referential title Ideas Mirrour develops scenes of mental generation and birth, actions within prisons, islands, and smithies of the mind and, of course, scenes of psychomachia, on which, again, the lover simultaneously comments in the detached manner of a spectator.12 In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, a meeting of a court of law unfolds before the speaker’s inner eye. To ‘the sessions of sweet silent thought’ various memories of past sufferings are summoned to appear, and they are shown to have a strong emotional impact on the I who witnesses the performance. Sir Walter Ralegh, the first protagonist of Greenblatt’s studies of Renaissance self-fashioning,13 extends his habit of social self-dramatisation to his writings, which again present selfreflexive mental scenarios. This holds true especially for the poems written during his first period of disgrace and imprisonment under Queen Elizabeth. In the enforced solitude Ralegh entertains himself with a theatre in the head: ‘My sowle the stage of fancies tragedye’, he says. He conjures up cruel visions of despair — ‘my ioyes and hopes lay bleedinge on the grovnd’ — with the self as the only spectator: Oh, hevy hart who cann thee wittnes beare, What tounge, what penn could thy tormentinge treat But thine owne mourning thoughts which present weare.14

However, all these theatricals of the self by the self and seemingly also exclusively for the self, finally turn out to be really addressed to someone else, namely the beloved one. The histrionics of the self-enclosed self are part of the rhetoric of love, meant to underline the absolute power of the Lady, the Friend, the Queen over the heart, soul or mind of the speaker. They serve as confessions, compliments, appeals to the other’s attention, pity, generosity, affection. While the speaker pretends to act out his emotions, his hopes and fears only for his own relief, the lady, thus Spenser in Amoretti 54, is the intended audience, ‘[b]eholding me, that all the pageants play’.15 The function

11. Astrophel and Stella, in Sir Philip Sidney, The Poems, ed. by William A. Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), pp. 163–237. 12. See Ideas Mirrour, Amour 16, 22, 44, 31 and others; Michael Drayton, The Works, ed. by J.W. Hebel, 2nd edn, 5 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961) I. 13. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). 14. ‘The 11th: and last booke of the Ocean to Cynthia’, ll. 144,163 and 147–49. Quoted from: Sir Walter Ralegh, The Poems, ed. by Agnes Latham (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951). 15. Amoretti and Epithalamion, in Edmund Spenser, The Shepherd’s Calendar and Other Poems, ed. by Philip Henderson (London: Dent/Everyman’s Library, 1932), pp. 280–327.

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of the sonneteer’s theatre in the mind is to fashion the social self of the speaker as lover rather than to establish a dimension of pure inwardness. In religious lyrics, introspection can be dramatised in theatrical terms as well. Yet again, performances of the self by the self in poems of religious meditation and introspection turn out to be intended not for the self, at least not solely for the self, but, this time, for a divine audience. They are sustained by a general religious sense that human life is a play acted out before the eyes of God, perhaps even directed by God. ‘My selfe am Center of my circling thought, / Onely my selfe I studie, learne, and know,’ says Sir John Davies in his poem Nosce Teipsum, yet he hastens to add: ‘[…] the best Soule, with her reflecting thought, / Sees not her selfe, without some light divine.’16 Virtuous self-reflexiveness is understood to depend upon the grace of God. Poems of this kind are bound up with and strengthen the religious identity of the performer. IV Totally self-referential representations of the inner life, pure solo-performances, are rare in English Renaissance literature. The pastoral declaration that the speaker has retreated into an inner world is seldom more than a rhetorical statement: ‘My mynde to me a kyngdome is’ declares Sir Edward Dyer in a song first printed in 1588, but he elaborates upon the despised things which exist outside the kingdom of his mind.17 A few decades later, Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’ announces that ‘[…] the Mind, from pleasure less, / Withdraws into its happiness’. Yet the promised delights of the solipsistic imagination are shortlived; the speaker’s claim that the imagination could recreate the outer world within the self and even invent new worlds is soon abandoned in favour of religious enthusiasm and social satire. 18 Fulke Greville, however, has a sonnet on a genuinely introspective state of mind in his sonnet cycle Caelica: ‘In night when colours all to black are cast’ (No. 100). Here, the claustrophobic nocturnal experience of a mind on its own, deprived of all outer resources and means of orientation, is upheld throughout. The isolation produces ‘images of self-confusednesses’ of a morally and reli-

16. Sir John Davies, The Poems, ed. by Robert Krueger (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), Nosce Teipsum, pp. 1–68, quotes ll. 167–68, 199–200. 17. Ralph M. Sargent, The Life and Lyrics of Sir Edward Dyer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), pp. 200–201. 18. Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters, ed. by H.M. Margoliouth, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952) I, pp. 48–50 (p. 49).

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giously dubious kind, images which become associated with the devil.19 As in Montaigne’s Essais, self-reflexiveness is considered a dangerous state. So it comes as no surprise that the first absolute declaration of the self’s mental autonomy, unalloyed by any doubts or moral misgivings, is voiced by the figure of Satan: ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n,’ he famously declares in Paradise Lost after his Fall.20 Milton, however, makes it quite clear that Satan is deluding himself: unknowingly, he is made to serve the ways of God. Seen before this background, the theatre of the self for the self by the self which Shakespeare’s Richard II creates for his own entertainment in the prison scene turns out to be unique in Elizabethan times.21 The situation in which it occurs is unique as well. Not only is Richard physically reduced to solitary confinement, but, being ‘unking’d’, he has also lost his social and perhaps even his religious identity. The tendency to histrionic self-stylization, which proved fatal to him as king,22 is now his only resource. Fastidiously he presents the cast of his inward stage: the imaginary actors, which are the offspring of a union of his female brain with his masculine soul, constitute a perverse commonwealth made up of religious thoughts quarreling about the principle of salvation, ambitious thoughts trying in vain to break free from imprisonment, and beggar-like thoughts who stoically endure the miseries of confinement. The performance in his mind then modulates to an interchange between a self imagined as beggar and a self imagined as king and hence into a replay of the deposition scene. This puts an end to the show as Richard finds that, due to his deposition, he has no self at all; his is the impossible, deadly state of being ‘nothing’. The theatre in Richard’s head can be said to act out a tragedy of the self. The only identity open to Richard in his isolation would be the modern, self-reflexive self, yet by imagining the theatre of the mind in pre-modern terms as a representation of social life he forfeits his last chance. His thoughts do not move freely like those in Cavendish’s mental skating scene. V To connect the solo-performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II with the theatre in the head of Margaret Cavendish is not as far-fetched as it might seem. 19. Fulke Greville, Selected Poems, ed. by Thom Gunn (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 129. See also Gunn’s commentary, pp. 36–37. 20. Paradise Lost I, 254–55. Milton, Poetical Works, ed. by Douglas Bush (London: Oxford University Press, 1966). 21. Richard II, 5.5.1–41. 22. Ibid., 3.2 (with Carlisle’s criticism in ll. 174–75).

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Cavendish knew the play; she even refers to a line from Richard’s prison monologue in her Sociable Letters.23 For her, Richard’s situation has attained a new actuality with the imprisonment and execution of Charles I. She seems to have had access to the letter that Charles wrote to his son in his last hours; in one of her Sociable Letters (No. 29) she justifies her own way of life by paraphrasing the King’s self-referential statement ‘we have learnt to own ourself by retiring into ourself”.24 Cavendish frequently compares her own situation with that of a solitary king. As a woman, she considers herself outside the sphere of political subjecthood. In Letter 16 of Sociable Letters she states on the ‘matter of Governments’ with regard to women: ‘we are not made Citizens of the Commonwealth, we hold no Offices, nor bear we any Authority therein […]; and if we be not Citizens in the Commonwealth, I know no reason we should be Subjects to the Commonwealth: And the truth is, we are no Subjects’.25 Therefore she finds that in their exile she is better off than her husband. While he has lost his social status, she had nothing to lose. She defines her identity (except for the matrimonial tie mentioned at the beginning of Letter 192 quoted above) only in relation to herself. Cavendish tends to express her self-referential mode of existence in political terms. Her mind to her is very much a self-sufficient kingdom. She likes to imagine herself as an absolute ruler within the realm of her own thoughts, her philosophical and her poetical ‘fancies’. Her (especially in Margaret Thatcher’s time) much quoted declaration: ‘though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First’ bears witness to this.26 That, as in the skating scene, her thoughts entertain her person by means of quasi-theatrical performances fits into this self-image: for the Stuarts, court theatricals and masques were an important aspect of royal self-fashioning.27 Because of Cavendish’s tendency to identify with royalty, Catherine Gallagher, in an article important for my own argument, calls Cavendish’s ‘I’ a moi absolu, in analogy with the roi absolu.28 She quotes Cavendish’s own state23. Sociable Letters, No. 6, p. 16 (‘as they waste Time; so Time wasts them’). 24. Cf. Anna Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998), pp. 14 and 87. Battigelli quotes Charles’s Letter to the Prince of Wales, 19 Nov 1648, from Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 190. 25. Sociable Letters, No.16, p. 25. 26. ‘To the Reader’, Preface to The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, in Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World & Other Writings, ed. by Kate Lilley (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 124. 27. See Jerzy Limon’s contribution to this book. 28. Catherine Gallagher, ‘Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England’, Genders, 1 (1988), 24–39.

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ment to the point: ‘My minde is become an absolute Monark, ruling alone, my thoughts as a peaceable Common-wealth.’ 29 Cavendish’s self is, so to speak, even more absolute than an absolute king. The king has absolute power with regard to his subjects, but he is not absolute with reference to God; on the contrary, he derives all his power from him. Cavendish’s self-awareness owes nothing to religion; she imagines her self as an autonomous being. This is why I prefer to borrow a formula from Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, which defines the democratic regime as the ‘government of the people for the people by the people’. Similar to Lincoln’s political cosmos, Cavendish’s self is conceived in terms of a self-sufficient trinity. A portrait of Cavendish painted by van Diepenbek shows her alone in her study as she is being crowned with a wreath of laurels. On a table in front of her are paper, pen, and ink — and a bell to summon her copyist. The conspicuous absence of books in the room is explained by the painting’s inscription. It tells us that Cavendish’s own head is her library, with her thoughts as books, and that her inspiration arises from nothing but her inward fire. Her thoughts serve her as company as well: she has ‘[m]ost visitants, when She has none’.30 The secular trinity of the imagination is thus made obvious. Her writing is of herself, herself being its sole origin; it is for herself, receiving the visits of her own thoughts; and it is, of course, by herself, who is its author. VI After the Restoration and the family’s return to England, Cavendish — now further ennobled as the Duchess of Newcastle — continued to live the life of a recluse. In a Sociable Letter probably written at that time, she defends her love of solitude against adverse criticism. To live in retirement gives her pleasure, she says, while it does no harm to anyone. She prefers the theatre in her head to all the shows offered by the newly established Court and the reopened theatres:

29. Cavendish, The Worlds Olio (1655) (London: A. Maxwell, 1671), p. 46. 30. The full text of the inscription reads: ‘Studious She is and all Alone, / Most visitants, when She has none. / Her Library in which she look’s / It is her Head her Thoughts her Books. / Scorning dead Ashes without fire / For her owne Flames doe her Inspire.’ A copy of Diepenbek’s portrait, engraved by van Schuppen, with ll. 3–6 of the inscription, served as frontispiece to Cavendish’s Philosophical and Physical Opinions (cf. Lisa T. Sarasohn, ‘A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 47 [1984], 289–307).

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[…] though I do not go Personally to Masks, Balls, and Playes, yet my Thoughts entertain my Mind with such Pleasures, for some of my Thoughts make Playes, and others Act those Playes on the Stage of Imagination, where my Mind sits as a Spectator.31

She then explains the mechanism of her inner performances: her senses send their objects to her mind, where they serve as materials for her thoughts. The thoughts make use of the sensations in order to make plots for imaginary plays, as well as to create poems and think up philosophical and scientific debates. Due to the diversity of her inner life, Cavendish is able to continually ‘delight my self with my Self’.32 It is the peacefulness of the mental theatre which appeals to her, its lack of real violence, but also its imaginary drama. Her thoughts engage in playful controversies, in which they may even oppose her favourite philosophical ideas. ‘Cavendish’s “Thoughts” have minds of their own’, as one critic put it.33 Sometimes they go so far as to object to performances which she has staged in her mind. Thus Letter 195 relates how she heartily enjoyed an imagined carnival scene — ‘so much, as to make me Laugh Loud at the Actions in my Mind’. However, her reasonable thoughts, much to her mind’s regret, ordered the ‘Fancy-Stage’ to be taken down and commanded the ‘Thought-Actors’ out of town.34 Her literary works derive from the theatre in her head. Her mind is not only the spectator but the critic of the performances and decides upon their literary value. ‘And those [performances] my Mind likes best’, she says, ‘it sends them forth to the Senses to write them down’.35 Thus she defines all her works as ‘scenographies’, written versions of selected scenes that have taken place in her mind and have been submitted to the mind’s censorship. In prefaces to single works, she confirms this poetics. Her closet dramas derive from imaginary plays: ‘For all the time my Playes a making were, / My brain the Stage, my thoughts were acting there’, she states in a poem introducing the first edition of the plays.36 Similarly, her book of tales, Natures Picture Drawn with Fancies Pencil to the Life, is offered as the record of stories told among the ‘Figures’ of Cavendish’s absent friends raised ‘in the Circle of [her] Brain’, where they gathered round a fire created by her Fancy.37 The 31. Cavendish, Sociable Letters, Letter 29, p. 40. 32. Ibid., p. 41. 33. Jay Stevenson, ‘Imagining the Mind: Cavendish’s Hobbesian Allegories’, in A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ed. by Stephen Clucas (Aldershot: Aldgate, 2003), pp. 143–55, quote p. 146. 34. Cavendish, Sociable Letters, Letter 195, p. 207. 35. Ibid., Letter 29, p. 40. 36. Cavendish, Playes (London: Martyn, 1662), n.p. 37. Cavendish, Natures Picture drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (1656) (London: Maxwell, 1671), ‘Preface’, n.p.

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Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663) have their origin in a performance of a more serious kind. The book is the record of a scholarly conference held in Cavendish’s head: I can assure you, Noble Readers, I was very Studious in my own Thoughts and Contemplations when I writ it, for all that time my Brain was like an University, Senate, or Council-Chamber, wherein all my Conceptions, Imaginations, Observations, Wit, and Judgment did meet to Dispute, Argue, Contrive, and Judge, for Sense, Reason, and Truth.38

VII The world outside the self cannot be made to correspond to the visions of the imagination. Real castles, Cavendish observes, probably thinking of her husband’s ruined estate of Welbeck in Nottinghamshire, are impossible to maintain properly. Therefore, her own habit of building castles in the air of her mind and eventually conserving them in writing is much more profitable.39 Real societies, she finds, generalising her personal experience of the Civil War, are aggressive and self-destructive. Her Hobbesian pessimism is confirmed by the King’s lack of gratitude to the Duke of Newcastle, one of his father’s most loyal servants. So Cavendish keeps herself to herself as much as she can and compensates herself for the lack of company by developing the art of creating single scenes into that of creating whole worlds in her mind. These heterocosms, made — as the Duke of Newcastle puts it in a commendatory poem — ‘of Nothing, but pure Wit’ can be fashioned entirely according to her own ideas of order, peace and beauty.40 In her narrative The Blazing World (1666), she acts out and simultaneously comments upon the project of imaginary world-making. By inventing the utopia announced by the title, she becomes, as she herself remarks, ‘Authoress of a whole world’.41 And this fictional world eventually opens up to the creation of more worlds in the minds of the fictional characters; the protagonists imagined in the head of the author begin to imagine other performances in their own heads. Cavendish is quite fond of Russian-doll effects of this kind. The Empress of the Blazing World, by the help of her Spirits, summons the Duchess of Newcastle’s soul from the terrestrial world into her presence. They both would like to create a new imaginary world, the Empress out of 38. Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London: William Wilson 1663), ‘Epistle to the Reader’, n.p. 39. Cavendish, Sociable Letters, Letter 113, p. 121. 40. Cavendish, The Blazing World, ed. by Lilley, p. 121. 41. Ibid., ed. by Lilley, p. 224.

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boredom with the perfect one she has created in her kingdom, the Duchess because of her ambition to become a ruler herself. The Spirits encourage them, stating that every human creature can create an immaterial world fully inhabited by immaterial creatures, and populous of immaterial subjects such as we are, and all this within the compass of the head or scull.42

The Duchess’s soul fully rises to the challenge. Step by step, she performs an exemplary act of mental world-making. She experiments with the structuring principles of several ancient and modern cosmologies, only to find that none of the worlds thus conjured up in her head answers to her own conception of a well-ordered, beautifully moving universe. Finally she relies entirely on her own taste and the result proves satisfactory to her. The Empress is full of admiration for the Duchess’s creation, yet the latter advises her not to imitate it but to imagine a different one according to her own individual preferences. Similarly the author, in the epilogue to her utopian narrative, encourages her readers to think out different worlds of their own and govern them as they please. Due to her insistence on everybody’s right to mental world-making, Cavendish has aptly been classified as an ‘egalitarian solipsist’.43 The scenes imagined in Cavendish’s mind, expanded into the creation of whole imaginary worlds, fixed in writing and offered as an example to others, become a public message. If everyone followed her advice, society would dissolve into so many solo-performances of selves who are busy fashioning their own ideal worlds within their minds for their own delight. Cavendish would have welcomed this, at least in theory. 44 According to her, such a society of self-sufficient individuals would tolerate every kind of philosophy and religion as a personal choice. So there would be no more civil wars. She appends the narrative of The Blazing World to her Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, thereby emphasising the subjective status of scientific and philosophical thought. Philosophy and science offer world-making ‘fancies’ which everybody is free to revise or to replace.45 If all thinkers came to share her attitude, hostilities in the republic of letters would cease as well. Cavendish’s inner theatre may have started as a defence against anxieties 42. Cavendish, The Blazing World, ed. by Lilley, p. 185. 43. Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘“Singularity of Self”: Cavendish’s True Relation, Narcissism, and the Gendering of Individualism’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, 21 (1997), 52–65 (p. 53). 44. As Diepenbek’s portrait reminds us, there had to be servants who answered the bell of the recluse. 45. Cf. her title Philosophical Fancies (1653).

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caused by personal memories of civil-war cruelties. In her writings, however, the act of psychic retreat overcomes the dangers of the psychotic46 and develops into the lucidity of well-staged solo-performances of the imagination. In a final metaliterary triumph, the author interprets her mode of writing as a way to establish universal peace in the real world. VIII For Cavendish the solo-performance of the self is gendered. She perceives a connection between inwardness and femaleness. Women are no political subjects, hence their need to create a country of their own in the mind. It might be rewarding to follow up Cavendish’s suggestion. When one reads the Diary of her older contemporary Lady Anne Clifford, another recluse, and comes upon entries such as ‘I spent the day in working the time being very tedious to me’, ‘still working & sad’, ‘I sat still thinking the time to be very tedious’, ‘I kept my Chamber being very troubled & sad in minde’ following closely one upon the other,47 one begins to understand how solo-performances of the self for the self by the self à la Cavendish could become a strategy of female survival.48 Lady Mary Wroth, the only female sonneteer in Renaissance England, writes in a more introspective mode than her male predecessors. Relegated like Anne Clifford, if for other reasons, to a marginal position at court, she imagines, in her sonnet cycle Pamphilia and Amphilanthus, an experience of love which takes place in landscapes of the mind and culminates in a spiritual court. Love is depicted mainly as an ennobling emotion on the part of the speaker, rarely as a social relationship to the absent beloved and, on the other hand, never quite transformed into a religious experience. Allegorical scenes, dream visions and addresses to Cupid make up most of the situations of the poems. Similar to the writer of the Sociable Letters,49 Pamphilia prefers the scenes staged in her mind for her own delight to the events at court: 46. For the psychology of the psychic retreat cf. John Steiner, Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organizations in Psychotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients (London: Routledge, 1993). 47. Anne Clifford, The Diary 1616–1619: A Critical Edition, ed. by Katherine O. Acheson (New York: Garland, 1995), entries for May 8, July 1st and 31st, August 10th 1617. 48. It is possible that Virginia Woolf alludes to and mocks Clifford’s incapacity of developing and writing about the inner self in the chapter of Orlando where the ‘biographer’ considers herself out of a job because of Orlando’s solitary life. Woolf agreed with Vita Sackville-West (the pattern for Orlando) that Vita’s personality was made up of the moods and mentalities of her ancestors, among them the Lady Anne Clifford. (Sackville-West published an edition of Clifford’s diaries and has a chapter on her in Knole and the Sackvilles). 49. Cavendish knows about the adverse criticism encountered by Lady Mary following the publication of the first part of Urania and the sonnets; she defends her in one of her Sociable Letters.

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‘When others hunt, my thoughts I have in chase / If hauke, my minde att wished end doth fly, / Discourse, I with my spiritt tauke […]’ (Sonnet 23).50 Much later, in the 1740s, Eliza Haywood in The Female Spectator will extol the virtues of absolute inwardness to her readers: In the mind is the true happiness, as the admirable Milton says, ‘The mind is its own place and in itself ‘Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.51

This is the only serious appropriation of the motto of Milton’s Satan which I have been able to find prior to Byron’s Romantic drama Manfred. In Manfred’s Byronic declaration of independence however, the mind, formerly a stage where new worlds could be imagined, has shrunk to a mirror for an autistic self.52 Bibliography Battigelli, Anna, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998). Byron, Poetical Works, ed. by Frederick Page, 3rd edn, corrected by John Jump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Cavendish, Margaret, Natures Picture drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (1656) (London: Maxwell, 1671). —, Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London: William Wilson, 1663). —, Philosophical Letters (London: s.n, 1664). —, Playes (London: Martyn, 1662). —, Sociable Letters (1664), ed. by James Fitzmaurice (New York: Garland, 1997). —, The Worlds Olio (1655) (London: A. Maxwell, 1671). —, The Blazing World & Other Writings, ed. by Kate Lilley (London: Penguin, 1994). Chothia, Joan, ed., The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Clifford, Anne, The Diary 1616–1619: A Critical Edition, ed. by Katherine O. Acheson (New York: Garland, 1995).

50. Lady Mary Wroth, The Poems, ed. by Josephine A. Roberts (Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), p. 100. 51. The Female Spectator, repr. in 4 vols (London: A. Millar, W. Law, and R. Cater, 1775), vol. IV, Bk. 24, p. 282. 52. Manfred, esp. 2.2, 2.3, 3.1 and 3.4.127–36. — Later examples of women’s identification with Milton’s Satan are: Helena Faucit, Shakespeare’s Female Characters, 2nd edn (London: Blackwell, 1887), p. 4–5: ‘Satan was my great hero. I think I knew him by heart. His address to the council I have often declaimed to the waves, when sure of being unobserved’; and Agnes Ebbsmith in Arthur Wing Pinero’s play The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895), 3.1.729–31: ‘You foolish people, not to know — (beating her breast and forehead) — that Hell or Heaven is here and here!’ (The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays, ed. by Jean Chothia [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], p. 121).

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Davies, John, The Poems, ed. by Robert Krueger (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). Drayton, Michael, The Works, ed. by J.W. Hebel, 2nd edn, 5 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961) I. Faucit, Helena, Shakespeare’s Female Characters, 2nd edn (London: Blackwell, 1887). Ferry, Anne, The ‘Inward’ Language: The Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Gallagher, Catherine, ‘Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in SeventeenthCentury England’, Genders, 1 (1988), 24–39. Gardiner, Judith Kegan, ‘“Singularity of Self”: Cavendish’s True Relation, Narcissism, and the Gendering of Individualism’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, 21 (1997), 52–65. Greenblatt, Stephen J., Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). Greenblatt, Stephen and others, eds., The Norton Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1997). Greville, Fulke, Selected Poems, ed. by Thom Gunn (London: Faber & Faber, 1968). Haywood, Eliza, The Female Spectator, London 1744–1746 (repr. in 4 vols, London: A. Millar, W. Law, and R. Cater, 1775). Marvell, Andrew, The Poems and Letters, ed. by H.M. Margoliouth, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952) I. Milton, John, Poetical Works, ed. by Douglas Bush (London: Oxford University Press, 1966). Nashe, Thomas, The Works, ed. by Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958) III. Neumann, Gerhard, Caroline Pross, and Gerald Wildgruber, eds., Szenographien: Theatralität als Kategorie der Literaturwissenschaft (Freiburg: Rombach, 2000). Oppenheimer, Paul, The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self Conciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Ralegh, Sir Walter, The Poems, ed. by Agnes Latham (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951). Reiss, Timothy, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Sarasohn, Lisa T., ‘A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 47 (1984), 289–307. Sargent, Ralph M., The Life and Lyrics of Sir Edward Dyer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935). Schoenfeldt, Michael Carl, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Seigel, Jerrold, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the 17th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Shelley, Percy Bysshe, A Defence of Poetry, in English Critical Texts: 16th Century to 20th Century, ed. by D.J. Enright and Ernst de Chickera (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). Sidney, Sir Philip, The Poems, ed. by William A. Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). Spenser, Edmund, The Shepherd’s Calendar and Other Poems, ed. by Philip Henderson (London: Dent/Everyman’s Library, 1932). Steiner, John, Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organizations in Psychotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients (London: Routledge, 1993). Stevenson, Jay, ‘Imagining the Mind: Cavendish’s Hobbesian Allegories’, in A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ed. by Stephen Clucas (Aldershot: Aldgate, 2003), pp. 143–55. Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989). Wroth, Lady Mary, The Poems, ed. by Josephine A. Roberts (Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).

Subjectivity and the Ekphrastic Prerogative Emilia’s Soliloquy in The Two Noble Kinsmen Andrew James Johnston This article examines Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s re-writing of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale with respect to the politics of same-sex desire and visual power. Like Chaucer, the two Jacobean collaborators show how Emilia becomes both an object and a victim of the male gaze and of male discourse. Whereas Chaucer’s Emilye is seen entirely from the outside, the Jacobean Emilia is granted a certain degree of subjectivity, a subjectivity which reaches its peak in the witty homosexual flirtation with the Serving Woman and the notion of a political utopia founded on an ideal of female friendship inspired by Montaigne. But that subjectivity is soon dismantled as the play progresses. Emilia’s subjectivity reaches its lowest point when, in her ekphrastic soliloquy, she succumbs entirely to discursive constructions of visual experience following the ideological imperatives of a masculine cult of sameness. And this message is rammed home by presenting it as a direct contrast to the visual politics of the Knight’s Tale with its self-consciously ekphrastic and voyeuristic narrator. Whatever Emilia may state early on in the play, for a lesbian Amazon, Montaigne might not, after all, be the perfect guide to happiness, just as, contrary to modern concepts, ekphrasis does not automatically grant a position of power.

In what is arguably the most important of the soliloquies in Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen, Emilia studies the images of her two would-be husbands, Palamon and Arcite. Despite having no wish to marry at all, she cannot help but admire the cousins’ portraits. And as she does so in an extended ekphrastic passage, she identifies the two men with Narcissus and Ganymede. This identification of her suitors with classical embodiments of homoerotic desire creates an especially ironic effect: an Amazon whose own erotic desires are characterised as profoundly lesbian is trying to make herself fall in love with two men sharing a strong homosocial and potentially homoerotic bond.1 After first extolling the virtues of Arcite, she moves on to acknowledge the advantages of Palamon, before finally declaring herself incapable of judgement: ‘I have no choice’ (4.2.35).2 This highly ambiguous phrase beautifully encapsulates Emilia’s problem. Not only does she feel incapable of choosing on the basis of what she sees in the portraits, she is, in fact, not even 1.

2.

Richard Abrams, ‘Gender Confusion and Sexual Politics in The Two Noble Kinsmen’, in Drama, Sex and Politics, ed. by James Redmond, Themes in Drama 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 69–76 (p. 72). All quotations from the Two Noble Kinsmen are taken from William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. by Eugene M. Waith, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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permitted to choose at all. It is, after all, the result of the tournament that will decide. Emilia’s ekphrastic soliloquy hence serves as an expression of and as a response to a twofold assault on her subjectivity. She is incapable of choosing from what is on offer and even if she were she is not permitted to do so, anyway. The limitations imposed on Emilia render her a passive object in a world of masculine politics and desire. This essay will attempt to tease out some of the contradictions and paradoxes expressed in Emilia’s soliloquy and to situate these contradictions within the play’s larger politics of gendered subjectivity. And this politics of subjectivity becomes not only especially visible but also considerably more problematic, I argue, against the backdrop of the highly complex dialogue that Shakespeare and Fletcher engage in with their source, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.3 The main plot of the drama unfolds with a logic of total chivalric absurdity. Looking out of their Athenian prison window, the Theban princes fall in love with Emilia who is strolling in the garden with a serving woman. Instantly, their sworn brotherhood turns into lethal hatred which eventually culminates in a lonely duel in the woods. Here they are discovered by Duke Theseus and his entourage. Theseus orders their immediate execution, but his decision is stayed by the intervention of his wife, Hippolyta, the former Amazon Queen, and by that of her sister, Emilia. Moreover, Theseus’s intimate friend, Pirithous, comes to the women’s assistance. Since Emilia refuses to decide between the two suitors, Theseus ordains that the duel be repeated in public with each prince supported by three knights. The winner gains the right to marry Emilia. For Emilia this is an especially unexpected turn of events, since she had not previously been aware of the princes’ existence, let alone of their love for her. Arcite, Palamon, and Emilia all pray to their respective tutelary deities and — except for Emilia — receive positive signs that their desires will be granted. Arcite wins the battle but suffers an accident with his horse and dies, though not before officially handing over Emilia to his cousin. These events are paralleled by a subplot in which the Jailer’s Daughter falls in love with Palamon, helps him escape, goes mad, and is eventually healed when her Wooer sleeps with her claiming to be Palamon.

3.

There is a long tradition in the criticism of this play of assigning its more nostalgic aspects to Shakespeare and its more cynical moments to Fletcher. However much such an analysis may actually be founded on a close analysis of the two playwrights’ respective contributions to the drama, it is nevertheless legitimate, as Richard Hillman argues persuasively, to treat the Kinsmen, in its finished state, as an artistic unity that generates meaning through the very tensions inherent in the juxtaposition of nostalgia and cynicism (Richard Hillman, ‘Shakespeare’s Romantic Innocents and the Misappropriation of the Romance Past: The Case of The Two Noble Kinsmen’, Shakespeare Survey, 43 [1991], 69–79 [p. 70]).

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Readers familiar with Chaucer are struck by how closely Shakespeare and Fletcher follow their predecessor’s design. Their adaptation succeeds in remaining faithful even in what it invents and adds, so that the changes intensify the basic thrust of Chaucer’s narrative and stress the unresolvable problems of the source instead of seeking to find some kind of solution for them.4 The Knight’s Tale depicts the world of chivalry as one of dangerously senseless and latently homoerotic male rivalry and violence fuelled rather than contained by the cult of love it purports to serve. It is a world in which the chivalric classes’ ideological claim to being capable of establishing a meaningful order within a providential universe is consistently undercut in a manner bordering on cynicism. This cynicism, I have argued elsewhere, becomes especially visible in a voyeuristic scene where the narrator drops his mask of bumbling incompetence and betrays an extremely salacious interest in the ritual ablutions Emilye performs before praying in the temple of Diana.5 According to Lee Patterson’s now classic interpretation of the tale, it is because of the chivalric classes’ ideological denial of subjectivity that their failures are relentlessly exposed.6 And this chivalric denial of subjectivity is perhaps most emblematically registered in the fact that the two cousins competing for the hand of Emilye remain effectively indistinguishable. Much as Chaucer scholars have sought to identify differences between the two characters, to all intents and purposes, there is nothing to choose between them. And the narrator emphasises this fact significantly by asking his famous demande d’amour at the end of the first of the tale’s four parts: ‘Who hath the worse, Arcite or Palamoun?’7 In its specific structure as a literary device based on a courtly parlour game, the demande stresses sameness even in apparent difference. Since a demande is meant to generate a never-ending debate, its very presence implies that any differences there might be between Palamon and Arcite can only be of the most superficial nature. Essentially, the two princes are so alike that one could argue about them ad infinitum. Another instance in Chaucer’s tale that highlights this aristocratic denial of subjectivity is that of the grand ekphrastic descriptions of the paintings in the temples. Here the narrator is virtually sucked into his story, describing the 4.

5. 6. 7.

Helen Cooper, ‘Jacobean Chaucer: The Two Noble Kinsmen and Other Chaucerian Plays’, in Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. by Theresa Krier (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 189–209 (p. 190). Andrew James Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 110–14. Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2001), pp. 165–230. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Fragment I, l. 1348.

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images as though he were seeing them himself. The conventions of ekphrasis are thus cleverly exploited as a means of depicting the narrator’s deep immersion in chivalric culture, an immersion so complete that it results in his being apparently incapable of maintaining his distance from his narrative. And these are the problems Shakespeare and Fletcher, too, address. For all their artistic piety, the Jacobean collaborators inevitably shift their focus in some respects, if only because theirs is a play, whereas the source they draw on is a chivalric romance-cum-epic. Thus, Chaucer’s oddly incompetent and sometimes even cynical narrator has to be cut entirely, while Emilia, whose medieval counterpart hardly ever speaks, is given a number of fascinating dialogues and soliloquies which — together with the words spoken by the Jailer’s Daughter — contribute considerably to the feminisation of the Kinsmen. Where Chaucer shows how a female is silenced in the world of male chivalry, Fletcher and Shakespeare, paradoxically, permit her to comment on that act of silencing. In so doing, as Kathryn L. Lynch has suggested, Shakespeare and Fletcher may have been picking up the threads that link Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale to the tale that succeeds and quites it, the Miller’s Tale which represents something like a critique and a parody of the story told by the Knight.8 If this were the case then the presence of the Jailer’s daughter would not so much constitute a supposedly ‘bourgeois’ element in conflict with the play’s aristocratic aspects but rather an attempt to bring onto the stage a specific effect of Chaucer’s frame tale narrative, namely that of the pairing of tales by antagonistic tellers within the larger scheme of the Canterbury pilgrimage.9 Not only do Shakespeare and Fletcher introduce a decidedly non-noble subplot, they also eroticise the story, highlighting and amplifying the homoerotic subtext already present in Chaucer, a subtext Chaucer daringly draws attention to through his antiquarian tinkering with his source material, i.e. when he depicts the naked wrestlers competing at Arcite’s funeral games.10 On the one hand, this subtext focuses on the suppressed or perhaps not-sosuppressed homoeroticism underlying the Theban princes’ rivalry. On the 8.

Kathryn L. Lynch, ‘The Three Noble Kinsmen: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fletcher’, in Images of Matter: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Proceedings of the Eighth Citadel Conference on Literature, Charleston, South Carolina, 2002, ed. by Yvonne Bruce (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), pp. 72–91 (p. 87). 9. For a thorough analysis of the drama’s bourgeois aspects not only in the subplot concerning the Jailer’s daughter but also in the metaphors and imagery employed by Palamon and Arcite themselves see Richard Abrams, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen as Bourgeois Drama’, in Shakespeare, Fletcher, and the Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. by Charles H. Frey (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), pp. 145–62. 10. Andrew James Johnston, ‘Wrestling with Ganymede: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and the Homoerotics of Epic History’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 50 (2000), 21–43.

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other, it concerns itself with the lesbian potential inherent in Emilia’s Amazon identity. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that two of the most persuasive readings of the play, Richard Mallette’s and Laurie Shannon’s, concentrate on its politics of homosociality and homoeroticism. Mallette sees the Kinsmen as an analysis of how homosocial/homoerotic desires are suppressed through a celebration of the heterosexist politics of marriage — albeit a celebration that is made ultimately to look unsatisfactory.11 Shannon, on the other hand, interprets the play as an eloquent denunciation of heterosexual marriage which, she argues, is identified with political tyranny.12 The difference in emphasis is crucial: whereas Mallette’s Duke represents a fairly conventional political authority engaged in policing homoerotic desire in Early Modern society, Shannon’s Theseus amounts to something considerably more sinister: a tyrant whose sexual politics correlate with the general arbitrariness of his rule. Hence, Shannon assigns a powerful ideological role to Emilia. Not merely does the heroine voice a spirited defence of female same-sex relations when she speaks of her childhood attachment to Flavina, but this defence itself assumes the function of a lesbian political utopia in which the politics of friendship Montaigne explicitly declares women incapable of, are, ironically, most perfectly fulfilled. It is a utopia where complete friendship and equality between women is realized in an atmosphere of eroticised chastity elevated to the status of a political ideal. Moreover, despite the fact that this utopia is located in the heroine’s childhood, as Helen Cooper remarks ‘there is no suggestion that Emilia’s evaluation of her childhood love is itself childish’.13 Indeed, as Ute Berns points out, the very fact that this ideal form of friendship between two women is placed in a seemingly marginal context of childhood experience actually testifies to its potentially destabilising power.14 Shannon’s reading is perhaps a little more original and complex than Mallette’s, amongst other things because it stresses the political implications of friendship as derived from Cicero and Montaigne and the cult of sameness this entails. Mallette’s reading, on the other hand, is the more self-consciously new historicist as it gestures towards the play’s subversive subtexts but sees them contained within an overall structure privileging the established systems 11. Richard Mallette, ‘Same-Sex Erotic Friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen’, Renaissance Drama, 26 (1995), 29–52. 12. Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 90–122. 13. Cooper, p. 201. 14. Ute Berns, ‘Interioritätskonstruktionen und Freundschaftsdiskurs bei Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 144 (2008), 148–67 (p. 158).

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of power. Shannon’s slightly more ambitious reading does, however, come at a price: first, that of largely disregarding the subtext of the Jailer’s Daughter — a sin I find excusable, if only because I, too, am in the act of committing it — and second, that of underestimating the manifold contradictions that Emilia’s eroticism is fraught with in the text — especially with respect to the ideal of chastity. One of the most important scenes dealing with Emilia’s eroticism is the dialogue with her Serving Woman in the garden. The scene interrupts the conversation between the imprisoned princes at the very point when they celebrate their friendship in highly eroticised terms, one addressing the other as ‘wife’ or declaring himself to be ‘wanton’ for the other’s company.15 Observed but apparently not heard by Palamon and Arcite, who carry on a running commentary on the Amazon’s beauty, Emilia and her Serving Woman engage in a flirtatious conversation ending in the following words: EMILIA (to her Woman) The sun grows high; let’s walk in. Keep these flowers; We’ll see how near art can come near their colours. I am wondrous merry-hearted, I could laugh now. WOMAN I could lie down, I am sure. EMILIA And take one with you? WOMAN That’s as we bargain, madam. EMILIA Well, agree then. (The Two Noble Kinsmen 2.2.149–53)

What makes this scene so fascinating is its paradoxically implicit sexual explicitness. The conclusion of the women’s conversation can be read as an agreement or a bargain between them, to use the words the characters themselves employ. It leads them straight to bed.16 Here, Emilia does not merely advocate or even inhabit an eroticised world of female friendship and chastity, here she enjoys a self-determined sex life with a social inferior — a sex life characterised by no particular notion of love or friendship but rather by a straightforward commitment to erotic pleasure. The scene neither celebrates a political cult of eroticised chastity, nor does it support a shaky triumph of heterosexual marriage. Consequently, both Shannon and Mallette attempt to explain it away through interpretive acrobatics. For Mallette it remains unthreatening because of the general tendency to 15. This kind of language will resurface again and again and characterise the exchanges between Palamon and Arcite up to their very end. Catherine Belsey draws attention to the way how in Palamon’s last words (5.4.110–12) the difference between same-sex and cross-sex emotional relations is effectively erased (‘Love in Venice’, Shakespeare Survey, 44 [1992], 41–53 [p. 53]). 16. Abrams, ‘Gender confusion’, p. 70.

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consider female same-sex desire as negligible and also because the exchange is so firmly embedded in the larger scene where Palamon’s and Arcite’s desires are all-important. At the end of the day, Malette argues, Emilia’s expression of her desires is drowned out by those of the cousins.17 Such a reading is not particularly convincing. In purely structural terms, I think it highly significant that immediately after Emilia leaves the garden the princes proclaim their love and embark on their new course of erotic rivalry. It is as though her eroticism were triggering theirs, as though the erotic playfulness in the garden were being somehow transmitted to the distant onlookers. Hence, I do not think it matters very much that Palamon and Arcite do not hear what Emilia and her woman say. Admittedly, they don’t seem to, but the erotic content of Emilia’s conversation with the Serving Woman might just as well be communicated through facial expression, gestures and body language. The scene is, after all, meant to be acted on a stage. Even though the princes do not actually hear what is going on, they are meant to pick up visually the erotically charged exchange between the two women. As Alan Sinfield observes: ‘It is in the context of erotic female bonding that the two boys set eyes upon Emilia.’18 This would also explain why the scene is constructed in such a way as to make the audience witness two dialogues, that between the women agreeing to go to bed together and that between the young men falling in love. Given the play’s emphasis on the voyeuristic qualities of the scene, it seems only logical that Emilia’s eroticism should be transmitted to the cousins visually and so elicit a response. The scene’s particular irony is not that Palamon and Arcite are unaware of what Emilia is saying, but rather that their heterosexual response to her occurs at the very moment in the play when she herself is full of homoerotic desire and feels free to express it. Arguably, Shakespeare and Fletcher here re-introduce that element of voyeurism that got lost by cutting Chaucer’s narrator. Palamon’s and Arcite’s desire is thus aroused by that ageold male pornographic fantasy — two women having sex. Laurie Shannon is even more ingenious in her ambition to efface the effects of Emilia’s erotic bargaining. Shannon acknowledges that everything about this exchange transgresses Montaigne’s conditions of ideal friendship — ‘in admitting sexuality, in traversing class lines, and in the element of “bargaining” it contains’ — but she sees this balanced by the fact that the scene supposedly envisions the feminised space of the Renaissance household — a

17. Malette, p. 35. 18. Alan Sinfield, ‘Cultural Materialism and Intertextuality: The Limits of Queer Reading in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen’, Shakespeare Survey, 56 (2003), 67–78 (p. 72).

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space which might contain all kinds of relationships between women.19 But even admitting the specific relevance of the Renaissance household, we would then be witnessing nothing less than a powerful alternative to Montaigne’s ideal; an alternative, moreover, that does not depend on sacrificing the erotic. The fact remains that here we witness the Amazon princess doing a series of things in stark contrast to the Montaignian ideal of friendship she claimed for herself earlier. And why should she not? Obviously, love is not involved, so this supposed transgression of Montaigne’s ideal of friendship need not be seen as a transgression at all. Her encounter with the Serving Woman is simply a different situation from the one Emilia describes in her conversation with Hippolyta. Surely, the fact that she once had a childhood relationship to a girl which perfectly embodied Montaigne’s principles does not preclude her having other kinds of relationships in later years. Still, we can understand why some critics should hesitate to accept the obvious, namely that in Jacobean society the acceptability of erotic desire was potentially subject to class distinctions. After all, an exclusively aristocratic utopia is just not quite as attractive to modern sensibilities as one which would include women regardless of social status. But Emilia is not quite off the hook yet, since Shannon rightly stresses the element of chastity in her concept of a female political utopia. The idea of chastity is, indeed, a presence in the play as it is in Chaucer’s tale. By claiming a special relationship to Diana, Emilia herself invokes this notion. (Though for all we know, being a votaress of Diana might not exclude active lesbianism.) We simply cannot tell, since there is no comment on the contradiction. Shakespeare and Fletcher simply let it stand. So, even though we might just be capable of getting around the chastity question by granting Emilia the right to have non-Montaignian relationships even as she proclaims her political ideal of female friendship, as far as her sacerdotal self-image is concerned, the scene introduces a note of uneasiness. And that sense of uneasiness further stresses the idea of Emilia as a sexually self-determined woman, votaress of Diana that she might actually be.20 19. Shannon, p. 121. 20. This shows that male poets were capable of representing female same-sex desire in a greater variety of forms than some critics, such as Valerie Traub, suggest. See Valerie Traub on The Two Noble Kinsmen: ‘The Insignificance of Lesbian Desire in Early Modern England’, in Queering the Renaissance, ed. by Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 62–83 (p. 72). For a more recent discussion of the issue based on the idea that in Renaissance England same-sex relations between women did not matter that much, see Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 172–75.

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I have stressed these problems in order to show that — as is to be expected — in the play Early Modern discourses of erotic desire mingle with all kinds of other discursive formations and distinctions. Social inequality between erotic partners is merely one of them. Yet it seems to be a very important one for this play in particular, since nearly all the major additions Fletcher and Shakespeare make to Chaucer’s tale seem to revolve around the specific issue of erotically crossing social boundaries. First, there is Emilia’s dalliance with the Serving Woman. Second, there is the Jailer’s Daughter who goes mad because of her unrequited love for Palamon. Third, there is the relationship between Pirithous and Theseus. Though they are closer in rank than Palamon and the Jailer’s Daughter or Emilia and the Serving Woman, their friendship has nevertheless to cross a broad divide, namely that between sovereign and subject. Given Theseus’s absolutist type of rule — Chaucer’s Duke is much more constitutional! — the gap between the ruler and the ruled, too, is absolute — however aristocratic the subject in question might actually be. Hence, on the discovery of the princes in the woods we find Pirithous kneeling in supplication together with Hippolyta and Emilia, pleading for their lives — something we do not find in Chaucer. Nonetheless, Pirithous is Theseus’s most intimate friend whose relationship to his ruler might easily equal that between the Duke and his wife. This is a fact Hippolyta herself discusses, referring to the relationship between her husband and his best friend with a phrase charged with erotic meaning: ‘Their knot of love, / Tied, weaved, entangled’ (The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1.3.41–42). And fourth, there is the string of heterosexual affairs that Palamon and Arcite entered into in a spirit of erotic competition when still living in Thebes. All of these affairs were apparently conducted with non-aristocratic women. The equality in rank that is the hallmark of Montaigne’s homosocial/homoerotic concept of friendship is absent in most of the relationships presented in the play, both in those that stay within gender boundaries and in those that transgress them. More importantly, not only do we see that relationships can work out in conditions of inequality, but actually, the two most successful relationships we see on stage — as opposed to the ones only described in retrospect — are decidedly unequal and also (potentially) homoerotic: that of Emilia to the Serving Woman and that of Theseus to Pirithous. Does this mean that Montaigne’s ideal of sameness in friendship is effectively devalued? The idea is tempting, not least because of the vast ideological implications of sameness. The Early Modern obsession with sameness goes back a long way and applies to a lot of phenomena besides friendship. Chaucer himself frequently quotes it from Boethius — though often in contexts which are highly ambivalent. In the Knight’s Tale, especially, sameness

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is time and again presented as problematic, most obviously in the representations of Palamon and Arcite themselves. Chaucer’s princes are much more alike or rather much less distinguishable than their counterparts in the Kinsmen. In Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play, there appears to be a number of features distinguishing them — though this is something we begin to understand only as the drama progresses. One striking difference between them is that Arcite seems to be much more committed to their friendship and hence reluctant to give it up in favour of a rivalry for Emilia.21 In the beginning, Arcite actually seems to believe it possible for both men to love Emilia at the same time: I will not, as you do, to worship her As she is heavenly and a blessed goddess! I love her as a woman, to enjoy her — So both may love. (The Two Noble Kinsmen 2.2.165–168)

Here Shakespeare and Fletcher add an interesting twist to what they find in Chaucer. In the Knight’s Tale Palamon’s praising of Emilye as a goddess merely provokes Arcite into a kind of casuistry. Since Palamon fell in love with her as a divine being and not as a person of flesh and blood, Arcite claims, that it is he who loved her first, namely as a woman. What in Chaucer constitutes no more than the occasion for a sophistic quibble that perfectly encapsulates the absurdity of the princes’ love, in Fletcher and Shakespeare is turned into a device that makes it possible to probe more deeply into the specific nature of Palamon’s and Arcite’s relationship. It is as though Palamon has to taunt his cousin into deadly enmity. And as they enter into their struggle it becomes clear that Arcite’s prime aim in pursuing Emilia is to spite Palamon rather than to win Emilia’s heart. Later, when the cousins arm each other, it is Arcite who tries to re-establish some form of provisional harmony. This is not to say that Palamon’s love of Emilia is more serious or mature than Arcite’s, but it does mean that Arcite’s desire for Emilia depends much more on Palamon’s loving her first than on any motivations of his own. And this is why in the end the dying Arcite claims that he was false in loving Emilia. Ironically, this admission substantiates the importance of Palamon’s famously ridiculous insistence on having seen Emilia first. Such an argument might not seem to be particularly convincing when it comes to claiming a woman for oneself, but it does further our understanding of the relationship between the young men. In Chaucer, the question of who saw Emily first simply sounds absurd; but in Shakespeare and Fletcher it actually tells us 21. Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 71.

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something about the specific emotional/homoerotic dynamic between Palamon and Arcite, a dynamic significantly more developed than in Chaucer: ‘Shakespeare transforms the Arcite-Palamon relationship into one in which philia appears much more prominent and complex than in Chaucer.’22 Interestingly, these observations tie in very well with the descriptions Emilia gives us in her soliloquy on her rival suitors’ portraits. She describes the pictures because she decides to choose between the Theban princes in order to prevent the deadly combat. In order to choose, she first has to make distinctions, so as to form a basis for her choice. To a certain extent, she employs the categories of contemporary humoral psychology as a means of establishing a difference between her two admirers. EMILIA […] Here love himself sits smiling; Just such another wanton Ganymede Set Jove afire with, and enforced the god Snatch up the goodly boy, and set him by him, A shining constellation. What a brow, Of what a spacious majesty, he carries, Arched like the great-eyed Juno’s, but far sweeter, Smoother than Pelops’ shoulder! […] Palamon Is but his foil, to him a mere dull shadow; He’s swart and meagre, of an eye as heavy As if he had lost his mother, a still temper, No stirring in him, no alacrity, Of all this sprightly sharpness not a smile. — Yet these that we count errors may become him: Narcissus was a sad boy but a heavenly. O, who can find the bent of woman’s fancy? I am a fool, my reason is lost in me, I have no choice, and I have lied so lewdly That women ought to beat me. On my knees I ask thy pardon; Palamon thou art alone And only beautiful, and these the eyes, These the bright lamps of beauty, that command And threaten love, and what young maid dare cross ’em? What a bold gravity, and yet inviting, Has this brown manly face! […] What a mere child is fancy, 22. Piero Boitani, ‘The Genius to Improve an Invention: Transformations of the Knight’s Tale’, in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. by Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 185–98 (p. 189).

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At first glance Shakespeare and Fletcher seem to have solved the famous problem that has exercised certain Chaucer-scholars for decades, i.e., how to distinguish between Palamon and Arcite. In the Kinsmen, the differences are obvious. According to Emilia’s descriptions Arcite appears to be free and easy, with a fresh and merry countenance and a body to match — his sounds like a sanguine disposition. Palamon on the other hand, is slight and dark and with an eternal frown that marks his melancholy nature. Yet, ultimately, things are not quite as clear, since even after precisely delineating the young men’s distinguishing features Emilia still declares herself incapable of choice. The desirability of each of the princes is equal even though their natures are different. Neither is to be preferred by the standards of the day. Their seeming difference dissolves into complementarity and, in effect, though not in actual fact, into something very much like sameness. Since one is all the other is not, paradoxically their differences vanish. To compare them means to realise that there can be a form of sameness even in difference. Each perfect as the embodiment of a well-known humoral type and each perfect in such a manner as to provide all that the other lacks, Palamon and Arcite defy the hierarchising tendencies one associates with comparison. If the comparison does not yield up a basis for preference, however flimsy and however subjective, then difference does not ultimately matter.23 Thus the text is closer to Chaucer than one would assume at first glance. Chaucer too, we recall, establishes a huge array of superficial differences in his descriptions of the kings Lygurgus and Emetrius who have come to fight for Palamon and Arcite, only to show that those exaggerated differences are ultimately insignificant. In their own special use of humoral psychology, this is exactly what Shakespeare and Fletcher do. And so it comes as no surprise that Emilia exclaims later: ‘Were they metamorphosed / Both into one!’ (5.3.84–85). But there might be a second and more complex reason why Emilia proves incapable of choosing between the two. That is because her choice itself seems to be based on a paradoxical premise. As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, she likens the princes to Ganymede and Narcissus, that is to the two best-known legendary objects of homoerotic desire. Under normal circum23. As Michael D. Bristol (‘The Two Noble Kinsmen: Shakespeare and the Problem of Authority’, in Shakespeare, Fletcher, and the Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. by Charles H. Frey [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989], pp. 78–92 [p. 89]) argues within a slightly different context in his Girardian reading of the play, Palamon’s and Arcite’s ‘exact social equivalence makes it impossible to allocate precedence between them’.

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stances this may not appear very significant, but in a play that is so obviously fascinated by same-sex desire in all kinds of guises, the names Ganymede and Narcissus gain an extra weight they might not have otherwise had. Hence, by invoking the images of Ganymede and Narcissus, Emilia occupies the role of the homoerotic admirer. In other words: hers is not the perspective of the heterosexual woman she is now expected to become, she is not Venus seeking to seduce Adonis. Rather, by calling Arcite ‘Ganymede’, she imagines herself as Jupiter swooping down to the foot of Mount Ida to snatch up ArciteGanymede in his talons. By calling Arcite ‘Ganymede’ she is claiming the position of a male, homosexual lover. With Palamon, ‘Narcissus’, she brings about a similar effect: […] and these the eyes, These the bright lamps of beauty, that command And threaten love, and what young maid dare cross ’em?

It is after all, the reflection of those eyes, the fascination with his own face that was the undoing of Narcissus. Those ‘bright lamps of beauty’ as she calls them essentially captivate her and — if we follow the Narcissus myth to its logical conclusion — then by imitating Narcissus’s fascination with his own face, she is effectively insinuating herself into his position, in effect becoming Narcissus as she admires him. Since Narcissus himself was the principal admirer of Narcissus and thus the prime victim of his own beauty, his love for himself is the most perfect example of sameness in homosexual love. In letting herself be captivated by the eyes in the portrait she studies, Emilia offers us a comic reversal of the Narcissus myth. In order to become Narcissus’s lover one must, in effect, become Narcissus. It looks as though, under the conditions of the Early Modern cult of sameness, instead of adopting the identity of a heterosexual woman through marriage, Emilia, the lesbian Amazon, simply occupies the position of a homosexual man. Again, this would tie in perfectly with Palamon’s own idea of how Emilia ought to respond to him erotically, namely by violently ravishing him. Thus Palamon projects his own violent homoeroticism onto Emilia as he desires to be loved by her as by a male rapist. Sameness all over again! There is yet another important aspect to her soliloquy that deserves mentioning, namely that Emilia’s description of the princes comes packaged in the form of ekphrasis. After all, Emilia is understood as having two miniatures in her hands of the kind Isaac Oliver and Nicholas Hilliard famously produced for the Elizabethan and Jacobean elites. I stress this point because it establishes a vital premise that makes her ekphrasis truly ekphrastic: Emilia, the character in the play, is capable of seeing the miniature portraits in her hands, but the audience is not, because the

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paintings must, to all intents and purposes, be too small to be visible from the auditorium. We must, therefore, rely entirely on what she tells us. Hers is, therefore, a perfect example of ekphrasis in James Heffernan’s terms, i.e. of a ‘verbal representation of visual representation’, 24 but of one — as is frequently the case — that is completely imaginary. In drama the ideal place for ekphrasis is, of course, a soliloquy, in as much as a soliloquy offers perfect conditions for extended description and narrative on stage. As W.J.T. Mitchell points out, ekphrasis is not so much about the relation of two ontologically distinct modes of artistic expression, that is: the visual and the verbal, but rather about an encounter between the Self and the Other in which the verbal takes the place of the Self engaging with an Other in the form of a visual image. Consequently, according to Mitchell, ekphrasis is a highly political phenomenon, implying very specific power relations. Thus he states: The “otherness” of visual representation from the standpoint of textuality may be anything from a professional competition […] to a relation of political, disciplinary or cultural domination in which the “self” is understood to be an active, speaking, seeing subject while the “other” is projected as a passive, seen, and (usually) silent object. […] Like the masses, the colonized, the powerless and voiceless everywhere, visual representation cannot represent itself; it must be represented by discourse.25

Emilia’s ekphrastic soliloquy is undoubtedly political, if only in the sense that, in the final analysis, it is concerned with dynastic issues. But oddly, it lacks the sense of verbal empowerment of the Self vis à vis an Other that resonates through Mitchell’s phrasing right down to the Marxian/Saidian pathos he employs as his final flourish. Ultimately, Emilia is denied the position of an ‘active, speaking, seeing subject’ staring at those supposedly passive images. On the contrary, her own gaze, linked as it is to the requirement of enforced choice, remains powerless: ‘Cannot distinguish but must cry for both!’ The use of the word ‘must’ in this context is highly significant. As Philip Finkelpearl remarks, there is no other play by Shakespeare that makes such an insistent use of the word, it occurs twice as often as Shakespeare’s average.26 In effect, Emilia is not granted the power of ekphrasis. Not being able to choose amounts to being incapable of taking advantage of the power struc24. James A.W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 3. 25. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 157. 26. Philip J. Finkelpearl, ‘Two Distincts, Division None: Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen of 1613’, in Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, ed. by R.B. Parker and S.P. Zitner (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), pp. 184–99 (p. 191).

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tures ekphrasis promises. Hence, Shakespeare and Fletcher deprive Emilia of what one might call the ekphrastic prerogative. But they do show that her ekphrasis is, indeed, the product of pre-existing discourse. Locked in a vicious circle of proliferating forms of sameness Emilia proves capable of applying only the discursive structures available to her. Mitchell is absolutely correct in stating that visual representation must itself be represented by discourse. And that discourse, we see, is not available to manipulation by Emilia. Her view of the princes’ images is determined by an ineluctable ideology of sameness capable of transforming a lesbian Amazon into a homosexual male. And these homoerotic forms of desire are conceptualised in terms of a sameness that cripples the capacity for choice, a capacity — the play seems to argue — that forms the very essence of subjectivity. If we see Emilia’s ekphrastic soliloquy in the specific context of the Knight’s Tale as Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s literary source, it gains an even greater poignancy. As she gazes at the portraits — thus superficially assuming a position of power she will be denied in the end — she is mirroring the culmination of the narrator’s ekphrastic performances in the Knight’s Tale. There the great tournament scene is preceded first by the narrator’s ekphrastic descriptions of the wall-paintings in the three temples and then by his voyeuristic semi-refusal to describe in detail how, in the temple of Diana, the naked Emilye performs a series of ritual ablutions before she actually implores the goddess to preserve her chastity. Especially if read as a continuation of the descriptions of the paintings in the temples, the narrator’s voyeuristic discussion of the naked Emilye constitutes his self-conscious claim to visual power. This is what Shakespeare and Fletcher invite their audience to remember when they let Emilia embark on her grand soliloquy. The Jacobean playwrights stage Emilia’s act of ekphrastic description before the literary-historical backdrop both of the ekphrases of the wall-paintings and the subsequent visual victimisation of Emilye in the Knight’s Tale. Again we see Shakespeare and Fletcher telescoping features which, in Chaucer, form the discrete elements of an extended narrative sequence. Whereas the Knight’s Tale uses its string of carefully ordered ekphrases as a preparation for the final voyeuristic coupde-grace, Emilia in the Two Noble Kinsmen combines the narrative activity of ekphrasis with gazing at the images of potential objects of erotic desire. Yet by merging into one great soliloquy those rhetorical actions Chaucer’s narrator executes one after the other, the text highlights the extent to which she lacks the powers of the male gaze so triumphantly celebrated by Chaucer’s narrator. He emphasises the choices he makes, the choice of first giving detailed descriptions of the images in the temples and later that of not providing a detailed description of the naked Emilye pouring water over her body. Thus, the aristocratic narrator displays to full view the power of his (narrative) gaze.

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In Emilye’s hands — literally — the images she represents verbally do not, however, yield up any possibility of choice. Like Chaucer, the two Jacobean collaborators show how Emilia becomes an object and a victim of the male gaze and of male discourse. Whereas Chaucer’s Emilye is seen entirely from the outside, the Jacobean Emilia is granted a certain degree of subjectivity, a subjectivity which reaches its peak in the witty homosexual flirtation with the Serving Woman. But that subjectivity is dismantled in the course of the play, and reaches its lowest point when in her ekphrastic soliloquy her discursive constructions of visual experience follow the ideological imperatives of a masculine cult of sameness. And this message is rammed home by presenting it as a direct contrast to the visual politics of the Knight’s Tale with its self-consciously ekphrastic and voyeuristic narrator. Whatever Emilia may have been stating early on in the play, for a lesbian Amazon, Montaigne might not, after all, be the perfect guide to happiness, just as ekphrasis does not automatically grant a position of power. Bibliography Abrams, Richard, ‘Gender confusion and Sexual Politics in The Two Noble Kinsmen’, in Drama, Sex and Politics, ed. by James Redmond, Themes in Drama 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 69–76. —, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen as Bourgeois Drama’, in Shakespeare, Fletcher, and the Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. by Charles H. Frey (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), pp. 145–62. Belsey, Catherine, ‘Love in Venice’, Shakespeare Survey, 44 (1992), 41–53. Berns, Ute, ‘Interioritätskonstruktionen und Freundschaftsdiskurs bei Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 144 (2008), 148–67. Boitani, Piero, ‘The Genius to Improve an Invention: Transformations of the Knight’s Tale’, in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. by Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 185–98. Bristol, Michael D., ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen: Shakespeare and the Problem of Authority’, in Shakespeare, Fletcher, and the Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. by Charles H. Frey (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), pp. 78–92. Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 3–328. Cooper, Helen, ‘Jacobean Chaucer: The Two Noble Kinsmen and Other Chaucerian Plays’, in Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. by Theresa Krier (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 189–209. Finkelpearl, Philip J., ‘Two Distincts, Division None: Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen of 1613’, in Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, ed. by R.B. Parker and S.P. Zitner (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), pp. 184–99. Heffernan, James A.W., Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). Hillman, Richard, ‘Shakespeare’s Romantic Innocents and the Misappropriation of the Romance Past: The Case of The Two Noble Kinsmen’, Shakespeare Survey, 43 (1991), 69–79.

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Johnston, Andrew James, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). —, ‘Wrestling with Ganymede: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and the Homoerotics of Epic History’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 50 (2000), 21–43. Lynch, Kathryn L., ‘The Three Noble Kinsmen: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fletcher’, in Images of Matter: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Proceedings of the Eighth Citadel Conference on Literature, Charleston, South Carolina, 2002, ed. by Yvonne Bruce (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), pp. 72–91. Mallette, Richard, ‘Same-Sex Erotic Friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen’, Renaissance Drama, 26 (1995), 29–52. Mitchell, W. J. T., Picture Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). Patterson, Lee, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Shakespeare, William, and John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. by Eugene M. Waith, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Shannon, Laurie, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002). Sinfield, Alan, ‘Cultural Materialism and Intertextuality: The Limits of Queer Reading in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen’, Shakespeare Survey, 56 (2003), 67– 78. Smith, Bruce R., Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). Traub, Valerie, ‘The Insignificance of Lesbian Desire in Early Modern England’, in Queering the Renaissance, ed. by Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 62–83. —, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Our Good Will Shakespeare’s Cameo Performance Richard Wilson This article traces the different ways in which Shakespeare performs his authorial self in his signatures, in the epilogues and prologues of his plays, as well as, on a metatheatrical plane, in the ‘performative crisis’ suffered by Cordelia in King Lear; yet it also considers Shakespeare’s performing self as it moves from stage to page, and into print. Rather than initiating the modern myth of a sovereign authorial self, Shakespeare performs secrecy and withdrawal. His is a self constrained by licensing authorities, censorship and the threat of punishment, expected to deliver artistic service on royal demand, and bound to a discourse of loyalty. If, following Bourdieu, these constraints can also be seen as circumscribing a form of liberty, this liberty is gained at the cost of relegating if not sacrificing a prominent authorial self. Shakespeare’s rash and evasive signatures as well as his ambivalence towards print, which he shares with Cervantes, are viewed in this context. However, they are also discussed, with Derrida, as conveying an anxiety towards printing that anticipates death — an anxiety that senses a spectralisation of the living writer in the timelessness of the authorial self.

At the end, ‘his nose was as sharp as a pen’ as he ‘babbled of green fields’ (Henry V, 2.3.15). In September 1615, a few weeks before Shakespeare began to make his will and a little over six months before his death, Thomas Greene, town clerk of Stratford, wrote a memorandum of an exchange biographers treasure as the last of the precious few records of the dramatist’s spoken words: ‘W Shakespeares tellyng J Greene that I was not able to beare the enclosinge of Welcombe’.1 John Greene was the clerk’s brother, and Shakespeare, according to earlier papers, was their ‘cousin’, who had lodged Thomas at New Place, his Stratford house. So the Greenes had appealed to their sharpnosed kinsman for help in a battle that pitted the council against a consortium of speculators who were, in their own eyes, if ‘not the greatest […] almost the greatest men of England’.2 The plan to enclose the fields of Welcombe 1.

Thomas Greene, memorandum September 1615, repr. in E.K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930) II, p. 143. Chambers thought the ‘I’ of the note was Greene himself; but the consensus is that it refers to Shakespeare, since as Edgar Fripp logically objected: ‘Why should Shakespeare tell John Greene, Thomas Greene’s brother, what John Greene had long known and Shakespeare perfectly well knew was known to him? And why should Thomas Greene, in his confidential note-book, then enter such an inane memorandum?’: Edgar Fripp, Shakespeare Man and Artist, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938) II, p. 812, n. 4. 2. Thomas Greene, quoting William Combe, memorandum December 10, 1614, quoted in Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 137 (not in Chambers).

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north of the town was indeed promoted by the steward to the Lord Chancellor, no less. But the predicament for Shakespeare was that it was led by his friends the Combes, rich money-lenders from whom he had himself bought 107 acres adjacent to the scheme. This land was his daughter Susanna’s dowry, and he raised her interest in its development by investing in a half-share of tithes on Welcombe’s corn and hay. Thus at the very close of his life, Shakespeare was pitched into the thick of the economic conflict tearing English society apart, as he now had to weigh his rental income from arable farming against the potential profits from sheep.3 The only certain losers from enclosure of Stratford’s green fields would be the tenants, who when sheep ate fields, in a notorious image of More’s Utopia, must ‘depart away’ with babes and chattels on their backs.4 Shakespeare had set these pathetic words in Sir Thomas More, where More’s lines were assigned to asylum-seekers. When it came to evictions on his own turf his last recorded utterance that he ‘was not able to beare the enclosinge’ was harder to read. Was his parting word on the most divisive social problem of his age that he could not bear or bar the change? It seems more than chance that Shakespeare’s final statement is such a textual crux we cannot tell whether he babbled how he could never suffer, prevent or carry enclosure of these fields. As Terence Hawkes has commented, ‘an entire spectrum of potential meaning’ is offered up by the indeterminacy of these famous last words, as if the unresolvable ambiguity in the text were a signifier of deep confusion not only about the barriers which bar real estate, but about the bearing on the writer of the weight of his own sad time: Plurality invests all texts, but none more so than this. Its very subject guarantees it a talismanic, even votive status which offers to propel the words beyond the page. They present, after all, a record of oral utterance on the Bard’s part, significant beyond the context of their saying.5

Human beings cannot bear much reality, quips Hawkes after Eliot, which is why they tell tales ‘to paper over the cracks’.6 Thus the dramatist would spin many fine stories about ‘poor naked wretches’ (King Lear, 3.4.29) dispossessed by England’s agricultural revolution. Yet when at the end his townsmen gave 3.

4. 5. 6.

For the details of Shakespeare’s 1602 purchase of the 107 acres in Old Stratford and Welcombe, see Màiri Macdonald, ‘A New Discovery about Shakespeare’s Estate in Old Stratford’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), 87–89. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. by Ralph Robinson, ed. by Richard Marius (London: Dent, 1994), pp. 26–27. Terence Hawkes, ‘Playhouse-Workhouse’, in That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 1–26 (pp. 10–11). Ibid., p. 21.

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him a leading part to play in history it seems he retreated behind what Stephen Greenblatt calls the ‘double consciousness’ through which the actor hid himself from view.7 This is the spectre which haunts every biography of a writer who, in the closing words of James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, ‘held the keys that opened the hearts and minds of others, even as he kept a lock on what he revealed about himself’.8 Such for instance is the fastidiously reticent Shakespeare of Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger, a study of the only other record of the Bard’s voice, his testimony in the 1612 Mountjoy case, when he withheld facts from the Court of Requests with similar taciturnity or tact. The stakes in this French farce were not so high — a dowry he brokered for marriage of his London landlord’s apprentice to the daughter of the Huguenot house — but his testimony in court, where he claimed on oath not to remember the sum, was flatly contradicted by another witness who stated he had visited ‘Shakespeare to understand the truth’, and learned that ‘as he remembered’ it was ‘about £50,’ to leave us with an identical impression of self-protecting retreat: He went ‘to Shakespeare to understand the truth’: something many have done since. This seems to imbue [Shakespeare’s] deposition with a note of betrayal, a refusal to involve himself. He was probably the only person who could swing the court. But he does not. Caution prevails: a man must be careful what he says in court. In his failure to remember, his shrug of non-involvement, he sides with the unforgiving father and against the spurned daughter. And so the deposition, a unique record of Shakespeare speaking, contains also this sour note of silence. He follows the example of his own Paroles […] whose last words are, ‘I will not speak what I know’ [All’s Well, 5.3.263]. ‘Mr Words’ has spoken enough.9

‘He can say nothing touching any part or point’: for Nicholl, this last entry in the court record sums up not merely Shakespeare’s tight-lipped discretion in the Mountjoy affair, but a cold-hearted detachment that characterises all his deeds and works, an indifference sealed in the hurried, perfunctory signature appended to his deposition: ‘Willm Shaks’. It is with this ‘frozen gesture’ of a scrawl ‘abruptly concluded with an omissive flourish’ that Nicholl opens and closes The Lodger, since its impatience seems to epitomise the uncaring aloofness of the unsatisfactory witness he calls ‘the gentleman upstairs’: ‘The pen blotches on the “k” and tails off. It will do. It will get him out of that court7. 8. 9.

Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), p. 155. Ibid., p. 50; James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 373. Charles Nicholl, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (London: Allen Lane, 2007), pp. 271–72.

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room, away from these questions and quarrels. The signature attests his presence at that moment, but in his mind he is already leaving.’ Nicholl’s last glimpse of the busy writer bidding curt good day to the litigants thus evokes an entire life of emotional and moral withdrawal: ‘He walks down to the wharf at Westminster Stairs to catch a boat downriver. He does not know if he will see them again, and we do not know if he did’.10 This picture matches the idea of ‘Ungentle Shakespeare’ that has become fixed in biographies, of the shifty tax-evader in that ‘upstairs room’ who lives out the artful dodging of Matthew Arnold’s sonnet: ‘We ask and ask — Thou smilest and art still, / Out-topping knowledge’.11 In 1975 Samuel Schoenbaum could pity ‘the poet-dramatist of superhuman powers’ as a ‘baffled mortal’ faced by the ‘sordid and mercenary’ scandal in the court of law.12 But Peter Ackroyd reflects current disbelief when he notes that the Mountjoy case shows how whenever Shakespeare is ‘called to account he becomes non-committal or impartial, maintaining studied neutrality. He withdraws; he becomes almost invisible’.13 So Nicholl is not alone in seeing in Paroles his creator’s self-portrait as an ‘actor with nothing inside’.14 Repeatedly the dramatist figures now as an ‘Unpolitical Man’ whose discretion is an abstention that only serves what in Bingo, his play about the Welcombe enclosure, Edward Bond calls ‘the Goneril-society’.15 Ben Jonson, who considered ‘rashness of talking should not only be retarded by the guard and watch of our heart, but fenced in’, was appalled that ‘in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted a line’, which the jealous rival mistook for careless talk.16 But as Wittgenstein would complain: ‘His pieces give me an impression as of […] having been dashed off by someone who can permit himself anything so to speak. And […] I don’t like it.’17

10. Nicholl, p. 3 and pp. 272–73. 11. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), p. 262; Matthew Arnold, ‘Shakespeare’, in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. by Kenneth and Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1965), pp. 48–49. 12. Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 213. 13. Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), p. 464. 14. Nicholl, p. 267. 15. Cf. Thomas Mann’s 1918 ‘Reflections of an Unpolitical Man’, with its disastrous defence of German spiritual inwardness (Innerlichkeit); Edward Bond, Bingo (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), ‘Introduction’, p. ix. 16. Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries, in The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. by C.H. Herford and P.E. Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925–52) VIII, pp. 583–84. 17. Quoted in: Stanley Cavell, ‘The Interminable Shakespearean Text’, in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, Mass.: Havard University Press, 2005), pp. 28–60 (p. 48).

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For a post-structuralism that values rashness, it is this ‘omissive flourish’ by a ‘creator of language’ who is spirited from the scene of writing which produces the ‘subjectivity effect’ Joel Fineman termed ‘Shakespeare’s “Perjur’d Eye”’: a presence in lying misrepresentation.18 Like Nicholl, Finemann reads this perjury in the haste with which the dramatist shortened his own signature to ‘Willm Shakspere’ and ‘Wm Shakspē’ in legal papers, a cursory marker that betrayed the hypocritical ‘relation between “Will” and “writing”’. For the ‘Shakespeare’ who ‘never blotted a line’ he penned for players was the same writer who acknowledged ‘What wit sets down is blotted straight with Will’ (Lucrece, 1299), so knew his letters were blotched by the rashness with which he signed himself: ‘Will I am’. As Jonathan Goldberg comments, in Shakespeare’s six signatures he never spells his name the same way twice, as if his only sense of being is in his secretary hand.19 What Jonson’s complaint therefore suggests is a Will who writes as if his cursive hand has neither beginning nor end, and is indeed a free hand: ‘frozen in a static motility, between a departure always initiated […] and an arrival prospectively postponed in anticipation of a […] forever deferred destination’.20 Always running on, the free Will post-structuralism celebrates for his ‘free and open’ text comes to resemble the Derrida who in his last interview disclosed how he never stopped writing so as to stave off his own death: ‘This is not a striving for immortality; it’s something structural. Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, “proceeds” from me. I live my death in writing.’ Whenever ‘I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die,’ the dying philosopher reflected.21 And the elective affinity is only increased by Derrida’s memory in Paper Machine of the performative crisis when he generated ‘endless drafts’ ‘with a special drawing quill’, before reluctantly ‘putting a stop to them’ in type, a final ‘signal of separation, of severance, the official sign of […] departure for the public sphere’.22 So Derrida’s reminder of how writers have always imagined manumission as a resistance to the dead 18. Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Towards the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 169 and 214. For a brilliant Derridean riff on the ‘rashness’ of Shakespeare’s hermeneutic openness, see Ewan Fernie, ‘The Last Act: Presentism, Spirituality and the Politics of Hamlet’, in Spiritual Shakespeares, ed. by Ewan Fernie (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 186–211, esp. p. 194. 19. Jonathan Goldberg, Shakespeare’s Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 129. 20. Fineman, p. 168. 21. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 32–33. 22. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 20.

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hand of authority perfected in mechanical writing suggests Shakespeare’s multifarious signatures, unreadable equivocations, missing manuscripts, and undocumented biography might all be traces of his ‘free hand’ within the Early Modern textual economy; as if he had always intended to leave no paper behind, to remain a paperless person, at the very instant when as Miguel de Cervantes similarly feared, the technological basis of literature was becoming the great and terrifying new ‘paper machine’: It happened, that as they passed through one street, Don Quixote looked up and saw written upon a door in great Letters: ‘Here are Books printed’, which pleased him wondrously, for till then he had never seen any Press, and he desired to know the manner of it.23

Towards the end of Don Quixote the Doleful Knight wanders into a busy Barcelona printing-house, ‘where he saw in one place drawing of sheetes, in another Correcting, in this Composing, in that mending: Finally, all the Machine that is usuall in great Presses’. Here he is introduced to the Author, ‘a good comely proper man’ but ‘somewhat ancient,’ whom he wishes luck before asking about the book being printed: ‘They answered him that it was called The second part of the Ingenious Knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha.’ What is disconcerting is how the Don instantly wants his book ‘turned to ashes’. For as Carlos Fuentes remarks, this representation of representation is surely the first time a character learns he is condemned to be a mere fiction. Thus, ‘[t]he act of reading is both the starting point and the last stop on Don Quixote’s route’. For Fuentes, this episode of chill foreboding, printed a year after Cervantes’ death, marks the true birth of literature, as it is where ‘reality loses its defined frontiers, feels itself displaced, transfigured by another reality made of paper and words. Where are the limits between Dunsinane and Birnam Wood?’ Only Shakespeare foresees the coming of the book, Fuentes believes, with the same dark misgivings about literary posthumousness as make Don Quixote sorrowful. And when Cervantes leaves open the page where the reader knows himself read and the writer written, it is easy to imagine these two who died on the same date in 1616 were the same man, that ‘Will Shakespeare, the comedian with a thousand faces, wrote Don Quixote’. For what these exact contemporaries both foresee is that the figurative birth of the author will mean the actual death of the writer himself. Fuentes likens the Sad Knight to the Black Prince who also knows he is a paper ghost composed of ‘[w]ords, words, words’ (Hamlet, 2.2.192). But the alarm at the coming book that for the novelist announces ‘the thing called 23. Miguel de Cervantes, The History of Don Quixote of the Mancha, trans. by Thomas Shelton, 4 vols (London, 1620; repr. London: David Nutt, 1896) IV, chap. 62, p. 195.

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literature’ had been rung by Shakespeare in 1613 with an even closer parallel to Cervantes, when the page Fidele played by Imogen was asked to identify his lost master, and the time of Cymbeline was punctured with a similarly uncanny reply: ‘Richard du Champ’.24 For as editors note, this French ‘champion’ translates as Richard Field, printer of Shakespeare’s poems and his Stratford friend, while Fidele is an anagram of a faithful page. At the time of Cymbeline the King’s Men occupied the playhouse beside Field’s print-shop in Blackfriars, where ‘the topography of print could be measured […] in feet’.25 So, no wonder that this most bookish play turns on a metaphor of printing as parenting; nor that it is the text where the Folio is first projected as ‘the world’s volume’ (3.4.137). The literariness of Cymbeline signals prescience about the new ‘paper machine’. But what makes Shakespeare so like his Spanish double is the melancholy with which he mourns his lost printer. For Richard Field would, in fact, never print him again. And without ‘such another master’, Shakespeare’s page would never recover fidelity to life: There is no more such masters. I may wander From east to occident, cry out for service, Try many, all good; serve truly, never Find such another master (Cymbeline, 4.2.372–76)

‘All that he hath writ / Leaves living art, but page, to serve his wit’: the final words on his memorial tablet underline what the bust above celebrates, and critical fashion would now restore: the image of Shakespeare as a sole author poised quill in hand over his sheet of paper, absorbed in that rapt scene of writing Jonson so resented and his editors Heminge and Condell evoked when they recalled: ‘His mind and hand went together, and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’26 This is the Bard generated by the First Folio as ‘a figure for Art itself’, existing, as Leah Marcus puts it, ‘in lofty separateness from the vicissitudes of life’, yet in trance-like communion with future ages; and enshrined in portraits like Virginia Woolf’s, when her Orlando bursts in on ‘a rather fat, rather shabby man’ sitting at the servants’ table, who looks through him with ‘eyes globed and clouded’, as he ‘turned his pen in his fingers this way and 24. Carlos Fuentes, ‘Cervantes, or The Critique of Reading’, in Myself with Others: Selected Essays (London: Andre Deutsch, 1988), pp. 49–71 (pp. 53–4, 58, 63 and 69–70). 25. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 68. 26. Henry Condell and John Heminge, ‘To the great Variety of Readers’, repr. in William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 3350.

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that way and then, very quickly wrote half-a-dozen lines’. 27 And it is the myth of absent-minded genius devouring reality that inspires films like Shakespeare in Love and Molière, where a love affair cues Twelfth Night or a month in the country Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.28 Yet the Stratford memorial also hints at a Cervantine disenchantment with the deadliness of a paper personality, when in the imagery of Cymbeline it insists print leaves the dramatist’s ‘living art’ with ‘but page, to serve his wit’. For ‘[l]iving art’ is what is lost by the bookmen in Love’s Labour’s Lost to buy the eternity of funereal print (1.1.1–14). So this is a tribute which adds a sharp twist to the critical debate about whether Shakespeare ever intended his ‘living art’ to be engraved, for it confirms how at the time of his death even his close colleagues sensed the playwright’s paper immortality to be an eclipse of reality, experiencing the painful birth of the ageless author in Derrida’s and Fuentes’s terms, as the death of the mortal wit. Together with Fidele’s lost faith, Shakespeare’s Stratford ‘graving’ throws a sombre shadow over the theory floated by Lukas Erne in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, that the playwright had always desired publication of his words, and had them printed as expertly as possible, until some point about 1602 when he began to authorise the novel idea of a folio of his collected Works. Erne himself thinks that the primary push for publication came not from Shakespeare but ‘printers, publishers, and booksellers’ eager to cash in on ‘an enterprise with little or no prestige’.29 But what the tombstone and Cymbeline instead seem to mourn is the falling-away of the dead and blackened page, the printed spectrality that demands the human sacrifice that theatre’s living ‘golden lads and lasses all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust’ (4.2.262). This is a penman who can never forget that together with soot, wormwood and urine, his ink is ‘made of gall’ (1.1.102).30 But as his book and grave both loom closer, so Shakespeare’s apprehension about the stigma of print deepens, we deduce, and the print-shop becomes, as for Cervantes, not the house of life but a place of death to add to the other perils of representation in an age when, if the author shows his face, he does so as the trailing 27. Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: California University Press, 1988), p. 24; Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 20. 28. See Robert Gottlieb, ‘Lit-Flicks’, New York Review of Books, 54.14, September 27 (2007), 20–22. 29. Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 33. 30. For the noxious constituents of printers’ ink, see Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 44 (1993), 255–83 (pp. 281–82).

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snail, ‘whose tender horns being hit / Shrinks backward in his shelly cave’ (Venus and Adonis, 1033). ‘Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen / Our bending author hath pursued the story’: what is striking about Shakespeare’s idea of authorship, it emerges from those few occasions like the one in the Epilogue of Henry V when he takes a bow, is how his authority is ‘bent’ by the same bonds of subjection he gave his protagonists, who in scene after scene he imagines in an attitude not of self-determination or intentionality, but of ‘rough and all-unable’ yet wily or peasant-like subservience. We like to imagine that ‘[p]rinting opened up a world previously undreamed of, in a sense of liberating writers from the constraints of aristocrats’, authorising an emancipation which had ‘already been happening in the theatre with its paying audience’.31 Yet whenever Shakespeare refers to ‘the author’, we notice, it is either in a traditional context of culpability — as Hamlet is said to be the ‘most violent author / Of his just remove’ (Hamlet, 4.5.76) — or the dozen times he uses the word in a modern literary sense, of authorial evasion — as when Malvolio ‘will read politic authors’ to ‘baffle Sir Toby’ (Twelfth Night, 2.5.141). So, at a time when the credibility gap opened up by printing is being bridged by a new book culture of good will and trust, Shakespeare’s authors remain always associated with hermeneutic crisis, like the ‘strange fellow’ who makes Ulysses ‘strain’ at his ‘drift’: ‘That no man is the lord of anything […] Till he communicate his parts to others’ (Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.90–11).32 On the Shakespearean stage where books are promiscuously ‘sluttish’, as they ‘wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts / To every ticklish reader’ (4.6.61–2), characters who ‘read much’ are depicted as myopic or treacherous, like Cassius and Brutus (Julius Caesar, 1.2.22).33 So when Troilus swears his love by ‘truth’s authentic author’ (Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.168); French ‘authors faithfully affirm’ law (Henry V, 1.2.43); or Gower retails ‘what mine authors say’ (Pericles, 1.1.20), credit is precisely what is strained, as in these plays, we discover, there is no ‘author in the world / Teaches such beauty as a woman’s eye’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.3.291:17). Bent double, ‘our humble author’ (2 Henry IV, Epi, 23) is as much a ‘crooked figure’ for this playmaker as his suspect text (Henr V, Pro. 15). So like the Foucault who told Americans that though ‘[w]e are accustomed to […] saying that the author is [a] genial creator, [t]he truth is quite the contrary: the author is a certain functional prin31. David Bergeron, Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570–1640 (London: Ashgate, 2006), p. 142. 32. Johns, pp. 31–37. 33. Frederick Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), p. 292.

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ciple by which, in our culture, […] one impedes the free circulation […] of fiction’, it seems Shakespeare never forgets the restriction of his own scene of writing, nor how ‘[o]ur bending author’ is obliged to bow low to the authorising institutions, even as his servile pen is subjected to the discourse of ‘the story’. 34 Thus, when he represents his twisted conditions of production in Hamlet he has the naughty ‘fellow’ who speaks the Prologue to The Mousetrap insist not only upon collective ownership of the play, but on the cravenly contorted ‘stooping’ required to present it on demand: ‘For us and for our tragedy, / Thus stooping to your clemency / We beg your hearing patiently’ (3.2.133–35). Between stage and page, when he takes a bow Shakespeare comes forward, he states, expressly ‘not in confidence’ of either ‘author’s pen or actor’s voice’ (Troilus and Cressida, Pro, 23–4). Editors like to think Shakespeare spoke such ‘curtain’ speeches in self-effacing cameo roles. But in 1599 Shapiro contends that the Epilogue of 2 Henry IV, which finishes by affirming ‘I will bid you good night, and so kneel down before you — but to pray for the Queen’, is ‘the closest we get’ to the author revealing his true or singular self, for there what began with ‘Shakespeare modestly curtsying’ abruptly shifts as he catches himself and ‘explains to his audience that while it may look as if he’s kneeling “before them”, he’s not; he’s kneeling in prayer for Elizabeth’. Like the makers of Shakespeare in Love, which has its ‘[s]elf-school’d, self-scann’d, self-honour’d, self-secure’ Bard authorised by Gloriana’s gala appearance on the stage of the Globe, Shapiro notices no contradiction between his capitalist entrepreneur, ‘who offers himself as a merchant’ to an audience of investors, and this servile grovelling to feudal authority.35 But in Secret Shakespeare I keyed Shakespeare’s recurring allegiance test, in which subjects are suborned to present subjection, to the ‘Bloody Question’ of a loyalty divided between Queen and Pope that conditioned the writer’s subject position in this age of vows, as one born into a Catholic milieu who resisted the resistance to Elizabeth’s ‘war on terror’ whilst making a drama out of the quiet refusal to be put on oath. There was an affinity, I argued, between Shakespeare’s truth games and the enigmatic gazes of Caravaggio, who in pictures like The Calling of St Matthew, where no one meets Christ’s eye or answers his call, repeats the same hermeneutic puzzle of a self performing secrecy, as Leo Bersani and Ulysse 34. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, trans. by Josué V. Harari, in The Foucault Reader, ed. by. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 101–20 (pp. 118–19). Cf. Clare Connors, ‘Derrida and the Fiction of Force’, Angelaki, 12.2 (2007), 9–15 (p. 13): ‘It’s deliberately orotund this chorus […] as well as excessive, in its very humility. It needs to invoke pardon, since it’s a crooked not a perfect figure’. 35. Shapiro, p. 41; Matthew Arnold, ‘Shakespeare’, in The Oxford Authors: Matthew Arnold, ed. by Miriam Allott and Robert Super (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 8.

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Dutoit put it: ‘at once presenting and withdrawing itself’, as if we were being solicited ‘by a desire determined to remain hidden’.36 For the compulsion with which painter and playwright both return to such scenarios of invigilation or interpellation confirms how these artists in the doorway of modernity see their own calling as the representation of subjectivity itself: CORDELIA What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent […] Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth. (King Lear, 1.1.60;90–91)

‘Now, our joy […] what can you say […]? Speak […] speak again […] me your speech’ (81–93): as Stanley Cavell notes in an aside on asides, it is in staging the problem of performative utterance that the dramatist speaks, for ‘[d]oesn’t it figure that it is Shakespeare who creates, as the first aside in King Lear — Cordelia’s perplexity over what to say or to do — a question of ambiguity between speaking and silence, which the aside precisely embodies?’ For Cavell the convention by which an aside is both ‘overheard and unheard’ foregrounds Shakespeare’s performative crisis by ‘suggesting that this is the condition of words of the play as a whole’.37 Thus, at the instant when a new rule of art is promulgated that to be an ‘authentic author’ it is necessary to ‘look in thy heart and write!’ Shakespeare makes a drama out of resistance to the imperative ‘[t]hat I […] [m]ust, like a whore, unpack my heart with words’, by demonstrating that although ‘you would pluck out the heart of my mystery’ (Hamlet, 2.2.561–3;3.2.336), ‘[y]ou cannot, if my heart were in your hand’ (Othello, 3.3.176).38 So Shakespeare in Love got him exactly inside-out when Tom Stoppard imagined his existential crisis to be a writer’s block, since what these execution metaphors make plain is how this most secretive writer identified the ‘windy suspiration of forc’d breath’ (Hamlet, 1.2.79) with racked confession, and self-expression itself with guts spilled upon the scaffold.39 By contrast, it is Shakespeare’s very reluctance to present himself as an author, allied to the stage-fright he betrays when he has ‘great clerks […] Throttle their practised accents in their fears’ (Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.93–97), 36. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 8–9; Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion, and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 37. Cavell, p. 57. Where Cavell’s interpretation differs from mine, however, is in his emphasis on Shakespeare’s staging of ‘stifled speech’ and ‘suppressed expression’ (p. 56). 38. Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, 1, 1. 14, in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 165. 39. For the association of ‘forced breath’ with torture and execution, see Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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that makes his texts such apt illustrations of Foucault’s theory that this ‘[v]isibility is a trap’.40 The ‘masked philosopher’ who traced psychiatry to the confession-box connected his desire to publish anonymously and ‘write without a face’ to his sensation, as a gay teenager in Vichy France, that ‘the obligation of speaking was both strange and boring. I often wondered why people had to speak’.41 Yet it is Foucault’s realisation that resistance leans upon what it opposes which offers a key to Shakespeare’s ‘sweet and witty soul’, the ‘honey tongue’ with which the poet is said to have accommodated himself to the demands from the great to speak, despite notoriously associating flattery with spaniels licking candy.42 So, rather than searching for some authentic Shakespeare, it might be timely to recall his own image of himself as that ‘bending author’ who bows to the power that he bends, and to do so by considering how he presents his own professional calling not as the self-advancing ‘trick of singularity’ (Twelfth Night, 2.5.132) of literary individualism, but as the more historically determined and contradictory desire to write without a face. ‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you — trippingly on the tongue’ (Hamlet, 3.2.1) — Hamlet’s instruction to the Players, so often misread as Shakespeare’s own artistic manifesto, reminds us how he analysed 40. For Shakespeare’s ‘narcissistic’ terror of exposure, see Meredith Anne Skura, Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993); ‘Visibility is a trap’: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 200. 41. ‘Masked philosopher’: ‘Le Philosophe masqué’, anonymised interview with Christian Delacampagne, Le monde dimanche, 6 April 1980, 1 and 17, quoted in David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993), p. 426: ‘For someone like me, and I am not a great author, but simply one who manufactures books, one likes [the books] to be read for their own sake’; ‘To write without a face’: Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 17; ‘speaking was strange and boring’: ‘An Interview with Stephen Riggins’ (Toronto, June 1982), pp. 121–2: ‘Silence may be a much more interesting way of having a relationship with people […]. This is something that I believe is really worth cultivating. I’m in favour of developing silence as a cultural ethos.’ 42. Michel Foucault, ‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity’, (interview with B. Gallagher and A. Wilson, Toronto, June 1982, originally pub. in The Advocate, 400 [August 7 1984]), in Michel Foucault: The Essential Works: 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. by Paul Rabinow (London: Allen Lane, 1997), pp. 163–73 (p. 168): ‘For instance […] the medical definition of homosexuality […] which was a means of oppression, has always been a means of resistance as well — since people could say, “If we are sick, then why do you condemn us […]?”’. ‘Honey tongued’: Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury (London 1598), ff. 281v- 2, repr. in Schoenbaum, p. 140. For the ‘tactfully suppressed grievance that Shakespeare did not love dogs as he should’, because he associated sycophancy with spaniels licking candy, see William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951), p. 176.

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his situation in terms not of free will or self-determination, but of performance to order. So, how did this writer understand the symbolic revolution by which the modern cult of the sovereign author broke free of the old culture of calendar custom and state ceremonial? Dialectically, and time and again he depicted his art as a negotiation like that at Elsinore where, as Pierre Bourdieu saw, the surprise is that literary independence has to be instituted under the tutelage of an aristocrat who directs the play like a master of revels, confirming how Shakespeare did not ‘display towards external restraints the impatience which for us appears to define the creative project’. For although he would finally ‘owe his freedom of expression to theatre managers […] and entrance fees paid by a public of increasingly diverse origin’, impresarios like Philip Henslowe could ‘mould the taste of the age’, which was why on Shakespeare’s stage, Bourdieu concluded, the first modern literary field was inaugurated in deference to rather than defiance of the licensing regime, and why even as he gained autonomy, the dramatic author declared ever more loudly his indifference to the public. Like the art-for-art’s sake it prefigured, the birth of the author involved a double rupture with power and profit. So for Bourdieu, the institution of the author began with that sweet Shakespearean refusal to reduce his theatre to either a capitalist commodity or political propaganda, when the playwright offered perfect proof of the reflexive theory that constraint makes freedom possible.43 Shakespeare’s will to freedom, according to Bourdieu, was as much in relation to the playhouse as the patron. This ironic analysis is minutely substantiated by Andrew Gurr in The Shakespeare Company, where the dramatist’s autonomy is attributed to the ‘democratic, non-authoritarian management’ of a joint-stock company that pretended ‘Motley’s the only wear’ by flaunting the feudal livery of strolling players.44 If the Lord Chamberlain’s Men remained ‘motley-minded’ (As You Like It, 2.7.44; 5.4.40), Gurr explains, that was because ‘customary suits’ (Hamlet, 1.2.78) of a feudal household fitted their ‘family’ firm, with joint ownership of assets, including play-texts, properties, costumes, and from 1599 the great Globe itself. This self-governance mimicked City livery companies, which also operated under royal charter, and of which players like Heminge and Condell were freemen (allowing them to enlist boys as apprentices). The complicity implied by the royal warrant ‘became a supreme paradox in 1603’, Gurr emphasises, ‘when the most demo43. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Intellectual Field and Creative Project’, trans. by Sian France, in Knowledge and Control: New Directions in the Sociology of Education, ed. by Michael F.D. Young (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1971), pp. 161–68 (pp. 162–63). 44. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 19.

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cratic organisation in England came under the patronage of King James, the most despotic figure in the country’.45 But the bad faith in such mock dependency was the dramatist’s anxiety from the start, for whenever he imaged a stage it was never a commercial playhouse but always the hall of a palace.46 So, from the Induction of The Taming of the Shrew, when the Lord has his page Bartholomew dressed ‘like a lady’ to mime love for Sly (Ind, 1.102); to the finale of The Tempest when Prospero, ‘last of the great house lords’, directs his boy-player Ariel to stage ‘calm seas’ (5.1.318), Shakespeare’s given situation is always a false one where a sovereign or seducer programmes the performance of devotion or desire.47 Thus Venus, ‘the lovesick Queen’ who so resembles geriatric Elizabeth, sets the scene for a lifetime of passive aggression towards the patronage system he exploited, when in Shakespeare’s poem she implores Adonis to cease behaving like a dumb statue: ‘But when her lips were ready for his pay / He winks, and turns his lips another way’ (89;175). For in these texts the obligatory command performance is always a similarly forced occasion: There is a lord will hear your play tonight; But I am doubtful of your modesties […]. (The Taming of the Shrew, Ind, 1.89–90) Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York […]. (Richard III, 1.1.1–2) Our court shall be a little academe, Still and contemplative in living art. (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1.1.13–14) Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments. Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth. (Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1.11–12) So shaken as we are, so wan with care Find we a time for frighted peace to pant […]. (1 Henry IV, 1.1.1–2)

45. Gurr, p. 88. 46. For discussions of this paradox, see Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 178, 180 and 195; and Richard Wilson, ‘The Management of Mirth: Shakespeare via Bourdieu’, in Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 123–39. 47. ‘[L]ast of the great house lords’: Skura, p. 201. For Ariel as a boy-player, see David Mann, The Elizabethan Player: Contemporary Stage Representations (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 41.

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But indeed, sir, we make holiday to see Caesar, and to rejoice in his triumph. (Julius Caesar, 1.1.29–30) The king doth wake tonight and takes his rouse, Keeps wassail, and the swagg’ring upspring reels. (Hamlet, 1.4.9–10) If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it […]. (Twelfth Night, 1.1.1–2) Come, shall we in, And taste of Lord Timon’s bounty? (Timon of Athens, 1.1.272–73) Which of shall we say doth love us most That we our largest bounty may extend? (King Lear, 1.1.49–50) If it be love indeed, tell me how much? (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.1.14)

The primal theatrical scene for Shakespeare is a test of loyalty to some lordly sponsor, yet always encountered with the same reserve: ‘If you look for a good speech now, you undo me; for what I have to say is of mine own making, and what indeed I should say will, I doubt, prove mine own marring’. For it is the self-deconstructing posture of Shakespeare’s claim to be the maker and purveyor of his own meaning that it advances in self-cancelling reverse, backing into the limelight by for ever harking back to service in the great house, as cap-in-hand it proffers ‘[f]irst my fear, then my curtsy, last my speech’ (1–6). Thus, Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann show how with his prologues and epilogues Shakespeare honoured the group dynamics of the great hall; while Leeds Barroll infers from his output that he only wrote to order and if there was no commission ‘simply did not wish to write plays’.48 A first among equals, he certainly affirmed that as Stanley Wells reminds us, he would remain a pre-eminent company man, who worked ‘exceptionally closely too with his fellow actors […] because no other dramatist of the period had so long and close a relationship with a single company’, nor such solid bonds with other 48. Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre: Performance and Liminality in Early Modern Drama (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 40 and 153; John Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 17. See also Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 116.

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writers. Thus, Wells’s Shakespeare & Co. concludes that to locate this good companion in his milieu ‘only enhances our sense of what made him unique’.49 Likewise, Bart Van Es pinpoints A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a watershed where he first realised his collective personality in being at once a performer, sharer, and writer in a permanent ‘fellowship’ exempt from market pressures. Shakespeare’s singularity arose, on this view, golden from the opportunity the 1594 Lord Chamberlain’s warrant afforded to cover all bases of the field.50 As Emerson wrote, Shakespeare proves ‘the greatest genius is the most indebted’.51 Such accounts are similar to Bourdieu’s thesis that reconstructing the professional world of the pre-eminent artist ‘allows us to understand the labour he had to accomplish, both against these determinations and thanks to them, to produce himself as the creator, that is, the subject of his own creation’.52 But the question they pose is also Bourdieu’s, about what it was the writer gained from continuing to merge his individual interest in the faceless impersonality of a corporate brand. What was Shakespeare’s interest in disinterestedness? And one answer that the plays themselves suggest is that it was the safety in numbers that gave him the freedom to write as he liked. In a system where for one of the band to roar too loudly, as his Peter Quince solemnly warns, ‘were enough to hang us all’ (Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.2.72), mutual ‘good will’ between patrons and performers was cemented by subduing the playwright’s intentions and identity to the métier he worked in ‘like the dyer’s hand’ (Sonnet 111); by ‘our good Will’, the implied authorial personality behind the scenes, never, in fact, stepping out of the collective line: ‘If we offend it is with our good will. / That you should think we come not to offend / But with good will’ (Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5,1,108–10). ‘All for your delight / We are not here’ (114–15): if texts began to have authors, as Foucault theorised and Quince fears, to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, Shakespeare’s paradoxical signature vanishingact, his reduction to the missing person who is yet a universal cipher of the world’s ‘good will’, also records the coincidence that (as Derrida countered) the ‘Strange Institution’ of literature commenced around 1600 as ‘the right to say everything’. Thus, if the originator of modern authorship insured his freedom of expression by remaining invisible, hiding his face in the crowd or 49. Stanley Wells, Shakespeare & Co. (London: Allen Lane, 2006), pp. 4–5, 27 and 231. 50. Bart Van Es, ‘Company Man: Another Crucial Year for Shakespeare?’, Times Literary Supplement, February 2 (2007), pp. 14–15. 51. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men, ed. by Pamela Schirmeister (New York: Marsilio, 1995), p. 188. 52. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. by Susan Emmanuel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 104.

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being dragged to the chair, this false modesty finessed the problem that prior to the securing of the public sphere the literary field had no other ground of authorisation. For ‘[h]ow is it possible to answer for literature?’ if it bows to no other institution and demands by definition ‘as large a charter as the wind’ (As You Like It, 2.7.48): ‘A paradox: liberation makes it an institution that is aninstitutional, wild and unconditional.’ Derrida deduced that what literature’s claim to sovereignty therefore entailed was ‘not irresponsibility but rather a mutation in the concept of responsibility’.53 And it is the vertigo of this process that does appear to be negotiated in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the work above all which identifies ‘good will’ as a precondition of literature when, in its closing pact, Puck takes upon his fictive persona responsibility for a theatre ‘No more yielding’ to authority ‘than a dream.’ On the strict understanding that the ‘play needs no excuse’ when its creator is ‘dead’ (5.1.341–3; Epi, 15–16), Shakespeare’s ‘powerless theatre’ thereby leaps its groundlessness to assert ‘the right to say everything […], if only in the form of a fiction.’54 In Shakespeare’s Athens free speech is gained by absenting authorial presence, since ‘[w]e do not come, as minding to content you, / Our true intent is’ [5.1.113–14]: ‘Therein lies literature’s secret, the […] power to keep undecidable the secret of what it says […] The secret of literature is the secret itself […] “the play’s the thing”’ [Hamlet, 2.2.581].55 So, if it is secrecy about its own origins and intentions which grants literature a permit ‘to say everything’, what is intriguing is how Shakespeare’s self-concealment extends, as Richard Dutton argues, to the startling paradox that he was too altruistic a company man, too loyal to collective identity to push his name, too bound by ties that went beyond a ‘mere contractual framework’ to be the single author of the book.56 Or as Jeffrey Knapp puts it, ‘Shakespeare worried throughout his career that a religion of the book might be inherently elitist, as The Tempest 53. Jacques Derrida, ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature”’, in Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 33–75; Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow…: A Dialogue, trans. by Jeff Ford (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 127. 54. ‘Powerless theatre’: Paul Yachnin, Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 12– 13 and 21; Jacques Derrida, ‘The Future of the Profession or the University Without Condition (Thanks to the “Humanities,” what could take place tomorrow)’, in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. by Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 24–57 (p. 27). 55. Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive, trans. by Beverley Bie Brahac (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), pp. 18–19. 56. Richard Dutton, ‘The Birth of the Author’, in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, ed. by Cedric Brown and Arthur Marotti (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 153–78 (p. 161).

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suggests’.57 So, like Hamlet, he escaped such sovereignty by perpetual postponement; and on the one occasion he claimed author’s rights it was to protest he was ‘much offended’ with William Jaggard, the printer of the Folio, for falsely publishing a volume in his name. 58 Such self-protection is not the same as Eliot’s dictum that all art is ‘an escape from personality’. But if we take ‘our good Will’ to be a founder of modern authorship, it is to agree that what happens in his writing is ‘a continual surrender of himself […] to something […] more valuable […] a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’: ‘Marry, if he that writ it had […] hanged himself […] it would have been a fine tragedy’ (Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.2.342–44).59 ‘Now he terrifies me’, wrote Rilke of the Shakespeare of the Epilogues, ‘[t]he way he draws / the wire into his head, and hangs himself / beside the other puppets, and henceforth begs mercy of the play’.60 ‘Good Will’s’ selferasure, his drive to ‘hide himself from view’ as if hanging beside his own creations, has indeed been decoded by Greenblatt as a burial ‘inside public laughter’ of the ‘intense fear that once gripped him’ of actual martyrdom. Having been traumatised by real executions of Catholics, the ‘genially submissive’ yet ‘subtly challenging’ writer excises his personality, on this view, ‘to ward off vulnerability’.61 Thus, in contrast to Caravaggio, who paints his own decapitation, the death of the author here serves a ‘symbolic effacement […] for, given rope to hang himself, [he] submits instead to an aesthetic closure’.62 Such symbolic self-denial is enacted by the Williams of the plays, ‘ironically self-deprecating cameos like Hitchcock’s brief appearances in his films’, a sly parade, typified by the bumpkin of As You Like It, in which Shakespeare associates his own name, Phyllis Rackin notes, ‘with inarticulate, humble life obliterated by the elite textualized world of his betters’.63 But such also is the resistance implied when these sweet Williams cheek masters, accuse the king, or skive at Hinkley fair (2 Henry VI, 5.1.21). Thus what 57. Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 54. 58. Schoenbaum, pp. 219–20. 59. T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. by Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 37–44 (p. 40). 60. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Spirit Ariel (After reading Shakespeare’s Tempest)’, in Rilke: Selected Poems, trans. by J.B. Leishman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 73–74. 61. Greenblatt, pp. 152 and 155. 62. Richard Wilson, ‘The Kindly Ones: The Death of the Author in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 143–62 (p. 160). 63. Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 244; ‘ironically self-deprecating cameos’: Skura, p. 139.

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these winking Wills personify is in fact the truant evasion of the textualised world of authority which Shakespeare makes the story of his life: his recalcitrance towards the printed fix of authorship itself. For as A.D. Nuttall concludes in his own posthumous book, Shakespeare the Thinker, while his name did become ‘a selling point’ because in his lifetime the public ‘certainly caught on to the fact that Shakespeare was the man behind the plays’, the writer himself appears to have feared the paper ghostliness of typographic immortality as ‘a freezing, a cryogenic perpetuation of something mobile’ and alive.64 Assuredly, Shakespeare was the author of his authorship, who produced himself as the ‘subject of his own creation’. But he was also a showman embarrassed to be ‘a motley to the view’ (Sonnet 110); and a ‘tongue-tied unlettered clerk’ in his nightmare, mumbling ‘Amen’ to every ‘well-refinèd pen’ (Sonnet 85). And so far from being indifferent to the dread ‘paper machine’, he littered his texts with allusions to the violence of penning, imprinting, pressing, branding, binding, and engraving: the morbid techniques of publishing which, as Goldberg argues, ‘throw into question any identification of the system with a sovereign author’, and mark aversion to inscription of a name in characters.65 Shakespeare would indeed become an ‘institutionalized residue’ that coats a proper name.66 But this writer who dreaded the coming book as his tombstone, like those brass-lettered graves which spell ‘the disgrace of death’ for the bookmen in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1.1.1–3); and who blackened his most bookish figure with the ‘inky cloak’ (Hamlet, 1.2.78) of the letter that kills; avoided ‘the Graver’ come to ‘outdo the life’ until the very last.67 And even as his ‘project gather[ed] to a head’ (Tempest, 5.1.1), when the future Folio was on his mind as ‘a book of all that sovereigns do’, he sensed ‘[h]e’s more secure to keep it shut than shown’ (Pericles, 1.1.137–8). ‘O, like a book of sport thou’lt read me o’er’, Shakespeare predicted; ‘[b]ut there’s more in me’, he insisted, ‘than thou understand’st’ (Troilus and Cressida, 4.7.123–4). So, until the very end, the creator of ‘the world’s volume’ (Cymbeline, 3.4.137), who was such an unsatisfactory witness in his time, aborted his own ‘birth’ as an author, intent on nothing more wilfully than that ‘[d]eeper

64. A.D. Nuttall, Shakespeare The Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 377– 78. 65. Jonathan Goldberg, Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 97. 66. Terry Cochran, Twilight of the Literary: Figures of Thought in the Age of Print (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 232. 67. ‘To The Reader’, repr. in William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, p. 3346: ‘This Figure, that thou here seest put, / It was for gentle Shakespeare cut; / Wherein the Graver had a strife / With Nature, to out-doo the life […]’.

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than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book’ (Tempest, 5.1.56): ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.68 Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter, Shakespeare: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005). Arnold, Matthew, ‘Shakespeare’, in The Oxford Authors: Matthew Arnold, ed. by Miriam Allott and Robert Super (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 8. —, ‘Shakespeare’, in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. by Kenneth and Miriam Allott (London: Longmans, 1965), pp. 48–49. Barroll, John Leeds, Politics, Plague and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Bergeron, David, Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570–1640 (London: Ashgate, 2006). Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998). Bond, Edward, Bingo (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974). Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘Intellectual Field and Creative Project’, trans. by Sian France, in Knowledge and Control: New Directions in the Sociology of Education, ed. by Michael F.D. Young (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1971), pp. 161–68. —, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. by Susan Emmanuel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Bruster, Douglas and Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre: Performance and Liminality in Early Modern Drama (London: Routledge, 2004). Cavell, Stanley, ‘The Interminable Shakespearean Text’, in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, Mass.: Havard University Press, 2005), pp. 28–60. Chambers, E.K., William Shakespeare, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930). Cervantes, Miguel de, The History of Don Quixote of the Mancha, trans. by Thomas Shelton, 4 vols (London, 1620; repr. London: David Nutt, 1896). Cochran, Terry, Twilight of the Literary: Figures of Thought in the Age of Print (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). Condell, Henry and John Heminge, ‘To the great Variety of Readers’, repr. in William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 3350. Connors, Clare, ‘Derrida and the Fiction of Force’, Angelaki, 12.2 (2007), 9–15. De Grazia, Margreta and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 44 (1993), 255–83. Derrida, Jacques and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow…: A Dialogue, trans. by Jeff Ford (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Derrida, Jacques, ‘The Future of the Profession or the University Without Condition (Thanks to the “Humanities,” what could take place tomorrow),’ in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. by Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) pp. 24–57. —, ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature”’, in Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 33–75.

68. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 387.

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Derrida, Jacques, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive, trans. by Beverley Bie Brahac (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). —, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). —, Paper Machine, trans. by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Duncan-Jones, Katherine, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London: Thomson Learning, 2001). Dutton, Richard, ‘The Birth of the Author’, in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, ed. by Cedric Brown and Arthur Marotti (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 153–78. Eccles, Mark, Shakespeare in Warwickshire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961). Eliot, T.S., ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. by Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 37–44. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Representative Men, ed. by Pamela Schirmeister (New York: Marsilio, 1995). Empson, William, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951). Erne, Lukas, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Fernie, Ewan, ‘The Last Act: Presentism, Spirituality and the Politics of Hamlet’, in Spiritual Shakespeares, ed. by Ewan Fernie (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 186–211. Fineman, Joel, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Towards the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). Foucault, Michel, ‘An Interview by Stephen Riggins’ (Toronto, June 1982), in Michel Foucault: The Essential Works: 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. by Paul Rabinow (London: Allen Lane, 1997), pp. 121–34. —, ‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity’, (interview with B. Gallagher and A. Wilson, Toronto, June 1982, originally pub. in The Advocate, 400 [August 7 1984]), in Michel Foucault: The Essential Works: 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. by Paul Rabinow (London: Allen Lane, 1997), pp. 163–73. —, ‘What Is an Author?’, trans. by Josué V. Harari, in The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 101–20. —, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). —, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1972). —, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970). Fripp, Edgar, Shakespeare: Man and Artist, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938). Fuentes, Carlos, ‘Cervantes, or The Critique of Reading’, in Myself with Others: Selected Essays (London: Andre Deutsch, 1988), pp. 49–71. Goldberg, Jonathan, Shakespeare’s Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). —, Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (London: Methuen, 1986). Gottlieb, Robert, ‘Lit-Flicks’, New York Review of Books, 54.14, September 27 (2007), 20–22. Greenblatt, Stephen, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004). Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Hanson, Elizabeth, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Hawkes, Terence, ‘Playhouse-Workhouse’, in That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 1–26. Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998).

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Jonson, Ben., ‘To The Reader’, repr. in William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 3346. Kernan, Alvin, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Kiefer, Frederick, Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996). Knapp, Jeffrey, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002). Macdonald, Màiri, ‘A New Discovery about Shakespeare’s Estate in Old Stratford’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), 87–89. Macey, David, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993). Mann, David, The Elizabethan Player: Contemporary Stage Representations (London: Routledge, 1991). Marcus, Leah, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: California University Press, 1988). More, Thomas, Utopia, trans. by Ralph Robinson, ed. by Richard Marius (London: Dent, 1994). Nicholl, Charles, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (London: Allen Lane, 2007). Nuttall, A.D., Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Rackin, Phyllis, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Rilke, Rainer Maria, ‘The Spirit Ariel (After reading Shakespeare’s Tempest)’, in Rilke: Selected Poems, trans. by J.B. Leishman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 73–74. Schoenbaum, Samuel, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Shapiro, James, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber, 2005). Sidney, Sir Philip, Astrophel and Stella, in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Skura, Meredith Anne, Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). Stern, Tiffany, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Van Es, Bart, ‘Company Man: Another Crucial Year for Shakespeare?’, Times Literary Supplement, February 2 (2007), pp. 14–15. Wells, Stanley, Shakespeare & Co. (London: Allen Lane, 2006). Wilson, Richard, ‘The Kindly Ones: The Death of the Author in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 143–62. —, ‘The Management of Mirth: Shakespeare via Bourdieu’, in Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 123–39. —, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion, and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Woolf, Virginia, Orlando: A Biography (London: Penguin, 2006). Yachnin, Paul, Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

Spiritual Self-Fashioning John Lilburne at the Pillory Werner von Koppenfels On April 18, 1638, John Lilburne, an obscure printer’s apprentice from London, used the pillory as an ‘oratorial machine’ (cf. Swift’s Tale of a Tub) in a highly memorable way. A victim of Bishop Laud’s anti-puritan campaign, he staged his sufferings as both a puritan conversion and profession of faith, as imitatio Christi and an act of martyrdom under a heathen regime. It is a three-layered feat of self-dramatisation: first of all in the ecce homo-like speaking image of the persecuted ‘saint’ with festering wounds in the place of shame, whose symbolism is then duly expounded to the beholders through ‘the heavenly speech uttered by him’ from the pillory, to be rounded off by a detailed narrative of his persecution, mixed with outbursts of zeal and saintly preaching. After directly addressing the man in the street (giving voice to the ‘dumb mouths’ of his wounds, till he was literally gagged by the powers he had defied) Lilburne reached a wider audience by his narrative, which was smuggled out of the Fleet Prison and printed immediately after the event: a pamphlet of some 35 pages, ill-set and inflammatory, which seems to have sold well. A political agitator, unlettered but of no mean linguistic command, was born.

Influence on human ears Among the wooden oratorial machines — pulpit, ladder, and stage-itinerant — recommended in Swift’s Tale of a Tub to all those who have ‘an ambition to be heard in a crowd’ the pillory is not explicitly included. But it is given honourable mention, thanks to its analogy with the dissenting pulpit, alias ‘tub’. The latter, we learn with a certain metaphorical shock, ‘[…] from its near resemblance to a pillory […] will ever have a mighty influence on human ears’.1 The great satirist was not yet a High Church dignitary at the time he wrote these lines, but well-endowed with the Restoration heritage of antiPuritan feeling. Here, on the face of it, he refers to the old cliché of the asinine roundheads, pricking up their long ears to imbibe the extempore rhetoric of a dissenting preacher — or delinquent at the pillory for that matter (to whom the privilege of free speech was usually granted). But on a secondary, more sarcastic or ‘flesh-cutting’ level the joke points to the fact that those condemned to exposure in this particular wooden machine frequently had their ears cropped as an additional mark of shame. In his cynically oblique manner Swift seems to be alluding to the three most prominent, or notorious, Puritan victims of the pillory, Burton, Bastwick and Prynne. These three relentless polemicists against Bishop Laud’s intolerant High 1.

Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1704), ‘The Introduction’, in Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, ed. by Ricardo Quintana (New York: The Modern Library, 1958), p. 279.

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Church policy had been sentenced by the Star Chamber, an ill-famed prerogative court, in 1637 to life imprisonment, loss of ears, and the pillory. Prynne, who had got his ears hacked off at an earlier occasion, was now to lose even the stumps. But somehow the whole deterrent measure misfired badly. The delinquents were turned into heroes, and celebrated by the London crowd for their bravery under torture, while the Star Chamber became a hate object of the populace, who from now on tended to regard it as an instrument of episcopal and royal despotism. Following the persecution pattern laid down in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the three undaunted Puritans made the most of their public martyrdom. ‘This day will never be forgotten’, said Burton, addressing the onlookers: ‘Through these holes [pointing to the pillory] God can bring light to His Church.’2 This seems an obvious echo of the most famous last words in Foxe’s folio, Latimer’s call of comfort to his fellow sufferer Ridley at the stake in Oxford: ‘We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as I trust shall never be put out.’ The Puritan sense of self-dramatisation in Burton, Bastwick and Prynne placed their own public act of faith in the great tradition of Christian martyrdom and its heroic records, going back via the Acts and Monuments (Foxe’s original title) to the Acts of the Apostles and, of course, ultimately to the Passion of Christ. Burton’s words add a memorable legend to the speaking picture of the three suffering ‘saints’ ready to sign the profession of Puritan faith with their own blood. Turning the tables on the spiritual authority which had condemned them, they transformed the elevated stage of dishonour into a theatre of uprightness and valiance. And the audience looked on and cheered. The next actors in this drama of spiritual and civil disobedience, which was soon to culminate in a civil war, were taking their cues. Among them was a young draper’s apprentice named John Lilburne, who had been converted to the Puritan cause by reading Bastwick’s Letany, a bitter attack on the Bishops which identified them with the Dragon of Popery and the Beast of Revelation. He then visited and befriended both Bastwick and Prynne in the Gatehouse prison and in the Tower respectively and became their sworn follower. If he was present at their ordeal, the scene must have left a deep and lasting impression on his mind. He absconded to Holland, partly to escape (as he put it) ‘the Bishops and their catchpoles’, partly to make some money by printing forbidden books like Bastwick’s Letany and shipping them secretly to England. On his return he was ‘treach2.

Cf. Mildred Ann Gibb, John Lilburne, the Leveller: A Christian Democrat (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1947); and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), ed. and abridged by G.A. Williamson (London: Secker and Warburg, 1965), p. 311.

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erously and Judasly betrayed’ by a false friend and delivered into the hands of the Archbishop’s ‘pursuivants’.3 During his interrogation before the King’s Attorney and the Star Chamber (responsible for the suppression of unlicensed books) Lilburne caused scandal by challenging the whole prerogative court system — its doubtful juridical status outside the Common Law, its inquisitorial cross-examinations, and its lack of a proper jury. Like Saint Paul claiming the rights of a Roman citizen, he appealed to the law of England and to the rights of a free-born Englishman. He refused to take the usual oath which he considered ‘unlawful’, insisted on being brought face to face with his accusers, and generally defied the hallowed customs of the court. Here we see Lilburne, at the tender age of twenty-two, casting himself for the first time in his favourite role of David against Goliath, as representative of the common man against the tyrannical powers that be. So much civil disobedience and contempt of court was not to be borne. He was fined £ 500, committed to prison for an indefinite period and condemned to be whipped at the cart’s tail from Fleet Prison to Westminster, where he was to stand in the pillory. Symbolic Suffering He was now in the predicament of his admired elders, and like them he decided to continue the good fight from prison, and in print. But he gave a more journalistic and topical turn to the strategy. In order to enlist public support for his civil and religious cause he felt obliged to keep the man in the street fully informed about his doings and sufferings as a disfranchised Englishman and persecuted saint. That is to say, he made his clashes with authority into instalments of an instant autobiography, penned in feverish haste immediately after the event and scattered hot off the illicit press among an eager crowd of unlettered readers. The etymological closeness of press and pressure can be felt in the urgency of these ill-set and inflammatory pamphlets, where confession becomes indistinguishable from agitation, and whose author assumes, under duress, a markedly symbolic stature. As Joan Webber says about Lilburne in her excellent book The Eloquent ‘I’: ‘His first step is to be entirely visible’.4 Though he will insist throughout on his immutable and indivisible character, whose motto is semper idem, ‘the same forever’, his first performance in print, the record of his early interrogations called The Christian Mans Triall, shows his dramaturgic skill at turning 3. 4.

Passage quoted in Joan Webber, The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in 17th Century Prose (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 73. Ibid., p. 57.

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his person into a public persona (the definite article is the point), into the Christian Everyman making a stand against the new English inquisition. This process is intensified in the next pamphlet, which sets out to detail his experience of the pillory. Its exemplary way of stylizing and exploiting a situation perilous to life and limb repays closer study. The title is both longish and outspoken: A WORKE OF THE BEAST OR A Relation of a most unchristian Censure, Executed upon JOHN LILBURNE, (Now prisoner in the fleet) the 18 of Aprill 1638. With the heavenly speech uttered by him at the time of his suffering. Very usefull for these times both for the encouragement of the Godly to suffer, And for the terrour and shame of the Lords Adversaries.5 There follow two epigraphs from Hebrews 10:36 and 11:36, urging the faithful to be patient in the face of cruel mockings and scourgings, bonds and imprisonments. The imprint, wisely witholding the name of the publisher, announces instead: ‘Printed in the yeare the Beast was Wounded 1638’. With his name in capital italics, Lilburne presents the relation of his sufferings, complete with date and present place of residence, as a work of the Antichrist, and himself in the role of the would-be dragon slayer, while the biblical quotations place him in the tradition of early Christian persecution and martyrdom. This bracketing of the personal and the apocalyptic is entirely typical of the tract and of Lilburne’s self-fashioning tactics. It is continued in a brief section ‘The Publisher to the Reader’, which in the face of increased persecution expresses the heartfelt hope ‘[…] that the Lord is now upon extinguishing the bloody Prelates of our Land’ and will ‘[…] send back these locusts to the Bottomlesse pitt, from whence they came’. By addressing the Anglican bishops in a final flourish as ‘English Popish Prelates’ he conjures up the twofold shade of Rome: the Pope (or to give him an English name: the ghost of Bloody Mary), as spiritual successor to Nero and his kind. The Worke of the Beast proper is a highly topical first person narrative with a plot that would have pleased Aristotle. It contains the events of a single day, the 18th of April 1638, and it has something like a three-act structure: the way to the pillory — Lilburne’s speech at the pillory — the aftermath in prison. The narrator, hero and victim of this drama, fashions all its different scenes as stages of a via crucis in the course of his personal Imitation of Christ. After comforting himself with God’s promises to His people in the Scriptures, he, ‘being one of his chosen ones’, goes to his suffering ‘with as willing and joyfull a heart’ as if it had been his marriage — his marriage with 5.

Reproduced in facsimile in Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution 1638–1647, ed. by William Haller, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934) II, pp. 3–34; here quoted with the original page numbering and obvious misprints corrected.

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the Lamb, that is, as announced in Revelation 19:7 (4, 8). He is then led along Fleet Lane, ‘[…] being attended with many Staves and Halberts, as Christ was when he was apprehended by his Enimies and led to the High Priests Hall, Mat. 26’. When the executioner ties his hands to the cart’s tail, he utters the words ‘Wellcome to the Crosse of Christ’ in the words and spirit of Foxe’s martyrs embracing the stake (4–5, 9).6 The biblical subtext in Lilburne’s self-presentation informs innumerable aspects of the narrative: Lilburne’s readership could be relied on decoding it at every turn. His cruel whipping from Fleet Bridge along the Strand and past Charing Cross to Westminster would have recalled the scourging of Christ and inscribed it firmly into the map of contemporary London. As might be expected, the biblical references are especially frequent in his speech from the pillory, which is a veritable sermon against the Beast of the Apocalypse, i.e. English Episcopacy, given under the eyes of the Star Chamber worthies, and bolstered up with long quotations from the Revelation and the metaphorics of Christian warfare in Ephesians 6. Near the end of his narrative he compares himself to Paul and Silas who sang in the stocks after they had been cruelly scourged (Acts 16: 22–25) — and were miraculously set free by an earthquake, as his readers would complement the allusion. The earthquake was long in coming. Only after two years of cruel imprisonment, when the Long Parliament assembled for the first time, Lilburne was set free at the instigation of his later adversary Oliver Cromwell. Well might he insist on being more inhumanly treated by the English Papists than Saint Paul was by the heathen Romans (8, 28). Biblical analogy does not exclude going one better, or worse. Speaking with boldness On his painful way to the pillory, ‘about the middle of the Strand’, Lilburne tells us, ‘there came a Friend and bid me speake with boldnesse. To whom I replied, when the time comes soe I will’ (6), thus announcing his hidden intention and the dramatic climax of the scene, for which he is trying to save the remnants of his bodily and spiritual strength. This boldness of speech is the biblical keyword for him to make good the legitimacy of his calling. It is claimed by Saint Paul at the end of his summons to spiritual warfare in Ephesians 6: 19 (‘that I may open my mouth boldly’), and both Peter and John, ‘filled with the Holy Ghost’ make ample use of it before the high priests and

6.

Cf. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, p. 218: ‘He [Laurence Sanders] […] took the stake in his arms and kissed it saying “Welcome to the cross of Christ” […]’.

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elders: ‘Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled’ (Acts 4: 13). Lilburne too, ‘a yong man and noe Scoller’, as he says of himself (19), absolutely refuses to be silenced by authority. He gives a first sample of his unquenchable spirit when bystanders ask him the reason of his punishment, to which he answers: ‘[…] I suffer as an object of the Prelates cruelty and malice’. At this one of the wardens interrupts him roughly and commands him to hold his tongue; without more ado the bleeding delinquent cuts him short, ‘[w]hom I bid meddle with his own businesse, for I would speake come what would, for my cause was good for which I suffered, and here I was ready to shed my dearest blood for it’ (7). Dialogues like this punctuate the narrative. They lead up to, and in their way anticipate, the great soliloquy which is at the same time a declaration of innocence, a profession of faith, a bitter attack on the diabolic Bishops, and a sermon preaching the urgent need of repentance to the crowd. The pillory, where only a few months ago Bastwick, Burton and Prynne, the admired forerunners, had stood, is being turned into a pulpit. Paradoxically it is the caesura in the penal procedure and in the malefactor’s sermonising that makes for the utmost rhetorical effect. The passage, which comes as a climax after an oration of more than ten pages in the printed text, is worth quoting in detail. It is the moment at which the speaker seems to be embarking on his peroratio: And as I am a Souldier fighting under the banner of the great and mightie Captaine the Lord Iesus Christ, and as I looke for that Crowne of immortality which one day I know shall be set upon my temples, being in the condition that I am in, I dare not hold my peace, but speake unto you with boldnes in the might and strength of my God, the things which the Lord in mercy hath made knowne unto my Soule, come life come death. When I was here about, there came a fat Lawier, I do not know his name, & commanded me to hold my peace & leave my preaching. To whom I replied and said [notice the biblical turn], Sr. I will not hold my peace but speake my minde freely though I be hanged at Tiburne for my paines. It seemes he himselfe was gauled and toucht as the Lawiers were in Christ time, when hee spake against the Scribes & Pharisees […]. (20)

This scene, performed in the old Palace Yard at Westminster, asks to be visualized in detail. It is a theatre with a sharply divided audience. From the Star Chamber window above are watching Lilburne’s judges, to whom he had bowed ironically before putting his head — he was a tall man — into the painfully low hole, and who now send their well-fed and no doubt self-complacent envoy to intimidate him; below crowds the London mob, ever eager for spectacle and fairground bustle, listening to the distorted orator who stands, stripped to the waist and with wounds festering in the hot sun, making their ‘dumb mouths’ speak to the audience, and visibly shedding his dearest blood for the Cause. Just like Foxe’s martyrs he had declined the offer to be let off the

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stocks (which here stand for the stake in bad Queen Mary’s time) if he would conform, preferring to bear public witness to his impetuous faith. But such professions are liable to interruption. Silencing a believer’s defiant eloquence is an old and imperative concern to those in power over their people’s minds and souls. In Acts 4: 18 the apostles Peter and John are expressly commanded ‘not to speak at all’, and Paul, ‘a pestilent fellow and a mover of sedition’ (24: 5) is actually smitten on the mouth at the high priest’s order (23: 2). Foxe’s martyrs are frequently struck on the lips and even have faggots thrown into their face before being burnt alive. When Ridley at the stake asked to speak but ‘two or three words’ the bailiffs and the vice-chancellor ‘ran hastily up to him and with their hands stopped his mouth’.7 The professing Puritan has to bear public witness to his calling, either by word of mouth or in print, come life come death. His pen is an extension of his fiery tongue, and both are a challenge to established hierarchies. In a magnificent gesture of defiance, just at the dramatically appropriate moment, Lilburne pulls out of his pocket and throws to the audience three of the scandalous books for whose distribution he is being so barbarously punished. This is too much for the onlooking lords of the Star Chamber. Again at the proper cue from the pillory sermon — ‘Alas if men should hold their peace in such times as these, the Lord would cause the very Stones to speake […]’ (23) — the fat lawyer reappears, accompanied by the Warden of the Fleet. On his renewed refusal to keep silent (‘I would speake […] though I were to be Hanged at the gate for my speaking’), the offender is brutally gagged and has to remain so for one and a half hours, stamping with his feet, blood issuing from his mouth.8 Thanks to this collaboration from above, which he had wittingly provoked, he could crown his dramatic performance with a most eloquent dumb show, a memorable emblem of censorship gone bankrupt. In this manner John Lilburne staged his twofold calling as persecuted saint and as a tribune of the people — one who, by speaking up against oppression, gives a voice to the muted masses. Boldness of speech goes to the making of both. Lilburne’s extempore prose, plain, artless, and rather repetitive, deeply steeped in biblical phraseology, yet vivid and urgent with spiritual

7. 8.

Foxe, p. 309. Cf. William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), p. 280; and John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 144–50: ‘Gagging is the most literal and visual image of censorship’.

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and civic passion, carries the message of a rousing sort of populism.9 Risking one’s neck in public speech makes for a wonderful sense of euphoria and power. ‘[Y]ou have undone yourself with speaking […]’, says the Warden of the Fleet after the event, before putting his charge in irons, solitary confinement, and on starving rations at the behest of the Star Chamber. And Lilburne answers: ‘[…] were I to speake againe, I would speake twice as much as I did, if I could have liberty, though I were immediately to loose my life after it. Wouldst thou so, said he? Ey indeed Sir would I, with the Lords assistance […]’ (25). In view of what he had gone through and what he was yet to suffer, this was no empty boast. Enter the Common Man Thus in his spoken and written text Lilburne presents himself as a man absolutely sure of where he stands. There is no trace of soul-searching, of wrestling with the Tempter so typical of Puritan autobiography up to Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. At this moment of historical crisis he is fully conscious of his historical role, for he sees the part he is called on to play as providential. There is no question of wooing the gentle reader; he is fully taken up with being the sober chronicler of his own ‘true history’. The voices from outside that he incorporates as part of his personal drama are either frankly hostile, i.e. devil-inspired, or encouraging and affirmative. If there is no explicit feedback to his soul-wringing sermon at the centre (except for the two telling interruptions), he takes care to include the Common Man, who is his implicit addressee throughout, into the overall picture; and not only in the heartening words coming from the crowd as he is being whipped through London but also in a few notable reactions from the other side, from functionaries of the repressive regime. No less a person than the executioner himself is made to feel the force of Lilburne’s personality: The Cart being readie to goe forward, I spake to the executioner (when I saw him pull out his Corded whipp out of his pocket) after this manner, Well my friend doe thy office. To which he replyed I have whipt many a Rogue but now I shall whip an honest man. But be not discouraged (said he) it will be soon over. (5)

9.

Webber, p. 61, quotes from a later courtroom scene: ‘When the prosecution read out passages from Lilburne’s works, as illustrations of his guilt, it pleased the People as well as if they had acted before them one of Ben Jonson’s plays.’ In this context, A.L. Morton’s verdict ‘Lilburne was as much the most significant as a political personality as he was the least gifted as a writer’ must appear questionable; ‘The Place of Lilburne, Overton and Walwyn in the Tradition of English Prose’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 6 (1958), 5–13 (p. 7).

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Illustration 1: Frontispiece of The Triall of Lieut.-Collonell John Lilburne. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 07/12/2009. Shelf mark E.343.(11).

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Illustration 2: “The Liberty of the Freeborne English-Man” (frontispiece of A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, 1646). Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Press.

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The professional tormentor is addressed as ‘friend’ in this remarkable exchange, and he retorts in kind. Another dialogue, no less revealing, is included in the last section of the narrative. It takes part the day after Lilburne’s return to prison. The Porter of the Fleet, one John Hawes, who had to keep him locked up and incommunicado at the command of the Warden (who was under strict orders from the Star Chamber), came to him with a peculiar request: Mr. Lilburne, I have one suite to you. What is that, said I? It is this, said he, that you would helpe me to one of those Books that you threw abroad at the Pillary, that I might reade it, for I never read any of them; I speake not for it to doe you any hurt, only I have a great desire to reade one of them. Sir, I thinke you doe not (said I) but I cannot satisfie your desire, for if I had more of them, they should yesterday have all gone. (25)

This would have sounded to Lilburne’s readers both biblical and contemporary. For it recalls the well-known episode in Acts 16: 30, where the keeper of the prison at Philippi asks his prisoners Paulus and Silas: ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’ At the same time this particular turnkey is a portrayal of the Common English Man as unwilling instrument of a deeply unjust system, ready to defect to the oppressed side; it is a clear mark of how Lilburne’s performance at the pillory has caught on. He can put down these instances of solidarity while proclaiming to be, as God’s chosen vessel, above such wellmeaning gestures of sympathy. When in the very last paragraph the charwoman looking after his cell voices the hope that he will soon meet with better treatment, he answers her with resonant bravado: ‘I did not much care how it went with me, for Jeremies Dungeon, or Daniels Denn, or the 3 Childrens Fornace, is as pleasant and welcome to me as a Pallace […]’ (29). This is not arrogantly spoken. It means simply that Lilburne’s spiritual self had given birth to his political ‘I’, and at this time still took precedence over it. Later on, when he is on his way to become spokesman of the Levellers and Cromwell’s antagonist, the symbolic portraits added to his pamphlets will stress the political angle, and picture him at the bar with a copy of Coke’s Institutes of Common Law in his hand (illustration 1), or — re-using the frontispiece of The Christian Mans Triall (1641 ed.) with a difference — his face crossed by the bars of a jail window and this sarcastic subscription: ‘The Liberty of the Freeborne English-man, Conferred on him by the house of lords’ (illustration 2).10 This is a far cry from John Donne’s self-portraiture as cross-armed Innamorato or shrouded Memento Mori — both of which it recalls.

10. Reproduced respectively in Webber, after p. 66, and in Haller, Tracts, III, frontispiece.

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From the Worke of the Beast onward, whatever Lilburne utters with tongue or pen is as written with his own blood. This he assures the Warden of the Fleet himself during a brazen attempt at proselytizing in the lion’s den, in which he claims to prove that the Bishops’ authority was conferred by the Devil: ‘[…] and I pray Sir, if the Bishop of Canterbury be offended at that which I spake yesterday, tell him I will seale it with my bloud’ (26). For lack of ink, he claims as a final flourish, the signature set to his tract is ‘written with part of my owne bloud’ (30). Bibliography Foxe, John, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), ed. and abridged by G.A. Williamson (London: Secker and Warburg, 1965). Gibb, Mildred Ann, John Lilburne, the Leveller: A Christian Democrat (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1947). Haller, William, ed., Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution 1638–1647, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934). —, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938). Knott, John R., Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Morton, A.L., ‘The Place of Lilburne, Overton and Walwyn in the Tradition of English Prose’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 6 (1958), 5–13. Swift, Jonathan, A Tale of a Tub (1704), ‘The Introduction’, in Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, ed. by Ricardo Quintana (New York: The Modern Library, 1958). Webber, Joan, The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in 17th Century Prose (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1968).

2. Self-Inventions and Pathologies

Auto-Dialogues Performative Creation of Selves Jürgen Schlaeger Solo performances as performances of a unique self — whether on stage or in private on a piece of paper — are predicated on a range of specific cultural conditions, conditions that took a long time to arise, develop and combine before they provided the fertile soil for that self to become an attractive, even indispensable blueprint for identity formation. The following essay discusses a number of possible explanations for the fact that solo performances became a central issue and strategy for self-perception and self-presentation in Western culture after the collapse of the medieval world-picture. In a first general conclusion the paper defines self-discovery and solo performances in life-writing as cultural strategies for increasing the capacity of the individual human mind for dealing with growing complexity. As a consequence solo performances of this kind cannot be simply seen as exteriorizations or representations of inner realities, but have to be analysed as feed-back-loop training programmes for activating new mental resources. The second part of the paper tests this general hypothesis by a detailed interpretation of some solo performances from the late 16th and the early 17th centuries: explorations of personal experience in manuals for self-analysis and spiritual diaries. Examples include Samuel Purchas’s Purchas his Pilgrim (1619), Daniel Dyke’s popular manual The Mystery of Self-Deceiving (1614), and Richard Rogers’s Diary (1587–1590). In conclusion: the ‘Africa within’ of which Sir Thomas Browne had written so eloquently did not just wait to be discovered, occupied and exploited rather late in human history but its exploration is a crucial agent in cultural change, is central to the Renaissance project in which auto-dialogical performances became a basic and integral part of improving the mind’s capacity for adapting to new spiritual, epistemological and emotional challenges.

In the beginning there was no ‘solo’, or more precisely: in the beginning of human culture there was no concept of the self as an individual, as the basic but self-contained component of larger formations such as families, communities or tribes. Even in our own Mediterraneo-European-Greco-Christian culture, it took a long time for some concept of individualism to be accepted as fundamental. There are nearly 2000 years between the earliest traces of individuation in Greek culture and the European Renaissance. From Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s ta eis heauton to Wordsworth’s claim that it is ‘unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself’, it is a long, long haul, indeed.1 And the same holds true for the distance between, say, St. Augustin’s 1.

In a letter to Sir George Beaumont, May 1st, 1805; quoted in: Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, ed. by Ernest de Sélincourt, rev. by Helen Darbishire (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. xii.

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Soliloquia and Rousseau’s Confessions in which the latter was ‘planning a project which has no precedent and whose realisation will never be imitated’. For, he writes, ‘I will expose to my fellow beings a man in all his natural truth, and that man will be me. Me and only me’.2 The timescale I have sketched is, it seems to me, a clear indication of the fact that individualisation in whichever form is not the starting point of civilization but a product of an advanced stage of its development. Living in an age of accelerating change and multiplying individual life-styles one tends to think that the march towards individuation as a conceptual framework for any kind of solo performance, has been surprisingly slow and stumbling. What is more, the ‘optical’ illusions of hindsight make it sometimes difficult to understand why Greek culture or Christian theology did not propel the process of individualisation rapidly towards a situation as we now know it. Obviously — and anthropologically speaking — the required ‘involution of consciousness’, to use Georges Gusdorf’s words, as a condition for self-gestation to become a pivotal cultural category had to overcome a large number of, so Gusdorf, ‘mythic taboos’, i.e. of social, religious and psychological obstacles, before it could win through.3 In short, solo performance as the performance of a unique self — whether on stage or in private — is predicated on a large number of specific cultural conditions. These conditions took a long time to arise, develop and combine before they provided the right soil for solo performance to become an attractive, even inevitable blueprint for identity formation. This might sound like a platitude if it was not for the fact that the question why it happened at all is still waiting for a convincing answer. For a long time the sagas told by European cultural historians and philosophers based their telling of ‘the grand story’ of individualisation on the assumption that there was some more or less hidden agenda, some historical logic at work. This logic delivered the plot of the apparently inevitable march of history towards the emancipation of the individual, a march that also provided the plot for parallel processes such as the development from tribalism to modern society, from ‘mythos’ to ‘logos’, and from animism through polytheism to monotheism. In much of the relevant work there seems to be also, and suspiciously so, an agreement in principle on how all of this happened,

2. 3.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bekenntnisse (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 1985), p. 37 (my translation). Georges Gusdorf, ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’, in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. by James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 28–48 (p. 32).

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although many of the details and much of the chronology have remained controversial. Some have traced this emancipation of the individual to Greek culture and philosophy — so Bruno Snell in his Die Entdeckung des Geistes (1955),4 some, like Jacob Burckhardt, associated its initiation with humanism and the Renaissance and, in particular, with Pico della Mirandolas De Dignitate Hominis (1486) as the centre piece. Others have claimed that the cradle of individualism lies in the respiritualisation and interiorisation of religious practices in the 12th century, and others, again, have described it as the inevitable long term outcome of Christian monotheism. After all, Christian monotheism tells a story of creation in which God shaped man in his own image, and it centres on the creed that the drama of salvation did not only provide the authoritative script for the history of the world but also for the fate of the individual believer who, at the end of the world, on the day of the Last Judgement, would be damned or saved. Why it took 1500 years and a Reformation to fully unlock the individualistic potential of the Christian faith, is less clear. However that may be — and there are good reasons to assume that most of the stories sketched above contain some truth about the necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for the rise of individualism — one can’t help noticing with a certain degree of bewilderment that hardly anybody has had a serious second look at the reasons why individuation as a seminal cultural concept should have emerged at all. The available explanatory models, based on influence, new ideas, inventions, and technology, discoveries, new intellectual horizons, and a return to the sources of Western culture in antiquity are clearly insufficient and some are even begging the question. Most scholars apparently rest satisfied with an equation between the inevitable and the good. Individualism is good, is a trade mark for modern advanced, democratic and pluralistic societies governed by human rights and the rule of law. And, what is more, individualism is supposed to be the indispensable basis for the explosion in curiosity and creativity we have seen since the Quattrocento. This is why individualism is all too often presented as a quasi-natural outcome of the march of human history, as a long overdue attainment of something that is desirable and, therefore, self-explanatory, as a crucial and inevitable stage of human progress. Since, however, we have moved into a phase of world history in which it seems to be possible for non-European cultures to build modern sophisticated societies that are technologically advanced, 4.

Bruno Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes: Studien zur Entstehung des europäischen Denkens bei den Griechen (Hamburg: Claassen, 1955).

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without the European concept of individualism, the whole question of its inevitability has been thrown open again. What is easy to see is that traces and elements of cultural practices which allow a certain degree of separating out and freeing individuals from social constraints and deeply rooted patterns of collective behaviour can be found in human history wherever there was also a considerable degree of sophistication in all aspects of life: economy, belief, technology, social practices. Against this background it is, it seems to me, reasonable to assume that individuation was and still is obviously a European answer of the system ‘man’ or ‘mind’ or ‘brain’ to specific cultural challenges which could not be adequately dealt with within the established and well practiced frames of knowledge and practices. From this point of view — and in more fundamental terms — individuation as a cultural technique is a means towards an end, not an end in itself. To translate this into my own field of investigation: self-discovery and solo performances in life-writing are strategies for increasing the capacity of the human mind to deal with growing complexity — and, as a corollary, for me at least, solo performances are not, in the first place, exteriorisations or representations of inner realities, but training programmes for opening up new mental resources. I suppose, ultimately, solo performances are strategies for cultural survival. In the second part of my paper I will concentrate on some examples of private solo performances, i.e. personal experience manuals for self-exploration and diaries. My aim is to show that we are dealing here with processes of exploration and guidelines for mastering inner complexities — or to put it differently, with performative self-reinventions rather than representations of something given, something, that had lain buried until it was finally and happily discovered. Let us start with Samuel Purchas’s ‘Introduction’ to his Purchas his Pilgrim published in 1619. Purchas outlines a master plan for mapping the unknown territory of the self in order to control it and then put its resources to profitable use: ‘Man living, as continually dying; as everie day looking to be called to give accounts of his Stewardship. That we may learne to number our dayes, and apply our hearts to wisdom, by considering our wonderfull making.’5 For him exploration of the world and exploration of the inner self are parallel operations that will bring spiritual and material benefits. The process of doing one’s daily accounts, a task that was to become standard practice for devout

5.

Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrim (London: printed by W.S. for Henny Fetherstone, 1619), p. 5.

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predestinarians, Purchas characterises as ‘Braintravell’, i.e. as a carefully planned, detailed registering and exploring of one’s own mental and bodily activities.6 Purchas even stresses the need to give internal exploration preference over the external one: ‘And should man travell farre, to see the supposed Miracles of the world, in Temples, Amphitheaters, and the like, and be ignorant of a better, which they possess at home, and carrie within them’, then man would have got his priorities wrong.7 Similarly, in 1576 Thomas Rogers, another clergyman with a dissenting background, had emphasised in his Anatomy of the Minde: ‘[…] those men of necessetie [must] be deemed the best, who addict themselves rather to knowing of theyr owne nature, then naturall things […]’.8 These exhortations to use one’s own mental powers for probings into the inner self in order to advance the process of self-knowledge look like instances of the conventional admonitions for moral watchfulness and selfcontrol, yet they should rather be read as indicating the growing need for tapping new mental resources in order to cope with a more and more complex internal and external world. A generation later Sir Thomas Browne sums up this need in an image that also parallels the explorations of the world and those of the mind. In his Religio Medici (1642) he writes: I could never content my contemplation with those generall pieces of wonders, the flux and reflux of the sea, the encrease of Nile, the conversion of the Needle to the North, and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of Nature, which without further travell I can doe in the Cosmography of my self; we carry with us the wonders, we seake without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labor at in a divided piece and endlesse volume. 9

The force of this new exploratory pathos manifests itself not only in the popularity of Hakluyt’s and Purchas’s books about maritime enterprises, but also in the growing importance of conduct books and in the spreading practice of keeping diaries. Doing one’s daily accounts, writing regularly about oneself, or even writing one’s own life story was the personal equivalent of capital investment which, managed with foresight and determination, would bring the hoped-for return.

6. 7. 8. 9.

Purchas, p. 6. Ibid., ‘Preface’. Thomas Rogers, Anatomy of the Mind (London: n.p., 1976), ‘Preface’. Sir Thomas Browne, The Major Works, ed. by C.A. Patrides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 78.

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If we now move on to explorations of the self in writing undertaken by predestinarian divines, we see even more clearly what was driving them on and what they were up to. Dyke’s popular treatise The Mystery of Self-Deceiving. Or A Discourse and discovery of the deceitfullnesse of Mans Heart published posthumously by his brother Jeremiah in 1614, shows us a scenario in which he dramatically and emotionally depicts not only the irresistible drive for self-exploration, but also the sort of scenario all Puritans faced in their attempts to appraise their state of salvation by turning inward.10 At the heart of Dyke’s deliberations is the conviction that the only appropriate and permanently salutary attitude the believer can have towards himself, is that of utter distrust of his heart — the heart, as he is quick to add, being synonymous with the soul or the whole of man’s inner being: ‘By heart, mans heart is meant, as appeareth by the context. And now because mans heart is one of the principall seats of the soule of man, therefore […] it is to bee taken for the whole soule and all the parts thereof, the understanding, the will, the affections: for all are deceitfull.’11 Such universal distrust of all human capabilities makes guilt the pervading mental disposition, but it also justifies intense concentration on the inner self. Guilt demands and legitimises an intense and meticulous preoccupation with the self — a preoccupation which the medieval church had always castigated as emanating from the deadly sin of pride. One could rephrase this situation by saying that Protestant solafideism provided the cultural password for internal colonialization. With minute attention to detail Dyke now proceeds to make an exhaustive list of all the obstacles and traps the believer is likely to encounter during his journey through the landscape of his own inner self, thereby underlining its dangers as well as its attractions. Success comes neither quickly nor easily. For as the self is inescapably driven to examine itself incessantly, it invariably gains insight into its own vast complexity. Dyke’s treatise is pervaded by phrases and images that point to such a state of affairs. The highly pictorial language, which is not exactly in line with the plain style ideal which Puritans professed to use as evidence for their desire to tell the truth, is a clear sign that the author is here moving on uncertain, unmapped ground. Two quotations may serve to illustrate this point: ‘O ye many blind corners, the secret turnings and windings, the perplex labyrinthes, the close lurking-holes that are heere!’, and ‘So mysticall are these hearts of ours. So 10. The Mystery of Selfe-Deceiving: or A Discourse and discovery of deceitfullnesse of Mans Heart: Written By the late faithfull Minister of Gods Worde, Daniel Dyke, Bachelour in Divinity. Published Since his death, by his brother I.D. Minister of Gods Worde (London: printed by Edward Griffin, for Ralph Mab, 1614). 11. Ibid., p. 3.

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deepe and abstruse are [t]h[e]ir mysteries of deceit.’12 Such an unstable and dangerous inner state cannot be tolerated. For the sake of salvation it has to be kept under constant surveillance. Therefore Dyke categorically demands: ‘Never then trust thou this heart of thine, […]’13 But for the sake of finding a solid foothold on the shifting ground of cosmology, religious controversies and social change, Puritans also projected the inner self as an inexhaustible source of self-reliance. It is therefore all the more important to become literate in these matters, i.e. to be able to discern, analyse and define the large variety of tricks and deceptions, the whispering voices and subtle temptations the inner self has in store. Learning how to discern them is tantamount to learning how to avoid them — and this is Dyke’s ultimate pedagogic aim. The treatise also reveals a growing anxiety about the dangers of continual self-examination. To get this message across, Dyke used the image of an exploratory voyage, thus linking the fascination and the horror of unknown territory with the fascination of an uncensored vision of one’s own dark depths: ‘Well then, since the word is that light which shineth in this darkness, having it with us, venter we to descend downe into this deepe dungeon, and to launch out into this vast Ocean, having this plummet to sound the bottome thereof.’ But this is only one side of the story, for he carries on: They that goe downe into the deepes, saith the prophet, they see the workes and wonders of the Lord. But they that goe downe into this deepe are not now like to see any thing, but the deepnesse of Sathan, the workes and wonders of the Divel, the Liviathan that sporteth himself in these waters, or rather a Neptune triumphing heere, as in his kingdome: […].14

This passage exposes the ambiguous psychological impulse of religiously inspired self-exploration: fear and fascination; self-depreciation and selfempowerment. And in this scenario self-writing provides toolkit and anchorage at once. Through the scriptures and written words guided by God’s Book, through other people and one’s own experience, it is hoped that the depths of the soul will become transparent and that the resultant increase in self-knowledge will lead to greater self-control. Dyke therefore entreats his readers to concentrate their efforts on the use of words as instruments for self-analysis: ‘Taking then the anatomizing knife of the word, and ripping up the belly of this monster, I finde such an infinite number of the veines of deceitfulnesse, and those so knotty and intricately infolded together, that hard it is distinctly, and cleerly 12. Dyke, pp. 7. 13. Ibid., p. 348. 14. Ibid., p. 10.

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to show them all.’15 The word taken as an ‘anatomizing knife’ with which to dissect the innermost self vividly describes the auto-performative activities among an increasing number of people under the influence of Protestantism and Puritanism. By deliberately applying one of the most popular scientific procedures of his day to the business of self-analysis, Dyke makes his plea all the more forceful. If we peel off the surface layer of contemporary religious concerns we can get a glimpse at the long-term cultural effects of such writing practices. Dissection of this kind can only be carried out through a medium that allows meticulous procedures, careful observation, faithful documentation and critical self-reflexivity — in other words, by performing the self in a daily practice of writing. Dyke seems to have deducted the necessity for writing regularly about oneself from his own anatomy of the human soul: ‘And here see that thou register, and recorde in thy accountes-booke this thy covenant, that so when thy deceitfull heart shalbe offering to start aside, and give thee the slippe, thou maiest presently recall it, and keepe it in with putting it in mind of this covenant.’16 He then moves still closer to recommending the practice of keeping a diary: ‘Let us never therefore let reckonings runne on, but every day let us make all even, let us chastize our selves every morning, examine our selves every evening, even in the still silence of the night, as we lie waking on our beds.’17 He actually kept a diary himself, as his brother informs us, but the manuscript was not published and is now lost. In the passages I have quoted we can discern the difficulties and the psychological pressure which the self had to cope with on its voyage into its own interior, but also a strong sense of promise that emanates from the possibility of rebirth in this life. The anatomising cut with the probing word is a kind of mental vivisection of a sensitive self. Intricate feed-back processes and continual self-reflection are therefore bound to become staple features of such an activity. ‘Man is the text’, declares Thomas Granger, another nonconformist clergyman in 1621, but for this to be true, man has to learn how to spell himself, and that is a lifelong process in a psychological roller-coaster.18 To put oneself down on paper requires, as Montaigne once asserted, a great deal of courage, for the ‘mythic taboos’ with which many cultures shield the inner self, threaten to generate self-doubt and provoke social 15. 16. 17. 18.

Dyke, p. 24. Ibid., p. 351. Ibid., p. 355. Thomas Granger, A Familiar Exposition or Commentary on Ecclesiastes — Wherein the worlds vanity, and the treu felicitie are plainely deciphered (London: n.p., 1621), p. 16.

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ostracism on anyone who dares to trespass against them.19 Self-doubt and social isolation were exactly those experiences which Puritans tended to welcome as signs of grace. So even in a strictly religious context their experiences of self-doubt and isolation became levers for something very important. To demonstrate the situations self-performers found themselves in, I shall now turn to the diary of Richard Rogers.20 Rogers was heavily involved in contemporary theological controversies. He published a collection of sermons and contributed to a work which also contained a piece by the Puritan master-mind William Perkins. His reputation as a theologian of considerable standing rests chiefly on his Seven treatises concerning such directions as is gathered out of Holie Scripture (1603). This book was reprinted five times, and a shortened version went through nearly a dozen editions, so it was something of a bestseller. Only a small part of Roger’s diary has survived (from February 1587 to August 1590), but what we have is of great significance for our understanding of what happened in the early stages of the process in which the modern introspective self was performatively invented. We know from this fragment that Rogers began writing a diary as early as 1574, that is to say, when he was 24 years old. For Rogers, writing about himself is not merely an act of account-keeping; it never serves only the purpose of drawing up lists of venial sins to be avoided or events to be remembered, as we would find them in traditional confession manuals. Instead, his diary is wholly devoted to the task of mastering internal complexity by creating a textual practice in which the self would be able to talk to itself. It is this intention which confronts him again and again with the need to answer the question of why he writes a diary. One of the answers he gives himself is: ‘that I may see my life in frame from time to time’ (22.12.1587). Another reads as follows: ‘that it may be a glass to me for hereafter’ (07.02.1589/90). This desire to see himself in a frame or a mirror creates a vis-à-vis situation, an auto-dialogical situation which seems to be essential for the construction and preservation of his identity, whose stability appears to be continually threatened by disturbing thoughts, images and impulses that arise from the unknown depths of his soul. Writing about it as well as returning to the written self of earlier days becomes his main strategy for keeping his self under control and practicing new strategies for mental policing. Writing thus makes the ‘wanderings’ and the ‘unsettledness’, the ‘temptations’ and the 19. See H. Lüthy’s ‘Introduction’ to his edition of the Essais (Zürich: Manesse, 1955), p. 27. 20. Extracts from his diary have been published by M.M. Knappen in Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries (Chicago and London: The American Society of Church History, 1933). This edition contains approximately a third of the text. The manuscript is in Dr. Williams’s Library in London (Rogers: Baxter MSS. 61/63).

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‘fantasies’ available for mental gymnastics and for a muscular approach to self-reflexivity. Here are two entries that illustrate the controlling power of writing, the second even more strikingly than the first: But this afternoon I felt a strongue desire to inioy more liberty in thinckinge uppon some vaine thinges, which I had lately weaned my self from. Me thought it great bondage to be tyed from delighting in such thinges as I took pleasure in and if I had not written this immediately […] I had almost been gone from this course […]. (September 12, 1587) So many thinges were molestinge me, one after an other, that being veary profitable for me and neerly concerning me, I took this in hande, persuading my self that I could neither have called my self to an account about these matters now neither many other times about the like if I had not tyed my selfe to this course of writinge. (June 20, 1587)

The growing reliance of the self on the vis-à-vis situation in the practice of writing eventually turns the textualized self into an authority to which the writer increasingly resorts for advice on current predicaments. All in all, an almost miraculous transformation of man into text seems to have taken place. Now the text speaks back to its creator. A dialogue ensues between Rogers the man and Rogers the diary, a dialogue that takes the form of re-reading earlier entries and going back to them for admonition or comfort. Entry of November 18th, 1589: I, perceiving my mind not so cheerful nor of so good courage as to be readily disposed to duty, and that by reason of my great liklihood of suspension, I did this morn[ing], after the reading of some part of my writings, fall to further consideracion with my self to frame my mind wil[lingly] to goe under it, though in itself most unwelcome.

In this way earlier entries become part of Rogers’ actual self. Past and present amalgamate. On 10th November 1588, for instance, he writes: ‘and was much helped forward to recover my peace by reading a leaf of my writings 7 years since’. There are many reflections and re-readings of this kind in his diary. The margins of most folios as well as their tops and bottoms are filled with later additions, explanations, references and comments of the following kind: ‘[n]ote’, ‘[r]ead meditation this month of August’, ‘[t]hincke of this ofttimes in disgrace’, ‘[n]ote and read this oft’, or ‘[b]ut my former writings will testify matter enough contrary to this’, etc. What are we to make of all this in view of my hypothesis that selfperformance in writing is an important factor in the development of European individualism — a sophisticated training programme for minds to increase their range of operation and their own synthesising power? The Africa within — of which Sir Thomas Browne had written so colourfully — is not just there to be discovered, occupied and exploited. But it

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is the object of a project in which auto-dialogical performance becomes a basis and integral part of improving ones social performance, for providing new resources necessary to deal with changing spiritual, epistemological and emotional needs in a situation that from then on would never stop getting more and more demanding. Solo performances are strategies for ensuring collective survival. Bibliography Browne, Sir Thomas, The Major Works, ed. by C.A. Patrides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Dyke, Daniel, The Mystery of Selfe-Deceiving: or A Discourse and discovery of the deceitfullnesse of Mans Heart. Written By the late faithfull Minister of Gods Worde, Daniell Dyke, Bachelour in Divinity. Published Since his death, by his brother I.D. Minister of Gods Worde (London: printed by Edward Griffin, for Ralph Mab, 1614). Granger, Thomas, A Familiar Exposition or Commentary on Ecclesiastes — Wherein the worlds vanity, and the true felicitie are plainely deciphered (London: n.p., 1621). Gusdorf, Georges, ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’, in Autobiography. Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. by James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 28–48. Montaigne, Michel De, Essais, trans. by Herbert Lüthy (Zürich: Manesse, 1955). Purchas, Samuel, Purchas His Pilgrim (London: printed by W.S. for Henny Fetherstone, 1619). Rogers, Richard and Samuel Ward, Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, ed. by M.M. Knappen (Chicago and London: The American Society of Church History, 1933). Rogers, Thomas, Anatomy of the Mind (London: n.p., 1976). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Bekenntnisse (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 1985). Wordsworth, William, The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, ed. by Ernest de Sélincourt, rev. by Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).

The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Hamlet, of Denmark Günter Walch ‘Who’s there?’ As well as opening Hamlet, Barnardo’s challenge initiates an enquiry of central importance far beyond the changing of the guards. It raises the historically fundamental problem of identity which will dominate the play as a whole. Hamlet’s soliloquies have become a critical battleground concerning the genesis and identity of the Early Modern self emanating from the rhetoric of these solo performances. What has, however, been neglected in previous discussions is the significance of the play’s extraordinary degree of narrativity. That neglect does not concern structural details so much as the sophisticated synthesis of performative and epic components, of ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. The tragedy is thus complemented by the largely narrative dimension of the protagonist’s life story.

No Shakespearean ‘solo performances’ have over the centuries attracted such a wealth of controversial comment as Prince Hamlet’s soliloquies. In his desperate situation, it is through his seemingly mysterious failure to obey the revenge imperative that Hamlet’s increasingly frantic soul-searching lays bare what appears as his interiority in the process. Agonizing over what he must consider his failure as an avenger, Hamlet suffers a severe crisis of identity. The play allows us to infer that up to that crisis Hamlet stood out as, in Ophelia’s words, ‘[t]h’ expectancy and rose of the fair state’ (3.1.152–63).1 But that unquestioned assumption is traumatically upset and thrown into doubt. Under extreme pressure, Hamlet’s soliloquies articulate aspects of ‘that within which passes show’ (1.2.85). It is that historically new interiority which is ultimately due to accelerating socioeconomic changes but is not yet describable in conceptual language.2 This interiority is expressed and constructed not least in and by a large variety of genres; poetry, drama — the theatre generally. Since, notwithstanding many differences in detail, consensus seems to prevail today among critics that Hamlet and in particular its protagonist’s soliloquies represent a climax in the process of emerging Early Modern subjectivity, I refer 1. 2.

All Hamlet quotations refer to William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Harold Jenkins, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982). Early Modern official identification methods which can here only be referred to in passing (personal identification criteria, authenticating seals, coats of arms, trademarks, insignia, etc.) developed collaterally between the 13th and 16th centuries. See Valentin Groebner, Who are You? Identification, Deception and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 2007).

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to available systematic discussions of the soliloquies for the purpose of this essay and will not undertake another one in this context.3 Instead, I will consider the larger context of the cultural production of subjectivity and the considerable agency involved in it, and specifically passages in Shakespeare’s text that significantly supplement and expand the soliloquies’ project. On the one hand, ‘English Renaissance culture lack[s] the modern vocabulary of meaning through which interiority is described’.4 The self-constituting self performing those soliloquies or ‘solos’ depends of necessity on available language such as ‘a succession of morality fragments, wrath and reason, patience and resolution’.5 The resulting tone is fairly general, as is underpinned by the grammar: in the famous soliloquy, ‘[t]o be, or not to be’, the pronoun ‘“I” or “me” is not found once’.6 On the other hand, as William Richardson declared in 1774 in an early piece of character criticism, by the end of the closet scene ‘all business of the tragedy, in regard to the display of character, is here concluded’. And thus, he went on with an acute sense of something irritatingly ‘irregular’ in Hamlet, ‘the succeeding circumstances of the play are unnecessary’.7 But the play does of course carry on for another two long acts, albeit without soliloquies after act four. As the present essay will show, the latter part of the play actually continues, expands and even tries to complete by other means the play’s original project concerning the protagonist’s identity. These means are dominantly narrative. Recent developments in postclassical narratology have emphasised the far-reaching, in fact fundamental, cultural significance of narration as a phenomenological and cognitive mode of understanding the world and the self. That concerns all media and genres, and consequently the interdisciplinary applicability of narration.8 Specifically in narratology, the convention prevailed of defining epic and drama by the 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

See Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeares Monologe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964); Alex Newell, The Soliloquies in Hamlet: The Structural Design (London and Toronto: Associated Universities Press, 1991); Günter Walch, Hamlet, Shakespeare und kein Ende, 2, ed. by Sonja Fielitz (Bochum: Kamp, 2004), pp. 81–121. John Lee, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 2. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 42. Lee, p. 154. Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Brian Vickers, 6 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974–81) VI, p. 123. Ansgar and Vera Nünning, ‘Von der strukturalistischen Narratologie zur “postklassischen” Erzähltheorie: Ein Überblick über neue Ansätze und Entwicklungstendenzen’, in Neue Ansätze in der Erzähltheorie, ed. by Vera and Ansgar Nünning, WVT Handbücher zum Literaturwissenschaftlichen Studium, 4 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002), pp. 1–33 (p. 2).

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rigid distinction between telling and showing, diegesis and mimesis. Indeed, when narrative elements undeniably occur in drama they have often been considered a necessary evil, a poor relation called in to help with some of the less attractive chores. Thus narrative has come to be regarded the lowly handmaid setting the stage, addressing the audience (exposition, prologue, chorus), telling what cannot be shown (off-stage action, passing of time), or cleaning up the mess after the catastrophe (epilogue), and so forth. The present narrative turn in cultural and literary theory, however, has opened up new avenues towards a revaluation of narrative in drama. A small example may illuminate one way in which a fresh look at the synthesis of mimesis and diegesis in drama can be shown to apply to Hamlet. With only 31 lines, scene six in act four is not at all spectacular. Its content seems trivially functional — letters are handed over by proverbial messengers —, and it does not seem to have attracted much comment. But as will be seen, the scene is fully relevant to the subject of my essay: Enter Horatio and a Servant HORATIO What are they that would speak with me? SERVANT Seafaring men, sir. They say they have letters for you. HORATIO Let them come in. [Exit Servant] I do not know from what part of the world I should be greeted, if not from Lord Hamlet. Enter sailors. (1–6)

Horatio reads his letter, and has the rest passed on to the king and queen. We are treated to a short version of Hamlet’s adventures during his prolonged absence. Even if the sailors (only one in the more economical Folio) were not clad in a ‘sea-gown’ similar to the one Hamlet tells Horatio about (5.2.13), which no doubt they were, the servant would have prepared us for the kind of messengers to expect. The audience get at least a whiff of salt water when the play has the letter presented performatively in this way, thus authenticating the narrative which has to be narrative because it is generically uncongenial and spatiotemporally impossible to perform in the given context. Much more is conveyed in this little scene than the traditional presentation of a letter, and this is achieved by the interplay of generic modes typical of the play. The function of the scene extends to act five, where it is to support the impact of Hamlet’s unperformable experiences. In Elizabethan drama and in particular in Shakespeare’s work, narrative proved increasingly important in complementing the ‘intelligible invocation of identity’ and ‘assertion of an I’ by the ‘contingent construction of meaning’

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through festive and ritual acts.9 For while the early Shakespeare ‘privileges the oral-aural and the practical-physical over the world of the book’, and while the actors’ cultural practice of performance and playing continued to inform significantly the Elizabethan theatre and to infuse it with its celebrated vitality, during the last two decades of the 16th century the relative emphasis was gradually shifting in favour of writing which of course involved scripted dialogue.10 What ensued was a complex process of a narrativisation of drama which began to become generally typical of the period.11 This is one reason for the extraordinary length of some of Shakespeare’s plays, and of Hamlet in particular. Critics have usually admired Shakespeare’s handling of, for example, the preparation of the dénouement of Hamlet. An intricate dramatic machinery is set in motion involving many narrative insets to give the protagonist the chance, on his return in act five, to vent his newly acquired philosophical composure: ‘There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow’; ‘[t]he readiness is all’ (2.215–18). But if the narrativisation of drama is generally typical of the period, in the case of Shakespeare it exceeds by far what is necessary in terms of dramatic economy.12 In the case of Hamlet this is particularly striking since the restitution depends — as critics have pointed out — on sheer chance.13 It is not a new insight, of course, that Hamlet in act five has somehow mellowed, seems resigned, is no longer aggressive. My argument is that the story told of that change is composed much more expansively and carefully than has hitherto been recognised, and that the energy invested in effecting that change of character is in excess of the dramaturgical requirements of the restitution. This investment actually follows a strong world-creating impulse and is an effect of the semantically based ‘greater potential of narrative to fill in background, supply detail, and engage the imagination’ and to create possible worlds, all of which we seem to be only beginning to understand.14 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 138–47, 139. See Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 9. Ansgar Nünning and Roy Sommer, ‘Die performative Kraft des Erzählens: Formen und Funktionen des Erzählens in Shakespeares Dramen’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 142 (2006), pp. 124–41 (p. 138). See ibid., p. 138. See e.g. Andreas Mahler, ‘Das ideologische Profil’, in Shakespeare-Handbuch: Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt, ed. by Ina Schabert (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2000), pp. 299–323 (p. 317). Rawdon Wilson, Shakespearean Narrative (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, Associated University Presses, 1995), p. 93.

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Hamlet’s ‘textual universe’ offers a multitude of embedded or concatenated possible narratives, 15 some actualised, some neglected, some products of ‘metaphoric creation’ based on ‘the cognitive value of metaphor’.16 Within its teleographic universe Hamlet offers many thresholds that narrative can cross. To mention just a few prominent examples, there is Horatio’s embedded narration of the struggle between old Fortinbras and old Hamlet (1.1.83–114), and Hamlet and the Player King telling between them the story of Troy’s last moments in no more than 57 lines (2.2.446–514). Such narratives allow spatiotemporal border-crossings into arenas which help define the ‘textual reference world’ in relation to the Middle Ages on the one hand and Antiquity as appropriated by the Renaissance on the other.17 Supplementing these historical dimensions of the play by talking about the Beyond, the Ghost fuels the audience’s imagination by withholding as too harrowing the most horrible ‘secrets of my prison-house’(1.5.13). Among the ‘world-creating utterances’ are those building a life ‘from the various materials collected by the mind’.18 Ophelia, herself a product of patriarchal Elsinore who has suffered a mental breakdown gives voice to her crushing experiences and thus reveals significant parts of her biography. She can only do so by famously citing splinters from songs which, however, ‘collectively tell a fragmented version of a recognizable story of death, love, seduction, and abandonment’.19 The 15. Marie-Laure Ryan defines ‘textual universe’ as ‘[t]he image of a system of reality projected by a text’ and as ‘a modal system if one of its worlds is designated as actual and opposed to the other worlds of the system’. A ‘semantic domain’ is ‘[t]he set of concepts evoked by the text, whether or not these concepts form a system of reality’. Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. vii. 16. Thomas L. Martin, Poiesis and Possible Worlds: A Study in Modality and Literary Theory (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004), p. 144. 17. Ryan, Possible Worlds, p. vii. 18. Ibid., pp. 29, 111. 19. Wilson, p. 195. — The Elizabethans’ deep interest in the new subjectivity included, and was possibly intensified by, pathological mental conditions accounting in part for the success of Hamlet with its fascinating case studies of Ophelia and Hamlet. — A female contemporary of Shakespeare’s, Dionys Fitzherbert, in 1608 wrote An Anatomie for the Poore in Spirit in which she gave an account of her severe mental breakdown which involved loss of speech. When she first recovered speech she was shocked to find herself uttering expressions of blasphemy as well as of religious faith. Repeatedly and explicitly stressing the importance of language she was fully aware of what she was doing: telling herself the story of her illness in a special kind of autobiography provided the means of understanding and finally curing herself. See Alison Findlay, ‘Hamlet: A Document in Madness’, in New Essays on Hamlet, ed. by Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning, The Hamlet Collection, 1 (New York: AIMS Press, 1994), pp. 189–205. — Sigmund Freud would have been impressed by Dionys’s Anatomie.

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tragic protagonist of course dominates the stage, not least through the power of his eight (of the play’s total of twelve) soliloquies. But, as I will show, over and beyond the story of the frustratingly unorthodox revenge tragedy the narrativity of the text allows and suggests the concatenation of a secondary story. It is the protagonist’s life story. Judging by the energy invested in the ‘unnecessary’ (William Richardson) epic task of telling, for the stage, the protagonist’s life story, which actually meant and of course goes on to mean the story of his maturation, seems to have posed a fascinating challenge for the dramatist. He had done something similar before in the near-contemporary Henry V (1598–99?). At the end of 2 Henry IV, scapegrace Harry abruptly makes his peace with the king and restores law and order in the realm (5.3.47). No direct explanation is offered in this play of the startling change this character has undergone. But at the very beginning of Henry V, it is explained to us by no less an authority than the Archbishop of Canterbury: The courses of his youth promis’d it not. The breath no sooner left his father’s body But that his wildness, mortified in him, Seem’d to die too; yeah, at that very moment Consideration like an angel came […]. (1.1.25–39)20

It was, we are told, nothing less than a miracle. But we remember Harry’s ominous ‘I know you all’ (1.2.190).21 Henry IV consistently and somewhat hypocritically manipulates the Prince’s pranks so that they will not really reflect on his character.22 We are, after all, looking back at English history’s future ideal king. Manipulating plot and character in this way affords a brilliant solution to showing the ‘sudden’ (1.1.33) transition from adolescence to early responsible maturity. Working on Hamlet, Shakespeare saw himself faced with a parallel problem yet with the additional intriguing challenge of a protagonist with a highly charged subjectivity which could no longer be adapted by a sudden miracle to the technical needs of the tragic dénouement. How did 20. William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. by J.H. Walter, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1977). 21. William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1, ed. by A.R. Humphreys, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1978). 22. See e.g. the parallel pointed out by Stephen Greenblatt in ‘Invisible Bullets’ between the activities of both Thomas Harriot (among the Algonquian Indians) and Hal among his Eastcheap cronies to gather knowledge useful for controlling and ruling them, in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 64.

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Shakespeare cope with a dramaturgical problem calling for a process of long maturation generically impossible to perform on the stage, with, in other words, a theatrical impossibility? For an answer we have to turn for a moment to the hoary question of Hamlet’s age. The locus classicus is of course in act five, where Hamlet asks the philosophical clown how long he has been a ‘grave-maker’: GRAVEDIGGER Of all the days i’th year I came to’t that day that our last King Hamlet o’ercame Fortinbras. HAMLET How long is that since? GRAVEDIGGER Cannot you tell that? Every fool can tell that. It was that very day that young Hamlet was born — he that is mad and sent into England.

Ten further punning lines on, the clown supplies the unambiguous information: ‘[…] I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years’ (5.1.139–44, 156–57). Without any doubt the clown with the astounding memory here tells us that Hamlet is thirty years old. But that unambiguous information contradicts the audience’s image of the prince so far. That is the image of a much younger man. The divergency emerging here has always been met with unease. Theatres have usually presented a young or an older leading man depending on the director’s intention or resources. Some critics like Maynard Mack simply accept the divergency,23 others play it down: ‘Because this broader philosophical issue overrides […] decisions concerning Hamlet’s age, the Hamlets of the theater do not diverge as widely as might otherwise be expected.’24 A brief archaeological expedition into the New Variorum Edition of 1877 will give an intimation of the heated discussion among Victorian scholars of the knotty point, some pleading for a young, some for an older Hamlet. But they are agreed that ‘[t]he two parts of the play are inconsistent on this main point’. The issue was finally decided by Edward Dowden (1843–1913) within his positivist reference system: ‘I accept as satisfactory the age assigned by Marshall, — twenty-five’. 25 The irritating contradiction and ‘inconsistency’ between a very young Hamlet in the beginning and one of thirty in the end is here dissolved in the arithmetical compromise of an average age. At a time when the world was measured, Shakespeare was measured, too. And to give just one recent example of the longevity of this 23. Maynard Mack, ‘The World of Hamlet’, in Shakespeare: The Tragedies. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Alfred Harbage, Twentieth Century Views, 40 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964), pp. 44–60 (pp. 56–59). 24. Robert E. Wood, Some Necessary Questions of the Play. A Stage-Centered Analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (London, Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), p. 51. 25. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Hamlet, ed. by Horace Howard Furness, 2 vols (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1877) I, pp. 391–94.

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venerable misapprehension, John Lee in his fine Hamlet book recently proposes that ‘[i]t is appropriate, if unintended, that Hamlet’s age and dress is so particularly indeterminate’.26 But both are, on the contrary, explicitly determinate.27 The conventional view runs directly counter to what Shakespeare has put down in his text, without the shadow of an inconsistency, and with amazing dramatic acuity. Curiously, why Shakespeare gives this information about Hamlet’s age so late in the play seems to be one of the hitherto unasked questions about Hamlet.28 Of course that kind of explicit information ‘normally’ belongs in the exposition which, however, in this case doesn’t offer any (which has led to that time-honoured assumption that what we are told in act five is Hamlet’s age in the whole play). But in terms of Shakespeare’s stage economy there is no need for such information early in the play since Hamlet is clearly defined by the stage context as a member of the young generation.29 He is a student, so is Horatio (significantly the first undergraduates in Elizabethan drama),30 and then there are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Fortinbras, Laertes, and of course Ophelia who is duly warned against young Hamlet’s ‘unmastered importunity’ (1.3.32). The young are contrasted with the old, those in power: Polonius, Claudius and Gertrude, old Norway and the shadowy figures of old Hamlet and old Fortinbras. What we have, then, in this astounding tragedy is two Hamlets firmly embedded in the text. The gravedigger scene (5.1.) has many functions, and one of them is, most unusually, to serve as a second exposition, an exposition designed particularly to introduce the mature Hamlet. The original Hamlets were played by Richard Burbage (c. 1571–1619), who actually was about thirty at the time of the play’s first performance. We cannot know whether that was pure coincidence or somehow helped to shape the dramatist’s decisions. In any case, Burbage was such a splendid actor that, supported by Hamlet’s immediately visible status as an undergraduate, he could play the very young Hamlet as well as the one his own age (Burbage also was the original Lear only about six years later). But why two Hamlets? Why endow a dramatic character with so much energy, intellectual prowess and charm, why send him off stage in scene four 26. Lee, p. 205. 27. Hamlet wears of course a student’s ‘customary suits of solemn black’ (2.2.77–8), and in 2.2. a traditional ‘inky cloak’ of mourning on top. 28. See Walch, Hamlet, pp. 33–39. 29. The adjective ‘young’ figures seventeen times in the text, most frequently in act 1 (6 times; 2 in act 2, 0 in act 3, 4 in act 4, 4 in act 5). 30. See Newell, p. 174.

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of act four for even more excruciating experiences only to have the tragedy end in fortuity? For an answer, let me return to that key dramatic gravedigger scene (5.1.) of highly suggestive narrativity. There is no time here to go into the famous eschatological disputation although that, too, prominently provides evidence of Hamlet’s new maturity. Instead, let us briefly look into the dramaturgical technicalities of the scene. After the discussion centring on the skull, Hamlet asks the clown how long he has been digging graves and gets the answer quoted above (5.1.139–44; 5.1.156–57). The scene is usually discussed — and directed — under the heading of ‘comic relief’. It is of course a superbly comic scene, comic in the profoundest sense of the word considering its context. But the scene’s functions are much more complex than that. Being told that the skull is Yorick’s, Hamlet is suddenly and shockingly confronted with a significant part of his biography, his childhood: HAMLET Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now — how abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar […]. (5.1.178–85)

Yorick, the gravedigger goes on to tell Hamlet, has been buried for twentythree years (167–68). It follows that Hamlet was seven when the court jester died. Again, that is no arbitrary choice of age. It signifies an important turning-point in the life of an Elizabethan boy. It was the age at which school or, for the less privileged, work began. ‘In the Renaissance it was also the age of transition from childhood to youth and from a culturally ungendered world to a culturally gendered world: It was the breeching age, when the smocks in which children of both sexes were dressed gave way to gender-specific clothing’.31 Seven was the age, in other words, at which boys moved officially, visibly from the world of womankind into that of men. In Hamlet’s case the death of Yorick, his playmate when the boy was seven, signifies the end of a fondly remembered childhood of ‘infinite jest’. When the German polyhistor and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz declared the existing world to be God’s choice out of a multitude of ‘possible worlds’, he explicitly drew on the inventive power of narrative literature to 31. Steven Mullaney, ‘Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600–1607’, in Political Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen, Shakespeare: The Critical Complex, 9 (New York and London: Garland, 1999), pp. 67–89 (pp. 83–84).

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clarify the point he was trying to make. Undeniably, he pointed out, we believe many inventions we read about in novels to be possible although we are well aware that they do not find a place in the universe chosen by God, and are therefore not real. According to Leibniz, one of literature’s functions is thus to represent the possibilities contained but not realised in our world.32 Each textual universe is, in the words of Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘a collection of concatenated or embedded possible worlds,’ and a ‘world is possible in a system of reality if it is accessible from the world at the center of that system’.33 Shakespeare’s performative power of narration creates a large number of worlds accessible from the centre that relate to Hamlet’s life and which are therefore possible. And what Shakespeare does here had never been done before: he tells a life story in a (revenge) tragedy, and he even makes the protagonist tell parts of it as autobiography. The childhood story is performatively elicited by the skull. Telling the hero’s childhood story within the second exposition opens up a new narrative beginning. Actually, what we are dealing with here is a new plot, and is a clear invitation to the audience to actualise, concatenate and organize, in a ‘participatory mode’,34 previous and present performative and narrative building bricks. Following the invitation means that we can recontextualise very familiar building bricks and read Hamlet’s biography from its chronological beginning in early life — in fact, as the gravedigger says, from ‘that very day that young Hamlet was born’ (5.1.143). First, we are given a vivid impression of the light-heartedness and fun of the child’s life at his father’s court. Subsequently (1.2.), we are shown Hamlet, the young student on leave from Wittenberg. This possible world of the university is richly associated with the Reformation and we are invited to use our knowledge and imagination to visualize this world. Thus we read a plot into the central stage performance: Hamlet is mourning his father’s death, and is in conflict with the new king and also with his mother. He is delighted to see again two school-friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They have turned traitor, tools in the hands of Claudius. However, he also has a true friend, Horatio, who firmly stands by him even beyond death. We become eye-witnesses of his heart-breaking relationship with ‘the fair Ophelia’ (5.1.235) with whom, as he confirms after her death 32. See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophische Werke in vier Bänden, ed. by Ernst Cassirer, trans. by Artur Buchenau, 4 vols (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1996) II, p. 654. 33. ‘These possible worlds may be actualized, thrown away, or remain in virtual state, depending on whether the text verifies, disproves, or leaves undecided the reader’s rationalization of the narrative events’. Ryan, Possible Worlds, p. 4. 34. Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘Introduction’, in Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, ed. by Mary-Laure Ryan (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 1– 40 (p. 14).

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(5.1.264), he really was in love. One intense interest of the young man has been the theatre. We see him welcoming a troupe of ‘tragedians of the city’ (2.2.327) with whom he has been on friendly terms for some time. This means that as part of his life narrative the young prince has also had experience of city life, which constitutes another chapter in his life lived in another possible world. The theatre to him is thus an institution of informal education, as to Wilhelm Meister at the end of the eighteenth century (1795/6). The theatre is ingeniously used by Hamlet to prove the king guilty (3.2.). For that purpose he directs a play, part of which he writes himself. We know from Ophelia that he used to address love poems to her, ‘words of so sweet breath compos’d / As made the things more rich’ (3.1.98–99). Now we see the young man extending his theatrical and literary experience as well as being a poet and a scholar, all parts of a Renaissance gentleman’s education and self-fashioning. A significant part of the narrative is devoted to the prince’s relationship with his mother. This is so important to the young man’s life story that it is shown from changing narrative perspectives, semi-public in the court scene, and in intimate dialogue, with interference by the Ghost (3.4.). It is here that Hamlet has that very extreme experience: in a rush of spontaneous activity he kills Polonius, mistaking him for the king. Claudius, to get the dangerous young fellow out of the way, sends him to England allegedly ‘for thine especial safety’ (4.3.40). Still on Danish soil he meets Fortinbras’s army on their march to make war on Poland. On board ship he discovers his death warrant, and by means of his calligraphic skill succeeds in replacing it with a forged letter of his own making that leads to the traitors’ death, all of which Hamlet first writes (4.6.) and then tells Horatio (5.2.13–80). Subsequently the classical travel motif produces a series of strange and surprising adventures. He is captured by pirates — yet another possible world conjured up in Hamlet’s letter to Horatio of merely sixteen lines (4.6.12–28). Released, Hamlet returns to England to be greeted by his friend Horatio and just in time to witness the finally unhappy ending of his love story and to tell the story of his adventures himself. In the graveyard scene his new maturity and equanimity are clearly in evidence. Above all, the context shows that he cedes his role as amateur fool to the professional clown, the gravedigger. The role-change is an additional dramaturgical means highlighting the dramatic change in the mature Hamlet’s rhetoric. In the fifth act he is not given a single one of those self-questioning soliloquies which have become his hallmark. He has learnt to control his passions.35 Where before he was given to 35. See Günter Walch, ‘Passionate Hamlet’, in History and Drama: Essays in Honour of Bernhard Reitz, ed. by Sigrid Rieuwerts (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2006), pp. 316–27 (p. 323).

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brooding, despair and raving, he now speaks about life in clear philosophical language. He also uses straightforward language in the exchange with Laertes before the duel. Hamlet, not suspecting the actual deadly conspiracy against himself nor Laertes’s part in it, offers the young man a handsome apology for his previous behaviour: ‘Give me your pardon, sir. I have done you wrong’ (5.2.222); a little later in the same scene Laertes will hesitantly come to regret his involvement as the criminal king’s tool: ‘And yet it is almost against my conscience’ (5.2.300). That is, first of all, another manifestation of Hamlet’s new maturity and noble attitude. Yet with nineteen lines (5.2.222–39) this speech of Hamlet’s is amazingly expanded. It does give the reformed prince the chance to explain his previous crudely overbearing and reckless behaviour. But what does that explanation consist of? ‘This presence knows’, Hamlet says pointing to the courtly assembly, ‘and you must needs have heard, / How I am punish’d with a sore distraction’ (224–25). That is indeed no news at all. Everybody knows that, even the gravedigger had previously referred to Hamlet as ‘he that is mad and sent into England’ (5.1.43–44). Everybody believes that, everybody with the exception of the Machiavellian Claudius who after eavesdropping on Hamlet and Ophelia shrewdly observes: KING Love? His affections do not that way tend, Nor what he spake, though it lack’d form a little, Was not like madness. (3.1.164–66)

The king’s guilty conscience has made him the prince’s keenest observer. By that time the audience know, of course, how well-founded the king’s doubts are. They have been witnesses to the scene in which Hamlet confides to Horatio his decision ‘[t]o put an antic disposition on’ (1.5.180). But that seems not to be what Hamlet is referring to in this context. He strongly insists that he was driven by some sort of strange madness and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his words uttered shortly before the great reckoning: HAMLET What I have done […] I here proclaim was madness. Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet. If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away, And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. Who does it then? His madness. If’t be so, Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong’d; His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy. (5.2.226–35)

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Hamlet exculpates himself from any responsibility for his overbearing, arrogant and cruel behaviour even towards his loved ones, Ophelia and his mother, because, he says, he was beside himself, not himself at all. In his own eyes, he is ‘poor Hamlet’, a victim rather than a perpetrator, ‘disclaiming from a purpos’d evil’ (237) because he was possessed by something mysteriously stronger than himself. But who was ‘poor Hamlet’s enemy’ (235)? What drove him to do things which he now seriously regrets? It cannot have been ‘madness’ in the clinical sense, because to mark the difference the play provides the heartbreaking example of the genuinely insane Ophelia. To make the difference even more pronounced, throughout the play whenever Hamlet talks to Horatio he can do so in the kind of language he otherwise uses only after the completion of his process of maturation. Even at the height of his ‘melancholy’ and raving on the two occasions in the second scene of act three when he is in private exchange with his friend but generally under enormous pressure there are no signs of insanity at all in his linguistic and general behaviour. As in the play throughout, Horatio sets a standard of classically stoical, well-balanced conduct. And in those situations, and in this respect, Hamlet is his perfect match. Hamlet’s ‘madness’ is thus not a medical category, nor is it an effect of the ‘antic disposition’ which he can after all, as he does in the presence of Horatio, switch on and off in accordance with the needs of his strategy. It is, then, rather an effect of the same phenomenon which initiated the protagonist’s stature and the tragedy’s second plot in the first place: the new subjectivity. What we are thus also shown in this incredibly complex and rich text is subjectivity’s extreme potential, its reverse as it were, the exuberance of an emancipated individualism — hence the nimblefooted sharp humour amid the desperation and melancholy, but also the individualism of a giant ego which recklessly considers itself the lone centre of the world. To wind up that remarkably long monologue Hamlet appeals to Laertes’s ‘most generous thoughts’ to grant him forgiveness. What he did to Laertes was, he says, ‘[t]hat I have shot my arrow o’er the house’ (5.2.238). The phrase is glossed by Jenkins (Arden, p. 408) as ‘common’ and as signifying that the arrow, ‘once released, may go farther than one meant’. As far as I can see, the metaphor has attracted little previous comment. But the high-flying image is a most adequate and powerful expression of egocentric individualism transcending, for better or for worse, deliberately or not, conventional boundaries of custom and decorum and possibly social compatibility. The example is evidence once again of Shakespeare’s untiring endeavours to find theatrical expressions for what cannot yet be expressed in conceptual language. And ‘melancholy’, the Elizabethan term also for the fashionable general phenomenon of the egocentric or even megalomaniacal genius, seems not at all in-

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appropriate for the condition. Hamlet, however, is cured not by any healer but by the experiences and challenges of life itself. All that is the ‘life material’ out of which the 18th century formed a new genre, the ‘novel of formation’ or ‘novel of education’ (‘Bildungs-’, ‘Erziehungs-’ or ‘Entwicklungsroman’). Its central concern was ‘the development of the protagonist’s mind and character, in the passage from childhood through varied experiences — and usually through a spiritual crisis — into maturity and the recognition of his or her identity and role in the world’.36 Beginning with Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser (1785–90) portraying the maturation of an individual male character, the novel of education included Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96), Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924). In Hamlet, we have all the stages and elements of a young man’s development presented by a complex structural blend of showing and telling on the experimental stage of the Elizabethan theatre: childhood, boyhood, adolescence, young manhood, formal and informal education, love, life at court and at the university, city life, tragedy in the family, a complicated relationship of a son to his mother, violent deaths, extended travel forcing him to brave many critical situations — the maturation of an Early Modern individual. The life story narrates what drama alone cannot show, what even highly narrativised drama finds it difficult to cope with, and what narrative will ultimately achieve: narrate a life, not just perform one tragic crisis. Each new adventure and experience widens Hamlet’s horizon and furthers his maturation, until in the end he achieves the balance and maturity and subjectivity which transcend the demands of the traditional generic ending. The various stages and rich episodes of that life story together represent the course of a lived life necessary for the individual to acquire a sense of selfhood, of subjectivity. That is why Hamlet’s evocation of his childhood experiences is of extraordinary importance. Only if there is a beginning, middle and end, tragically premature in this case, is there a subject of whom a story can be told. The evolution of biographical structures corresponds to the actual historical emergence of modern subjectivity (and simultaneously to the process in which ‘an author becomes an Author’).37 In telling and showing The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Hamlet, of Denmark, as such a narrative might have been typically called over a century later, Shakespeare also 36. M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988), pp. 119–20. 37. David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 134.

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resorted to what were to become the classical means of the later narrative art including a large number of letters. In the last analysis, the play’s generic transgressions far more than individual quotations have led, I suggest, to Kiernan Ryan’s observation that ‘the unvoiced assumptions that govern it are indeed far ahead of its time’,38 and to that of Richard Wilson, based on Mallarmé, Joyce, Nietzsche and Heiner Müller, of an apocalyptic Hamlet.39 Hamlet’s generic transgressions do indeed gesture towards the future, but as a result of trying to cope with the seismographic recording of the new subjectivity already in evidence, for better or for worse, in Shakespeare’s own time. In the end, the generic demands of the tragedy have obviously to be met, its hero has achieved maturity and recognized his identity, but he cannot assume his ‘role in the world’ (Abram): as a tragic hero he has to be sacrificed. Since that is brought about by mere chance, however, the sacrifice becomes a hollow ritual. The discrepancy between a highly sophisticated Early Modern individual and a questionable ‘restitution’ has grown so wide as to have become unbridgeable. And yet the play clearly endeavours to preserve the dignity befitting a tragic hero by ceremoniously granting him the honours of war and by a whole series of ‘obituaries’, by Laertes (5.2.333–36), Horatio (5.2.364–65) and, finally, Fortinbras (5.2.400–8). In light of the play’s second plot the protagonist’s final commission to Horatio is also invested with a secondary significance: ‘Report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied.’ (5.2.344–45) Following the logic of the second plot, the question of a ‘cause’, as vital to a restitution as it is difficult to define in the present case, is dropped only a few lines on when Hamlet repeats his urgent request: ‘And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story.’ (5.2.353–54) Except for finally giving Fortinbras his ‘dying voice’ (5.2.361), these are Hamlet’s last words in the play, and they culminate in literally naming the innovative project the play has been engaged in all the while — to tell Hamlet’s life story. Some final conclusions can only be briefly and tentatively suggested in the present context. In bringing a supremely developed self to the stage, Shakespeare strained the generic potential of even this highly narrativised tragedy, and thus subliminally helped prepare the emergence of the modern novel in a long period of gestation. No doubt English epic writers (Thomas Deloney, George Gascoigne, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, etc.) and major European prose writers, Cervantes first and foremost, prepared the way for the classical 18th century novel, the genre which, to poster38. Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare (London: Palgrave, 2002), p. 194. 39. Richard Wilson, Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 229–30.

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ity, would appear as that period’s most significant one. But the history of English literature can no longer, I suggest, be perceived generically as a linear progression, since, as our case clearly shows, that process involves perpetual transgeneric negotiations. We can see these prefigured in Hamlet owing to complex circumstances and a brilliantly unpredictable ‘Author’ (Kastan) who clearly got fascinated by what were to become the materials of that modern novel typically centring on the experiences and maturation of a young man. My contention is not that a radical change of genre was taking place, or that the play may be considered a sort of antecedent of the modern novel form. But the materials ingested in that way were allowed to gestate paradoxically in a genre not suitable for their generic accomplishment. For prose narratives to assume their modern shape it took, as Monika Fludernik analysing Aphra Behn’s novels has shown, the transfer of the larger scenic units and tight plot structure from Elizabethan drama to the novel.40 Bibliography Abrams, M.H., A Glossary of Literary Terms (Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988). Belsey, Catherine, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985). Burnett, Mark Thornton and John Manning, eds., New Essays on Hamlet, The Hamlet Collection, 1 (New York: AIMS Press, 1994). Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). Clemen, Wolfgang, Shakespeares Monologe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964). Findlay, Alison, ‘Hamlet: A Document of Madness’, in New Essays on Hamlet, ed. by Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning, The Hamlet Collection, 1 (New York: AIMS Press, 1994), pp. 189–205. Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996). Furness, Horace Howard, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Hamlet, 2 vols (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1877). Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Groebner, Valentin, Who are You? Identification, Deception and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 2007). Lee, John, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of the Self (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Philosophische Werke in vier Bänden, ed. by Ernst Cassier, trans. by Arthur Buchenau, 4 vols (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1996). Kastan, David Scott, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

40. See Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural Narratology’ (London: Routledge, 1993).

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Mack, Maynard, ‘The World of Hamlet’, in Shakespeare: The Tragedies. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Alfred Harbage, Twentieth Century Views, 40 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964), pp. 44–60. Mahler, Andreas, ‘Das ideologische Profil’, in Shakespeare-Handbuch: Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt, ed. by Ina Schabert (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2000), pp. 299–323. Martin, Thomas L., Poiesis and Possible Worlds: A Study in Modality and Literary Theory (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004). Mullaney, Steven, ‘Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger´s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600–1607’, in Political Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen, Shakespeare: The Critical Complex, 9 (New York and London: Garland, 1999), pp. 67–162. Newell, Alex, The Soliloquies in Hamlet: The Structural Design (London and Toronto: Associated Universities Press, 1991). Nünning, Vera and Ansgar, ‘Von der strukturalistischen Narratologie zur “postklassischen” Erzähltheorie: Ein Überblick über neue Ansätze und Entwicklungstendenzen’, in Neue Ansätze in der Erzähltheorie, ed. by Vera and Ansgar Nünning, WVT Handbücher zum Literaturwissenschaftlichen Studium, 4 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002), pp. 1–33. Nünning, Ansgar and Roy Sommer, ‘Die performative Kraft des Erzählens: Formen und Funktionen des Erzählens in Shakespeares Dramen’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 142 (2006), 124–41. Ryan, Kiernan, Shakespeare (London: Palgrave, 2002). Ryan, Marie-Laure, ‘Introduction’, in Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, ed. by Marie-Laure Ryan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 1–40. —, ‘Possible worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typology of Fiction’, in Poetics Today 12.3 (1991), 553–76. —, Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Shakespeare, William, King Henry V, ed. by J.H. Walter, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1977). —, King Henry IV, ed. by A.R. Humphreys, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1978). —, Hamlet, ed. by Harold Jenkins, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982). Vickers, Brian, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 vols, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974–81). Walch, Günter, Hamlet. Shakespeare und kein Ende, 2, ed. by Sonja Fielitz (Bochum: Kamp, 2004). Walch, Günter, ‘Passionate Hamlet’, in History and Drama: Essays in Honour of Bernhard Reitz, ed. by Sigrid Rieuwerts (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2006), pp. 316–27. Weimann, Robert, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice. Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Wilson, Rawdon, Shakespearean Narrative (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1995). Wilson, Richard, Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). Wood, Robert E., Some Necessary Questions of the Play: A Stage-Centered Analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (London, Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994).

A Spider in the Eye/I The Hallucinatory Staging of the Self in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale Maria Del Sapio Garbero Just before Polixenes, the King of Bohemia, flees with Camillo from Leontes’s homicidal jealousy, Polixenes asks: ‘How should this grow?’. Camillo, Leontes’s cupbearer, answers: ‘I know not: but I am sure ‘tis safer to / Avoid what’s grown than question how ’tis born’ (1.2. 431–33). As if invested with the role of driving forward the action of the play, Camillo seems to dismiss the fundamental relevance of the question by confusing the process of Leontes’s folly with its origins. For, unaware as he may be, what has been staged until then, and what we are called to observe in most of the play, is primarily a physiology, or rather a pathology; the how of the hysterical fantasy working its way through the king’s body, as if independent of its cause. Tellingly, in revising his source (Greene’s Pandosto), Shakespeare subtly constructed Hermione’s adultery as a non-existing cause, or more precisely as a ‘touched conjecture’, in Leontes’s words, ‘that lack’d sight only, nought for approbation / But only seeing’ (2.1.177–78). This ‘cause’ remains without ocular or testimonial proof throughout the play, and yet it is maniacally substantiated by Leontes, through repeatedly invoked acts of seeing. Focusing on Leontes’s solo performances which take immediate centre-stage in the first act of The Winter’s Tale, I first relate his error of vision to a physiology of the self and to contemporary discoveries concerning the eye and the nature of sight. I then consider the extent to which Leontes’s hallucinatory quasi-soliloquies epitomize a disempowered proto-baroque staging of the self. I also speculate on the way in which the female body of Hermione visually influences the king’s disturbed perspective.

The Winter’s Tale is well-known for presenting us with a case of unjustified jealousy and destructive masculinity. Indeed, we have hardly been introduced to the main characters onstage in the first act of the play — Leontes, the King of Sicily; his wife Hermione; and their guest Polixenes, King of Bohemia — when we are left alone with Leontes elaborating on his abrupt suspicion of Hermione’s adultery, which soon develops into a homicidal plot against his old and best friend Polixenes. Just before fleeing into the night on the suggestion of Leontes’s cupbearer, Camillo, Polixenes asks: ‘How should this grow?’. To which Camillo, until that moment the almost silent onlooker of his king’s swelling folly, answers: ‘I know not: but I am sure ’tis safer to / Avoid what’s grown than question how ’tis born’ (1.2. 431–33).1 As if invested with the role of driving forward the action of the play, Camillo seems to dismiss the fundamental relevance of the question by con1.

Quotations from The Winter’s Tale are taken from the Arden Edition, ed. by J.H.P. Pafford (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).

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fusing the process of Leontes’s folly with its origins. For, unaware as he may be, and to the disappointment of the too curious, what has been staged until then, and what we are called to observe in most of the play, is primarily a physiology, or rather a pathology, the how of the hysterical fantasy working its way through the king’s body, as if independent of its cause. Tellingly, in revising his source (Greene’s Pandosto), Shakespeare subtly constructed Hermione’s adultery as a non-existing cause, or more precisely as a ‘touched conjecture’, in Leontes’s words, ‘[t]hat lack’d sight only, nought for approbation / But only seeing’ (2.1.177–78). This ‘cause’ remains without ocular or testimonial proof throughout the play, and yet it is maniacally substantiated by Leontes, through repeatedly invoked acts of seeing. ‘Ha’ not you seen, Camillo […] or heard?’, Leontes insists, while searching for a replica of his kingly and yet unassured sight. ‘(But that’s past doubt: you have, or your eye-glass / Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn) […]. / If thou wilt confess, / Or else be impudently negative, / To have nor eyes, nor ears, nor thought, then say / My wife’s a hobby horse…’ (1.2. 267–76). As we can see, despite (or perhaps because of) the absence of ocular proofs, sight soon emerges as an issue in itself. Sight occurs as the deceitful sense of the self, the object of dissection, the instrument of a carnivalised exposure of the deceived self. And sight is the vector along which Leontes’s self-portrait as a jealous man soon evolves into a sort of nihilistic manifesto. For, he argues, if what I see is nothing, ‘[…] then the world is nothing, and all that’s in’t, is nothing’ (1.2.293).2 This is how Leontes furiously and despotically over-rules Camillo in his courtly dialogical role of truthful counsellor and rapidly wins the theatrical space of the throne for his neurotic monological perspective. All other interlocutors (oracles included) who do not comply with his selfgenerating gaze are sentenced to prison or silence. LEONTES What! lack I credit? […] Why, what need we Commune with you of this, but rather follow Our forceful instigation? Our prerogative Calls not your counsels, but our natural goodness Impart this; which if you, or stupefied, Or seeming so, in skill, cannot or will not Relish a truth, like us, inform ourselves We need no more of your advice: the matter,

2.

But this is ‘the portrait of the skeptic as a fanatic’, in the terms of Stanley Cavell. That of a man who transforms his own perspective into a disastrous disavowing programme. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 206.

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The loss, the gain, the ord’ring on’t, is all Properly ours. (2.1.157–69)

Focusing on Leontes’s solo performances which take centre-stage in the first act of The Winter’s Tale, I will first relate his error of vision, or infected vision, to a physiology of the self and to contemporary discoveries concerning the eye and the nature of sight. I shall then consider the extent to which Leontes’s hallucinatory quasi-soliloquies epitomise a disempowered protobaroque staging of the self. In doing this I will speculate on the way the female body of Hermione visually influences the king’s disturbed perspective. ‘So disgrac’d a part’ To date, at least to my knowledge, Leontes’s dramatisation of his ill-humoured self has received little attention in connection with its pervading anatomical/ medical register. 3 Compared with other Shakespearean plays The Winter’s Tale has at the most deserved a quotation (or minor comments) in the vast research of the last two decades or so devoted to ‘Renaissance psychological materialism’4; research which has forcefully brought to the fore the relation between physical bodies and ways of experiencing the self in an epoch when ‘[…] the psychological had not yet become divorced from the physiological’. 5 One partial exception to this oversight is perhaps offered by David Hillman’s essay in The Body in Parts (1997), where The Winter’s Tale is discussed together with Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida as an incisive example of Shakespeare’s preoccupation with ‘corporeal inwardness’ and of an Early Modern ‘visceral knowledge’ of the self. ‘The rise of the protomodern science of anatomy’, says Hillman following Sawday’s work6 on the culture of dissection in the Early Modern period, 3.

4.

5. 6.

This is a register that will be reinforced later in the play by Paulina who refers to her chastising verbal interventions as a ‘purge’, an aid in combating the king’s malady: ‘I / Do come with words as medicinal as true, / Honest, as either, to purge him of that humour / That presses him from sleep’ (2.3.36–39). See especially Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), but also Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Paster, Humoring the Body, p. 7. Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

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allowed the interior of the body during these years to become the site of a rapidly growing body of ‘humane knowledge’. Beginning, more or less, with Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543), the body’s ‘Secrets unknowne’ [here Hillman is quoting John Davis of Hereford, 1603] increasingly became privileged — and accessible — objects of a reifying science, one that turned corporeal insides into a visible spectacle. In the anatomy theater and in the period’s profusion of anatomical texts […] human entrails were exposed to a penetrative gaze […].7

The Winter’s Tale gives ample evidence of how Shakespeare assimilates the playhouse into the anatomy theatre. What is interesting, however, is that Leontes turns the anatomical gaze upon himself, and consequently the gaze itself becomes the object of representation and self-representation. Following the first appearance of Leontes’s jealousy which he refers to as tremor cordis, soon biblically rephrased as a dancing heart (‘I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances, / But not for joy — not joy’ [1.2.110–11])8, princely entrails (whether those be the king’s or the queen’s, or both) are lavished on the audience in the course of Leontes’s soliloquizing experience of his obsessed self. But as in Dürer’s Self-portrait as a sick man (illustration 1), pertinently chosen by Michael Schoenfeldt as a frontispiece for his book on Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (1999), Leontes’s self-dramatisation strongly stages his gaze as he points to the physical place of his inner discomfort: his panting heart, and later in the second act, ‘his gorge’ and ‘sides’ cracked ‘[w]ith violent hefts’ (2.1.44–45). Given this emphasis on the gaze in the play, Hillman’s categorization of Leontes as a sceptic appears problematic if, as we witness in his essay, this is based exclusively on the part played by the king’s innards (belly, gorge, sides).9 I feel that we partly miss the point of Leontes’s shattered self unless we take as our critical focus the perspective of his false, self-generated knowledge and hence the role played by sight and its concomitant if not prior disturbance. As I see it, Leontes is less the embodiment of a viscerally-based scepticism than he who dramatises with his whole body — and Early Modern communicating organs, belly, heart, eyes, brain — the delusions of knowledge, and thus the late Renaissance vulnerability of the perceiving subject. Leontes’s false knowledge, I argue, originates in what I would call a fatal short circuit 7.

8. 9.

David Hillman, ‘Visceral Knowledge: Shakespeare, Skepticism, and the Interior of the Early Modern Body’, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 81–105 (pp. 81 and 83–84). See footnote to The Winter’s Tale, ed. by J.H.P. Pafford, p. 11. His bodily discomfort, Hillman maintains, is that of a person who responds to knowledge with a painful closure or stiffening of the body. His scepticism is founded on ‘a refusal to allow some encroaching knowledge of the other to inhabit the body’ (Hillman, p. 96).

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between bowels and eye. Indeed, the alimentary trait and the eye are forcefully yoked together by Leontes when he says: ‘I have drunk, and seen the spider’ (2.1.45). He thus offers, through an intromissive, drinking metaphor, a marvellous synthesis of the two functions of seeing and corporeally eating up what he has himself created as a hallucinatory object: a spider.

Illustration 1: Albrecht Dürer, Self-portrait as a Sick Man, c. 1512–1513. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Bremen – Der Kunstverein in Bremen.

I am using the term ‘intromissive’ advisedly since Shakespeare’s alimentary metaphor seems to refer us to what could be regarded as an innovative conception of vision in a period when, as an effect of the anatomical turn, the Platonic extramissive theory of vision (with its eyebeam motif) was being superseded by the more plausible Aristotelian rival theory of intromission.

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The Early Modern French anatomist and royal physician André Du Laurens summarises this debate when he tells his readers: ‘the first doe hold that we see by emission or having something going forth of the eye, the latter by reception or receiving something of the object into the eye’.10 The prevailing theory of intromission, and the relevance it had in fostering the sense of an unprotected, diminished status of the eye and hence that of the perceiving ‘I’, provides the conceptual ground for an understanding of Leontes’s drinking metaphor. I will expand upon vision and Leontes’s invaded and infected eye/I, but first it is important to point out Leontes’s strong awareness of himself as an ‘I’ alone on stage in front of an audience, theatrically rehearsing his grotesque, or carnivalised self. LEONTES […] [Exeunt Polixenes, Hermione, and Attendants] Gone already! Inch-thick, knee-deep; o’er head and ears a fork’d one. Go, play, boy, play: thy mother plays, and I Play to; but so disgrac’d a part, whose issue Will hiss me to my grave: contempt and clamour Will be my knell. Go, play, boy, play. (1.2.185–90)

As in Macbeth (5.5.24–28), but more so here, theatre (or the metaphor of life as theatre) is exploited for a curtailed derisive diagnosis.11 In fact, as shown by his monologues (or asides), Leontes’s self-understanding seems less a measure of his tragic stature than of his histrionic capacity to provokingly act out, to the discomfort of his audience, the hallucinatory gaze of a debased kingship. Nourishing his ravenously jealous gaze with the fantasised open body of the queen (a ‘pond’ with open gates, ‘fish’d by his next neighbour’), Leontes makes his audience participate in his anguish over the idea of a hostile entity (whether that be bodies or bodies of knowledge) entering and invading likewise his own helpless open interior: a kingly interior which he lays bare to his audience as an assailable feminised anatomy. 10. André Du Laurens, A discourse of the preservation of the sight; of melancholike diseases; of rheumes, and of old age, trans. by Richard Surphlet (London: Felix Kingston, 1599), p. 37. For a discussion of the two rival theories see Marcus Nordlund, The Dark Lantern: A Historical Study of Sight in Shakespeare, Webster, and Middleton (Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1999), pp. 49–90; see also Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, ‘Taming the Basilisk’, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 195– 217 (pp. 198–99). 11. Quotations from Macbeth are taken from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. by W. J. Craig (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).

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LEONTES […] There have been, (Or I am much deceiv’d) cuckolds ere now, And many a man there is (even at this present, Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th’arm, That little thinks she has been sluic’d in ’s absence And his pond fish’d by his next neighbour, by Sir Smile, his neighbour: nay, there’s comfort in’t, Whiles other men have gates, and those gates open’d, As mine, against their will. Should all despair That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind Would hang themselves. Physic for’t there’s none; It is a bawdy planet, that will strike Where ’tis predominant; and ’tis powerful, think it, From east, west, north, south; be it concluded, No barricado for a belly. Know’t, It will let in and out the enemy, With bag and baggage; many thousand on’s Have the disease, and feel’t not. How now, boy? (1.2.190–207)

It would be difficult to understand what and whom Leontes is talking about if we did not consider that the abhorred, invaded belly of the queen conveys here a surfacing perception of himself as corporeally entered by an infective (and homoerotically charged), destabilising body.12 If, however, we want to know how the ‘invasion’ metaphor is handled in Leontes’s hallucinated reasoning, we should first take notice of the underlying cultural conceptualisation at work here of the humoral body in its ‘physical openness’.13 This Early Modern body was conceived as permeable to the exterior marks and influences analogically imprinted on it by nature and astrology, as well as internally porous, and as such liable (when left unrestrained) to being invaded in all its parts by hostile entities. Leontes’s uncontrolled humoural subjectivity is concisely hinted at in passing by Camillo (in spite of himself) before leaving the king to his folly at the end of the first act: CAMILLO […] you may as well Forbid the sea for to obey the moon, As or by oath remove or counsel shake The fabric of his folly, whose foundation Is pil’d upon his faith, and will continue The standing of his body. (1.2.426–31)

12. The relation to Leontes’s ‘own corporeal interior’ has already been pointed out by David Hillman, but with a different critical purpose, in his ‘Visceral Knowledge’, p. 95. 13. On this and on porous humoral subjectivity, see Paster, Humoring the Body, pp. 14–19.

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Camillo seems to suggest that as powerful as the system of astrological influences among planets and stars may be, it is the fatal circularity of his corporeal inner drives from which the king will fail to escape. Indeed, the more Leontes anatomises the supposed motivations of his distemper, the more he enters the hallucinatory process. But of course, Leontes is better than Camillo in dramatising his kingly body in its stubborn and yet porous humoral subjectivity.14 He shows what one can do via an associative process, even without Freud, by a disorderly ‘piling’ of one’s obsession (or ‘theme’, 1.2.459) upon self-generated analogies. He need only give free rein to what he calls his ‘forceful instigation’ (2.1.163), and a frantic turn to the analogical series of concatenations in which the Elizabethans were so well trained. And so, through mixing bodies, landscape, and astrology, moving to and fro between the particular and the general, and making the metaphor frantically traverse different planes of meaning, Hermione’s fantasised unguarded ‘pond’ is doubled in the exposure of other bodies, and in that of the king’s own body open to the otherness of a malignant knowledge. In observing himself as playing what he calls ‘so disgrac’d a part’, Leontes distances himself from the distemper he is experiencing. He does so by staging himself as both the victim and anatomist of his curtailed infected self. On looking into Hermione’s body, he sees his own, via the ambiguity of female ‘ponds’, and men’s ‘gates’. He looks inside at the vilification of his open, infected body; but at the same time he spectacularises his gaze by overtly and consciously involving his audience in his carnivalesque self-exposure or anatomy theatre. Leontes’s doubling of his persona is part of the monopolisation of roles in his play; it is part of his monological perspective. But it is precisely the despotic spectacularisation of his kingly monological gaze which spells out the grotesque side of his disordered subjectivity. Indeed the loss of status he laments coincides precisely with the dethronement of what was deemed the noblest of all senses: sight; or worse, of what should have been a proper exercise of his kingly visual virtues, as they were ritually celebrated in the Stuart masque.15

14. Indeed, he often flaunts it as when he boasts that he can see with the vitality of his body (thus alerting us to the risky short-circuiting of knowledge and senses): ‘Cease; no more. / You smell this business with a sense as cold / As in a dead man’s nose: but I do see’t and feel’t, / As you feel doing thus; and see withal / The instruments that feel’ (2.1.150–54). 15. See Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). See also Jerzy Limon’s interesting article in this volume.

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Leontes’s spider Let us turn for a moment to the part of the monologue we find at the beginning of act two, when as a consequence of Polixenes’s fleeing in the night with the cupbearer Camillo, Leontes thinks he has been served, as in a cup, the venomous proof of Hermione’s adultery. LEONTES How blest am I In my just censure! in my true opinion! Alack, for lesser knowledge! How accurs’d In being so blest! There may be in the cup A spider steep’d, and one may drink, depart, And yet partake no venom (for his knowledge Is not infected); but if one present Th’ abhorr’d ingredient to his eye, make known How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides, With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider. Camillo was [Polixenes’s] help in this, his pandar: There is a plot against my life, my crown […] (2.1.36–45)

Leontes’s jealousy has here expanded into more general paranoiac fears about his life and his crown. But I now want to return to his metaphor of the spider in the cup and concentrate on the way it literally contributes to the construction of ‘knowledge’ as a potentially false knowledge. Along the same lines as the previously quoted first monologue of act one, scene two, Leontes is here following a Renaissance physiological, medical reading of his distress. Evil knowledge, in fact, is figured materially, through the drinking metaphor, as something entering and inundating the self through a bodily orifice: the eye. Hermione’s offence is an infection physically invading, through his eyes, his permeable body-interior. But your body (‘gorge’, ‘sides’) is poisoned and shattered by that infection only in so far as you know that you are infected, only if you have seen the venomous ‘ingredient’: thus runs Leontes’s argument when he says, ‘[he has] drunk and seen the spider’. The drinking metaphor thus yokes together body and self, eye and ‘I’, in the cognitive process. According to the Arden edition of the play, Leontes’s argument (in 2.1.38– 41) is a commonplace in Shakespeare’s times: ‘The commonplace is found also in Middleton’s The Witch’, writes Pafford in his footnotes: ‘Oh, ’tis a paine of hell, to know ones shame, / Had it by hid, don, it’ had bin don happy, / for he that’s Ignorant lives long, and merry’. As to the spider: ‘[t]here was a

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belief’, he writes, ‘that a spider in drink or food would poison the person who consumed it only if he knew the spider were there’.16 Leontes’s metaphor of the spider in the cup, however, is inscribed in a context of false self-generated knowledge; that is, in a play where Hermione’s adultery (differently from that of Desdemona, for instance, or Gertrude) is posed as an allegation with no testimonial evidence, or better, as a persistently disproved allegation; a non-existent cause, as I said earlier. So the point is whether we should take Leontes’s reasoning at face value and be content with listing his metaphor among the commonplaces of Shakespeare’s time. Rather, the question which seems to arise as increasingly relevant in the context of the play, and which I take on in my physiological approach to Leontes’s monological perspective, is precisely why he sees what no one else does. Why has Shakespeare created a character who cannot share his isolated vision of the ‘spider’ with anyone else? In fact, the spider, i.e. the object which Leontes offers his audience as a visual guarantee, is only the correlative of a pseudo-forensic, subjective argument based on circumstantial evidence. It is a token of his capacity to see or not to see. So, how does he see, and what does he see? This is the question Shakespeare seems to be raising, in a period when the eye, to a greater degree than other body organs at the turn of the sixteenth century, was anxiously made the object of the reifying, dethroning inquiries of anatomy and medicine. ‘Evidence is in the eye of the beholder’, Katharine Eisaman Maus has written commenting on Othello’s growing suspicion of Desdemona. ‘The inaccessibility of the other produces […] a dubious attempt to reconstruct an alien point of view from the inside’.17 This might equally well be said of Leontes, and even more appropriately. For, in The Winter’s Tale the question of the isolated and isolating vision, cut off from external motivations as it is, and linked as it is to the ontological issue posed by the spider (i.e.: the spider is not incontrovertibly there; its existence depends on your being able to see it), forces us to look for the idiosyncrasies of the perceiving subject. I argue that Early Modern cognitive materialism can help us give bodily substance to our present psychoanalytical insights. My question is whether we should consider Leontes’s spider as simply metaphorical. My suspicion is that Shakespeare was not merely crediting Leontes’s dramatisation of his faith or obsession with a platitude, but that he was consciously drawing on the current physiology of the eye for his representation of misrepresentations, or better, for the representation of a late Ren16. The Winter’s Tale, ed. by J.H.P. Pafford (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 32. 17. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 125 and 123.

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aissance subjectivity deceived by maladies (or distortions) which were imputable to that sense charged with the task of transforming outer objects into inward knowledge. To begin with, for the anatomists, the spider’s web was literally ‘in the eye of the beholder’. As we find explained in the surprising number of medical/ philosophical treatises devoted to the anatomy of the eye at the turn of the sixteenth century, the spider’s web, or Arachnoid, is the film (or tunicle) enveloping the crystalline, and responsible for receiving and retaining the light or the image refracted by it. ‘The Aranoides […] is very fine’, writes André Du Laurens in A discourse of the preservation of the sight: of melancholike diseases; of rheumes, and old age (translated into English by Richard Surphlet in 1599), ‘and resembleth the ciper web; or threeds which the Spider draweth out with her feete; it covereth and lyeth close unto the christalline humour, and serveth to unite and retaine the forms of things, as the lead doth in looking glasses’.18 As such the arachnoid (or spider’s web) is strictly connected, as we shall see, with the combining operations of the imagination and the judging function of the brain to which Du Laurens draws great attention in the second part of his treatise devoted to melancholy. If we want another description of this important film enveloping the crystalline we only have to look in the fifth chapter of Kepler’s treatise, Optics (published in Latin in 1604), in which its author surveys and updates the work done in Europe (Basel, Padua, Wittenberg, Prague) by his contemporaries on the anatomy of the eye. Here physiology appears even richer in its metaphorical suggestiveness of crystalline-like quality and entanglement. The crystalline, in turn, also has its tunic (called the arachnoid or spider’s web because of its fineness), likewise pellucid, by which the crystalline is contained, also when freed from the surrounding humors. But the anatomists should consider the cause of the name. For this name, spider’s web, appears to belong not just to the skin of the crystalline, but to the ciliary processes taken together. For truly, just as the spider stays suspended in the center of her web, so the crystalline humor is suspended in the center of the ciliary processes, by means of threads drawn inwards to the center on all sides.19

Spiders or webs were also self-generated objects of sight: the effect of maladies like the severance of the retina, or wrinkling of the eye’s membranes, or cataract. And these were of no less interest to the modern science of optics and anatomy. Kepler and his late Renaissance European contemporaries increasingly made clear how, as a conveying organ, the eye interposed, with its 18. Du Laurens, p. 31. 19. Johannes Kepler, Optics: Paralipomena to Witelo & Optical Part of Astronomy (1604), trans. by William H. Donahue (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2000), pp. 178–79.

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own anatomy, distortive effects, and/or maladies, between inside and outside. Looking for ‘error in vision’, or ‘deceptions of vision’, Kepler for instance underlined the optical relevance of cases in which one saw that which was only inside one’s eye: ‘how does it happen that at night one see a flashing of his own eyes, which is inside the eye?’, he asks.20 Kepler’s Optics was widely circulated all over Europe. It was accompanied at the turn of the sixteenth century by other European works on optics, dioptrics, perspective, and by a surprising number of medical treatises partly dealing with or specifically devoted to the physiology and pathologies of the eye. Some of them were circulated in Latin, some others were by English physicians, others were made immediately available in English translations. Among these works may be counted: Philip Barrough’s The methode of physicke (1583); Georg Bartisch’s Ophthalmodouleia (1583); Felix Platter’s De Corporis Humani Structura et Usu (1583), Jacques Guillemeau’s A worthy treatise of the eyes (trans. by Anthony Hunton, 1587); André Du Laurens’s A discourse of the preservation of the sight (trans. by Richard Surphlet, 1599); Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente’s De visione voce auditu (1600); George Hakewill’s The vanitie of the eie (1608). As we can see, the treatises mentioned here were issued in the three decades or so preceding The Winter’s Tale, or are contemporary to other Shakespearean plays particularly concerned with sight, blindness, hallucinatory visions (Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth). In an age of great permeability among the different domains of knowledge, Shakespeare was doing his part in performing the task strongly advocated by Kepler in 1604, that ‘looking into error in vision must be sought in the formation and functions of the eye itself’.21 The playwright was forcefully aligning in the playhouse the modern dissecting job and the exploration of the disturbed links between the physical eye and the imagination. In fact a great deal of space in these treatises was devoted to maladies of the eye which might lead to a false vision of reality, especially cataracts, or ‘webbes’, a disease of old age, also called imaginatio in Latin, ‘because we imagine we see that which indeed we see not’. So explained Jacques Guillemeau in the English version of his Worthy treatise of the eyes. But this happens at the beginning, he says, […] when the cataract is as thin and slender as a spiders web. It is then named, aqua and gutta when the cataract beginneth to receive some forme enlarging and running abroad like water; but when it is thicke and ripe, and harder, it is called a cataract, and

20. Kepler, pp. 171 and 50. 21. Ibid., p. 171.

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of Avicen gutta obscura. […] Nowe when the webbe or cataract beginneth, these signes and tokens are incident to the diseased. They imagine there are before their eyes little darke things resembling flies: others suppose they see haires, others threads of wool, others spiders webbes, others thinke they beholde a circle about the candles when they are light, and sometime two candles for one.22

Du Laurens (quoted previously) also stated that ‘cataracts have always for their forerunners, certain false visions, which men call imaginations: for men thinke they see flies, haires or threads of a spider web in the ayre, which yet are not there’. Owing to a dark ‘shadowie vapour’ which intrudes between ‘the hornie membrane and christalline humour’, one ‘thinketh that which is within the eye to be without it’.23 The study of the physical eye strongly destabilised a holistic notion of the perceiving subject. As Marcus Nordlund has stressed, it contributed to bringing forth a ‘radical discontinuity between the eye and the mind’.24 Sergei LobanovRostovsky incisively reminds us of the new in-between status acquired by the anatomised eye: ‘The eye becomes, in effect, a third realm, distinct from both world and soul, a realm much like London’s liberties, which originated as a defensive barrier but became a site of spectacle and temptation’.25 For, if this ‘discontinuity’ eroded the optimism of early Renaissance theories of vision, it also stimulated a concern for (baroque) idiosyncratic forms of perception and creativity, as Stuart Clark has demonstrated in his recently published book Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. He also signals the ‘crucial borderline’ position between senses and intellect acquired by the imagination,26 which we should consider as paralleling that of the eye. What is relevant in this context is the way the physiology and idiosyncrasies of the eye interacted (in Early Modern medical and philosophical debates) with psychology and eventually with the normal role of imagination. Indeed, as the faculty responsible for holding and compounding ‘the form of things’ received by the eye or other senses, the imagination (vis phantastica for the ancients) was assigned a new power in the physiology of human cognition. The imaginative facultie doth represent and set before the intellectuall, all the objects which she hath received from the commom sence, making report of whatsoever is dis22. Jacques Guillemeau, A worthy treatise of the eyes, trans. by A.H. (London: Robert Waldegrane, 1587), pp. 158–60. 23. Du Laurens, p. 56. 24. Nordlund, p. 85. 25. Lobanov-Rostovsky, p. 202. 26. Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 44.

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couvered of the spies abroad: upon which reports the intellectuall or understanding part of the minde, frameth her conclusions, which are very often false, the imagination making untrue reports […] the imagination is a certain thing surpassing the common or inward sense, which judgeth of all outward objects […] but the imagination receiveth and reteyneth them without any presence of the object. The imagination compoundeth and joyneth together the forms of things, as of Golde and a mountaine, it maketh a golden mountain.27

Thus we read in Du Laurens in the 1599 translated edition of his Discourse of the preservation of the sight: of melancholike diseases. Du Laurens was only an anatomist and a physician, and yet seemed well aware of how sense distortions and poetical imaging, misapprehension and connotative reinvention of the object could coexist in the workings of the imagination. As I will argue in the last section of this essay, the baroque imaging of Hermione in the first half of The Winter’s Tale is an instance of how Shakespeare takes advantage of Leontes’s delusive external and inward senses to experiment with new forms of perception and representation. But how are outer objects received by the eye, according to the contemporary science of the eye? As stressed by Du Laurens, the eye is like a looking glass. It ‘[…] receiveth but the bare shapes or likeness of things without matter and bodie’, by which he means (with Aristotle) a ‘form’, or ‘quality’. This forme cannot be a substance […] It must needs be a qualitie, without matter or bodie, and uncapable of all maner of division […] This forme doth multiplie it selfe throughout the ayre: for the ayre being subtile & moyst is apt to receive all the forme: and receiving one part of the object, representeth the whole object. This forme is not seen, but maketh us to see, for there is nothing but the object which can be seene.28

This form or quality of the objects may be altered, however, if in its journey from the crystalline to the brain, it is distorted by alterations of the spider’s web, or of the optic nerve (a ‘messenger’ between eye and brain), or by disturbances of the imagination caused by the inward evil vapours of melancholy. Rooted as it is in humoral physiology, the link between the melancholic perturbation of the senses and that of visual perception is increasingly put under focus in the new science of the eye at the end of the sixteenth century. As in Du Laurens’s treatise, the melancholic’s fantastical visions are materially explained as the false reports of an imaginative faculty optically turned inwards. The eye of the melancholic, he says, doth not onely see that which is without, but it seeth also that which is within, however it may judge that same thing to be without. Those which have some small beginnings of 27. Du Laurens, p. 74. 28. Ibid., pp. 43 and 45.

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Cataract, doe see many bodies flying, like to Ants, flyes, and long haires, the same also doe such as are readie to vomite. Hippocrates and Galen place amongst the signes and tokens of a criticall fluxe of blood, these false apparitions, as when one seeth red bodies hanging in the ayre […] The melancholike partie may see that which is within his owne braine, but under another forme, because that the spirits and black vapours continually passe by the sinews, veins and arteries, from the braine unto the eye, which causeth it to see many shadowes and untrue apparitions in the aire, whereupon from the eye the forms thereof are conveyed unto the imagination.29

As was evident at the turn of the sixteenth century, optics and the anatomy of the eye were fuelling with plenty of arguments and optical metaphorical analogies a baroque sensibility and a Cartesian sceptical outlook. Shakespeare may have produced a relativistic philosophical concern for these issues, which he shared with the episteme of his times. But, as years passed, he may have also developed a personal autobiographical interest as in the case of his aged Leontes; a character as much infected by the evil spiders of his own eyes, as persistently condemning in others a malformation of sight, ‘[b]lind’, as he says ‘with the pin and web’ (1.2.291), names used for cataract. If considered in the light of the visual disturbances diagnosed in melancholic persons or diseased imaginations, Leontes’s eaten up spider conjured up in the second act, as well as functioning as the final metaphor of an argument against Hermione, reopens the ontological issue and the question of a dethroned eye/I. Indeed, Leontes’s inundated eye seems to have none of the barriers (like the ‘waterish humour’), physiologically figured by contemporary anatomy, ‘as a warlike forward to intercept and break off the first charge of the objects thereof’. But also, objects meet no obstacle in reason, ‘the souveraigne and predominant power of the minde’30, which should judge, as the final tribunal, the objects received by external or inward senses. ‘My life stands in the level of your dreams’, says Hermione during the trial the king has brought against her. ‘Your actions are my dreams’, is Leontes’s reply (3.2.81–83). Leontes, however (in the first act), well before her, has himself lucidly diagnosed his pain for his audience as that of a subjectivity suffering from dream-like visions. Not unlike Macbeth (whose eyes

29. Du Laurens., pp. 91–92. Visual disturbances, according to Philip Barrough, whose only interest was ‘[…] to cure the malady of the eye, then to define the nature of it’, could be due to ‘the distemperature of the braine’ caused by the ‘aboudance of melancholy’. And so ‘it seemeth to the patient that there are flies flieng in the ayer, and that there are three or four Moones, and three or four faces, when he beholdeth but one: but these infirmities happen most commonly to aged persons, which are melancholy, superfluitie of melancholy dimming their eyesight’. The Methode of Physicke (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1583), pp. 39 and 45. 30. Du Laurens, pp. 32 and 77.

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are fooled by his senses), he presents himself as a person experiencing with his senses something which has no existence in reality: LEONTES […] Affection! thy intention stabs the centre: Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicat’st with dreams; — how can this be? — With what’s unreal thou coactive art, And fellow’st nothing: then ’tis very credent Thou may’st co-join with something; and thou dost, (And that beyond commission) and I find it, (And that to the infection of my brains And hard’ning of my brows). (1.2.138–46)

From the very first act, Leontes is caught in the evil web of his own making. From the very start the spider is there, in the eye of the beholder, crossing his brows and shattering his entrails. In the context of this disturbed visual circle of what is inside and what is outside, vomit, the implied nausea originating the altered visual experience, or, one might add, induced by distorted forms produced from within, mentioned in contemporary medical treatises (see Du Laurens) is of no little account. If this seems to confirm even too precisely Leontes’s ‘violent hefts’ as the bodily distemper of a fogged perception of reality, most importantly, I argue, it refers us to the visual distortion or uncertainty that the form of Hermione’s female body, his ‘theme’ (1.2.459), is doomed to assume in Leontes’s dramatisation of his hallucinatory eye/I. ‘A woman’s story at a winter’s fire’: Hermione’s inviting palm ‘O! full of scorpions is my mind’ (3.2.36), laments Macbeth after the murdering of Duncan in a fit of his worsening distempered self. Shakespeare had offered with this character the tragic staging of a subjectivity shamed by what, in the play, is variously commented upon as womanish enfeebling ‘things of the minds’, ‘[p]roceeding from the heat-oppressed brain’ (2.1.39). Macbeth’s visions are seen as fear induced ‘paintings’ by his rebuking wife, the production of an inner distress, worthy of figuring in ‘[a] woman’s story at a winter’s fire’. LADY MACBETH O proper stuff! This is the very painting of you fear; This is the air-drawn dagger which, you said Led you to Duncan. O! these flaws and starts — Impostors to true fear — would well become A woman’s story at a winter’s fire,

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Authoriz’d by her grandam. Shame itself! Why do you make such faces? When all’s done You look but on a stool. (3.4.60–68)

Shakespeare is certainly complying with Lady Macbeth’s opinion in The Winter’s Tale, when he reproposes as a tragicomic subject, fit for a ‘winter’s fire’, the connection between an inner disturbing ‘passion’ (as it is for Macbeth and Leontes) and the fantasies of the eye. He does it by attributing to his character a folly devoid of obvious motivations, thus isolating his character’s vision and problematising to the extreme the question of his disturbed and distortive monological perspective; a distortion which, I argue, the audience is called to see at work from the very start in relation to the figuring of Hermione’s body. In fact, as I see it, Hermione’s other name might well be ‘Perspective’, or ‘Perception’, as in Albrecht Dürer’s famous woodcut reproduced in The Painter’s Manual (1525) in which we see an artist drawing a nude with a perspective device (illustration 2). The woman here, as often in art and literature, occurs as an epitome of reality. The capacity to properly reproduce her is a measure, or guarantee, of the artist’s capacity to grasp reality.

Illustration 2: Albrecht Dürer, Artist Drawing a Nude, 1525. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Bremen – Der Kunstverein in Bremen.

The problem is that the Hermione we have been presented with, through Leontes’s eyes, in the first half of the play, does not fit the squares, and hence the discipline of Renaissance geometrical or linear perspective, the technique devised to produce the illusion of reality. Something disturbs the reassuring codified relation between object and eye. Janet Adelman would say (and I unconditionally agree with her) that this is the queen’s pregnant body that (with the mention of the ‘[n]ine changes of the watery star’, in 1.2.1) we are supposed to see on stage at the very opening of the play. In Adelman’s brilliant analysis, Hermione’s pregnant body disquietingly reminds men that they

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are ‘born’ of woman (Macbeth, 5.7.2–3); it is the token of their being contaminated ‘at the site of origin’.31 Hermione’s body, I argue, turns male anxiety into a furious distortive perspectivalism. Placed behind the disturbed and distorting focus of Leontes’s ocular lenses, her body becomes something different from what everyone else in the play is supposed to see. As in the monomaniac formation of objects (well known to students of psychopathology), the malignant knowledge Leontes associates with her pregnant body invades his eye as a body part. In fact, her body is soon metonymically reduced to her hand, or better, to her palm, the hospitable side of the hand she opened years before when she returned Leontes’s love and which she now tenders to Polixenes in her invitation to him to prolong his visit. The audience will hear it repeated several times in its variants of hand, or palm or ‘paddling palms’ or ‘pinching fingers’ (in the course of only 25 verses; see 1.2.101–126), marshalled by Leontes as proof of adultery. This body part, an analogue of the Queen’s receptive pregnant womb, seems to have acquired the amplified iconicity of an autonomous retinal image in Leontes’s heated perception; something capable of blotting out the pure perspective of the male alliance between the two kings. The quasi-Olympic nature of the two kings’ friendship is depicted pictorially by the two courtiers Camillo and Archidamo at the opening of the play, like hands shaking, ‘as over a vast’, as over an unalterable receding and expanding horizon (‘[they] embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds’, ‘I think there is not in the world either malice or matter to alter it’, 1.1.29–34). But the perspective of this conciliated geography is soon dimmed by the king’s inwardly constructed ‘fixation’. Obsessively evoked, the Queen’s hospitable palm becomes a disorderly ‘theme’ (1.2.459), which, as in a baroque painting, inundates the eye of the beholder as well as the visual scenario of the theatrical space monologically created by him. As if suspended in the void of its dark contours (as in the cases of visual disturbances studied in Shakespeare’s times), Hermione’s palm, from the very start, hints at the king’s cup with a spider within. After all the spider may well be the web one might be caught in if fixing persistently the intricate threads of lines materially marking a palm. But it is the king himself who thus stages his self as that of an eye/I trapped in its dark contours, transfixed by his deadly self-generated basilisk.32 Commenting on Shakespearean pregnant bodies, Richard Wilson has stressed how the inspective power of the Early Modern anatomy theatre, which 31. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays. Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 226 et passim. 32. In the play the fatal gaze of the basilisk is referred to Polixenes and to his agency in unleashing Leontes’s jealousy and distemper (1.2.387–90).

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was absolute in respect to dead bodies, was forced to register a blindness at the place of birth. ‘“[T]hat which hides and envelops” knowledge for Early Modern medicine, “a curtain of night over truth” [he says quoting Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic], “is, paradoxically, life […]”’.33 In The Winter’s Tale we witness how this male visual impotence turns into a distortive representational field; a field in which the jurisdiction of the king’s gaze, self-carnivalised as it is as a corporeal decayed sense, is nevertheless absolute, and endowed with the power of transforming life-giving bodies into still or dead bodies. The eye, we have previously read in a contemporary anatomical/medical treatise ‘receiveth but the bare shapes or likeness of things without matter and bodie’ (Du Laurens, 1599); shapes or a likeness the author defines as a ‘quality’. Now, the quality which Leontes’s disturbed gaze (often occurring as a crossed/disapproving brow) seems to project onto the Queen’s swelling body is an unresting form, or invasive motion, a movement of the body enveloping or intermingling with other bodies that we are elicited to see while we hear him insisting on his ‘theme’ as both a jealous husband and father. Consider, for instance, the lines ‘To mingle friendship far, is mingling bloods. […] But to be paddling palms, and pinching fingers, […] O, that is entertainment / My bosom likes not, nor my brows’ (1.2.109–19), and ‘Give me the boy […] you / Have too much blood in him’ (2.1.56–58). Hermione’s imagined adultery is indeed a nightmarish adulterating quality, or an altering ‘matter’ (as that evoked by Archidamo at the opening of the play [1.1.34]), which sweeps away the clarity of the male pastoral setting of the beginning of the play (let us remember that the infantile friendship of the two kings is referred to as that of two lambs playing together). This quality inundates that original setting with the hallucinatory form of a ‘predominant’ body, variously resonating in the king’s invectives as an intermingling body part, an evil ‘planet’, an unfortified belly, until it is finally arrested, or better sentenced, with ‘that she’s big with’ (2.1.60–61). As I have suggested elsewhere we might imagine the haunting unresting figure of the Hermione we meet in the first part of the play by invoking the supportiveness of Italian visual art. 34 I propose as a possible analogue a proto-baroque Madonna of the Michaelangelesque school: a Madonna like the one we find in Pontormo’s Deposition (1526–1528; illustration 3). 33. Richard Wilson, ‘Observations on English Bodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare’s Late Plays’, in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. by Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 121–50 (p. 125). 34. See Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Il bene ritrovato: Le figlie di Shakespeare dal King Lear ai romances (Roma: Bulzoni, 2005), pp. 139–83.

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Illustration 3: Jacopo Pontormo, Deposition, 1526–1528, Chiesa di Santa Felicita, Florence. By permission of Soprintendenza Beni culturali. [Serpentlike line added.]

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As if floating unrestingly in its aerial space, and intermingling with other bodies, this is the very opposite of the reassuring Hermione who reappears (‘as tender / As infancy and grace’ [5.3.26–27]), at the end of the play, reshaped according to the disciplined contours of a still statue by an artist like Giulio Romano, an artist belonging to the Raphaelesque school (and as such well trained in graceful Raphael-like Madonnas). As in a mannerist or proto-baroque painting, the folded and enveloping figure of the queen of the first part of The Winter’s Tale swallows up the orderly lines of the Renaissance perspectival regime with a movement, a motion, which in Italy had been defined as ‘furia della figura’. The English playwrights could find this translated as ‘spirite of a picture’ (or ‘Serpentlike’ motion) in Giovanni Lomazzo’s treatise on art, published in 1584 and soon after made available in an abridged English edition in 1598, with the title A Tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, Carvinge, and Buldinge.35 ‘The view-point’, Gilles Deleuze has written in his book Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque, ‘is the power to give an orderly disposition to chance, it is the condition which makes the appearance of truth possible’. In this sense it is both a ‘jurisprudence’ (an art of judgement) and a knowledge of the ‘secret of things’.36 Indeed, as in anamorphosis (a practice arousing curiosity in Shakespeare’s times) the eye standpoint is the place where the ‘secret of the art of seeing’ lies. But Leontes’s dramatisation of the self is that of a subjectivity which does not possess such a perspectival art. He has no such secret, or privileged and sovereign focal point (a centre, or a ‘tower’ according to a current metaphor) from where to judge the world or make it right. He has only the vantage point of his tyrannical kingly throne. Accordingly his trials are massacres. He will have to wait sixteen years for the moment when, purged of his evil humours by mourning and loss, he will be restored to a perspectival, sanitised gaze. That, however, will be the job of persons who proverbially never tell the truth: the job of a woman (Paulina) and of an artist, Giulio Romano, praised by Vasari (in his Lives) for the uttermost form of deception, that of making people seem more real than life. Which meant, according to mimetic perspectival art, putting the object at the right distance decided by the eye, so that by becoming instrumental to the eye, the object reveals with clarity its form, hence acquiring truthfulness and grace and beauty: ‘[…] the immediate end of Painting and Carving from their first institutions is, to make 35. Giovanni Lomazzo, A Tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, Carvinge, and Buldinge, trans. by Richard Haydocke, 1598 (Facsimile, Amsterdam and New York: Capo Press, 1969), p. 17. 36. Gilles Deleuze, Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988), my trans., p. 30.

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such images as shall present to mans eie the true proportion […]. Now this being the immediate ende of this arte, it followeth plainly, that Pictures are the meanes or instrument, and the Eie is the Ende’. Thus we read in Lomazzo in the 1598 translated edition of his Tracte.37 The animated ‘stone’ of Hermione descending from its/her niche and moving forward, in a straight line, towards the centric point established by Leontes’s eyes (during Paulina’s ritualized ‘staging’ of the event), is mimetic art made flesh. The statue is so ‘[m]asterly done’ by its assumed Italian author, Giulio Romano, that ‘[t]he very life seems warm upon her lip’ (5.3.65–66), observes Polixenes. And Leontes exclaims: ‘What fine chisel / could ever yet cut breath?’ (5.3.78–79). Hermione’s ‘dead likeness’ (5.3.15) is now endowed with the conciliating ‘proportion’ and ‘quality’ which can reintegrate Leontes in his sovereign gaze. The Queen is true to life, and yet ideal (‘as tender / As infancy and grace’ [5.3.26–27]). But as we are alerted, in the course of the (non-accidental) protracted disquisition on ‘good’ mimesis which accompanies the spectacularised reanimation, and with which Shakespeare decides to conclude his play, perfect resemblance, or seeing right, doesn’t mean avoiding artifice, or being deceived. ‘The fixure of her eye has motion in’t, / As we are mock’d with art’ (5.3.67–68), says Leontes. If intended as a gift for the old penitent king, Hermione’s resurrection as a reassuring Madonna (‘as tender / As infancy and grace’) is, as it is staged by Shakespeare, one more illusionism. It is, as I see it, Shakespeare’s baroque playing with the delusions of trompe l’oeil, the perfect copy (or fictive truth), and with a late Renaissance subjectivity made aware of the fact that seeing (and hence being deceived or undeceived) could be no longer conceived of as a simple affair, especially if the hallucinatory object inundating one’s eye/I was a woman. Bibliography Adelman, Janet, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays. Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). Barrough, Philip, The Methode of Physicke (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1583). Cavell, Stanley, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Clark, Stuart, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 37. Giovanni Lomazzo, ‘Of the fifth booke of Perspectives’, in A Tracte, Chapter I, p. 180. See also chapter VIII (in Book V), ‘Of Distance’, and the subsequent Chapters XII–XVIII on ‘Catoptica’ and on the Six ‘Deceitfull Sights’ used in Perspective (pp. 206–12).

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Deleuze, Gilles, Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988). Del Sapio Garbero, Maria, Il bene ritrovato: Le figlie di Shakespeare dal King Lear ai romances (Roma: Bulzoni, 2005). Du Laurens, André, A discourse of the preservation of the sight; of melancholike diseases; of rheumes, and of old age, trans. by Richard Surphlet (London: Felix Kingston, 1599). Guillemeau, Jacques, A worthy treatise of the eyes, trans. by A.H. (London: Robert Waldegrane, 1587). Hillman, David, ‘Visceral Knowledge: Shakespeare, Skepticism, and the Interior of the Early Modern Body’, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 81– 105. Kepler, Johannes, Optics: Paralipomena to Witelo & Optical Part of Astronomy (1604), trans. by William H. Donahue (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2000). Lobanov-Rostovsky, Sergei, ‘Taming the Basilisk’, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 195–217. Lomazzo, Giovanni, A Tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, Carvinge, and Buldinge, trans. by Richard Haydocke, 1598 (Facsimile; Amsterdam and New York: Capo Press, 1969). Maus, Katharine Eisaman, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). Nordlund, Marcus, The Dark Lantern: A Historical Study of Sight in Shakespeare, Webster, and Middleton (Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1999). Orgel, Stephen, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Paster, Gail Kern, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004). Paster, Gail Kern, and others, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Sawday, Jonathan, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Schoenfeldt, Michael C., Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Shakespeare, William, The Winter’s Tale, Arden Edition, ed. by J.H.P. Pafford (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). —, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. by W. J. Craig (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). Wilson, Richard, ‘Observations on English Bodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare’s Late Plays’, in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. by Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 121–50.

Of Idiocy, Moroseness, and Vitriol Soloists of Rage in Ben Jonson’s Satire Rui Carvalho Homem A punitive design energised by a sense of self-righteousness is probably the most persistent defining trait of the satiric voice within a conventional understanding of this literary mode. Empowered by a set of exacting values, the satiric persona inveighs against vice or folly, his or her verbal energy hardly accommodating the possibility of doubt. Satire’s ‘radical moral stance’, its assuredness regarding ‘standards’, and its sharp sense of ‘direction’ have often been critically argued. And its appertaining urge to discriminate, with vehemence and imperiousness, is best served by the singularity of a raging voice, unforgivingly pronouncing on the ills of other individuals or of a community. The work of Ben Jonson contains several generic environments in which the satiric mode can become manifest, ranging from the ostensibly monological regime of the Epigrams or the prologues to his plays to frequent tirades delivered by unflinching or obsession-driven dramatic characters. A discursive feature of those characters in the comedies who voice their highly strung satiric indignation is precisely that, even when they do so as apparent contributions to dramatic dialogue, their verbal excess highlights the isolation, self-centredness, and inability to communicate that defines them. But the moment when the satiric ranter becomes an object as much as an agent of satire is also when the rationale for the supposed normative value of satiric denunciation reaches its breaking point. By setting off the strong presence of irony and inconclusiveness in Jonson’s construction of satiric solo performances, this paper partakes in the interrogation of traditional definitions of satire that has characterised recent critical revisitations of the mode — while it also underlines the extent to which such interrogation coincides with a fundamental swerve in Jonson’s critical reputation.

Satire has long been beset by a particular perplexity. Within theoretical frameworks that one might dub ‘traditional’, it has been construed as predicated on a sense of ethical certainty and hence rhetorical directionality — indeed, as ‘militant irony’, empowered by ‘[a] radical moral stance’;1 however, its place within the literary system has often been described as uncertain, fluid, and unstable — a ‘[…] most problematic mode to the taxonomist, since it […] can take almost any external form’.2 This oppositional nexus between the mode’s supposedly defining sense of legitimacy and purpose, and the protean nature of its relation to literary forms, has in fact been eroded (if not resolved) in re1.

2.

The phrases come respectively from Northrop Frye’s classic essay on ‘The Mythos of Winter: Irony and Satire’ and Alastair Fowler’s no less canonical study of genres and modes: Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 223–24; Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 110. Fowler, p. 110.

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cent years, as the association of satire with moral assuredness has come under fire. This recent development largely reflects the currency of the poststructuralist choice tropes of ambivalence and indeterminacy, and of a related preference for truncated or fluid form. A concomitant tendency to construe laughter — certainly the human response through which satire most commonly pursues its ends — as inherently subversive and non-authoritarian contributes to a growing emphasis on any ironical and self-cancelling elements that can be seen to undermine the moral high ground so often taken by the satiric persona throughout the history of the mode. And this has also entailed phasing out another conventional critical distinction, that which opposed the punitive, segregating laughter of satire (energised by a stark sense of the distinction between its agents and butts) to the gregarious, all-absolving laughter of comedy.3 Dustin Griffin’s programme in his study Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (1994) is characteristic of the recent reconfiguration of critical discourse on satire. From the outset, Griffin’s avowed purpose is to challenge ‘the old theoretical consensus […]’ established in the early 1960s on satire as ‘a highly rhetorical and moral art’. Griffin further declares his scepticism vis-à-vis all universalising accounts of a characteristically diverse, ‘farraginous’ and ubiquitous mode. A major acknowledged influence (on Griffin as on most recent theorists of the literature of laughter) is of course Bakhtin on Menippean satire and on grotesque realism, an influence that shows in Griffin’s contention that ‘with few exceptions, satirists want to keep their work open, ambiguous, unresolved, even when declaring that they have finished’.4 When investigating the satiric voice as a solo performance, I will largely and generally endorse the current view of satire (and comedy) as just characterised by Griffin. To move in that direction, though, I will first have to point out that ‘the old theoretical consensus’ of the mid-twentieth century in fact echoed many of the explicit pronouncements on their art by authors — like Jonson — who largely crafted the English satiric tradition. It is by reading them against the grain, and in particular by highlighting those moments in 3.

4.

This opposition was evident in critical remarks from the 1950s to the early ’80s, such as (on the one hand) Ronald Paulson’s view that ‘[p]unishment is the most extreme, and at the same time most common, consequence in satire’, and (on the other) Frye’s understanding that ‘[t]he tendency of comedy is to include as many people as possible in its final society’, or yet David Farley-Hills’s proposal that ‘[a]mbiguity and paradox lie at the heart of comedy […]. The comic mode accepts that as far as the human mind is concerned truth is a plurality’ — Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 10; Frye, p. 43; David Farley-Hills, The Comic in Renaissance Comedy (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 32–33. Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1994), pp. 1–2, 3, 111 and passim.

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their writing when satire turns on itself and an apparent scourge of folly becomes a target, that we can indeed argue that theirs is a fundamentally ambivalent art. To carry out such a reading, I will consider Jonson’s management of the mode both in the ostensibly monological regime of his Epigrams or the prefatory materials to his plays, and in tirades delivered by unflinching or obsession-driven dramatic characters. Jonson repeatedly wrote apologies for his art, although the key arguments for its legitimation can be seen to vary significantly. His construction of an authorial standing is, possibly, less consistent than he would have his audience and readers believe, but it is undoubtedly based on claims to singularity. The first and foremost claim concerns a supposed ethical soundness: ‘[…] the Impossibility of any Man’s being the good Poet, without first being a good Man’ ([Dedication], Volpone).5 It is this singularity that authorises the embattled satirist to take on caustic, corrosive — and supposedly healing — action against outrageous human traits. Here, Jonson does not even balk at the analogy with vitriolic attack: [S]hee [poetry] shall out of iust rage incite her seruants (who are genus iritabile) to spout inke in their faces, that shall eate, farder then their marrow, into their fames […]. (‘To the most Noble and most Eqvall Sisters, The two Famovs Vniversities […]’, [Dedication], Volpone) […] why doe Physicians cure with sharpe medicines, or corrosives? Is not the same equally lawfull in the cure of the minde, that is in the cure of the body? (Timber: or, Discoveries, 2315–17)

These passages come from a paratext to a comedy and from Jonson’s book of maxims — sources that readers may feel entitled to understand as authorised and authorial, rather than emanating from an ironical persona. And yet their textual environment does not fail to generate perplexities, since these bids for satiric corrosiveness sit rather ill with Jonson’s repeated protestations that the attacks dictated by his verbalised sense of self-righteousness are ultimately benign. His epigrams — the generic format par excellence for raging solos — are punctuated, from the start, by an explicit rejection of the aggressive tools and ‘medicines’ claimed in the passages above. This state of affairs is further compounded by the author’s acknowledgment of his reputation, since his name on the cover of the book will condition readers to expect caustic attacks:

5.

All quotations, in the course of this essay, from the work of Ben Jonson refer to the Herford and Simpson edition: C.H. Herford and Percy Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52).

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It will be look’d for, booke, when some but see Thy title, Epigrammes, and nam’d of mee, Thou should’st be bold, licentious, full of gall, Wormewood, and sulphure, sharpe, and tooth’d withall; Become a petulant thing, hurle inke, and wit As mad-men stones: not caring whom they hit. Deceiue their malice, who could wish it so. (‘To My Booke’, Epigrams II)

This wavering between a construction of the satirist’s stance as outright punitive, and its defence as mildly corrective, is matched by Jonson’s apparent hesitation between the belief in the possibility of cure that informed some of the above-quoted remarks, and a scepticism regarding the possibility of human correction — irrespective of human failings being evil or merely foolish: Natures that are hardned to evill, you shall sooner breake, then make straight; they are like poles that are crooked, and dry: there is no attempting them. […] No precepts will profit a Foole. (Timber: or, Discoveries 36–8, 1770–72)

Jonson’s texts arguably condition their audience to adopt responses that are no less equivocal towards personae or dramatic characters defined by a singleminded castigating purpose, and a corresponding solo performance. Some of those figures may seem to match the profile proposed in the dedication to Volpone — a ‘good man’, who out of ‘just rage’ and an ‘irritable’ frame of mind inveighs against fools and rogues. But this does not guarantee that these personae or characters will themselves be immune to satiric denunciation, or that their acts and utterances will be brought close to the text’s implicit norm and validated by success, verbal and/or otherwise. Jonson’s ‘comical satire’ Every Man Out of His Humour, because or in spite of its gallery of dramatic types, confronts us with obsessively pursued individual goals (and their respective discourses), illustrating a variety of ‘humoral’ extremes. Audiences may feel justified to take Asper, the ‘Presenter’ and playwright-within-the-play, as a straightforward projection of the author. After all, Asper vows to ‘strip the ragged follies of the time, / Naked, as at their birth […] / […] and with a whip of steele, / Print wounding lashes in their yron ribs’ (‘After the second Sounding’, 17–20). For the reader who encounters the text on the page, with all its paratexts, and who may also know Jonson’s remarks elsewhere on the necessity of satiric denunciation, this affinity between author and character should also seem to be supported by the character’s description as ‘of an ingenious and free spirit, eager and constant in reproofe, without feare controuling the worlds abuses. One, whom no seruile hope of gaine, or frosty apprehension

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of danger, can make to be a Parasite, either to time, place, or opinion’ (2–6). However, as is well known, the commentators who, as part of a ‘Grex’, chorically frame the plot of Every Man Out also include Cordatus, ostensibly proposed as a normative figure: ‘The Authors friend; A man inly acquainted with the scope and drift of his Plot: Of a discreet, and vnderstanding iudgement; and has the place of a Moderator’ (111–13). Further, readers may wonder if the defining traits of a sanguine author of satirically inflected comedies with an acclaimed penchant for the grotesque, a yearning for preferment, and an urge to be recognised in higher genres than comedy, are not more broadly diffused through the dramatis personae. These include such other stock characters as the malcontent (the character that in fact Asper goes on to play within his play, managing the plot from within) and the scurrilous parasite: MACILENTE A Man well parted, a sufficient Scholler, and trauail’d; who (wanting that place in the worlds account, which he thinks his merit capable of) falls into such an enuious apoplexie, with which his iudgement is so dazeled, and distasted, that he growes violently impatient of any opposite happinesse in another. (8–13) CARLO BVFFONE A Publicke, scurrilous, and prophane Iester; that […] with absurd simile’s will transforme any person into deformity. […] that will sent you out a supper some three mile off […]. A slaue, that hath an extraordinary gift in pleasing his palat, and will swill vp more sacke at a sitting, then would make all the Guard a posset. His religion is rayling, and his discourse ribaldry. They stand highest in his respect, whom he studies most to reproach. (25–34)

Under this arguable dispersal of authorial identity, the linearity of the ‘comical satire’, ostensibly based on a neat distinction between the respective solo performances of the satirist on the one hand and his butts on the other, gives way to a much more complex set of textual relationships. This not withstanding, the plurality of agent and object status does not cancel the ineluctable individuality of each character’s course, and the incisiveness with which they are ‘cured’ of their humoral imbalance. After all, Cordatus refers to Asper, the satirist, as moved by ‘Furor Poeticus’, his discourse seeming that of a ‘madman’ (‘After the second Sounding’, 147–50), and he describes his play as ‘somewhat like Vetus Comoedia’. Cordatus thus seeks an antecedent in Aristophanic comedy, characterised by invective and individualised targets — precisely the features that, elsewhere, Jonson is at pains to deny. Nonetheless, if the characters’ individual salience assists the satiric modalisation of such a comedy, the re-integrative, normalising move conventionally required by its ending ultimately demands that all such salience be cancelled. Or, as Nicholas

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Grene puts it, ‘[t]he switchback action of comedy repeatedly throws off those characters who try to ride it towards a fixed goal of their own choosing’.6 As has often been remarked, Jonson maintains an equivocal relation to the over-assertive and egotistical characters that parade through his plays, so strongly focused on their own course and discourse that dramatic interaction becomes itself a delusion and an irony. This equivocal attitude also reflects his fascination and revulsion before the starker manifestations of Early Modern individualism — as revealed in his frequent dismayed or outraged remarks on the ‘disease[s] of the Age’ (Timber: or, Discoveries, 300). Francis Bacon, for whom he professed admiration, famously remarked that ‘men who are great lovers of themselves waste the public’; but he also acknowledged that, under current conditions, success in worldly ventures depended on making one’s life into a solo performance whilst pretending to play along with others. Hence, secrecy and dissimulation inform the prescribed ethos: ‘The best composition and temperature is to have openness in fame and opinion; secrecy in habit, dissimulation in seasonable use; and a power to feign, if there be no remedy.’7 Jonson’s middle comedies — Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair — offer a rich gallery of characters that reflect his fascination and ambivalence before radical individuality, and such characters are framed to evoke either awe or laughter (or both). Volpone’s self-description, in the first scene, is a hymn to his supposed uniqueness: I glory More in the cunning purchase of my wealth, Then in the glad possession; since I gaine No common way; I vse no trade, no venter; I wound no earth with plow-shares; fat no beasts To feede the shambles; haue no mills for yron, Oyle, corne, or men, to grinde ’hem into poulder; I blow no subtill glasse; expose no ships To threatnings of the furrow-faced sea; I turn no moneys, in the publike banke; Nor vsure priuate. […] What should I doe, But cocker vp my genius, and liue free To all delights, my fortune calls me to? (1.1.30–40, 70–72)

6. 7.

Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare, Jonson, Molière: The Comic Contract (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980), p. 43. Francis Bacon, ‘Essay XXXIII — Of Wisdom for a Man’s Self’; ‘Essay VI — Of Simulation and Dissimulation’, Essays, ed. by Michael J. Hawkins (London: Dent, 1981), p. 72, 19.

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Although, formally, this speech occurs in a dialogue, Volpone might just as well be soliloquising, since Mosca ostensibly acts as a mere foil. He provides Volpone’s self-centred discourse with the necessary cues for the verbal extension of his vanity, while effectively concealing his own designs, bent as he (Mosca) is on ‘gaining’ (differently from his deluded master) in the most ‘common way’. Indeed, disaster arrives for both characters when circumstances prompt Mosca to try and outwit Volpone, thus overreaching himself — since the Venetian Magnifico will rather bring the house down on the two of them than accept to share protagonism and spoils with a grasping parasite. In the world of Volpone, individuals are never compatible, energised as they are by a vanity and greed whose absoluteness admits of no compromise. And it is revealing that disaster is precipitated by Volpone’s inability to restrain his ambition to find a broader stage for his unique ‘genius’ beyond the immediate confines of his palace. He actually moves out into the open space of the piazza, in order to play the mountebank, a soloist of deception, in front of a crowd and of Celia’s window. Desire for her leads to an attempted seduction in another great solo scene that is verbally enacted in Jonson’s best-known lyric, ‘Come, my Celia, let us prove, / While we can, the sports of Love’. This scene forms another demonstration of Volpone’s incapacity to realise that his ‘vision’ is indeed unique in its debasement — an incapacity the playwright exposes by making figures like Nano, Castrone and Androgyno emblematic of Volpone’s palace. It is arguable that Jonson’s middle comedies correspond to an evolving design, emerging from the relation between singular and incompatible desires and the spaces where they seek fulfilment. If in Volpone (1605) the aristocratic protagonist plays out his singularity in the enclosed remoteness of a Venetian palazzo, with disastrous sallies into the outside world, the following comedies are all set in London, but with diverse social settings. Epicoene (1609) portrays middle-class households inhabited and/or visited by members of the gentry and the rising bourgeoisie; The Alchemist (1610) is set in a wealthy house deserted by its owner in plague-ridden London, and used by a roguish servant and a couple of accomplices from the London underworld for a swindle that lures into it a gallery of victims from different social groups; in Bartholomew Fair (1614) the enclosed social space of London households is revisited in act one, but abandoned for the totally open and socially various world of the Fair, with its civic freedoms, its liminality (on the border of urban and rural), and its traditional allegorical significance. Though remote from the rarity and seriousness of transgression in the world of Volpone and its corresponding, annihilating penalties, the more homely, English settings of the later comedies do not mean that their characters are less intent on ferociously pursuing solo projects. In Epicoene, the

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young rakish gallants — forerunners of the heroes of Restoration comedy, Jonson’s comedy being ‘the beginning of the comedy of manners’8 — conceal their intents from one another, despite their much affected familiarity. Some of their names are suggestive of a normative value that the ethical implications of the plot and its dénouement hardly substantiate. The play’s title evokes androgyny, construed farcically through the supposed oxymoron in its subtitle, The Silent Woman, rather than as the freakish scenario embodied in Volpone’s fools. But Truewit describes the life of his friend Clerimont, arbiter elegantiarum, as spent ‘between his mistress abroad and his ingle at home’ (1.1.22–23), and relations between the sexes are as predatory and selfserving as the animal fable in the earlier play. Sexual gratification is here individual gratification, a solo performance afforded by the stark object status of the (hopefully, consenting) partner. And this egotistical scene is in fact compounded by the continuity of animal allegory in the aptly titled Captain and Mrs Otter, the husband deriving a habit of animal metaphor from his activity in the Bear Garden, and famously decrying his wife in a virtuoso satiric tirade: OTTER Shee has a breath worse then my grand-mothers, profecto. […] And she has a perruke, that’s like a pound of hempe, made vp in shoo-thrids.[…] A most vile face! and yet shee spends me fortie pound a yeere in mercury and hogs-bones. All her teeth were made i’the Blacke-Friers: both her eye-browes i’the Strand, and her haire in Siluerstreet. Euery part o’the towne ownes a peece of her. […] She takes her selfe asunder still when she goes to bed, into some twentie boxes; and about next day noone is put together againe, like a great Germane clocke: and so comes forth and rings a tedious larum to the whole house, and then is quiet againe for an houre, but for her quarters. (Epicoene 4.2. 83–84, 88–89, 91–95, 97–101)

This verbal dissection could hardly be a more obvious operation of the satirist’s scalpel (another well-tried somatic metaphor for satire). The animal imagery, the ‘fatness of the body’, and its association with bear-baiting (a characteristically festive activity), would seem to make this passage an instance of ‘grotesque realism’, as characterised by Mikhail Bakhtin. Indeed, such features tell this passage apart from other instances of misogynous invective in Jonson’s work, as in his epigrammatic lines: A Womans friendship! God whom I trust in, Forgive me this one foolish deadly sin. […]

8.

Jonathan Haynes, The Social Relations of Jonson’s Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 91.

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I could forgive her being proud! a whore! Perjur’d! and painted! if she were no more —, But she is such, as she might, yet, forestall The Divell; and be the damning of us all. (‘A Satyricall Shrub’, The Vnder-wood XX)

A closer look at Otter’s rant suggests, however, that festivity is upstaged by ‘the modern grotesque’. Historically, the modern grotesque occurs when communal and celebrative gluttony is superseded by individual acquisitiveness, and when revulsion is no longer balanced by desire, or debasement by fruition — in short, when life is overcome by the energies of death.9 Itemising the parts of a body is a characteristic strategy of grotesque representation.10 And just as in the ambivalent, regenerative grotesque the body as living matter overspills its boundaries to mix with the world in a great organic fusion, so in Otter’s words his wife indeed belongs to the whole town. In this case, however, the body appears rather as a great mechanical monster, an example of what Henri Bergson called ‘une certaine raideur de mécanique’, ‘[une] mécanisation de la vie’; the body is rendered awkwardly and repetitively mechanical as it becomes a fundamental source of laughter.11 Otter’s invective is memorable, and yet Epicoene’s best-known instance of individual salience involves a relation to discourse based on absence and silence, rather than boisterous assertiveness: BOY […] hee hath chosen a street to lie in, so narrow at both ends, that it will receiue no coaches, nor carts, nor any of these common noises […] TRVE-WIT […] How do’s he for the bells? CLERIMONT O, i’ the Queenes time, he was wont to goe out of towne euery satterday at ten a clock, or on holy-day-eues. But now, by reason of the sicknesse, the perpetuitie of ringing has made him deuise a roome, with double walls, and treble seelings; the windores close shut, and calk’d: and there he liues by candle-light. He turn’d away a Man, last weeke, for hauing a paire of new shooes that creak’d. And this fellow waits on him, now, in tennis-court socks, or slippers sol’d with wooll: and they talke each to other, in a trunke. (1.1.167–69, 180–90)

Thus Morose’s phonophobia and agoraphobia make him an emblem of the self encroached upon by the Early Modern city. He experiences its promiscuous inter-individual dynamics as oppression rather than opportunity as he is 9.

Cf. Mikhaïl Bakhtine, L’oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance, trans. by Andrée Robel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 30–38, 240–41. 10. Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 20. 11. Henri Bergson, ‘Le Rire’, in Oeuvres (Paris: P.U.F., 1963), pp. 391, 435.

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pushed by the pain of noise and company to the very edge of the civic experience, the ultimate border of the space he owns and inhabits: DAVPHINE […] Hee has got on his whole nest of night-caps, and lock’d himselfe vp, i’ the top o’ the house, as high, as euer he can climbe from the noise. I peep’d in at a crany, and saw him sitting ouer a crosse-beame o’ the roofe, […] vp-right: and he will sleepe there. (4.1.21–26)

Morose is baited by his nephew Dauphine Eugenie, whose name of ‘wellborn heir’ is rendered ironical by the grasping selfishness with which, all pretence of family affection gone, he blackmails his uncle (in the style of a mobster’s ‘protection’) to buy him off in exchange for solitude and silence. If Morose wants everyone out of his house, the swindlers in The Alchemist want to lure as many as possible into the house — but they need each and every one of their victims to believe himself the sole beneficiary of the philosopher’s stone. With ridiculously inflated selves, their customers offer a verbal parade of their wild dreams — the most memorable being Epicure Mammon’s intent to ‘[…] purchase Deuonshire, and Cornwaile, / And make them perfect Indies’; to ‘[…] walke / Naked between [his] succubae’; to have ‘no bawds, / But fathers and mothers. They will doe it best’ (2.1.35–36; 2.2.47–48, 57–58). However, not even for this profitable fiction of singularity can the confidence tricksters — the roguish servant Face, the pseudo-alchemist Subtle, the prostitute and seductress major Doll Common — truly unite. The opening scene is characteristic of the inter-individual warfare always ready to erupt under the surface of a pact in crime: FACE Beleeu’t, I will. SUBTLE Thy worst. I fart at thee. DOL COMMON Ha’ you your wits? Why gentlemen! For loue — FACE Sirrah, I’ll strip you — SUBTLE What to doe? lick figs Out at my — FACE Rogue, Rogue, out of all your sleights. DOL COMMON Nay, looke yee! Soueraigne, Generall, are you mad-men? SUBTLE O, let the wild sheepe loose. Ile gumme your silkes With good strong water, an’ you come. (1.1.1–7)

The episode of conflict that so often opens Jacobean comedy is here literally explosive, as a play of ferocious selfishness starts with a flatulent but very real threat (that directors have on occasion interpreted as an implicit stage direction). The threat, reiterated in liquid version towards the end of this passage, may seem an instance of the ‘excremental aggression’ that Bakhtin characterised as a fundamental feature of carnival: a joyous immersal in phys-

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iological matter construed as a collective celebration of the living body.12 However, as with Otter’s rant in Epicoene, there is ultimately no life and no communal joy in The Alchemist, and the point of the play is precisely that any sharing, any collective design become impossible. But Subtle’s first ‘utterance’ has an even broader resonance. Epicure Mammon’s debased vision of the greatness promised him by alchemy includes having at his court those ‘poets […] that writ so subtly of the fart’ (2.2.62–63). This alludes to a famous impromptu episode in Parliament in 1607, also mentioned by Jonson in his most extended scatological joke, the epigram ‘On the Famous Voyage’, a mock-heroic journey up a sewer that evokes ‘the graue fart, late let in parliament’ (‘CXXXIII — On the Famovs Voyage’, 108). This line occurs in a passage on the debasement of eloquence; a vulgar solo performance, indeed, or a case of afflatus reduced to plain flatus. Ranting and farting, fighting and farting are here jokingly equated with one another and with the vitriolic hurling and spouting found elsewhere in Jonson and, indeed, in Subtle’s own threat — all of them aggressive images proper to the ‘modern grotesque’. For representations of somatic processes that involve a celebration of the body as the great leveller, and the supersession of the human atrophy brought about by selfish concerns, we have to turn to Jonson’s following comedy, Bartholomew Fair. As suggested above, the open and sprawling space of the Fair welcomes all visitors. Their respective single-minded urges and ambitions are presented in act one (when they are still in the City) and widely satirised during their brief solo careers through the Fair. The visitors’ concerns are no different from those of the citizens exposed in earlier comedies (especially in The Alchemist), and in Smithfield they likewise come up against the craftiness of conmen, pickpockets, and pimps. But a major difference resides in the ability of the Fair denizens to offer a counterpoint, debased however it may be, to the strictly individualised concerns associated with the Early Modern city. Confronted with the visitors, the sellers and entertainers act as a body, moved by a common purpose. Their ‘game of vapours’, described in a stage direction as ‘nonsense. Euery man to oppose the last Man that spoke: whether it concern’d him, or no’ (4.4.26ff), mimicks the visitors’ inclination to quarrel (one of the gallants is called Quarlous, and the aptly named Humphrey Wasp has a gift for scatological invective). Moreover, the game is stage-managed to exploit the outsiders’ rage for gain — contention is a ruse, not an inevitability that dooms the Smithfield sellers and entertainers. It is as if Jonson were sardonically offering a mock-pastoral of old-time, pre-Modern fraud, regressively 12. Bakhtine, p. 151 and passim.

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celebrated for its sense of community, its members preying only on outsiders — and, even then, in a festive way, under the licence proper to the Fair. Because here indeed the somatic is quintessentially carnivalesque, as shown in Ursula. Roasting pigs at the centre of the fair, ruling over it as ‘Vrsa maior’ (2.5.190), and indistinctly hailed or derided as the ‘fleshly woman’ (3.6.33) and the ‘shee-Beare’ (2.3.1), the ‘mother o’ the Pigs’ (2.5.75), the ‘fatnesse of the Fayre’ (2.2.118), and the ‘Body o’ the Fayre!’ (2.5.73), Ursula epitomises her environing space — and its allegorical coextension with the world.13 As a literal centre of the marketplace (in the Bakhtinian sense), she is the apotheosis of the body in grotesque realism. In her dual function as provider of food as well as of the only equivalent to a toilet in the fair, she foregrounds a concomitant grotesque trait, the fusion and interchangeability of bodily functions. This corporeal ambivalence proves decisive for the discomfiture of the character that in Bartholomew Fair represents, par excellence, an attempt to impose a singular voice and judgement on the Fair — Judge Adam Overdo. Though invoking personal authority and pursuing a singular course, he is exposed before his audience as either inadequate or inept, and eventually exploded out of any sense. Whether in soliloquy or aside, the solo initiative is his dream and ambition. Aptly named, Adam Overdo announces his commitment to discover, by resorting to the stock strategy of the magistrate in disguise, the ‘enormities’ supposedly practised in Smithfield, the territory of his jurisdiction. But the fundamental misjudgement of his hyperbolic pronouncements on the petty transgressiveness of the Fair is proportional to the rhetorical inflation of each oratio: OVERDOO Well, in Iustice name, and the Kings; and for the common-wealth! defie all the world, Adam Ouerdoo, for a disguise, and all story; for thou hast fitted thy selfe, I sweare; […] They may haue seene many a foole in the habite of a Iustice; but neuer till now, a Iustice in the habit of a foole. Thus must we doe, though, that wake for the publike good: and thus hath the wise Magistrate done in all ages. […] I Adam Ouerdoo, am resolu’d therefore, to spare spy-money hereafter, and make mine owne discoueries. Many are the yearly enormities of this Fair […]. But this is the speciall day for detection of those foresaid enormities. Here is my blacke booke, for the purpose; […] under this couert I shall see, and not be seene. […] And as I began, so I’ll end; in Iustice name, and the Kings; and for the Common-wealth. (2.1.1ff)

The accumulation of errors of judgment in Overdo’s solitary and incognito observations proves the aptness of his disguise as a fool. This makes his sten13. Cf. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 24–26.

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torian address, the invoked precedents, his rage for individual salience when he believes his moment of glory has come, all the more ludicrous: OVERDOO Now, to my enormities: looke vpon mee, O London! and see me, O Smithfield; The example of Iustice, and Mirror of Magistrates: the true top of formality, and scourge of enormity. Harken vnto my labours, and but obserue my discoueries; and compare Hercules with me, if thou dar’st, of old; or Columbus, Magellan; or our countrey man Drake of later times: stand forth, you weedes of enormity, and spread. (5.6.33–40)

This comic hubris finds its nemesis — somatic and boisterous. When the judge’s wife emerges, drunk and vomiting, from Ursula’s booth, Bartholomew Fair is brought to a gregarious and absolving ending, in which all bids for individual assertion are dis-authorised and diluted in food and drink. It is certainly revealing that the name given to the judge’s wrong assumptions is also the title of Jonson’s book of maxims and received knowledge: QUARLOVS […] remember you are but Adam, Flesh, and blood! you haue your frailty, forget your other name of Ouerdoo, and inuite vs all to supper. There you and I will compare our discoueries; and drowne the memory of all enormity in your bigg’st bowle at home. (5.6.96–100)

Introducing a collection of essays on translation and cultural difference, Rosanna Warren remarks on the close connection between ‘psychic health’ and the ability to recognise otherness, and she points out: Our word ‘idiot’ comes from the Greek […] [word] whose primary sense is of privacy, peculiarity, isolation. A person or culture guarding its privacy to an extreme extent becomes ‘idiotic’, […] and such resistance to the foreign, such incapacity to translate, spells its doom.14

The discomfiture of Overdo’s ambition to stand out from the crowd and enjoy, solo, a moment of glory, and the bid for conviviality and acknowledgement of a common humanity that follows on it, can be described as the full achievement of a comic ending. It seems to vindicate the virtues of a rurality associated from the Ancients with greater freedom and, indeed (even etymologically), with the comic genre.15 But Quarlous’s remark to Overdo is also, in more basic terms, a bid for sanity — for the supersession of ‘idiocy’. As such, 14. Rosanna Warren, ed., The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), p. 3. 15. Cf. Erich Segal, The Death of Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 3–4.

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Quarlous’s words validate Cordatus’s remark, in Every Man Out, that Asper’s harsh, solitary vow to impose a caustic cure on the ills of the social body seems couched in the words of a madman. Moreover, Quarlous’s summation also echoes the judgement passed by the prostitute Doll Common, in the opening lines of The Alchemist, on the ineluctable conflictuality of her partners in fraud. And, finally, Quarlous’s remark endorses the implicit judgement that, in Epicoene, emerges from Morose’s solitude and imperviousness to the world. Morose’s position is emblematic in this regard, since he has shut himself away from life, unable to co-exist with others, as he sits in much-sought silence on his rafters. The moment when the soloist of rage becomes an object as much as an agent of satire, and in that sense shares the position of a butt with the selfcentred fools and rogues against whom he has inveighed, is also when the rationale for the supposed normative value of satiric denunciation reaches its breaking point. A measure of irony and inconclusiveness is thus found in Jonson’s construction of satiric agents as ultimate solo performers. If this contributes to the interrogation of traditional definitions of satire that has characterised recent critical revisitations of the mode, it also partakes in the ongoing revision of Jonson’s critical reputation. Indeed, a major topos of Jonsonian criticism since the final years of the twentieth century has been the contestation of his self-fashioned image as monolithic classicist, literary pedant, and political reactionary. At a moment in cultural history that can hardly reconcile such values to an admired literary profile, many critics strive to present ‘a new Jonson […] who is alert to the socio-political contingencies of his age(s)’, ‘a pluralist Jonson’, ‘a twenty-first-century Jonson’.16 Irrespective of their own contingency, such critical efforts shed further light on the challenges that a society in transit, in Early Modern Europe, posed to the relation between self and others — and therefore help delineate, in sharper terms, the foundations of a modern sense of the human.

16. Kate Chedgzoy, Julie Sanders, and Susan Wiseman, ‘Introduction: Refashioning Ben Jonson’, in Julie Sanders, Kate Chedgzoy, and Susan Wiseman, eds., Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 1–27 (pp. 4–5); Martin Butler, ‘Introduction: From Workes to Texts’, in Martin Butler, ed., Re-Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, History, Performance (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 1–19 (p. 1). The greater ambition that resonates in the last of these quotations, the one by Martin Butler, reflects the close links between his edited collection and the new Cambridge Jonson edition — meant to replace the old Herford and Simpson standard edition — currently being prepared under the joint editorship of Martin Butler, David Bevington and Ian Donaldson.

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Bibliography Bacon, Francis, Essays, ed. by Michael J.Hawkins (London: Dent, 1981). Bakhtine, Mikhaïl, L’Oeuvre de François Rabelais et la Culture Populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance, trans. by Andrée Robel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). Bergson, Henri, ‘Le Rire’, in Oeuvres (Paris: P.U.F., 1963), pp. 381–485. Butler, Martin, ed., Re-Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, History, Performance (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999). —, ‘Introduction: From Workes to Texts’, in Martin Butler, ed., Re-Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, History, Performance (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 1–19. Chedgzoy, Kate, Julie Sanders, and Susan Wiseman, ‘Introduction: Refashioning Ben Jonson’, in Julie Sanders, Kate Chedgzoy, and Susan Wiseman, eds., Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 1–27. Dutton, Richard, ed., Ben Jonson (London: Longman, 2000). Fowler, Alastair, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973). Grene, Nicholas, Shakespeare, Jonson, Molière: The Comic Contract (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980). Griffin, Dustin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1994). Harp, Richard and Stanley Stewart, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Haynes, Jonathan, The Social Relations of Jonson’s Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Herford, C.H. and Percy Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52). McEvoy, Sean, Ben Jonson, Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). Paulson, Ronald, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967). Parker, Patricia, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987). Rhodes, Neil, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge, 1980). Sanders, Julie, Kate Chedgzoy and Susan Wiseman, eds., Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998). Segal, Erich, The Death of Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Stott, Andrew, Comedy (London: Routledge, 2004). Warren, Rosanna, ed., The Art of Translation: Voices From the Field (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989).

The Poem as Performance Self-Definition and Self-Exhibition in John Donne’s Songs and Sonets Wolfgang G. Müller More than any other poet of the Early Modern Age, John Donne presents his texts as events, performances, that is, in which the speaker of the poem — or the poet — acts out a role in a specific situation with an addressee whom he seeks to persuade, impress, or use as a witness. The high degree of performativity especially in Donne’s love poetry essentially derives from three qualities. First, there is the strongly rhetorical character of his poems, which is shown in the frequent use of the address to a ‘you’ and a great intensity of argument and persuasion, with surprising shifts of position and paradoxical reversals, as in ‘Womans constancy’. Second, with the address to a ‘you’ a communication situation is evoked and frequently elaborated into a dramatic scene, which may include action, even though the basically monological mode of the utterance is never transcended. A characteristic example would be ‘The Flea’. Third, the notorious subjectivity of Donne’s poetry, its frequent focus on the ‘I’ is never solipsistic, since the speaker lays bare his soul in front of an audience, so that self-scrutiny tends to assume the character of self-exposure or self-exhibition. Thus the rigorous self-representation conducted in a stunning series of selfdefinitions in ‘A nocturnal upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day’ is characteristically related to an audience: ‘Study me then […]’.

Performativity, Rhetoric, and the Lyric In an article on Shakespeare’s sonnets Manfred Pfister points out that these poems are ‘processes, as opposed to products’,1 texts evincing the qualities of performance and performativity in a very high degree. This may seem astonishing to readers who entertain a romantic understanding of poetry as immediate self-expression, the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.2 Yet in the Early Modern period the lyric is a kind of stage for a speaker to present himself or herself in front of an intratextual and an implied extratextual audience in ever-changing self-representations which are quasi theatrical roles enacted in the small space of a poem. Thus it is the lyric — roughly defined as a single subject’s utterance of greater or less linguistic complexity with an 1.

2.

Manfred Pfister, ‘“As an unperfect actor on the stage”: Notes Towards a Definition of Performance and Performativity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, ed. by Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 207–28 (p. 218). William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads’, in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by E. de Sélincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969) II, pp. 384–409 (p. 387).

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explicit or implicit addressee — which becomes a conspicuous testimony of the Renaissance concern with self-representation or, more specifically, solo performance. Endowed with this theatrical quality the lyric turns into an outstanding testimony of a culture deeply concerned with performativity.3 The discovery of the general importance of the performative in all areas of cultural production in the Early Modern period can be interpreted as a paradigm shift from rhetoric to performativity. The Renaissance has deservedly been called a rhetorical culture,4 because during this period rhetoric is understood not as a bloodless system of rules and principles, but as a dynamic persuasive force. This force permeates not only all artistic endeavours, but also dominates social life and particularly courtly conduct, which requires a constant role-playing on the part of the courtiers who want to find favour with their prince or king. This dynamic can even be observed in elocution as the art of rhetorical ornament, as George Puttenham’s attempt to find English equivalents for rhetorical terms indicates in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), a rhetorical poetics and conduct book designed for the English courtier in his role as a poet. In his translation of Greek and Latin names of figures and particularly tropes Puttenham tends to use nomina agentis, which refer to social role behaviour. 5 Thus he calls hyperbole ‘the Ouer reacher’ or ‘loud lyer’ (159), sententia ‘the Sage sayer’ (197), liptote ‘the Moderatour’ (153), meiosis ‘the Disabler’, and tapinosis ‘the Abbaser’ (154). The most conspicuous name is given to allegory, the trope to which he accords the highest rank in his courtly poetics, ‘the Courtier or figure of faire semblant’ (251). This translation conflates rhetoric and social conduct. The dynamics of social life is here seen to infiltrate the very nomenclature of rhetorical devices. Now it is obvious that an understanding of rhetoric which is so closely associated with social and poetic practice can contribute to appreciating the performance quality of poetry, but a wider concept than that of rhetoric, i.e. the concept of performativity, is necessary when it comes to characterising, as a whole, the culture of the period in question. For various reasons rhetoric is too limited in its scope to serve as a paradigm for conceptualising the Early Modern age as a cultural period. For one thing there is humanist rhetoric which is generally averse to or at least not explicitly in favour of performativity. And rhetoric in 3.

4. 5.

For the notions of performance and perfomativity see Manfred Pfister, ‘Performance/Performativität’, in Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, ed. by Ansgar Nünning (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2001), pp. 496–98; Irmgard Maassen, ‘Text und/als/in der Performanz in der frühen Neuzeit: Thesen und Überlegungen’, Paragrana, 10 (2001), 285–302. Heinrich F. Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004). George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie is quoted from the first edition (London: Richard Field, 1589). Page references are given in brackets in the text.

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the tradition of Castiglione and Puttenham, while being fully aware of the performative potential of social and poetic role-play, is strongly related to the culture of the court. The performance quality of Shakespeare’s sonnets, however, which Pfister scrutinised in such depth, is hardly indebted to the rhetorical culture of the court. The same applies to John Donne’s Songs and Sonets, which are to be the subject of the following discussion.6 I do not deny that rhetoric is one of the outstanding formative influences on the culture of the age. Even if the concept of performance and performativity is here preferred to rhetoric as a paradigm for the culture of the Early Modern period, a complete understanding of the performance quality of the period’s literature is not possible without reference to rhetoric and its power of argument (inventio), and persuasion (persuasio), and its theatrical appeal (actio).7 But as will be shown in the analytical part of this paper, performativity tends to come into its own when the text transcends the conventional rules and structures of rhetoric. The poems’ deviation from traditional rhetorical rules and structures will be a measure of their performance quality. In what follows, varieties of the performance quality of John Donne’s Songs and Sonets will be examined.8 My procedure differs to some extent from that of Ted-Larry Pebworth who relates the notion of ‘the text as performance’ to ‘the coterie nature’ of Donne’s poetry.9 Pebworth believes that Donne’s poems are linked to ‘particular occasions’ and as such are ‘essentially ephemeral’.10 He understands Donne’s ‘texts as scripts for performances’.11 His concept of coterie poetry would be, in Irmgard Maassen’s words, that of ‘text in performance’ (‘Text in der Performanz’).12 While a lot speaks for the ‘coterie theory’, I do not believe that the Songs and Sonets are a kind of occasional verse, which ‘once the occasion has passed […] the poem commemo6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

‘For Donne was a chief actor and influence in what may be called the “reinvention of love,” from something essentially social and feudal to something essentially private and modern.’ Anthony Low, ‘Donne and the Reinvention of Love’, English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990), 465–86 (p. 466). ‘The rhetorical illusion of the play of the body falls under the competence of the orator as an actor (and vice-versa), that of the play of language under his competence as a poet (and viceversa).’ Plett, p. 252. For the performative power of Donne’s poetry — the power of words and the theatricality of his poems — see Margret Fetzer, ‘Plays of the Self: Theatrical Performativity in Donne’ (in this volume). Ted-Larry Pebworth, ‘John Donne, Coterie Poetry, and the Text as Performance’, SEL, 29 (1989), 61–75 (p. 61). As for the concept of ‘coterie poetry’ see especially Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). Pebworth, p. 65. Ibid., p. 62. Maassen, p. 289.

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rating it ceases to have its primary excuse for existence and so is expendable’.13 After all, the performance quality ingrained in the text is part and parcel of the poem, or, as Maassen puts it, there is also ‘performativity in the text’ (‘Performanz im Text’),14 which can be identified by certain textual strategies such as specific forms of address, dialogicity, simulation of physical presence, the feigning of oral communication situations, the self-fashioning of the speaker, the fashioning of the addressee, and the production of fictitious social role models etc. Signs of performativity remain in the text and can be identified in the poem regardless of the role the text may have played in a performance situation on the occasion of its original presentation. In order to appreciate the performance quality of Donne’s poems it is necessary to have a close look at the texts, a task which Pebworth denies himself. Disputation and Self-Colloquy in the Dramatic Lyric: ‘Womans constancy’ The first poem to be analysed, ‘Womans constancy’, presents a rhetorical situation, a speaker pleading before an addressee in an accusatory tone, but it deviates strongly from what is usually found in a persuasive speech, and it is in the deviation from what is expected in forensic rhetoric that the text’s performativity manifests itself. Considering the ‘preponderance of “masculinist” lyrics in the Donnean canon’, I assume the poem’s speaker to be male, but with Ben Saunders I am aware that it is also possible to ‘give’ the poem to a woman or to leave the attribution of gender undecided.15 Now thou hast lov’d me one whole day, To morrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say? Wilt thou then Antedate some new made vow? Or say that now We are not just those persons, which we were?

13. Pebworth, p. 65. I do not subscribe to Pebworth’s following statement: ‘But performance must of necessity be consciously turned into artifact if it is to be such, and this transformation Donne did not perform, or allow to be performed, on eighty-six percent of his surviving poetic corpus.’ 14. Maassen, p. 291. 15. Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 135. To refer to another critic, James S. Baumlin, starts his discussion of the poem with the following words, ‘[t]hough other interpretations are possible, let us for the moment assume a woman speaker’. John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991), p. 231. There is no room in this paper to deal with the gender problem in Songs and Sonets. For an intriguing discussion see David Blair, ‘Inferring Gender in Donne’s Songs and Sonets’, Essays in Criticism, 45 (1995), 230–49. Even if one assumes, as I do, a male voice in ‘Womans constancy’, there is no need to attribute an acerbic masculinist attitude to the poem, as its ending makes it clear.

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Or, that oathes made in reverentiall feare Of Love, and his wrath, any may forsweare? Or, as true deaths, true maryages untie, So lovers contracts, images of those, Binde but till sleep, deaths image, them unloose? Or, your owne end to Justifie, For having purpos’d change, and falsehood; you Can have no way but falsehood to be true? Vaine lunatique, against these scapes I could Dispute, and conquer, if I would, Which I abstaine to doe, For by to morrow, I may thinke so too.16

This poem conveys an enormous sense of presence. It begins with the deictic adverb of time — ‘now’ — which is emphasized by metrical inversion. This is followed by a deictic pronoun of person — ‘thou’. The two deictics are linked by internal rhyme: ‘now thou’. A more immediate plunge of a poem into a dramatic situation seems scarcely possible. In the ensuing temporal deictic — ‘one whole day’ — the time reference is widened from ‘now’ to a whole day, i.e. a day of loving, while in the next deictic of time in line two — ‘to morrow’ — a precise moment in the near future is referred to, the moment of the addressed woman’s leaving. The poem’s impetus of address is in this line — line two — intensified by the twice-repeated personal deictic pronoun ‘thou’ in the question ‘when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say?’ The speaker bears almost aggressively on the woman, taking it for granted that she will leave him and make excuses. The poem does not establish a dialogue, even though the interrogative form points in the direction of dialogue. The woman’s voice is excluded from the poem. Her arguments are not presented in direct speech, as would normally be the case in the rhetorical figure of impersonation or sermocinatio, which Puttenham refers to as Hypotiposis or ‘counterfait representation’ (199). A rhetorician would never dream of the transformation to which Donne subjects sermocinatio or counterfait representation. He makes the speaker himself answer the question he asks, imputing a number of arguments to his mistress in a taunting tone, which is intensified by the use of questions. These arguments are of considerable sophistry and sophistication. The mistress may predate a newly made vow. She may argue that ‘now’ they are not the same persons they were, quite a sophisticated argument which refers to the Montaignesque idea that the identity of persons may change from day to day. She may deny the legal validity of lovers’ oaths which are made in an extremely emotional condition of the persons involved. She may 16. John Donne, Poetical Works, ed. by Herbert Grierson (London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 9.

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argue by way of analogy: just as marriage contracts are untied by death, so lovers’ contracts are undone by sleep, the image of death. The whole sequence of arguments culminates in a paradox. The lover’s mistress may justify her calculated falseness by saying that she has ‘no way but falsehood to be true’. What is so remarkable with regard to the poem’s performativity, is that the speaker claims for himself the capacity to represent the woman’s argument. After this climax of the poem there is a turning-point realised in a change of the communication situation, which, however, reveals a profound ambiguity as it would also be inconceivable in a strictly rhetorical argument. The lover turns to his mistress, addressing her as a ‘vaine lunatique’, whose arguments he might refute, if he would, but he refrains from doing so because tomorrow he may hold the same position as his mistress. This is one of Donne’s characteristic inversions, an argumentative somersault, a denial of the point argued so fervently before in the poem. The text’s performativity is highlighted by the fact that the speaker here refers to his own way of arguing (‘against these scapes I could / Dispute, and conquer, if I would, / Which I abstaine to doe’). But this is not yet the whole truth. Since all the arguments the speaker had imputed to his mistress are of his own making, since they have all derived from his own brain, even though he imputes them to his mistress, the address to the ‘vaine lunatique’ at the poem’s volta can and must also be understood as a self-address. The ambiguity of the apostrophe ‘vaine lunatique’ is the poem’s performative core. The poem is an extraordinary performance in the way it deals with the addressee. It imputes a series of arguments for inconstancy to the woman addressed — arguments for which, however, the speaker himself is responsible. They bear the stamp of the speaker’s capacity for argument. In producing his arguments the speaker reveals himself. In the volta at the poem’s end the argument, then, becomes explicitly self-referential. The dramatic immediacy of the lover’s address to his mistress is more than a rhetorical bravura piece, which is meant to have a persuasive effect. It is rather an achievement in self-presentation and self-exhibition. The high degree of this text’s performativity is confirmed by the fact that almost all the features which Pfister mentions in his list of performativity-heightening criteria (‘Skalierung von Performativität’) in the appendix of Maassen’s article are evident in ‘Womans constancy’.17

17. Here are free translations of Pfister’s criteria: use of interrogatives, use of pronouns, reference to the hic and nunc of the utterance, stylistic idiosyncrasies marking the speaker’s subjectivity, simulation of orality, articulation presented as vocal act, emphasis on the process of thinking and arguing, change of the argumentative position, the form of address coming close to dialogue, presentation of the utterance to a hearer, theatricality of the situation, auto-

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Erotic Persuasion as Paradoxical Argument in ‘The Flea’ ‘The Flea’ is more dramatic or even theatrical than ‘Womans constancy’ in that it creates a situation in which the speaker and the addressee seem to be physically present to a greater extent. There is also a specific physical object, the flea, which the speaker utilizes for his argument and which stimulates the addressee to perform an action, which in turn is used by the speaker to give his argument a new twist.18 As distinct from ‘Womans constancy’, this poem is more rhetorical, in a higher degree targeted towards persuasion, and it lacks a self-reflective dimension. What is so astonishing about this poem is that it assumes the character of a ‘miniature play’19 with two characters, a dramatic conflict, and a stage action and yet we hear only one voice, the voice of the would-be seducer. The action, which takes place before the beginning of the poem and between the stanzas is implied in the speaker’s monologue. In the tension between the poem’s dramatic content and the monological form of presentation the text’s character as a solo performance emerges.20 It would, incidentally, be wrong to conclude from the absolute dominance of the voice of the male speaker at the level of discourse that there is a hierarchy of gender suggested in the poem. Even though the speaker achieves a stunning rhetorical and argumentative triumph, it is by far unclear whether his attempt at seduction succeeds. The point is not success in the attempt at persuasion, but a successful achievement of a performance. The Flea Marke but this flea, and marke in this, How little that which thou deny’st me is; It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee;

reflective reference to the utterance, subversion of the speaker’s own position, open ending. See Maassen, p. 302. 18. There is none of the lasciviousness of the conventional flea poem in Donne’s text, the lasciviousness of the unrequited lover who imagines to be in his mistress’s cleavage. See, for example, H. David Brumble, ‘John Donne’s “The Flea”: Some Implications of the Encyclopedic and Poetic Flea Tradition’, Critical Quarterly, 15 (1973), 147–54; Theresa M. Di Pasquale, ‘Receiving a Sexual Sacrament: “The Flea” as Profane Eucharist’, in John Donne’s Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. by Donald R. Dickson (New York and London: Norton, 2007), pp. 350–62. 19. Laurence Perrine, ‘Explicating Donne: “The Apparition” and “The Flea”’, College Literature, 17 (1990), 1–20 (p. 5). 20. The poem’s monological character makes a communicational analysis problematic. Manfred Malzahn, ‘The Flea, the Sun, and the Critic: A Communicational Approach to John Donne’s Poetry’, Symbolism, 3 (2003), 53–70.

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Thou know’st that this cannot be said A sinne, nor shame, nor losse of maidenhead; Yet this enjoyes before it wooe, And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two, And this, alas, is more then wee would doe. O stay, three lives in one flea spare, Where wee almost, yea more then maryed are, This flea is you and I, and this Our mariage bed, and mariage temple is; Though parents grudge, and you, w’are met, And cloysterd in these living walls of Jet. Though use make you apt to kill mee, Let not to that, selfe murder added bee, And sacrilege, three sinnes in killing three. Cruell and sodaine, hast thou since Purpled thy naile, in blood of innocence? Wherein could this flea guilty bee, Except in that drop which it suckt from thee? Yet thou triumph’st, and saist that thou Find’st not thy selfe, nor mee the weaker now; ‘Tis true, then learne how false feares bee; Just so much honor, when thou yeeld’st to mee, Will wast, as this flea’s death tooke life from thee.21

This poem creates an intense impression of dramatic immediacy with its repeated imperatives and a plethora of deictics. The evocation of a concrete situation is heightened by the assumed presence of a flea, which is made an essential part of the speaker’s rhetorical performance. This is shown already in the poem’s beginning, where the focus is emphatically directed to the flea, as the repeated deictic pronoun ‘this’ shows. The personal deictics ‘thou’ and ‘me’ then appear in the second line: ‘Marke but this flea, and marke in this, / How little that which thou deny’st me is’. The poem’s issue — the desire for sexual conquest — is also referred to by a deictic — ‘that’ — in the periphrastic phrase ‘that which thou deniest me’. It is interesting that the lady addressed in the poem, though being only a listener at the level of discourse, acts physically and by acting influences the speaker’s argument. This argument proceeds in three steps. In stanza one the speaker presents to his mistress the flea, which has sucked the blood of the two lovers, as an example of how harmless the mingling of the lovers’ blood is in sexual encounter (a Renaissance belief). This argument is based on the analogical thinking of the Renaissance. In the second stanza the speaker warns his mistress of squashing the flea, because that 21. Donne, p. 36–37.

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would mean triple murder, namely of the insect, the lover, and herself. This argument is paradoxical — take, for instance, the idea that killing a little insect may be tantamount to self-murder. The period’s analogical thinking is here stretched hyperbolically. The third stanza represents a complete change of the speaker’s argument. From his words we realise that his mistress has killed the flea and triumphed at having thus destroyed the speaker’s argument that slaughtering the insect would cause the lover’s death. In a surprising turn of the argument he now contradicts his earlier assertion, pointing out that as little as the flea’s sucking harmed his mistress, so little will her honour be damaged, if she yields to his persuasion. The whole poem is again a performance, a demonstration of the speaker’s argumentative skill, his capacity for inversion and reversal of argument. Even though the poem implies physical action and counter-argument on the part of the woman courted, it is a solo performance, a display of the speaker’s rhetorical skill and his capacity for paradoxical argument. The innovative achievement of the poem is to be seen in the fact that a dramatic scene is here rendered in a single speaker’s utterance, in a monologue. That monologue radiates with dialogicity and evinces a high degree of performative energy in the insistence and urgency with which arguments and twists of argument are pressed on the addressee, who, however, seems to be unimpressed and even makes a defiant gesture. Whether the speaker’s argumentative feat ultimately changes the attitude of the woman remains undecided.22 Self-Diagnosis and Self-Presentation in a Situation of Loss: ‘A nocturnal upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day’ The next poem to be examined, ‘A nocturnal upon S. Lucies day’, presents a completely different kind of performance, a self-presentation in which the speaker lays his soul bare in a kind of rigorous self-analysis. One point to be discussed is the question of whether this text is performative in the sense of being a self-exposure before an audience. In this connection the problem of the text’s rhetoricity and performativity emerges once again. ‘Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes, Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes, The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;

22. The question whether the seduction is successful, is controversially discussed. Di Pasquale, to mention at least one critic, reads ‘the seduction as successful’ (Di Pasquale, p. 352). To speculate about what the text is silent on runs the risk of reading the poem in a naively realistic or biographical way.

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The worlds whole sap is sunke: The generall balme th’hydroptique earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke, Dead and enterr’d; yet all these seeme to laugh, Compar’d with mee, who am their Epitaph. Study me then, you who shall lovers bee At the next world, that is, at the next Spring: For I am every dead thing, In whom love wrought new Alchimie. For his art did expresse A quintessence even from nothingnesse, From dull privations, and leane emptinesse: He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not. All others, from all things, draw all that’s good, Life, soule, forme, spirit, whence they being have; I, by loves limbecke, am the grave Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood Have we two wept, and so Drownd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow To be two Chaosses, when we did show Care to aught else; and often absences Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses. But I am by her death, (which word wrongs her) Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown; Were I a man, that I were one, I needs must know; I should preferre, If I were any beast, Some ends, some means; Yea plants, yea stones detest, And love; All, all some properties invest; If I an ordinary nothing were, As shadow, a light, and body must be here. But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew. You lovers, for whose sake, the lesser Sunne At this time to the Goat is runne To fetch new lust, and give it you, Enjoy your summer all; Since shee enjoyes her long nights festival, Let me prepare towards her, and let mee call This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.23

23. Donne, p. 39–41

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This poem is an exception in Songs and Sonets in that it does not seem to begin in a rhetorical way and fails to create at its start a communication situation between a speaker and an addressee. The first stanza describes an entirely dismal situation, the shortest day of the year, which is metaphorically called ‘the yeares midnight’, a world robbed of light and life. Life is presented as shrunk ‘to the beds-feet’, ‘Dead and enter’d’. At the climax of this bleak vision there is, then, a reference to the ‘I’. The general loss of life in winter seems laughter in comparison to the situation of the ‘I’: ‘yet all these seeme to laugh, / Compar’d with mee, who am their Epitaph.’ The descriptive beginning of the poem thus turns out to have a rhetorical function. By way of contrast the description serves to characterise the speaker’s incomparably abysmal condition. This pointed ending of the stanza contains the first in a series of paradoxical self-definitions which represent the poem’s most striking formal feature — the pervasive use of the rhetorical figure of definition, which here appears in the form of negative self-definition. Here are the ensuing examples of this figure: I am every dead thing, A quintessence even from nothingnesse, re-begot Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not (stanza 2) I […] am the grave Of all, that’s nothing (stanza 3) I […] Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown, […] an ordinary nothing (stanza 4) I am None (stanza 5)

In this exercise in self-definition, hyperbolical language is driven to an extreme so that at times it paradoxically expresses negativity by positive metaphors such as ‘quintessence’, creatio ex nihilo (‘re-begot’), ‘Elixir’. This differentiated reference to nothingness reminds us of Heidegger’s famous 1929 inaugural lecture ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, where he distinguishes between ‘an ordinary nothing’ and ‘the nothing’, the latter being a metaphysical concept. Heidegger interprets the old proposition ‘ex nihilo nihil fit’ so that it contains the opposite proposition ‘ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fit’.24 It is interesting that Donne also distinguishes between different categories of ‘nothing’ and that he also refers to creatio ex nihilo. Donne does not, however, deal with

24. Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klosterman, 1965), pp. 38–40.

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‘Seinsphilosophie’.25 It is his concern to present the lover’s sense of his own negativity in the strongest rhetorical terms, a sense of a nothingness which outdoes every other — ‘ordinary’ — nothing. It is significant that in stanza three, after the speaker has defined himself as ‘the grave / Of all that’s nothing’, the tense changes from present to past and the pronoun ‘I’ is replaced by ‘we’. Referring to the time when his mistress was still alive, the speaker states that then there were moments when their union was already threatened by annihilation: when they wept, they drowned ‘the whole world, us two’. They grew into ‘two Chaosses’, when they cared about anything but themselves, and ‘absences’ drew their souls out of their bodies and made them ‘carcasses’. Love here emerges as an absolute value, separated from all other concerns of the world. Beside the lovers nothing else exists, the world is ‘us two’, so the absence of the beloved person means loss of identity and life to the bereaved. Thus the ‘we’-passage contributes to explaining the abysmal state of the lover, the reduction to nothingness as the inevitable consequence of the loss of his mistress. My analysis of this poem has so far been rhetorical in nature. I have analysed Donne’s use of the rhetorical figure of definition as an instrument of self-representation.26 But it must be observed once again that rhetoric can hardly contribute to appreciating the performance quality of a lyrical text. The performative dimension of the poem is revealed most clearly at the beginning of the second stanza, where the form of address emerges in an imperative: ‘Study me then, you who shall lovers bee / At the next world, that is, at the next Spring’. The poet presents his case as an example to be studied by future lovers. It is significant that this poem, which is so intensively concerned with the state of the self in a situation of bereavement, does not merely express a mental condition, but exhibits this condition to an audience. Self-diagnosis and performance go together. This is pervasively shown in a demonstrative and explanatory mode of expression. The speaker seems to feel the necessity to give reasons for his sense of being nothing. Love is referred to as the cause of the mental state of the self. It is pointed out that ‘love wrought new Alchimie’ in the lover (stanza 2); ‘by loves limbecke’ he has become ‘the grave / Of all, that’s nothing’ (stanza 3), ‘by her death’ he has ‘Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown’ (stanza 4). This discursive aspect of the poem, its constant reference to the reason 25. An in many ways significant interpretation of the poem in terms of alchemical thought may be found in Kathleen H. Dolan, ‘Materia in Potentia: The Paradox of the Quintessence in Donne’s “A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day”’, Renascence, 32 (1979), 13–20. 26. This is an approach which may yield acceptable results — Wolfgang G. Müller, ‘Die Definition in John Donnes Liebesdichtung’, Anglia, 94 (1976), 86–97 — , but which I now see limited in its scope.

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for the desolate condition of the self has to be seen in the context of the performative character of the poem. I do not wish to say that the lover parades his grief, but he demonstrates his case, the drastic consequences of the loss of his mistress, before an audience. The poem is simultaneously self-diagnosis and self-exhibition. In the last stanza, after having defined himself as ‘None’ and postulated that his ‘Sunne’ (his mistress) will not ‘renew’, he turns to the audience again with an imperative and asks the future lovers to enjoy their summer, when the ‘lesser sunne’ (the heavenly body) will have gained strength again. The poem ends on a consolatory note when the speaker declares with yet another imperative that he will prepare himself for a re-union with his mistress, ‘Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call / This houre her Vigill, and her Eve […].’ Conclusion: The Nature of Performativity in Donne’s Love Poetry In the poems discussed Donne projects an imaginary space existing solely for the purpose of argument and disputation. There is ample evidence of deictic elements, which refer to the speaking self, to various addressees, and to place. Yet there is no sense of a tangible physical reality. The texts are performed in a purely intellectual sphere in which the self exposes its argumentative capacity. In order to get a clearer view of what performativity means in Donne’s poetry, the performative paradigm has in our discussion been set against the rhetorical paradigm. It has been shown that rhetorical analysis is too limited in scope, when it comes to appraising the performance qualities of Donne’s poetry. In each of the three analysed poems it is the deviation from normative rhetoric which gives the text its performative thrust. In ‘Womans constancy’ rhetorical sermocinatio (‘counterfait representation’) is transformed so as to give us only the speaker’s version of the woman’s arguments instead of her own words — a strategy which turns the poem into a solo performance. The performative core of the poem is to be found towards its end in the reversal of the argument and the turn to the speaker’s self, discourse strategies which are alien to rhetorical discourse and even transcend the rhetorical technique of arguing two sides of a case (in utramquem partem). The ambiguity of the address to the ‘vaine lunatique’, which may be understood to refer equally to the addressee and to the speaker himself, is yet another feature which is not provided for in rhetoric. The overall character of the poem ‘The Flea’ is rhetorical in that it is targeted towards persuasion. But the way in which a ‘theatrical’ situation with a dramatic conflict between two characters, and actions related to a physical object (the flea) is integrated into the argument of one single speaker is something unknown in rhetoric. ‘The Flea’ is also, albeit in another way, a solo performance which exhibits the speaker’s capacity for paradox and inversion of argument. ‘A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day’, with its pattern of negative self-

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definitions, possesses a rhetorical structure, too. It is well-known that definition belongs to the inventory of rhetorical figures. In Donne’s poem, however, the definition is embedded in a performative context, that of a diagnosis and exhibition of the self in front of an audience. It is characteristic of the performative nature of Donne’s poetry that self-reflexivity and audienceconsciousness are inextricably connected. Donne has frequently been praised for his mastery of paradox and paradoxical argument. As we have seen, this is an aspect of his poetry which is also insolubly related to its performance quality. As an additional example a poem will be adduced which bears the title ‘The Paradox’. It is Donne’s poetic version of the famous liar paradox (‘Epimenedes, the Cretan, says, “All Cretans are liars”’ or ‘Socrates says‚ “Socrates speaks the untruth”’).27 The poem is a sequence of paradoxes, variations on the notion that it is impossible to say anything about love. It culminates in the speaker’s deictic reference to himself not only as a dead man talking, but a dead man lying, with a pun on the two meanings of ‘lying’ (speaking the untruth, being in a resting position): Once I lov’d and dy’d; and am now become Mine Epitaph and Tombe. Here dead men speake their last, and so do I; Love-slaine, loe, here I lye.28

The poem’s ending with the images of the self as an epitaph and tomb and a dead man speaking pinpoints its character as a performance in the sense of self-representation and self-exposure. The text is an exhibition of the speaker’s skill in paradoxical argument. Its climax is reached when the speaker, making use of deictics (‘here I lye’), presents himself — in the sense of rhetorical evidentia — as the proof of his paradoxical argument, when, in other words, he is performing what he is arguing.29

27. J.M. Bocheński, Formale Logik (Freiburg: Alber, 1956), pp. 275–366. See also Wolfgang G. Müller, ‘Das Paradoxon in der englischen Barocklyrik: John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw’ in Das Paradox: Eine Herausforderung des abendländischen Denkens, ed. by Paul Geyer and Roland Hagenbüchle (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1992), pp. 355–384, (pp. 365–66). 28. Donne, p. 62. 29. The assumption that at its end the whole poem turns out to be the speaker’s epitaph — ‘[p]resumably the last line echoing the hic jacet of funeral inscription, would metamorphose the lyric itself into the speaker’s epitaph’ (Baumlin, p. 18) — does, perhaps, not do justice to the text’s performance quality, since an inscription is a written text and not orally delivered speech.

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Bibliography Baumlin, James S., John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991). Blair, David, ‘Inferring Gender in Donne’s Songs and Sonets’, Essays in Criticism, 45 (1995), 230–49. Bocheński, J.M., Formale Logik (Freiburg: Alber, 1956). Brumble, H. David, ‘John Donne’s “The Flea”: Some Implications of the Encyclopedic and Poetic Flea Tradition’, Critical Quarterly, 15 (1973), 147–54. Di Pasquale, Theresa M., ‘Receiving a Sexual Sacrament: “The Flea” as Profane Eucharist’, in John Donne’s Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. by Donald R. Dickson (New York and London: Norton, 1995; repr. 2007), pp. 350–62. Docherty, Thomas, John Donne, Undone (London and New York: Methuen, 1986). Dolan, Kathleen H., ‘Materia in Potentia: The Paradox of the Quintessence in Donne’s “A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day”’, Renascence, 32 (1979), 13–20. Donne, John, Poetical Works, ed. by Herbert Grierson (London, NewYork, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968). Heidegger, Martin, Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klosterman, 1965). Low, Anthony, ‘Donne and the Reinvention of Love’, English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990), 465–86. Maassen, Irmgard, ‘Text und/als/in der Performanz in der frühen Neuzeit: Thesen und Überlegungen’, Paragrana, 10 (2001), 285–302. Malzahn, Manfred, ‘The Flea, the Sun, and the Critic: A Communicational Approach to John Donne’s Poetry’, Symbolism, 3 (2003), 53–70. Marotti, Arthur F., John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). McCanles, Michael, ‘Paradox in Donne’, Studies in the Renaissance, 13 (1966), 266–87. Müller, Wolfgang G., ‘Die Definition in John Donnes Liebesdichtung’, Anglia, 94 (1976), 86– 97. —, ‘“My selfe, the hardest object of the sight”: The Problem of Personal Identity in John Donne’s Poetry’, in Poetry and Epistemology: Turning Points in the History of Poetic Knowledge, ed. by Roland Hagenbüchle and Laura Skandera (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1983), pp. 57–71. —, ‘Das Paradoxon in der englischen Barocklyrik: Johne Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw’, in Das Paradox: Eine Herausforderung des abendländischen Denkens, ed. by Paul Geyer and Roland Hagenbüchle (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1992), pp. 355–84. Okerlund, Arlene N., ‘The Rhetoric of Love: Voice in the Amoretti and the Songs and Sonets’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 68 (1982), 37–46. Pebworth, Ted-Larry, ‘John Donne, Coterie Poetry, and the Text as Performance’, SEL, 29 (1989), 61–75. Perrine, Laurence, ‘Explicating Donne: “The Apparition” and “The Flea”’, College Literature, 17 (1990), 1–20. Pfister, Manfred, ‘Performance/Performativität’, in Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, ed. by Ansgar Nünning (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2001), pp. 496–98. —, ‘“As an unperfect actor on the stage”: Notes Towards a Definition of Performance and Performativity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, ed. by Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 207–28. Plett, Heinrich F., Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004).

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Ploeg, Scott D. Vander, ‘Reflexive Self-Reference in Donne’s “The triple Foole”’, Kentucky Philological Review, 9 (1994), 39–45. Puttenham George, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589). Raja, Tilottama, ‘“Nothing sooner broke”: Donne’s Songs and Sonets as Self-Consuming Artifacts’, ELH, 49 (1982), 805–28. Saunders, Ben, Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2006). Wolf, Werner, ‘The Lyric — An Elusive Genre. Problems of Definition and a Proposal for Reconceptualization’, AAA, 28 (2003), 59–91. Wordsworth, William, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by E. de Sélincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969). Zickler, Elaine Perez, ‘“nor in nothing, nor in things”: The Case of Love and Desire in Donne’s Songs and Sonets’, John Donne Journal, 12 (1993), 17–39.

Plays of Self Theatrical Performativity in Donne Margret Fetzer This essay analyses the extent to which John Donne’s worldly and divine poetry may be said to distinguish themselves from one another with regard to their performative dimensions. Donne’s poems are performative not only in that they employ the power of words to do rather than merely say something, but also in as far as their communicative situation is often theatrical. After an analysis of the ways in which ‘The Curse’ engages in these two kinds of performativity, my reading of some of Donne’s Holy Sonnets explores how the communicative situation of these poems differs from that of the coterie poetry. Drawing on Barthes, Montaigne, and Ignatius of Loyola, I shall show that the speakers of these poems are more fundamentally ‘alone’ or ‘solo’ than their worldly counterparts. I will suggest that, as a consequence, the performative dimension of these devotional poems tends towards the ritualistic rather than the theatrical.

When it comes to ‘solo performances’, or indeed to linguistic performativity in general, John Donne appears a promising candidate. As Richard Baker tells us, Donne was ‘a great Visiter of ladies’,1 and judging from Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, ‘doing things with words’ constituted the precondition for ‘doing things with the ladies’. In order to be allowed to perform sexually, Donne’s speakers first had to persuade their female addressees by means of linguistic performance. That same verbal power is also at the heart of Donne’s religious writing, whose linguistic potency rehearses the divine act of speaking the world into existence. Donne is notorious for his stubborn insistence on the performative power of the word, the word which, in the aftermath of the Reformation, gained in significance in the same degree as the relevance of church ritual dwindled. However, apart from being ‘a Visiter of ladies’, Donne was also ‘a great Frequenter of plays’2 — and this personal predilection of his has been less frequently and diligently explored than the poet’s verbal power with the ladies, although Stevie Davies characterises Donne’s poetic writings as performances of a ‘theatrical ego on a private stage’.3 Donne’s writing, I argue, is performative in two senses: on the one hand, it is performative in that it employs the power of words to do rather than merely say something. On the other hand, it is also performative in as far as the communicative situation of most of what Donne has written is theatrical. It is marked by role-play as well as by the 1. 2. 3.

Richard Baker, A Chronicle of the Kings of England (London: Printed by R.C. & R.H. for Daniel Frere, 1643), l. 156. Ibid., p. 156. Stevie Davies, John Donne (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1994), p. 35.

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interplay of an internal with an external communicative system — and it is this kind of theatrical performativity which my paper is primarily going to focus on. First, a reading of ‘The Curse’ is to introduce these two dimensions of Donne’s performativity, i.e. the power of ‘all that words can do’ as well as the theatricality of Donne’s coterie poetry. Then I shall look at some examples from Donne’s divine poetry, where, however, we shall find that this same theatricality becomes problematic, due to a ‘theatrical impasse’ which is, as I shall argue, not in principle related to the subject of religion — after all, the sermon may be considered the most intrinsically theatrical genre Donne ever articulated himself in. Instead, it is the apparent lack of an external audience that is responsible for the shift of Donne’s Holy Sonnets from theatrical (role)playfulness towards a more meditative and, thus, more ‘solo’ and ritualistic mode of communication. But let us turn to ‘The Curse’: as Judith Butler observed, ‘language can act in ways that parallel the infliction of physical pain and injury’, and it seems to be employed with just that intention in ‘The Curse’.4 The speaker attempts to be as thorough as possible in his curse, wishing upon the cursed sexual humiliation (l. 6), together with illness (l. 9), poverty (ll. 14, 22–24) and the ruin of his reputation (ll. 11–13).5 Most of what the speaker thinks up for the cursed man is based on the destructive power of words. The words which he will have said to the woman scorned by all, who, however, scorns him,6 will come back to him as he will have to distance himself from those embarrassing vows before others (ll. 7–8) — and, presumably, fail to do so as the ‘[…] fame […] that ’twas shee’ (ll. 12–13) is already established; once again, it is words, the words of gossip, that come down upon the head of the cursed. On the other hand, the words with which he shall falsely admit to criminal intentions are to bring about his death: ‘May he dreame Treason, and beleeve, that hee / Meant to performe it, and confesse, and die’ (ll. 17–8). However, whereas it was too many words which caused his downfall in this case, the gap caused by the absence of words to explain his innocence and thus the error of his death (‘And no record tell why’, l. 19) will be filled with other words, namely those constituting ‘his infamie’ (l. 21). ‘The Curse’ thus employs the power of words on various levels. Obviously, the poem seizes upon the performative genre of the curse to actually do rather than merely say something to the accursed object of the speaker’s wrath. Furthermore, however, it specialises in that kind of nas4. 5. 6.

Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 4. John Donne, The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. by John T. Shawcross (New York: Anchor Books, 1967). All following quotations are from this edition. Scorning in itself, of course, already constitutes an activity that is significantly verbal: by speaking ill of or to someone, I perform the act of scorning.

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tiness where evil comes through words, i.e. where the words of embarrassing vows, of gossip, of false confessions contribute to the addressee’s ruin. In addition, ‘The Curse’ is performative because it is implicated in a system of dramatic and theatrical communication. As a poet, Donne was firmly integrated in that ‘still powerful traditional culture based on the spoken word, spectacle, and manuscript’.7 Most of his worldly poetry was written for performance in one of the following domains, except for the first one virtually all-male: ‘(1) aristocratic households; (2) the universities; and (3) the Inns of Court (and City)’.8 There is thus good reason to read Donne’s erotic poetry in the communicative situation of the theatre. Due to the poetic rivalry and competition, which manuscript performance and predominantly male coterie subject the poem to, it may be argued that ‘The Curse’ is aimed at two targets. In the poem’s internal communicative system, the speaker’s beloved is to be moved into acknowledging and returning the love which the speaker bears her. The radicalism with which he guards the secret of his love against nosy addressees is to persuade her of the high value he attributes to her and of his passion for her. Here it could even be argued that this communicative situation constitutes a play within a play, since the lady has to be added as the curse’s ‘on-stage’ witness. On the other hand, the poem works to secure — in its external communicative system — the respect of the poet’s male listeners and potential competitors by establishing itself as a powerful instance of cursing, which any fellow-poet or fellow-curser would have difficulty in surpassing.9 Right from the start, ‘The Curse’ is set up as a challenge to its readers/listeners, who, in Donne’s time, would often have been potential poetic or sexual competitors. ‘Who ever guesses, thinks, or dreames he knowes / Who is my mistris, wither by this curse;’ (ll. 1–2) — such lines are bound to rouse any listener’s curiosity, and since it is this very curiosity that the poem sets out to disparage and curse, the listener, by allowing himself to become interested, has involuntarily and unwittingly placed himself in the position of the cursed. ‘The Curse’, as curse, applies to him who is interested in the mistress’s identity — but since the poem itself is nothing but a curse of curiosity, ‘The Curse’, as poem, perhaps curses any reader who dares to become interested in its text. 7.

8. 9.

Michael D. Bristol and Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Introduction’, in Print, Manuscript and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. by Michael D. Bristol and Arthur F. Marotti (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2000), pp. 1–29 (p. 6). Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 149. For the context of poetic competition, also see Manfred Pfister, ‘“As an unperfect actor on the stage”: Notes Towards a Definition of Performance and Performativity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, ed. by Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 207–28 (p. 210).

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This does not, however, mean, that the curious addressee or listener need keep quiet: verbal power, after all, lends itself not only to the speaker, but is also available to him who is cursed. The speaker’s strength is, as Stanley Fish argues, ‘borrowed from a storehouse of verbal formulas that belong to no one and precede everyone’.10 Indeed, one may even argue that the accursed person’s ability to appropriate the power of words for his own sake by speculating on or even telling all the world ‘[w]ho is [the speaker’s] mistris’ (l. 2) is the very reason for the curse’s existence. ‘The Curse’ is to shut up him who might know those very words which may ruin the speaker — but in the end, he can never hope to deprive the accursed of his power to speak, and to speak against him. Both the speaker and the cursed victim are equally able to employ verbal power for their purposes and thus against each other. The likeliness that the victim’s disclosure of the speaker’s mistress’s identity will have damaging effects on the speaker is high — as demonstrated by the speaker’s terror at the thought of it, this inner turmoil having probably occasioned ‘The Curse’ in the first place. In fact, the tortures the speaker thinks up to intimidate the victim of his curse are oddly reminiscent of what may actually constitute his own fears. He is afraid of what might happen if the accursed did venture to speak. In that case, it may rather be the speaker himself who will have to ‘[f]orsweare to others, what to her he’hath sworne, / With feare of missing, shame of getting torne’ (ll. 7–8); he, and not the accursed, may turn out to be ‘[a]nguish’d, not that ’twas sinne, but that ’twas shee’ (l. 13). The power of words thus cuts both ways — it may also cut you back. No reading of ‘The Curse’ can ignore the poem’s ending. Having elaborated all kinds of misfortunes to ‘[f]all on that man’ (l. 31) who ‘[…] guesses, thinks, or dreames he knowes / Who is my mistris’ (ll. 1–2), the poem famously concludes: ‘For if it be a shee / Nature before hand hath out-cursed mee’ (ll. 31–32). Frequently, these lines are read as one of Donne’s many misogynist outbursts: no matter how harsh the cruelties the speaker thought up for the victim of his curse, he would have to admit that nature has outdone him in cursing had she made the accursed a woman — as Ilona Bell puts it, ‘[m]erely to be a woman […] is a fate more dire than anything all prophets and poets can imagine for any man’.11 Read in this way, the poem would come to a fairly safe conclusion. Should the accursed be a man, the speaker 10. Stanley Fish, ‘Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power’, in John Donne: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. by Andrew Mousley (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 157–81 (p. 163). 11. Ilona Bell, ‘“If it be a shee”: The Riddle of Donne’s “Curse”’, in John Donne’s “desire of more”: The Subject of Anne More Donne in His Poetry, ed. by Thomas M. Hester (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1996), pp. 106–39 (p. 108).

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may safely rely on the workings of his curse; should it be a woman, he need worry even less as nature would already, and better, have taken care of the cursing. But there is yet another way in which these final lines might be understood. Whereas the previous reading takes the speaker and nature to be fighting for the same cause, namely that of cursing whoever may betray the speaker’s mistress’s identity, the poem’s ending could also hint that, in the case of the accursed being a woman, nature would have cursed the speaker far more than he could ever have cursed his hateful opponent. Nature would have ‘out-cursed’ the speaker by turning him into the object of a curse far more efficacious than the one he has just produced. Ilona Bell believes to have solved ‘The Riddle of Donne’s “Curse”’ by reading it biographically, i.e. by arguing that ‘[i]f there be a shee’, that ‘shee’ would have been Anne More and thus a ‘shee’ whose identity would indeed, at least temporarily, lead to Donne’s being ‘outcursed’. Yet the speaker’s being ‘outcursed by nature’, ‘if it be a shee’ may also be interpreted differently. First of all, much of the preceding curse would not really work with regard to a woman. Apart from the third-person male pronouns used throughout, the image of a woman buying love from a man (ll. 3–4) is not convincing. Moreover, a woman could always be certain about being the mother of her children, whereas only with a man his sons ‘[…] none of his may bee’ (l. 20) without him being able to tell. Thus, if the victim of his curse was indeed a woman, nature would have put an end to his curse, would have ‘out-cursed’ him by making his curse largely inefficacious and irrelevant. More importantly, nature would have out-cursed the speaker if the accursed was of the female sex because women were considered to be more talkative than men. According to Early Modern humoral concepts, women, as opposed to men, were characterised as cold and humid, and even subject to leaking, as their monthly period confirmed. This led to the belief that women could not keep themselves together, nor keep things to themselves. Thus, if ‘The Curse’ is implicitly about a competition between curser and accursed in terms of verbal power, as the curser tries to threaten the accursed to beware of inquiring into, let alone articulating the identity of the speaker’s mistress, then things would look rather bleak for the speaker and curser if his opponent was female and hence (supposedly) both more nosy and gossipy than a man, and far less able (or willing) to control herself and her tongue. However, if we recall that ‘The Curse’ was, in all likelihood, performed in front of an all-male coterie, none of the hearers would have been able to beat the curser on that count — in fact, that final hint at the one possibility of the curse’s inefficacy strengthens its power even further, as, in all probability, no woman would have been present at the poem’s performance. Although ‘The Curse’ acknowledges that the performative power of language is avail-

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able also to others, and to the poem’s addressees in particular, and although it may thus be said to invite some poetic counter-curse, it has taken precautions against any of these efforts becoming too overwhelming. On top of his own curses, the speaker adds not only ‘[…] all ill which all / Prophets, or Poets spake’ (ll. 28–29), but also ‘all which shall / Be annex’d in schedules unto this by mee’ (ll. 29–30). Not only does the speaker here appropriate all those curses uttered by professional performers of the word which may have preceded him — he also insists on further extending and elaborating his curse if need be. Thus, should he himself be countered with another elaborate instance of cursing, he has already provided for the possibility of appropriating it for himself and adding it to his own long list of evil wishes. On the poem’s internal communicative level then, ‘The Curse’ is concerned with guarding the secret of the speaker’s love as its speaker ostentatiously demonstrates to his beloved how exclusive he wants this relationship to remain. With regard to the poem’s external communicative situation, however, the poem is to illustrate the poet’s power to curse. While it invites male listeners to counter ‘The Curse’ with demonstrations of their own cursing powers, any such attempts are already nipped in the bud. Naturally, as is also the case with drama proper, the precise relationship between what is at stake in the internal and external communicative system, may vary from poem to poem. The members of Donne’s male coterie(s) presumably knew each other fairly well and even befriended each other. According to Bacon, men are included in various relationships which assign them certain roles in accordance with which they have to behave (a father, for example, has to speak as a father to his son and as a husband to his wife). But with one’s friends, one may be more free: ‘[…] a friend may speak as the case requires, and not as it sorteth with the person. […] I have given the rule, where a man cannot fitly play his own part: if he have not a friend, he may quit the stage’.12 Only with a friend can one truly be oneself then, can one ‘fitly play his own part’ — but speaking as a self depends on ‘as the case requires’, meaning that, with a friend, one does not have to confine oneself to one particular role, but may adopt several different roles and undergo various conversions of self. Among friends, one may fashion oneself as a devoted lover or a sexually promiscuous rake, as the sexually satisfied speaker of ‘The good-morrow’ or as the despairing bereft lover of ‘A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day’. However, once we turn to Donne’s divine poetry, which is what I shall do now, the role-play at the heart of such poems as ‘The Curse’ becomes problematic, and that for three reasons: the (potentially) ulterior motives of role12. Francis Bacon, Essays, intr. by Michael J. Hawkins (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1972), p. 86.

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play, the recognition of the potential inefficacy of theatrical performance, and the collapse of the theatrical communicative situation. As has been variously noted, the distinction between Donne’s erotic and divine poetry is by no means hard and fast, yet most critics even today maintain the distinction between the two by devoting their work to either one or the other. As Rebecca Bach points out, Donne and his contemporaries themselves would have been likely to approach the erotic poems from an altogether different angle than the divine. To Donne, man’s relationship to woman would have been inferior not only to any relationships between men, but still by far more so to man’s relationship to God.13 Thus, a reading of Donne’s devotional poetry in the exact same vein as all his other writing would needs be inadequate. I shall attempt to point out some of the relative differences which I believe may be found between these two kinds of poetry. First, then, for the ulterior motives which may be behind a speaker’s adoption of a certain role, in particular the role of Christ. The first lines of Holy Sonnet 11 confront us with the speaker in the middle of re-staging Christ’s passion: ‘Spit in my face yee Jewes, and pierce my side, / Buffet, and scoffe, scourge, and crucifie mee,’ (ll. 1–2). The same sonnet’s final four lines are concerned with the kind of role-play God himself engaged in when He, from his sheer disinterested generosity, took on the body of man in the figure of Christ. This kind of role-play is contrasted with Jacob’s dressing up as his brother Esau in order to deceive his father Isaac into blessing him before his elder brother: And Jacob came cloth’d in vile harsh attire But to supplant, and with gainfull intent: God cloth’d himselfe in vile mans flesh, that so Hee might be weake enough to suffer woe. (Holy Sonnet 11, ll. 10–14)

If we read these four lines as a comment on the sonnet’s octave where the speaker inverted God’s ‘dressing down’, i.e. God’s becoming man in Christ, by ‘dressing up’ and playing the part of Christ who was both God and man, we are led to wonder about the ‘gainfull intent’ in this theatrical move. The final couplet of Holy Sonnet 15 reminds us that ‘[’t]was much, that man was made like God before, / But, that God should be made like man, much more’ (ll. 13–14). This indicates that these two movements, i.e. of man being or becoming God and God becoming man, belong together. However, one may well suspect that, whereas God was indeed ready to sacrifice himself in taking on the body of man, the speaker of Holy Sonnet 11 replays the sacrifice of Christ 13. Rebecca Ann Bach, ‘(Re)Placing John Donne in the History of Sexuality’, ELH, 72.1 (2005), 259–89 (p. 263).

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merely out of the ‘gainfull intent’ of having a share in Christ’s redemption and resurrection that is to follow upon his death. Clearly, though, a thorough, convincing and life-like performance of Christ’s passion would have to take place without the foreknowledge that he who suffers will be redeemed anyway later on. This is why much of Donne’s sermons and most of his devotional poetry only mention in passing or even avoid Christ’s resurrection and prefer to engage in thorough re-enactments of the Lord’s passion instead. Donne’s converted Christs have to pretend that they are unaware that their passion will eventually lead them to salvation — else they would not only fail to perform their suffering convincingly, but might even be criticised for their opportunism, in that their only goal in suffering was that of being resurrected and redeemed in the end. When it comes to an issue as serious as salvation, the potentially gainful intent of role-play has to be carefully shielded. In fact, the poem appears to criticise self-reflexively, albeit not self-consciously, the strategy of re-enacting Christ’s passion and to betray an awareness of the potential blasphemy of continually crucifying Christ and oneself in spite of the Lord’s (or even the speaker’s own) glorification. Apparently, the speaker here fails to realise what according to O’Connell is essential for all Christian poetry, namely that ‘[…] the central figure in a Christian poem is not the poet but Christ himself, so that the speaker’s primary concern must be not his own aesthetic role but rather his relationship as a human person to Christ’.14 Secondly, in contrast with his erotic poetry, Donne’s divine poems frequently articulate their concern about the potential inefficacy of theatrical performance. Generally, enacting or inserting oneself into the role of a Biblical figure or even of Christ was believed to have real effects on the man who undertook the play-acting. Therefore taking on the role of a positive character such as Christ would not immediately have been looked upon as hypocrisy or fraud. Rather, it indicated one’s determination to improve oneself by way of (theatrical) imitation. Only on the basis of such an Early Modern assumption of ‘acting-as-becoming’15 does the theatrical incorporation and enactment of Biblical example make sense, does the term ‘fashion’ take on the meaning of ‘the forming of a self’.16 Donne’s Holy Sonnet 8, however, explicitly questions that same concept of ‘acting-as-becoming’. The poem hints at the insufficiencies of performance offering no direct link between that which is inside and outside: 14. Patrick F. O’Connell, ‘“La Corona”: Donne’s Ars Poetica Sacra’, in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, ed. by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), pp. 119–30 (p. 123). 15. Nancy Selleck, ‘Donne’s Body’, SEL, 41.1 (2001), 149–74 (p. 155). 16. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 2.

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But if our mindes to these souls be descry’d By circumstances, and by signes that be Apparent in us not immediately, How shall my mindes white truth by them be try’d? (ll. 5–8)

Indeed, there may be inward states which do not manifest themselves in external ‘signes’ and that may be at odds with what is to be seen on the outside, such as when, for example, ‘Pharisaicall / Dissemblers feigne devotion’ (ll. 11–12). The poem may here be said to betray an awareness of the two mutually contradictory meanings of ‘perform’ — to enact vs. to pretend. 17 One may play a role or one may seriously convert oneself into someone else, e.g. Christ. Even the poem’s concluding couplet, where the speaker encourages his soul to turn ‘[…] to God, for he knowes best / Thy griefe, for he put it into my breast’ (ll. 13–14) is only superficially consolatory. In fact, this final move is deeply ambiguous. First of all, the speaker here addresses his soul as only part of himself, or even separate from but not altogether identical with himself (cf. the ‘Thy griefe’ vs. ‘my breast’). Secondly, the speaker’s breast, which implicates his heart, may not necessarily be the seat of truthfulness. After all, it is the heart, as the supposed seat of one’s true self, that is significantly deconstructed in a poem such as ‘The Legacie’ where the speaker, on looking for his heart, only finds ‘something like a heart’ (l. 17) which, merely seeming ‘[a]s good as could be made by art’ (l. 21), proves to be anything but authentic and in the end turns out to be not even his own. The third and final reason for the divine poems’ uneasiness with theatricality and role-play may be explained by the difference between Donne’s erotic and divine poetry in terms of their communicative situation — one may even argue that the specific communicative situation of the Holy Sonnets is responsible in the first place both for recognising the problem of the potentially gainful intent involved in role-play as well as for doubting how efficacious role-play can actually be. Although the divine poems frequently make use of a model of love as passion that is familiar from Donne’s erotic poetry, their communicative situation is not quite the same. Contrary to the Songs and Sonnets, the addressee and the audience of each poem are no longer as distinct. Whereas Donne’s erotic poetry predominantly addresses a female addressee in order to gain the respect of a male audience, addressee and audience, internal and external communication, frequently collapse into one in the case of the Holy Sonnets. These devotional poems address themselves alternatively to God (‘Father, part of his double interest’), Christ (‘Show me deare 17. Pfister, p. 220.

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Christ, thy spouse, so bright and cleare’), and the speaker himself (‘Oh my blacke Soule!’), often switching from one to the other within one single sonnet.18 However, their audience consists of the exact same personages: being meditations, they are to be heard again and again by the speaker and poet himself — being ‘divine’, they simultaneously function as prayers, to be heard by God and Christ. If addressee and audience coincide, it follows that the gap between speaker and poet, between role and actor, is considerably reduced or even vanishes. For each of the poems to succeed as a meditation, the speaker has to be altogether at one with himself. The duality of role versus actor, of loving, misogynist or lovesick speaker versus the performing poet which is typical of the Songs and Sonnets may no longer be exploited — conversion, i.e. fully ‘becoming’ the role, has to take the place of ‘mere’ role-play. How, then, is religious devotion to work? The devotional speaker’s self features not only as speaker, but also in the position of his own addressee and audience — after all, it is to his own soul that many a speaker of Donne’s devotional poems direct themselves. Rather than playing a part and being judged for the performance by some implied audience, the religious self has to be his own theatre and audience at the same time. In A Lover’s Discourse Roland Barthes writes: I take a role: I am the one who is going to cry; and I play this role for myself, and it makes me cry: I am my own theater. And seeing me cry this way makes me cry all the more; and if the tears tend to decrease, I quickly repeat to myself the lacerating phrase that will set them flowing again.19

Since one may potentially be averse to using this 20th century quotation of Barthes for an approach to Donne’s poetry which was, after all, written in the late 16th and early 17th century, it is worth noting that a strikingly similar quotation may be found already in Montaigne: An Orator (saith Rhetorick) in the play of his pleading, shall be moved at the sound of his owne voice, and by his fained agitations: and suffer himselfe to be cozoned by the passion he representeth: imprinting a lively and essentiall sorrow, by the jugling he acteth, to transferre it into the judges, whom of the two it concerneth lesse: As the persons hired at our funerals who to aide the ceremony of mourning, make sale of their teares by measure, and of their sorrow by waight. For although they strive to act it in a borrowed forme, yet

18. Cf. Marjory E. Lange, Telling Tears in the English Renaissance (Leiden, New York, and Köln: Brill, 1996), p. 187: ‘In the case of the Holy Sonnets, the speaker’s own soul or God becomes the auditor’. 19. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), p. 161.

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by habituating and ordering their countenance, it is certaine they are often wholly transported into it, and entertaine the impression of a true and unfained melancholly.20

The notion that playing a part may affect the actor himself evidently has a fairly long history. Hence it does not come as a complete surprise that Barthes borrows a term from an author that is still older than Montaigne. Barthes has recourse to Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises when he chooses the term ‘loquela’ in the heading of the above-quoted fragment from his A Lover’s Discourse. In defining ‘The Loquela’ as ‘the flux of language through which the subject tirelessly rehashes the effects of a wound or the consequences of an action’, Barthes echoes the founder of the Jesuit order.21 Ignatius similarly encourages a kind of ‘[…] “recapitulation” […] that the intellect, carefully and without digressing onto any other subject, should range over the memory of matters contemplated in the previous exercises’.22 As Barthes suggests in the fragment at hand, such re-hashing of wounds and tears is at the centre of Ignatian spiritual practice. And it is this which Donne’s Holy Sonnets have in common with the Ignatian meditation, although they differ from that tradition in that they are of course far less regular and much more ruptured than Ignatian exercises.23 They, too, aim at creating an adequately grieving and repenting state of mind within the meditating self — a state of mind that is persuasive and convincing to both addressee and audience, i.e. God, Christ, and the speaker’s self. Through meditation, the self has to bring itself to and remain in a state of grief, and it does so by a continual re-performance of its own sorrow. As Barthes argues in his Loquela-chapter from A Lover’s Discourse, ‘I make myself cry, in order to prove to myself that my grief is not an illusion: tears are signs, not expressions’24 — and once I become aware that I am indeed crying for all my grief, this is bound to encourage me to cry even more. Thus, if Davies argues that, ‘[…] for Donne, the theatrical production of emotion was its sincerest expression’, 25 then ‘production’ is here to be taken in a very literal sense. By repeated and autistic utterances and articulations of one’s own grief and despair, these very emotions are indeed produced. This, in my opinion, is the primary communicative purpose of Donne’s Holy 20. Michel Lord of Montaigne, Essays, intr. by A.R. Waller, trans. by John Florio, 3 vols. (London: Dent & Sons Ltd., 1946) III, pp. 59–60. 21. Barthes, p. 160. 22. Ignatius of Loyola, Personal Writings, trans. and intr. by Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 298. 23. Ramie Targoff, John Donne: Body and Soul (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 110. 24. Barthes, p. 182. 25. Davies, p. 53.

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Sonnets. They are to remind the self that ‘[d]espaire behind, and death before doth cast / such terrour’ (‘Thou hast made me’, ll. 6–7), to make ‘[…] those sighes and teares returne againe’ (‘O Might those sighes’, l. 1), and to yearn for and create ‘[…] new seas in mine eyes, that so I might / Drowne my world with my weeping earnestly,’ (‘I am a little world’, ll. 7–8). The Holy Sonnets constitute ‘prayerful performances’ that are ‘[…] to create, rather than simply to correspond to, prodigal personalities’. 26 For this reason I do not share Stachniewski’s conclusion that the God of the Holy Sonnets is strictly Calvinist in that all speakers cannot but utterly and helplessly depend on him.27 Rather, as I suggest, the sonnets’ despair is very actively fashioned and therefore does attribute some initiative to each believer. Poetry like the Holy Sonnets is to provoke tears with the self, and these same tears may then eventually be acknowledged by the other addressees and listeners i.e. the self, God and Christ. The speakers of these poems resemble Montaigne’s hired mourners, who, although they are but mourning actors, cannot but be watching themselves at the same time, with the effect that ‘[…] they are often wholly transported into it, and entertaine the impression of a true and unfained melancholly’. 28 Authenticity arises from performance as the mourners’ pretended woe engenders real grief. The coincidence of actor and audience places the Holy Sonnets in close proximity to ritual, in the sense of Victor Turner’s account. Whereas in theatre — just as in Donne’s straightforwardly theatrical coterie poems — actor and audience are neatly separated, the two coincide in the performance of ritual.29 The more tears a speaker produces, the louder he cries, the more likely is he to make himself cry indeed and, eventually, to succeed in being heard and consequently obliged also by God and Christ. Thus the speaker of Donne’s ‘Lamentations of Jeremy’ proclaims: ‘Mine eye doth drop down teares incessantly, / Untill the Lord looke downe from heaven to see’ (ll. 247–48). The constant, autistic ‘rehashing’ of tears and pain in actual fact effects tears and constitutes that same pain for himself and eventually before God and Christ: indeed, only some five lines 26. Peter Iver Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), p. 17. I do not agree with P.M. Oliver, who argues that the poems’ despair should therefore be less real or efficacious. See P.M. Oliver, Donne’s Religious Writing: A Discourse of Feigned Devotion (London and New York: Longman, 1997), p. 111. 27. John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 286–287. 28. Tears are also one of the primary desired effects of the Ignatian spiritual exercises (see Ignatius, pp. 302, 321, 323). 29. Viktor Turner, Vom Ritual zum Theater: Der Ernst des menschlichen Spiels, trans. by Sylvia M. Schomburg-Scherff (Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Campus, 1989), p. 178.

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later, the speaker of the ‘Lamentations’ has been proved correct in his hope: ‘And thou my voice didst heare; / Oh from my sigh, and crye, stop not thine eare’ (ll. 255–56).30 Religious ritual had of course become fairly problematic by the time that Donne wrote — and no one would have been more (painfully) aware of this than the poet himself. A convert from Catholicism, Donne died in 1631 as the renowned Anglican Dean of St. Paul’s. Reformation theology was a theology of homiletics, so much so that the sermon gradually came to surpass the sacramental relevance of the Eucharist. However, whenever Donne preached at Lincoln’s Inn or at St. Paul’s, he would have been aware of that other institution which competed with him for his listeners — even on church days — namely the theatre. There were two opposite ways in which this challenge might be met. One strategy was to use the pulpit for a thorough denunciation of the theatre as the epitome of heresy and ungodliness. The other possible response was to seize upon the potential of dramatic communication for the production of the sermon itself in order to equal or even outdo the theatre on its own terms. Donne’s preaching was rather inclined towards the latter. Surprisingly then, it may be argued that, in terms of their communicative situation, the sermons are very similar to Donne’s erotic poetry. After all, both Donne’s sermons, as well as his erotic poems, were written for performance, whether in front of a congregation or a male coterie. In both cases, there would have been a significant gap between the speaker within and the man external to the text. Admittedly, the range of theatrical plots available to Donne’s homiletic speakers was considerably narrower than the range of roles that he was able to take on in his erotic poetry. Donne’s sermons are but so many various stagings of man’s need to convert himself to God. Also, listeners were asked much more directly to insert themselves into the examples offered by a sermon: ‘Hath God made this World his Theatre, ut exhibeatur ludus deorum, that man may represent God in his conversation; and wilt thou play no part? But think that thou only wast made to pass thy time merrily, and to be the 30. For a very thorough and convincing analysis of the subject of Early Modern tears, see Lange, who ingeniously uses the example of tears to illustrate various shifts in Early Modern concepts of self and identity, especially with regard to a potential disparity of external manifestations and internal motivations. In her analysis of Early Modern estimations of tears in connection with listening to a sermon, she writes: ‘The tendency moved from residual initial suspicion of the persuasive power of emotion such as tears evidence, toward confidence in the use of such direct, affective terms for communicating important messages, to a dissatisfaction with or distrust in the rationality of such expression’ (p. 111). The evaluation of tears of course also differed between individual authors, and it is for our purpose fairly significant that, according to Lange, ‘Donne consistently puts more faith in tears as humane expression than his contemporaries do’ (p. 183).

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only spectator upon this Theatre?’31 Not only with regard to the world, but also with respect to his sermons, are congregations expected to do more than merely pass their ‘time merrily’. Instead, they should be ‘fit to be inserted’ (I, 3, p. 208) — they were supposed to imaginatively assume the roles offered by these examples. By contrast, the internal plots of the Songs and Sonnets hardly ever literally concern their external listeners since they are, most of the time, fictional and not concerned with as serious an issue as salvation. And yet, both Donne’s erotic poetry, as well as his sermons are intrinsically theatrical since they are both performed for someone other than the speaker within or the poet/preacher behind the text — actor and audience, speaker and addressee are fairly separate here, role-play is permissible, and no convergence of actor and role or of actor and audience is at stake. As I have shown this does not in the same degree hold for Donne’s Holy Sonnets. Their communicative situation demands not only that actor and role, audience and addressee coincide, but also that the self be the audience to its own performance. In fact, one may argue that it is due to this need for the convergence of actor, role, addressee and audience that the potentially gainful intent of role-play is so much more problematic in the Holy Sonnets than it is in the erotic poems. No secret was made of the gainful intent behind the writing of worldly poetry — apart from gaining a man the respect of his coterie, it even served as ‘[…] a useful screening procedure for applicants to the civil service’.32 It would, however, have been very precarious to conceive of the writing of devotional poetry as ‘a useful screening procedure for applicants to salvation’, which one would have engaged in from opportunist motives. Also, whereas the various role-plays undertaken by the speakers of Donne’s erotic poetry only had to be maintained for the length of the respective poem, reaching salvation was a matter of a man’s whole life, as religious conversion concerned the actor as much as the role, so that only a real resemblance with Christ would have yielded the desirable consequences. As we have seen, quite a lot of Donne’s writing uses language performatively, but, as I have suggested, his sermons and his erotic poetry are performative also in a full theatrical sense, as they were written and performed for an audience other than the self. The Holy Sonnets, by contrast, appear to have been intended more as solo performances, as they ‘[…] show no signs of having been intended for broad readership’.33 Donne’s Holy Sonnets place 31. John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. by George R. Porter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953–1964) I, 3, p. 207. 32. Ted-Larry Pebworth, ‘John Donne, Coterie Poetry, and the Text as Performance’, SEL, 29 (1989), 61–75 (p. 62). 33. Targoff, p. 108.

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a lot of trust in what words may do — they are expected to cause that kind of despair and grief which is requisite for salvation. However, that very despair is to be triggered not by the self for the benefit of an audience other than himself — instead, the Holy Sonnets constitute a self’s listening to and watching itself grieving, so as to make that self grieve even more, the eventual effect of which is to make it-self heard and seen by God. As a theatre of their own, a theatre of the self, where speaker and addressee, actor and audience are no longer clearly distinct from one another, the communicative situation of the Holy Sonnets is less indebted to theatre proper than to Catholic ritual and meditation in the Ignatian style.34 If one were to interpret this insight biographically, one might say that the divine poetry betrays Donne’s Catholic roots which would not have been fit for performance in front of an Anglican audience, and one may further speculate that the poet’s subconscious recognition of the divine poems’ implied Catholicism may have enhanced the spiritual uneasiness behind every single one of these ‘Divine Meditations’. Finally, a certain loss of control in the performance of these poems, so as to lose oneself in one’s own grief and repentance and to allow actor to coincide with role, would have been inevitable.35 One may suspect that this did not come easy to a man who, both as ‘Visiter of ladies’, as well as in his prestigious position of Dean of St. Paul’s, appears to have preferred to be in control of all of his performances of self — whether public or solo. 34. The recognition that no ‘outside assurance’ is available anymore encourages Carey to classify the Holy Sonnets as ‘documents of Protestant religious pain’ which may no longer rely on those securities ‘which, for the Catholic, the Church and the sacraments supplied’ (see John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art [London: faber and faber, 1990], p. 43). But the religious allegiance of the Holy Sonnets is, in my opinion, far from easy to determine. Theresa DiPasquale, for example, sees a link between Petrarchan and religious passion and identifies ‘Roman piety’ in the discourses of frustrated lovers, amongst which we may also count the speakers of various Holy Sonnets (see Theresa M. DiPasquale, ‘Donne’s Catholic Petrarchans: The Babylonian Captivity of Desire’, in Renaissance Discourses of Desire, ed. by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth [Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993], pp. 77–92 [p. 78]). Furthermore, Louis Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation unambiguously endorses a reading of Donne’s Holy Sonnets as meditations in the Ignatian tradition, although his study pays only little attention to the particularity of the poems’ communicative situation. Martz also significantly points out that meditation ought not to be considered as exclusively Roman Catholic since a strong focus on interiority encouraged meditative practices within Puritan contexts as well (see Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962]). 35. Stanley Fish pronounces a general warning against placing Donne outside of, i.e. in control of the performative mechanism of his poetry (Fish, p. 179). I would like to argue that the degree to which Donne’s poetic speakers are able and allowed to exercise performative control rather than having to be consumed by those performances themselves very much depends on which type of poem we are focussing.

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Bibliography Bach, Rebecca Ann, ‘(Re)Placing John Donne in the History of Sexuality’, ELH, 72.1 (2005), 259–89. Bacon, Francis, Essays, intr. by Michael J. Hawkins (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1972). Baker, Richard, A Chronicle of the Kings of England (London: Printed by R.C. & R.H. for Daniel Frere, 1643). Barthes, Roland, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979). Bell, Ilona, ‘“If it be a shee”: The Riddle of Donne’s “Curse”’, in John Donne’s “desire of more”: The Subject of Anne More Donne in His Poetry, ed. by Thomas M. Hester (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1996), pp. 106–39. Bristol, Michael D. and Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Introduction’, in Print, Manuscript, Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. by Michael D. Bristol and Arthur F. Marotti (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2000), pp. 1–29. Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997). Carey, John, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: faber and faber, 1990). Davies, Stevie, John Donne (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1994). DiPasquale, Theresa M., ‘Donne’s Catholic Petrarchans: The Babylonian Captivity of Desire’, in Renaissance Discourses of Desire, ed. by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993), pp. 77–92. Donne, John, The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. by John T. Shawcross (New York: Anchor Books, 1967). —, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. by George R. Porter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953–1964). Fish, Stanley, ‘Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power’, in John Donne: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. by Andrew Mousley (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 157–81. Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Kaufman, Peter Iver, Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996). Lange, Marjory E., Telling Tears in the English Renaissance (Leiden, New York, and Köln: Brill, 1996). Loyola, Ignatius of, Personal Writings, trans. and intr. by Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean (London: Penguin, 2004). Marotti, Arthur F., Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995). Martz, Louis, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962). Montaigne, Michel Lord of, Essays, intr. by A. R. Waller, trans. by John Florio, 3 vols (London: Dent & Sons Ltd., 1946). O’Connell, Patrick F., ‘“La Corona”: Donne’s Ars Poetica Sacra’, in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, ed. by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), pp. 119–30. Oliver, P.M., Donne’s Religious Writing: A Discourse of Feigned Devotion (London and New York: Longman, 1997). Pebworth, Ted-Larry, ‘John Donne, Coterie Poetry, and the Text as Performance’, SEL, 29 (1989), 61–75. Pfister, Manfred, ‘“As an unperfect actor on the stage”: Notes Towards a Definition of Performance and Performativity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, ed. by Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 207–28.

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Selleck, Nancy, ‘Donne’s Body’, SEL, 41.1 (2001), 149–174. Stachniewski, John, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). Targoff, Ramie, John Donne: Body and Soul (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008). Turner, Viktor, Vom Ritual zum Theater: Der Ernst des menschlichen Spiels, trans. by Sylvia M. Schomburg-Scherff (Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Campus, 1989).

3. Fashioning Sovereignty

Stating the Sovereign Self Polity, Policy, and Politics on the Early Modern Stage Roger Lüdeke / Andreas Mahler The Early Modern period witnessed a marked shift from substantial to functional authorisation. This is the shift from the belief in the God-given sovereignty of the Divine Right of Kings to the performative actualisation of sovereignty by an acting, speaking, and calculating self, in which sovereignty is no longer given but produced, i.e. stated through linguistic acts strategically projecting the body natural onto the body politic. The present contribution attempts to trace this development with regard to the concepts of ‘polity’, ‘policy’, and ‘politics’ through two paradigmatic readings (Julius Caesar and Macbeth) of exemplary solo-performances of sovereign and/or rebellious selves on the Early Modern stage.

I Political crises can be seen as public performances perpetrating political change. In particular, coups d’état seem to constitute ineluctable ‘states of exception’ during which the law finds itself suspended so as to provoke a renewed institutionalising contract bent on re-establishing political order. 1 Accordingly, these states of exception can be considered to be ‘re-iterations’ of the allegedly ‘original’ emergence of political institutions; they can be seen as attempts to re-inaugurate a social system in its inalienable ‘proper’ right. As a consequence, any new juridico-political order, in order to justify itself, refers to a set of laws, norms, and values, which at the moment of its rebellious constitution was not (yet) in effect. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the problem of justice in his Force of Law, one may even say that coups d’état mark the decisive deficiency at the heart of any political order, since they highlight the problematic relationship between the act of utterance and the contents of the uttered, i.e. between the act of stating sovereignty and the result of what 1.

For the idea, and function, of ‘states of exception’ in times of political crisis, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). Since they ask for a heightened need for rhetorical justification, these states of exception seem to be privileged moments of self-legitimising solo-performances, above all in history plays and in tragedies, on the Early Modern political stage. For coups d’état cf. also Albrecht Koschorke, Susanne Lüdemann, Thomas Frank, and Ethel Matala de Mazza, Der fiktive Staat: Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2007), pp. 184–91. For an overview of the nexus between ‘politics’ and Early Modern drama, see Margot Heinemann, ‘Political drama’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. by A.R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 161–205.

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is hereby politically stated.2 Speech acts that aim to state, or re-state, the legal order presuppose that the law that is just being stated is already in force; for, it is only this that provides the act of stating with the lawfulness required.3 As long as sovereignty seems to be guaranteed by a divine agency, the political act of stating sovereign power can be conceived of (in the Austinian sense) as ‘constative’.4 In this case, the act of stating ‘re-presents’ what seems to be pre-existent, God-given, and eternally true; and in this way the symbolic representation of power seems to be secured by a transcendent force that guarantees a substantial — and anaphoric — relation between the symbolic act and the contents of what is symbolised.5 Once this divine ‘guarantee’ finds itself problematised, however, the act of ‘stating’ political power becomes a ‘performative’ act, i.e. a ‘declarative’ that, instead of ‘re-presenting’ the divine right post factum, must be seen as creating, producing, or ‘presenting’ its proper foundation.6 Or again, in terms of speech act theory, once the transcendent guarantee of socio-political reality or sovereignty seems lost, the success of acts of stating begins to depend on the validity of their propositional content, on its believability, whereas the proposition of what is thereby stated depends 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

See Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in Acts of Religion, ed. and trans. by Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 228–98; cf. also Roger Lüdeke, ‘Embodying Politics in Early Modern Drama: John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi’, in Theater im Aufbruch: Das europäische Drama der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Roger Lüdeke and Virginia Richter, Theatron, 53 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008), pp. 117–32 (pp. 120–24), as well as Koschorke and others, Der fiktive Staat, pp. 151–59. For a discussion of Early Modern problems of authorisation, see Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. by David Hillman (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). For the felicitous distinction between ‘institution-as-a-process’ (‘Setzung’) and ‘institutionas-a-given’, i.e. as result (‘Satzung’), see, with reference to classical and Early Modern drama, Bernhard Teuber, ‘Die Tragödie als Theater der Macht: Repräsentation und Verhandlung königlicher Souveränität bei Seneca und im frühneuzeitlichen Drama der Romania’, in Theater im Aufbruch: Das europäische Drama der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Roger Lüdeke and Virginia Richter, Theatron, 53 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008), pp. 155–80 (p. 156). For ‘constativity’ as an opposition to (as well as part of) ‘performativity’, see J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, ed. by J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 1–11 and 133–50. For the linguistic notion of anaphoric relations as referring backwards (or to the past) in opposition to kataphoric relations as referring forwards (into the future), see Gillian Brown and George Yule, Discourse Analysis, Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 190–222. This is the shift from a medieval concept of ‘guaranteed reality’ (with the guarantee based on a belief in God) to the more ‘modern’ concept of ‘reality as the result of an act of realization’ (with the human subject as the principal agent), as it has been traced by Hans Blumenberg, ‘The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel’, in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, ed. by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 29–48 (pp. 31–34).

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on the pragmatic correctness of the speech act proper, i.e. on the felicitousness of its — kataphoric — illocutionary force, its power of ‘make-believe’.7 Stating sovereignty under the conditions of a lost transcendence — under the corrosive effect of an ongoing ‘disintegration of providentialist belief’8 — thus turns out to be a highly paradoxical act. For the legitimacy of the statement requires that what is being stated is already in effect, whereas the political force of what is stated presupposes that the act of stating is already a lawful one. This is the paradox of temporalisation.9 Political institutions under the terms of a (post)guarantee-model of reality thus become prone to performative self-contradictions, and as a consequence of this, they are structurally bound to the epistemological impossibility of distinguishing between ‘law’ and ‘violence’, i.e. between what is ‘just’ and what is not.10

7.

Cf. Austin, pp. 14–45 and 136–61, and, especially, John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 54–71. For the imaginary as the decisive force in instituting social structures, see Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. by Kathleen Blamey (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987); for the relation between the imaginary and the forces of power, see Thomas Frank, Albrecht Koschorke, Susanne Lüdemann, and Ethel Matala de Mazza, Des Kaisers neue Kleider: Über das Imaginäre politischer Herrschaft (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2002), esp. pp. 73–84. 8. Cf. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2nd edn (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 83–108. 9. It is the Early Modern shift from a providentially guaranteed, closed concept of cyclical time to an open concept of linear ‘realisation’. As Blumenberg points out, his third, ‘modern’ concept of reality ‘differs from the others through its time component: reality as “evidence” makes itself felt in the present moment; guaranteed reality refers back to the instance that creates and mediates between the world and human reason — in other words, to what scholasticism called “veritas ontologica” that has its place in the past.’ (p. 32). 10. In other words, what remains hidden or ‘latent’ in times of providentialist belief, runs the risk of being foregrounded in times of individual realisation. As a consequence, the ‘mystical foundations of authority’ become all too visible, since they have to be negotiated by individual acts of realisation. Or, as Derrida puts it: ‘Since the origin of authority, [and] the founding or grounding […] of law, cannot by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground. […] They exceed the opposition between founded and unfounded.’ (Derrida, p. 242) For a stimulating discussion of the differences between ‘law’ and ‘justice’ and their repercussions in Early Modern drama, see Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare, Rereading Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 35–63, esp. pp. 36–37: ‘As with language, the formal structure of the law generates certain events (verdicts, legal judgements, and the like) which may end up by undermining that structure. […] The paradox, then, is that to preserve the structure of the law you must transgress what it actually says.’

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II ‘I could be well moved’, says Shakespeare’s Caesar in his last solo-performance before he is killed by his fellow Romans:11 if I were as you. If I could pray to move, prayers would move me. But I am constant as the Northern Star, Of whose true fixed and resting quality There is no fellow in the firmament. The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks; They are all fire, and every one doth shine; But there’s but one in all doth hold his place. So in the world; ’tis furnish’d well with men, And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive; Yet in the number I do know but one That unassailable holds on his rank, Unshaked of motion; and that I am he Let me a little show it even in this — That I was constant Cimber should be banished, And constant do remain to keep him so. (Julius Caesar, 3.1.58–73)12

In contrast to classical stereotypes of the tyrant, Caesar’s claim to political authority is not so much based on arbitrary power or passionate violence;13 rather, it is the paradoxical mixture of virtù masquerading as excessive constantia that seems to constitute the possible threat of his future reign.14 As a consequence, the mutinous act of the rebels pretends to be ‘re-acting’ to a 11. For detailed textual (as well as rhetorical) analyses of Shakespearean solo-performances, see Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare’s Soliloquies, trans. by Charity Scott Stokes (London: Methuen, 1987), as well as, with special reference to Julius Caesar, Wolfgang G. Müller, Die politische Rede bei Shakespeare (Tübingen: Narr, 1979), esp. pp. 89–156; for a systematisation of monological speech, see Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama, trans. by John Halliday, European Studies in English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 126–40. 12. All quotes, with the usual abbreviations, are to William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 13. For a thorough discussion of Early Modern representations of tyranny, sovereignty, and subjectivitiy, see Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Routledge, 1985, repr. 1991), pp. 93–125. 14. Cf. Andreas Mahler, ‘“There is Restitution, no End of Restitution, only not for us”: Experimental Tragedy and the Early Modern Subject in Julius Caesar’, in Julius Caesar: New Criticial Essays, ed. by Horst Zander (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 181–95. For a Derridean reading of the paradoxicalities of the political crisis in Julius Caesar, see Richard Wilson, Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 194–200).

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hidden, or latent, dimension of violence, to a kind of force in Caesar that cannot legitimately be represented as a concept of sovereignty and that has to be banned immediately. The violence implied in Caesar’s awkwardly hubristic statement of absolutist sovereignty is thus answered by a spectacular act of non-verbal counter-violence perpetrated by the rebels: ‘They stab Caesar’ (Julius Caesar, 3.1.76 s.d.). The intrinsic contradictions of the political performative find themselves acted out in a spectacular performance of theatrical violence which is apt to show that political empowerment is always linked to a dimension of violence which concerns both the insurgents and the ruler. Uncertainties like these tend to affect our capacities not only to discern, but also to point out, the intrinsic difference of core concepts such as ‘law’ or ‘violence’, ‘justice’ or ‘injustice’, on which societies are built. Consequently, any trace of the unjust in what we usually consider justice, any remainder of violence in what we conceive of as lawful, has to be avoided. It is only by this strategy of concealment that a given political order can lay claim to authority. This is a society’s basic latent function.15 One way to conceal the irritating identity between the lawful and the unlawful was the idea of, and belief in, the mystic unity of the king’s ‘body natural’ and ‘body politic’. As Ernst Kantorowicz has shown, the medieval notion of the sovereign’s body natural being transcended by the body politic was modelled in analogy to the double nature of Christ, to his human and divine nature.16 The ideal paradigm for this model of the state was the Christian ecclesia, as developed in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Paul, too, repeals the distinction between the political, the social, the individual, and the religious, seeing them unified in the ubiquitous presence of the Saviour, the corpus mysticum Christi: ‘For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office. So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another’ (Rom 12,4–5).17 This concept of a paradoxical — and mystical — identity in difference can also be seen as the central symbol of unity on which the system of fealty relies: a substantial, and analogical, foundation in God that underlies the notion

15. For latency as that which has to remain hidden in order to guarantee the functioning of society, see Niklas Luhmann, ‘Soziologische Aufklärung’, in Soziologische Aufklärung: Aufsätze zur Theorie sozialer Systeme, 6 vols, 4th edn (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1974) I, pp. 66–91 (p. 69). 16. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957, repr. 1997); cf. also Jing Xuan, Der König im Kontext: Subversion, Dialogizität und Ambivalenz im weltlichen Theater Calderón de la Barcas, Studia Romanica, 124 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004), pp. 13–31 (pp. 27–30). 17. Cf. Lüdeke, p. 119.

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of the Divine Right of Kings and the brotherhood of love.18 This polity of fealty finds itself still employed, or rather re-instituted, by absolutist models of sovereignty, which make use of it whilst at the same time concealing the fact that they have come to ‘realize’ it through strategies of an acting, speaking, and calculating self, in which sovereignty is no longer given but produced, i.e. stated through performative acts that allow to project, time and again, the body natural onto the body politic.19 Contemplating the reasons why he rose against Caesar, Brutus, in his speech on the forum, says that it was not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him. As he was fortunate, I rejoice at it. As he was valiant, I honour him. But, as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love, joy for his fortune, honour for his valour, and death for his ambition. (Julius Caesar, 3.2.21–29)

It is precisely this moment of dissociation of the body natural (Caesar) and the body politic (Rome) in which the crisis of sovereignty finds itself articulated. And Brutus attempts to make use of this to legitimise the illegitimacy of the rebellious act. By dissociating the body natural of Caesar from the body politic of Rome, he, however, invokes the threatening idea of a relationship between the ruler’s physical body and the laws, the social interactions and the symbolic ceremonies of the body politic, which from the particular perspective of this rupture must be regarded as purely arbitrary. This arbitrariness is what Antony addresses when he finally reveals the blatant discrepancy between Brutus’s performative affirmation of Caesar’s power and his complicity in performing Caesar’s factual disempowerment. ANTONY In your bad strokes, Brutus, you give good words. Witness the hole you made in Caesar’s heart, Crying ‘Long live, hail Caesar’. (Julius Caesar, 5.1.30–32)

18. For the concept of a brotherly ‘Personenverband’, see Theodor Mayer, ‘Die Ausbildung der Grundlagen des modernen Staates im hohen Mittelalter’, Historische Zeitschrift, 159 (1939), 457–87, as well as Wilfried Schulze, Einführung in die Neuere Geschichte, 2nd edn (Stuttgart: Ulmer, 1991), pp. 142–66; for the idea of a ‘brotherhood of love’, see Mahler, pp. 182–84. 19. This would be Blumenberg’s third concept of reality, which he defines as the one of ‘realization’, i.e. ‘the actualization of a context in itself’, which ‘takes reality as the result of an actualization, a progressive certainty which can never reach a total, final consistency, as it always looks forward to a future that might contain elements which could shatter previous consistency and so render previous “realities” unreal’; Blumenberg, pp. 32–33 (Blumenberg’s italics).

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What Antony recognises and describes is precisely the conspirators’ ineluctable shift from performativity to performance.20 On the one hand, the (political) performativity of the common cry ‘Long live, hail Caesar’, paradoxically affirming Caesar’s might, and at the same time serving as the decisive command to kill him, produces a semiotic state of undecidability that is ‘solved’ by a spectacular theatrical, i.e. aesthetic, performance of irrational self-empowerment suspending the uncertainty by means of ‘bad strokes’ and ‘the hole made in Caesar’s heart’.21 On the other hand, this theatrical performance in turn both requires and implies a new performative act of discursive foundation different from the original one in order to allow the legitimacy of performance to be accepted and, as it were, retrospectively — pseudo-anaphorically — guaranteed. BRUTUS Stoop, Romans, stoop, And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords; Then walk we forth, even to the market-place, And, waving our red weapons o’er our heads, Let’s all cry ‘peace, freedom, and liberty!’ CASSIUS Stoop, then, and wash. How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, In states unborn and accents yet unknown! BRUTUS How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport, That now on Pompey’s basis lies along, No worthier than the dust! CASSIUS So oft as that shall be, So often shall the knot of us be called The men that gave their country liberty. (Julius Caesar, 3.1.106–19)

By means of its monological form this dialogue thus finds itself transformed into a collective solo-performance22 that stages a speech act which aims at re20. If performativity can be said to be ‘transitive’ in the sense that it is always performativity of something (a political concept or social idea), performance is ‘intransitive’ inasmuch as it eludes semanticity, presenting nothing but ‘show’, such as the display of the waxwork bodies in the Duchess of Malfi (see Lüdeke, pp. 127–30). This would be its ‘aesthetic’ quality; cf., with reference to Shakespeare’s histories, Wolfgang Iser, Shakespeares Historien: Genese und Geltung (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1988); cf. also Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Le cauchemar de la royauté: Richard III’, in Figures de la royauté en Angleterre de Shakespeare à la Glorieuse Révolution, ed. by François Laroque and Franck Lessay (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999), pp. 15–31 (p. 19). 21. For a more general discussion of the relation between politics and aesthetics, see Jacques Rancière, ‘The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics’, in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 12–19. 22. For ‘dialogical monologues’ as collective solo-performances, see Pfister, pp. 129–30.

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establishing the former political system of fealty as well as at eschewing any further coups d’état. After inviting the Roman people to ‘stoop’ and ‘wash their hands’ in Caesar’s blood, however, Brutus performs another act of invitation the proposition of which is a third speech act which has to be fulfilled in the near future: ‘Let’s all cry “peace, freedom, and liberty!”’ The corporeal ‘token’ of Caesar’s blood thus provides the rebels with the symbolic ‘type’ that allows them to perform the linguistic act of re-instituting the political order and its fundamental laws of ‘peace, freedom and liberty!’23 This can be seen as an attempt at re-semanticising an act of violence as an act of liberation. The repetitive and intercalated structure of Brutus’s performative utterance, however, is further complicated by Cassius who repeats the linguistic invitation to ‘stoop’ and ‘wash’. Because what is important is the self-reference to the theatricality of the scene, indicated by Cassius’s reflection about ‘[h]ow many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!’ The meta-theatrical framing of Cassius’s speech makes clear that, as a consequence of the performative weakness of discursive empowerment, the current and newly established Roman order will from now on invariably depend on theatre-like enactments, or ‘performances’, of its performative force; i.e. what at first sight looks as if it were unique becomes serialised. It is precisely this particular quality of theatrical opsis, or performance, which Aristotle’s theory of tragedy prefers to exclude: ‘Spectacle, while highly effective, is yet quite foreign to the art and has nothing to do with poetry. Indeed the effect of tragedy does not depend on its performance by actors.’ And, ‘to produce the tragic effect by means of an appeal to the eye is inartistic and needs adventitious aid, while those who by such means produce an effect which is not fearful but merely monstrous have nothing in common with tragedy’.24 Opsis, or performance on stage, is thus the least important quality of tragedy; for Aristotle opsis is to be transformed into syn-opsis, and, as a consequence of this, the scenic medium is reduced to a mere surplus that ‘allows the plot to emerge’.25 In fact, Aristotle does not leave much elbowroom for the tragic peripety to develop. Rather, his theory of tragedy concentrates on how the tragic plot is to overcome the paradoxical reversal of the tragic shock. It is 23. For the (statistical) distinction between an abstract ‘type’ and its individual ‘tokens’, cf. Hadumod Bussmann, Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, ed. and trans. by Gregory P. Trauth and Kerstin Kazzazi (London: Routledge, 1996), s.v. ‘type-token relations’. 24. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. by Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1982), poet. 1450b & 1453b. 25. Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), p. 101.

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anagnorisis, or recognition, that is bound to put a definitive end to the potentially endless series of tragic reversals: ‘anagnōrisis [reassembles] what peripeteia has overturned.’26 In contrast, the scene quoted above rather aims to delay the moment of anagnorisis, it tends towards repetition, one shock following another, with spectacular ‘surprise piling up on surprise’.27 It is precisely this temporality of repetition that distinguishes the newly established order from types of sovereignty based on a concept of timeless guarantee. The iteration of political performances stating sovereignty establishes the illusion of a timeless system of political langue, some grammar of power, allegedly underlying the endless series of continuous instances of political paroles. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar thus shows the attempt to revive an older political order where the act of stating sovereignty was believed to be anchored in a constative act whose validity seemed to be secured by a transcendent power guaranteeing a substantial relation between the act of stating and the contents of what is stated. By exposing the failure of this attempt, Julius Caesar cannot but introduce a different paradigm of sovereignty in which the act of ‘stating’ political power becomes a performative process. Here, the divine right is not represented anaphorically, post factum; rather, it is the statement of sovereignty itself that creates, and produces, its proper foundation in a potentially endless succession of political realisations. III In respect of the Early Modern shift from ‘guaranteed’ sovereignty to sovereignty ‘as result of a realization’, the character of Macbeth is also a case in point.28 As soon as it offers itself, he seizes the opportunity of the new paradigm of a performative polity. And, at first sight, he seems to be successful in the sense that the witches’ prophecy, implying the imminence of a ‘state of 26. Weber, p. 263. 27. Ibid., p. 261. 28. If Julius Caesar, which can be dated about 1599, marks the end of the illusion of a brotherly (or rather ‘sisterly’) Elizabethan compromise, Macbeth, which must have been written about 1606, sees itself already confronted with the absolutist pretensions of the Jacobean court. For the political dimension of Macbeth, see Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 95–108; for the shift from forms of Elizabethan to Jacobean authorisation, see Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘Strategies of State and Political Plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII’, in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 109–28; for a general drift towards ‘political’ serious drama on the English stage after the turn of the century, see Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 301–10.

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exception’, can, just like the Roman conspirators’ ambivalent cry of ‘Long live, hail Caesar’, be read as a positive promise: ‘All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!’ (Macbeth, 1.3.48). In this, Macbeth is the addressee of a highly ambiguous, even ‘mystical’ promise of political power given by a source that makes it impossible for him — and the viewers — to distinguish between its lawfulness or unlawfulness. ‘Say from whence’, Macbeth addresses the ‘imperfect speakers’ of his future reign: You owe this strange intelligence, or why Upon this blasted heath you stop our way With such prophetic greeting. Speak, I charge you. [Witches vanish] (Macbeth, 1.3.73–75)29

The play as a whole can be said to consist of Macbeth attempting to put into practice, to ‘realise’ in a Blumenbergian sense, what has been stated by the witches. Macbeth thus ‘performs’ the witches’ statement of his future sovereignty without being able to re-anchor what has been prophesied in some ‘absolute’ origin that would, indeed, guarantee the lawfulness of his actions. But instead of trusting God and waiting for providence to play into his hands, instead of waiting, as he himself says, for fortune to crown him: ‘If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me / Without my stir’ (Macbeth, 1.3.142–143), he begins to ‘stir’ by increasingly relying on the assets of his virtue (or virtù).30 Quite similar to Caesar, he claims that the cause of political power is in his ‘will’, but in contrast to him, he seems to acknowledge to a much greater degree already the individual — autonomous — ‘realisability’ of that power, which he himself begins to produce, generate and perform: ‘For mine own good / All causes shall give way’ (Macbeth, 3.4.134–135). As a consequence, the older model of a God-given sovereignty based on the constative act of an ‘original’ and ‘timeless’ stating of its power can in Macbeth only be found in fragmented quotations from earlier times. One of these relics introducing an older order of sovereignty is the topos of the divine king apt to cure evil, evoked by Malcolm as a counter-model of Early Modern political power:

29. For the a-semiotic, catalytic, function of the witches, cf. Eagleton’s cogent and concise remarks in Shakespeare, pp. 2–4. 30. For the Early Modern distinction between a (more or less semantic, i.e substantial) Roman concept of virtue and a (recklessly pragmatic, i.e. functional) Machiavellian concept of virtù, see Wolfgang Weiß, Das Drama der Shakespeare-Zeit: Versuch einer Beschreibung, Sprache und Literatur, 100 (Stuttgart and others: Kohlhammer, 1979), pp. 123–24.

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MALCOLM A most miraculous work in this good King, Which often since my here-remain in England I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven Himself best knows, but strangely visited people, All swoll’n and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, The mere despair of surgery, he cures, Hanging a golden stamp about their necks, Put on with holy prayers; and ’tis spoken, To the succeeding royalty he leaves The healing benediction. With this strange virtue He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy, And sundry blessings hang about his throne That speak him full of grace. (Macbeth, 4.3.148–60)

Word and name do not simply signifiy or denote here, but they exist and take immediate and divine effect. Macbeth attempts to ascribe this divinatory force of speech to the witches — but is deceived. Eventually, he has to recognise that, contrary to the God-given force of the divine word, the power of speech in the performative mode can never wholly secure its authority even though the topos of the king curing evil still seems to hold the promise of a possible return to such older, and allegedly more valid, paradigms of socio-political stability. The world order of Macbeth thus seems to be ruled by new principles. The illusion of a self-sufficient sovereignty finds itself broken and replaced by a performative dynamics in which political power is, and must be, repeatedly produced. If Julius Caesar, as we have seen, was marked by a desire to fall back on earlier models of sovereignty situated in an idealised past of fealty masquerading as an everlasting present, Macbeth seems to be directed towards a future forever holding the promise of fulfilling the desire of political constancy but never reaching it. For it is only the future that seems to offer an assurance that the endless series of stating sovereignty might finally come to a conclusion and bring definitive political stability. Seen in this light, one might even say that Macbeth is already living in the relentless linearity of the temporal world order established by the Roman rebels killing Caesar for the excess of an over-assumed ‘constancy’.31 Unsurprisingly then, it is Macbeth’s greatest mortification to see the witches deprive him of the illusion of timeless power by making clear, in the show of the Eight Kings, that there will be no dynastic constancy for him. The show displays the ghost of Banquo in what looks like the first ending of a series of 31. This would, again, refer to the effect of temporalisation, this time only already from the other side of the threshold; cf. notes 9 and 19 above.

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dynastic successions, confronting Macbeth with the radical temporality of his reign. Macbeth’s reaction to the witches’ show leaves no doubt that he understands their message. This is finally corroborated by his last solo-performance. After learning that his wife is dead, he sees past and future events dissolving into a series of continuous horizons of time. As a consequence, the contingent moment of a ‘present’ seems to be determined only by the ever-varying difference between before and after, between a yesterday and a tomorrow. While the transcendence-guaranteed model of power seemed to enclose the concept of future within an integral and self-sufficient world order, the future in the performative mode of temporal ‘realisation’ becomes an essentially open process, in which reality has to be successively reconstituted with each emergence of a new and ever new beginning. MACBETH Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (Macbeth, 5.5.18–27)

As a result of this temporalised model of reality, the integrity of the guaranteed world model — the illusion of a given, instituted ‘Satzung’ — is replaced by the idea of a process of changing contexts and contextualisations — of an interminable series of (re)instituting ‘Setzungen’.32 This notion of reality as a context to be ‘realized’ by performative statements also explains why, in the last analysis, the witches’ prophecies are neither false nor true (which additionally corroborates their ‘exceptional’ character). Instead, the propositional content of their prophecies wholly depends on the variable (pragmatic) contexts in which their speech acts can be made use of. Thus, in Macbeth, reality — and sovereignty — seem to be the intersubjective effects of what can be enforced as a coherent framing of what is henceforth to be considered true,

32. For the idea of context and contextualisation, see once more Blumenberg, p. 32–33; for the distinction between an institutionalising ‘Setzung’ and an institutionalized ‘Satzung’, see note 3 above.

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valid, and real.33 The reality of the world as context is a reality of multiple possibilities, whereas the reality of the guaranteed world order stands for the unified reality of the divine. With his desperately deferring motto of ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’, Macbeth further explores the contradictions of the performative model of polity already emergent in Julius Caesar, whilst at the same time emphasising the complexity of its intrinsic temporality. Both in Julius Caesar and in Macbeth, however, it is above all theatrical performance which proves to be the device through which the temporal intricacies of polities can be seen to materialise. This explains why Macbeth, in his last solo-performance, is so much bent on paraphrasing the temporal logic of ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow’ by drawing on the traditional topos of the world as stage, and why he seems so keen on allegorising life as ‘a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more’. In particular, Banquo’s spectral appearance as a ghost in the banquet scene makes clear that in Macbeth, too, political performativity is readily apt to shift into theatrical performance, into aesthetics.34 While Macbeth attempts to re-affirm the brotherhood of fealty he is proven wrong by the spectral appearance of Banquo which indicates that the community evoked is already disunited and decomposed, since there is a brother missing. At the same time, Banquo’s ghostly apparition somehow seems to promise to overcome the contingent model of performative polity by (aesthetically) staging a powerful, and well-nigh believable, performance of divine presence and wonder. MACBETH Here had we now our country’s honour roofed Were the graced person of our Banquo present, Who may I rather challenge for unkindness Than pity for mischance. His absence, sir, ROSS Lays blame upon his promise. Please’t your highness To grace us with your royal company? MACBETH The table’s full. LENNOX Here is a place reserved, sir. MACBETH Where? (Macbeth, 3.4.39–46)

Banquo’s histrionic presentation of what is henceforth to be considered absent and without substance finds its answer in the spectacular disguise of a theatre33. Cf. Blumenberg, p. 33: ‘Reality as a self-constituting context is a borderline concept of the ideal totality of all selves — it is a confirmative value for the experience and interpretation of the world that take place in intersubjectivity.’ (Blumenberg’s italics) 34. See again note 20.

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like show. What used to be transcendence is thus transformed into a mere stage trick. In the end, Banquo emerges as one of Macbeth’s ‘poor players’, that ‘strut and fret their hour upon the stage / And then are heard no more’. The spectacular evidence of what seemed to be the transcendent guarantee of worldly power is thus dismissed. Banquo’s ghostly appearance brings evidence only of what is lost forever. Early Modern theatre thus proves to be a social ritual that makes the performative failure of social and political rituals discernible on stage. Theatrical performance cannot overcome the temporal intricacies of the performative model of polity and its endless productions of sovereignty. However, the dramatic staging of spectacular performances such as Banquo’s — the foregrounding of ‘opsis’ — allows the audience to experience the tragic uncertainties, or latencies, of secular empowerment and the loss of ritualistic forms of legitimation by means of doubtful productions of theatrical presences. It is precisely this theatrical experience of the immanent transcendence of Early Modern polity that permits Shakespeare to perform a form of justice which is equidistant from both human and divine jurisdiction, and thus makes the traumatic deep structure of political justice discernible in the harsh light of the stage. In this sense, theatre makes the withdrawal of a God-given reality palpable in a physical, material, and even corporeal way. IV In terms of their aesthetic function, Julius Caesar and Macbeth do not seem to differ in any significant way. What is different, however, is how they combine the key terms referred to in the title of our paper — the particular way in which they stage the interrelation between polity, policy, and politics.35 By ‘policies’ we mean any political content defining the political aims and purposes that can be pursued by political players and factions.36 In order to enforce such (semantic) policies their representatives are required to undergo a conflictual process in which the struggle for power and influence is negotiated. Policies thus presuppose ‘politics’ insofar as politics can be seen as a set of specific (pragmatic) strategies or tactics that allow the representatives of certain policies to realise their particular claims. Even more fundamental than policies and politics, then, is the term of ‘polity’. For polities define the (syn35. For political readings of Early Modern drama, cf. the contributions in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). 36. For the following cf. OED, s.v. ‘policy’, ‘politics’, and ‘polity’; for the German debate about these terms, see Karl Rohe, Politik. Begriffe und Wirklichkeiten: Eine Einführung in das politische Denken, 2nd rev. edn (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1994).

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tactic) conditions of the political and juridical order under which policies can be thought out and/or under which politics can be put into practice. Hence, polities determine the discursive, epistemological, and linguistic setting that causes political orders to emerge in the first place.37 From this perspective, we can now see that we are apparently dealing with two different models of polity. In Julius Caesar, polity seems to be oriented towards an ideal, and perfect, timeless ‘past’ (or, rather, a present masquerading as a past) that promises a self-sufficient, constative, pseudo-anaphoric statement of sovereignty. The model of reality connected to this type of polity is a cyclically closed, seemingly ever-present, and God-given world order. In contrast, Macbeth is dominated by a polity that is oriented towards an ideal future where the iterative series of performative empowerments is endlessly concluded, and deferred. The model of reality connected to this latter type of polity is an open and ever-changing field of possible realisations and contexts. Applying this to the protagonists of our plays, we can finally see that a character such as Mark Antony assumes an interesting intermediate position. At first sight, Antony’s politics seems to be framed by a constative model of guaranteed polity insofar as he seems to fight for the restitution of the feudal ideology of brotherly love. But the question is: is Antony really a restitutional hero fighting for the polity of fealty?38 Instead of creating an atmosphere of brotherly concord among the triumvirs, he is only too ready to sacrifice Lepidus’s brother along with his own sister’s son. Furthermore, he is the first to nourish Caesar’s absolutist pretensions while, after Caesar’s death, he claims superiority over Octavius on the mere grounds of his age. All this goes clearly against the ideology of brotherly love. The following quote makes clear that, contrary to his apparent policy of ‘guaranteeing’ brotherhood, Antony’s politics is dominated by the concept of a performative polity of strategic ‘realization’: ANTONY O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers. Thou art the ruins of the noblest man That ever livèd in the tide of times. Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood! Over thy wounds now do I prophesy — Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips 37. In semiotic terms, ‘policies’ thus designate political meanings (semantics), ‘politics’ political action (pragmatics), and ‘polities’ political order (syntactics). For the distinction between syntactics (relation of signs to signs), semantics (relation of signs to meanings), and pragmatics (relation of signs to users), see Charles William Morris, Writings on the General Theory of Signs (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 417. 38. See Mahler, pp. 184–90.

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To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue — A curse shall light upon the limbs of men; Domestic fury and fierce civil strife Shall cumber all the parts of Italy; Blood and destruction shall be so in use, And dreadful objects so familiar, That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quartered with the hands of war, All pity choked with custom of fell deeds; And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice Cry ‘havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial. (Julius Caesar, 3.1.257–78)

In this counter-revolutionary prophecy, Antony obviously establishes a new performative type of polity, evoking a permanent ‘state of exception’. Oikos and polis are seen as forever transformed into ‘domestic fury and fierce civil strife’. And the state of crisis imagined by Antony seems endless. In terms of policy, the effect of ‘re-stating’ sovereignty, however, remains comparatively void. The future sovereign’s possibility of making an authorial statement seems to be reduced to the mere cry of ‘havoc’. As a consequence, the reinstitutionalizing act of the monarch here anticipated looks like a linearisation of a perpetual state of war and chaos. At the same time, however, the force of Antony’s own prophecy lacks further guarantees, since it depends on a conspicuously mute agency — the ‘dumb mouth’ of Caesar’s ‘ruby lips’ that ‘beg the voice and utterance of Antony’s tongue’. In the last analysis, Antony’s prophecy of political re-institution thus turns out to be an empty selfprophecy in that it finds its political, and performative, force only in itself. In the end, however, Antony’s political actions find themselves crowned with success, and he obtains the opportunity to ‘realize’ his alleged policy of restitution. While he seems bent on re-establishing the older polity of fealty, his politics obviously draws on a different paradigm — that of a time-bound realization within a field of open contexts. Antony thus seems to (strategically) re-constitute a set of policies in which he no longer believes whereas Brutus, who still most emphatically believes in them, inadvertently destroys his belief through his own actions. BRUTUS Remember March, the ides of March, remember, Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake? What villain touched his body, that did stab, And not for justice? (Julius Caesar, 4.2.70–73)

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Acts of remembrance like these illustrate that, in contrast to Antony, Brutus most faithfully believes in the policy he is about to extinguish. The punning on ‘remember’ and ‘re-member’ obviously attempts to re-establish the cyclical order of fealty (as well as the ideology of the brotherly ‘Personenverband’) that is already present in Paul’s description of the ‘many members in one body that are member of one body in Christ’. Nevertheless, in the course of the play, Brutus’s political strategies cannot help but reveal that what seems to be re-membered here owes itself to a continuous repetition of context-bound and ever-varying acts of ‘stating’ (an endless series of pragmatic ‘Setzungen’) of what is supposedly given (the illusion of a syntactic ‘Satzung’) but which in the end lacks definite conclusion (i.e. it never materialises as such). As for Macbeth, he, too, can be seen as representing an inverted shape, or negative pattern, of Antony. Where Antony succeeds in ‘realising’ his policy, Macbeth fails. Nevertheless, in terms of polity and politics the difference between Macbeth and Antony is no bigger than the one observed between Malcolm and Macbeth. After the paradigm change from constativity to performativity, they are all of them bound up in a system of polity based on performative realisation only. Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. by Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1982). Austin, J.L., How to Do Things With Words, ed. by J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Belsey, Catherine, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Routledge, 1985, repr. 1991). Blumenberg, Hans, ‘The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel’, in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, ed. by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 29–48. Brown, Gillian, and George Yule, Discourse Analysis, Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Bussmann, Hadumod, Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, ed. and trans. by Gregory P. Trauth and Kerstin Kazzazi (London: Routledge, 1996). Castoriadis, Cornelius, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. by Kathleen Blamey (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987). Clemen, Wolfgang, Shakespeare’s Soliloquies, trans. by Charity Scott Stokes (London: Methuen, 1987). Cohen, Walter, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985). Derrida, Jacques, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in Acts of Religion, ed. and trans. by Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 228–98.

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Dollimore, Jonathan, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2nd edn (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989). Dollimore, Jonathan, and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). Eagleton, Terry, William Shakespeare, Rereading Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Frank, Thomas, Albrecht Koschorke, Susanne Lüdemann, and Ethel Matala de Mazza, Des Kaisers neue Kleider: Über das Imaginäre politischer Herrschaft (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2002). Greenblatt, Stephen, ‘Le cauchemar de la royauté: Richard III’, in Figures de la royauté en Angleterre de Shakespeare à la Glorieuse Révolution, ed. by François Laroque and Franck Lessay (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999), pp. 15–31. Heinemann, Margot, ‘Political Drama’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. by A.R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 161–205. Iser, Wolfgang, Shakespeares Historien: Genese und Geltung (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1988). Kantorowicz, Ernst H., The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957, repr. 1997). Koschorke, Albrecht, Susanne Lüdemann, Thomas Frank, and Ethel Matala de Mazza, Der fiktive Staat: Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2007). Lüdeke, Roger, ‘Embodying Politics in Early Modern Drama: John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi’, in Theater im Aufbruch: Das europäische Drama der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Roger Lüdeke and Virginia Richter, Theatron, 53 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008), pp. 117–32. Luhmann, Niklas, ‘Soziologische Aufklärung’, in Soziologische Aufklärung: Aufsätze zur Theorie sozialer Systeme, 6 vols, 4th edn (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1974) I, pp. 66–91. Mahler, Andreas, ‘“There is Restitution, no End of Restitution, only not for us”: Experimential Tragedy and the Early Modern Subject in Julius Caesar’, in Julius Caesar: New Criticial Essays, ed. by Horst Zander (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 181–95. Mayer, Theodor, ‘Die Ausbildung der Grundlagen des modernen Staates im hohen Mittelalter’, Historische Zeitschrift, 159 (1939), 457–87. Morris, Charles William, Writings on the General Theory of Signs (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). Müller, Wolfgang G., Die politische Rede bei Shakespeare (Tübingen: Narr, 1979). Pfister, Manfred, The Theory and Analysis of Drama, trans. by John Halliday, European Studies in English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Rancière, Jacques, ‘The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics’, in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 12–19. Rohe, Karl, Politik. Begriffe und Wirklichkeiten: Eine Einführung in das politische Denken, 2nd rev. edn (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1994). Schulze, Wilfried, Einführung in die Neuere Geschichte, 2nd edn (Stuttgart: Ulmer, 1991). Searle, John R., Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Sinfield, Alan, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Tennenhouse, Leonard, ‘Strategies of State and Political Plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII’, in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 109–28.

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Teuber, Bernhard, ‘Die Tragödie als Theater der Macht: Repräsentation und Verhandlung königlicher Souveränität bei Seneca und im frühneuzeitlichen Drama der Romania’, in Theater im Aufbruch: Das europäische Drama der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Roger Lüdeke and Virginia Richter, Theatron, 53 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008), pp. 155–80. Weber, Samuel, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Weimann, Robert, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. by David Hillman (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Weiß, Wolfgang, Das Drama der Shakespeare-Zeit: Versuch einer Beschreibung, Sprache und Literatur, 100 (Stuttgart and others: Kohlhammer, 1979). Wilson, Richard, Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (London: Routledge, 2007). Xuan, Jing, Der König im Kontext: Subversion, Dialogizität und Ambivalenz im weltlichen Theater Calderón de la Barcas, Studia Romanica, 124 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004).

The Monarch as the Solo Performer in Stuart Masque Jerzy Limon The paper deals with the special position the monarch held during the masque performances in the early seventeenth century. James I was not only the most important spectator, whose special position was signalled by a raised throne and its location immediately opposite the vanishing point of the stage perspective scenery, which always marks the best viewing ‘station point’, but also he was presented as the chief source and cause of everything that occurred on the stage. From this point of view, the king may be seen as the central element of the masque, and not just a spectator. In spite of the fact that the monarch does not say anything, he is addressed directly by the performers, and becomes incorporated into the created world. Moreover, the latter seems to be governed by laws different from those that govern reality, and the king is presented as the immediate source of those laws. This means he becomes an active agent, and the masque appears as an exteriorization of the royal god-like powers. Thus the masque places the king in the role of a silent solo performer. Owing to his unique superhuman features, the king does not have to ‘act’ in the usual way, his mere presence is sufficient for the magical world of the masque to appear before the spectators.

One of the unique and conspicuous features of the masque is the suspension of the laws of physics as we know them in the empirical world. Changeable scenery was introduced in these shows, and the scale of the miraculous and the spectacular not only in the masque but also in Renaissance and Baroque court performances in general was without precedence in theatre history. As a consequence of the new inventions in theatre technology, gods could ride their chariots across the sky in the masque, mountains could rise and disappear, underwater palaces could open their interiors, stars could dance and sing, people would undergo miraculous transformations as in Ovid or in Kafka, and mythological gods and goddesses descended on earth. On this earth, moreover, one could overcome the laws of gravitation and stop the flow of time. The stage-set could transform itself, and instantly change from a castle to a landscape, or a seascape, or an ancient Roman forum. And all of this without the aid of computer technology — the scene was lit by the magic of light, with its source being invisible to the spectators. But the spectacular and the magical components of the masque were not aims in themselves: they were to be understood as the result of the king’s presence and created meanings in relation to his body and mind. Without the presence of the monarch those meanings and their coherence would have been almost entirely lost. We must not forget that to the then audiences the wonders of changing scenery must have been similar to the effects of holography, 3-D and other new media in today’s world, where these technologies are often employed in theatre. However, the laws that governed this highly imaginary masque world

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were not merely aimed to evoke wonder: they were a part and an attribute of the created model of the universe and of the laws that governed it. The laws of the masque world gave the audience an insight into the unknown, into something usually concealed from sight and other senses, showing its unique nature, which in normal circumstances, for ordinary humans, remained as if covered by a mask. Paradoxically, the court masque, as if through magic, unmasked the true laws that govern the world and showed them in action, and it also implied that the process of unmasking was made possible only through the presence of the monarch. Actually, the masques showed the audience one aspect of the human world, the nature of monarchy and kingship, and also the unique role played by the monarch who had just created a new empire and thus changed the world.1 The surviving texts of Jacobean masques leave no doubt: the king was meant to be the source of everything that happened in the masque proper (as opposed to the antimasque, which may be seen as a oneact play governed by the rules of theatre rather than anything else). For the miraculous events shown on stage, and the unveiled direct communications channel with the metaphysical sphere, were all to be understood as the result of the king’s presence and his super-human qualities. He was even the source of light, which, metaphorically, meant also life. Thus, the fluorescent monarch became a life-generating agent. ‘He is a god, o’re kings’ we learn in one of the masques (Oberon); further, ‘[h]e makes it ever day and ever spring / Where he doth shine […] Hee’s all’.2 In Love Restored, Cupid says, pointing to the king: ‘To those bright beames I owe my life’.3 And in The Vision of Delight, the allegorical character Wonder asks: WONDER Whence is it that the air so sudden clears, And all things in a moment turn so mild? Fant’sy replies, pointing directly to the throne: FANT’SY Behold a king Whose presence maketh this perpetual spring, The glories of which spring grow in that bower, And are the marks and beauties of his power.4 (ll. 167–68, 193–96)

1. 2. 3. 4.

Tristan Marshall, Theatre and Empire: Great Britain on the London Stages under James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Ben Jonson, Oberon, ed. by Richard Hosley, in A Book of Masques (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 43–70; the quote comes from ll. 284–87. Ben Jonson, Love Restored, in Court Masques, ed. by David Lindley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 66–73; the quote comes from l. 223. The Vision of Delight, in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, ed. by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, 2 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973) I, pp. 271–73 (p. 273).

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However, the king was much more than just the source of light or the springlike power of life and generation: he also had a god-like ability to transform nature beyond the changes wrought by the seasons. In the anonymous Masque of Flowers (1614) the king is compared to the life-generating sun, which has the power of transforming flowers into humans: Hearken, ye fresh and springing flowers, The Sun shines full upon your earth; Disclose out of your shady bowers, He will not blast your tender birth. Descend you from your hill, Take spirit at his will, No flowers, but flourish still.5 (ll. 321–27)

At this point the stage direction informs us that the flowers vanished and in their stead the Masquers appeared. Similarly, in Ben Jonson’s The News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (1620) we find the following passages, sung by the characters in the masque, which confirm the monarch’s lightemanating ability capable of transforming inanimate into animate, non-human into human etc.: SONG 1: Howe’er the brightness may amaze, Move you, and stand not still at gaze, As dazzled with the light; But with your motions fill the place, And let their fullness win your grace Till you collect your sight. So while the warmth you do confess, And temper of these rays, no less To quicken than refine, You may by knowledge grow more bold, And so more able to behold The body whence they shine.6 (ll. 290–301)

5.

6.

Anon., The Masque of Flowers, in A Book of Masques: In Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, ed. by Terence John Bew Spencer and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 149–77 (p. 168). Ben Jonson, The News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, in The Complete Masques, ed. by Stephen Orgel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 292–305 (p. 303).

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SONG 2: Now look and see in yonder throne How all those beams are cast from one. This is that orb so bright Has kept your wonder so awake, Whence you as from a mirror take The sun’s reflected light. (ll. 304–09)

Again, the singers are not the musicians, but characters in the masque who address each other. The king, as the source of light and life, can also influence time and transform transitoriness to timelessness, since, as we already know, his very presence ‘maketh perpetuall Spring’: SONG 3: Not that we think you weary be, For he That did this motion give, And made it so long live, Could likewise give it perpetuity. Nor that we doubt you have not more, And store Of changes to delight; For they are infinite, As is the power that brought forth those before.7 (ll. 318–27)

And finally, in Britannia Triumphans (1637) by William Davenant, it is the power of the monarch that makes statues come to life and move about the stage: FAME [to masquers] Why move these princes of his [Britanocles’s] train so slow As taking root they would to statues grow, But that the wonder of his virtue turns them so! ’Tis fit you mix that wonder with delight, As you were warmed to motion with his sight, So pay the expectation of this night.8 (ll. 552–57)

7. 8.

Jonson, The News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, p. 304. William Davenant, Britannia Triumphans, in Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973) II, pp. 661–67, (666).

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Thus, the king is presented as having the power to bring to life inanimate objects, or the other way round. Transformations of that sort were not unknown in the theatre tradition of the period. However, the difference between similar scenes in the masque and in theatre, say, in William Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, is significant, because it draws our attention to the differences between the two types of performances. In the stage play, the king is fooled into believing that the statue, being a portrait of his wife, is made of real stone, but the rest of the stage figures and the audience know perfectly well that the statue is in fact a live human being. In the masque, the statues are presented as real, and the transformation is presented not as a trick played on the watchers, but as if it were of a miraculous nature, stemming from the supposedly superhuman qualities of the monarch. Naturally, this does not mean that the early seventeenth-century audiences believed in what they were seeing on the Banqueting House stage, but it is important to notice the ‘attitude’ of the masque, which wants to be seen not as a representation of some fictional realm, but as the result of the true laws that govern the world, which are usually concealed from the eyes of the mortals. During the masque performance and owing to the presence of the monarch, the veil of secrecy is drawn, and the select few have the privilege of seeing into the matter of things. Thus, the king appears as the driving force of what we see and hear. As noticed long ago by Stephen Orgel, the masque appears as a ‘mirror’ or exteriorisation of the king’s mind.9 His mere presence changes the laws of physics, the impossible becomes possible, time and transitoriness change into timelessness, spring becomes perpetual, chaos evolves into harmony, and deformity into beauty in front of our eyes. Visitors from the metaphysical sphere, usually as messengers from the gods, appear in person and communicate messages directly to the king, and the masked aristocrats who are discovered in some cave or in a cloud, descend onto the stage and first ‘make obeisance’ to his Majesty, before they start to dance.10 Hence the king appears not only as the main spectator of the masque, to whose location everything is subjected. He also becomes the source of a magical power that governs the world represented 9.

Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1975), p. 77. The same image is repeated by Jonathan Goldberg in his James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 31. 10. As described, for instance, by Horatio Busino, chaplain to the Venetian Ambassador: ‘After they had made an obeissance to his Majesty, they began to dance in very good time, preserving for a while the same pyramidacal figure, but with a variety of steps […] When this was over, each took his lady […] all making obeissance to his Majesty first and then to each other.’ (Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1617–1619, ed by Robert Ashton [London: Public Record Office, 1969], p. 242).

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on stage by laws different from those that govern the human realm. Or rather, owing to his presence, the stage becomes a magical instrument, through which the select few who are present, are shown the truth about the nature of the world and of the monarchy. New channels of communication with the gods, usually invisible and inaudible, are unveiled and shown as operational. On the surface this is nothing unusual, for in theatre we always have a demarcation of, on the one hand, the empirical world of the audience as well as the empirical stage including material objects and actors, and, on the other hand, the fictional realm created on stage — a demarcation I call the ‘fifth wall’.11 But the significant difference here is that the masque world, and all in spite of its magical attributes, does not want to be read as fiction. It does not ‘represent’ anything but itself, it is not a sign of a different, fictional realm; it defines itself as reality. I shall return to this point shortly, but it is worth noting now that this attitude is highly reminiscent of today’s theatre practice, where blurring the borders between art and life is omnipresent, especially in postmodern and postdramatic productions. Again, the abolition of the boundaries may be possible in rituals or in some types of performance art, but in theatre it may be treated as yet another convention, similar to asides or soliloquies, where the actors pretend to be addressing the audience directly.12 This means that the masque reveals more affinities to performance art, where the real presence of human bodies and objects is a rule, than to the traditional theatre, where the real becomes a signifier of the denoted, fictional realm. It may be observed that the integration of the masque world with the physical presence of the monarch, i.e. James I, is so thorough that without

11. So far, scholarship has only distinguished the invisible fourth wall, which separates the box stage from the auditorium and is often identified with the bourgeois theatre and its aesthetics. However, I have come to understand the fourth wall as a metaphor rather than a literal reference to the ‘missing wall’ in the proscenium stage. In my understanding, the fourth wall may refer to any type of stage, meaning the temporal and spatial distance created by the actors from the audience. The ‘fifth wall’, on the other hand, refers to the invisible divide between the material and non-material, the vehicle of the sign and its denoted meaning, the physical and fictional time, etc. Basically, it is the invisible boundary between two time streams — two present times, two temporal dimensions, separating the material substance from the fictional sphere: separating human bodies, props, costume, music and the like from what all this signalling matter denotes in the fictional realm. In addition, the fifth wall marks the division between the two spheres governed by different laws of physics, and that includes geometry (space) and, most importantly, time. I have discussed the concept of the fifth wall in my Piąty wymiar teatru (Gdańsk: słowo obraz/terytoria, 2006). 12. For a theoretical analysis of soliloquies and asides see my essay ‘The Fifth Wall: Words of Silence in Shakespeare’s Soliloquies and Asides’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 144 (2008), pp. 47–65.

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him the masque cannot be staged.13 Without him it does not and cannot create full meaning. Everything that appears on stage reveals some sort of relationship with the monarch, and creates additional meanings through that relationship. Let me give just one example, which shows that even the stage set created additional meanings in relation to the seated king.14 Of the designs for the masques mentioned, Britannia Triumphans (1637) is unique in its presentation of a panoramic view of London, as seen from the South Bank, through a street perspective (see illustration 1). Along the vertical axis of the design, and along its horizon, St. Paul’s Cathedral may be seen, which means that it is set right in the centre, in what is known as the vanishing point. Right below is river Thames and part of Southwark, with the Globe theatre in the centre,

Illustration 1: A masque design by Inigo Jones. © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.

also set along the vertical axis. This means that the art of perspective points to two architectural buildings and creates some sort of equivalence between them. The public theatre is linked to the cathedral, which, being a model of 13. The integrity was pointed out long ago by Stephen Orgel in his Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 66–67. 14. I have used this example in my essay ‘The Masques of the City: Staging London in Early Stuart Court Spectacles’ (in press).

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Heavenly Jerusalem, is a space detached from the human world. Through that space humans may contact and communicate with divinity. Please note that again we have a juxtaposition of two times here: the mundane physical time of the human world is contrasted with the timelessness of the cathedral and divinity. Furthermore, every implementation of the art of perspective projects its other side, lying as if in a mirror reflection within the space of the reality of the observer, determining his or her position, i.e. the so-called station point. In this particular case the station point is the actual location of the monarch during the performance. Thus a conspicuous equivalence is established, namely, that parallel to the relationship established by the stage design is the relationship between the real space of the court and the implied adjacent metaphysical space created on the court’s stage. Again, humans may communicate with the gods through the space of the court only. This, in turn, creates an equivalence between the court and the cathedral. Both are presented as gateways to heaven. Moreover, in a number of masques, the court is identified with a temple devoted to some deity, e.g. Jove (as in Aurelian Townshend’s Albion’s Triumph, 1632), or some abstract goddess, such as Honor (as in George Chapman’s Memorable Masque, 1613) or Fame (Britannia Triumphans). It should be added that the perspectival equivalence between the royal throne and the cathedral is particularly relevant in the case of a monarch who was also the head of the Church of England. As we can see, spatial relations foregrounded in Inigo Jones’s design, and during the actual staging, convey meanings that corroborate Stuart ideology. This is in accordance with Jones’s concept that words are not necessary to convey meaning: ‘We speak in acts [= actions], and scorn the words’ trifling scenes’.15 This anticipates the postdramatic and postmodern theatre practice. Furthermore, it has to be remembered that the technicalities connected with the introduction of changeable scenery were not well known in the early seventeenth century: most of the spectators had no preconceptions or presuppositions connected with the magical changes of scenes. People simply did not know how this scenery functioned or how it rendered possible the miraculous events. Thus the king himself could be presented all the more convincingly as the driving force behind the magic. In fact he was the essence and the meaning of the whole, and the masque’s main function was to illustrate and explicate that meaning. In this sense, the king actually became part of the

15. Aurelian Townshend and Inigo Jones, Albion’s Triumph, in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, ed. by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, 2 vols (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1973) II, p. 454, l. 99.

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show.16 And since the king functioned as the meaning-generating source of the show, he could even be said to ‘act’, i.e. to play the assumed, albeit silent role of ‘little god’ on Earth, in accordance to King James’s well-known theory of kingship, presented in his own writings (Basilikon Doron). In the process of this semiosis, his inner features and hidden powers, as described in his political writings, were exteriorised and shown in action. What in writing often appears as a metaphor, here assumed a material shape, and indeed took the form of a ‘bodied space’ or of materialized cognitive blends. 17 It was the monarch who made the world go round, at least in the masque world. In a way, his role was reminiscent to that of Tadeusz Kantor in the twentieth century who always appeared in his performances in the ineluctable role of the director (equally conspicuous is the presence of Richard Foreman at his performances).18 The difference, however, is that Kantor moved around the stage, observed closely the development of the performance, and with his gestures, eyes, and mimicry of the face, gave signs of instruction to the actors. In the masque something similar occured, but the king did not move and did not have to interfere with the masque in a visible way — his mere presence evoked and controlled wonders which were made visible to the audience in a unique show of the monarch’s concealed powers. In the critical tradition, the major tendency is to treat the masque as a spectacle staged, as it were, in a nineteenth-century box stage, where the boundary between the fictional and empirical realities is clearly marked by a raised stage, or by the proscenium framed by the proscenium arch. Since we know that elaborate and illusionistic changing scenery was used in the masque, a number of critics tend to assume that the action of these spectacles, including 16. It may also be added that King James was sometimes presented as an impersonation of some identified god, as is the case with Neptune’s Triumph of 1624, where the monarch is addressed as Neptune, and his court is incorporated into the fictional realm to become Neptune’s court. In this case, the function of the king is somewhat different and more theatrical in nature, although the fictional space is not accompanied by a parallel jump in time: everything is still occurring in the present time of the audience. 17. See Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, ‘Blending as a Central Process of Grammar’ (1998), an article available on the home page of the authors (accessed 21.06.2009). See also their book The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, ‘Introduction’, in Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies after the Cognitive Turn (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 1–26, pp. 18–20 in particular, and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 18. See, for instance, Jacqeline Martin, Voice in Modern Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 138–40.

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what was said and sung, took place within the stage set and on the proscenium, as it does in today’s theatres. However, there is much evidence that the most important acting area was not what we would normally call a raised stage, but the so-called ‘dancing place’. The term denotes the floor of the hall, stretching between the proscenium and the king’s raised throne (often referred to as the ‘state’), an empty area surrounded on the three sides by seated spectators reminiscent of the theatre-in-the-round tradition. We know, for instance, that dances were an important part of the show, often occupying most of its time, and a number of important speeches and songs were actually presented in the area below the perspective stage and close to the king. The surviving text of the Masque of Twelve Months (1612?) tells us, for instance, that in the opening scene ‘the Hearte opens, and Beauty issues […] the two Pulses beating before them up towardes ye King. Beinge neare, Beauty speaks’.19 Similarly, in many other masques there are figures descending from above, or entering from the sides, or from below, and taking steps down to the dancing floor in order to address the king, or to present songs or dialogues immediately in front of him.20 Most of what happened in the masque took place not within the illusionistic stage, but (partly) immediately in front of it, i.e. on the narrow proscenium, and on the dancing floor — the large rectangular area in the middle of the hall, surrounded on three sides by spectators and backed with the stage picture. One of the reasons for this arrangement was practical: the proscenium stage was simply not deep enough to accommodate stage action, and its dimensions forced the set designer to create a rather ‘sharp’ perspective, in which the relation between live human bodies and scenographic elements would be totally out of proportion, if the former appeared in one of the vanishing streets or landscapes.21 Architecturally, the world of the masque was divided into three spheres: first, the metaphysical world on stage, created by the stage-set, acting, costumes and the lyrics of the songs sung during the masque, second, the court represented metonymically by the dancing floor and third, the human world

19. This was first printed ‘from the manuscript’, now apparently lost, in Peter Cunningham, Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1853), pp. 131–42. 20. Several examples are: ‘Then he advanced with them to the King’ (Ben Jonson, The Masque of Augurs, 1622, in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, ed. by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973) I, 337, l. 311; ‘Proteus, Portunus, and Saron come forth, and go up singing to the state’ (Ben Jonson, The Fortunate Isles and Their Union, 1625, in ibid., 374, ll. 382–83), ‘He goes up to the state’ (Ben Jonson, Love’s Triumph through Callipolis, 1631, in ibid., 406). 21. On the stage designs by Inigo Jones see John Peacock’s excellent study, The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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outside, which entered into the court sphere in the form of the antimasque.22 The very structure of this model is significant: communication of humans with the metaphysical sphere can be achieved only through the mediation of the god-like monarch and his court of super-humans. In this sense, the king functions as the link between divinity and humanity, a mediating agent the masque shows at work. In other words, what we see and hear may be treated as a projection of how the king’s mind works, unveiling his ability to see through earthly mundane matter into heavenly realms, to communicate with the gods and their messengers, to transform chaos into harmony or bring to life the inanimate. Seen from this perspective, the stage appears not so much as a mirror but as a projection of the subjective mind of the monarch, and the whole show is a magical instrument through which the audience can share with the king his superhuman qualities. The Royal court reveals its spatial and temporal contiguity with the metaphysical realm. A unique indexical relationship — that of spatial and temporal contiguity — is established between the monarch and the world created during the show: the king, whose presence is noticed by the metaphysical figures, appears as the ultimate cause of what is made visible and audible. In this sense the masque is the effect of his super-human qualities in particular. In scholarship it has often been stressed that the king is the chief spectator in the masque. That is true; however, that spectator is equipped with unusual qualities, which make him much more than just a VIP seated in the auditorium. Let me recapitulate: the king is incorporated into the performance as the driving force of what we see and hear; he is the chief source of power that moves mountains and opens underwater palaces, makes chariots fly across the sky; and he transforms chaos into harmony, or deformed creatures into noble human beings. Moreover, it is his presence that makes the communication with the metaphysical sphere possible, as indeed in augury (one of the masques is entitled The Masque of Augurs). The king is also the source of light, which often, literally, blinds the mortals who happen to intrude into the hall. Ordinary humans cannot perceive the true nature of the world: this special talent is limited to the select few who have gathered to watch the masque. And the ability to create the indexical relationship, i.e. the one based on spatial or temporal contiguity or on a cause and effect sequence of events, is the most important feature of acting.23 It may therefore be said that during the masque perform22. I have written about this aspect of the masque performances in The Masque of Stuart Culture (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1990), especially in chapter 2, ‘The Emblematic Masque’. 23. Acting is an extremely complicated theoretical issue. I have tackled it in previous publications, available in Polish (an English version is in progress). For a theoretical scrutiny that

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ance King James became the solo performer whose mere presence created the spatial and temporal contiguity with divinity — with divine beauty, harmony and timelessness. However, as indicated above, the metaphysical realm, as presented in the masque, wants to be perceived as reality, not fiction.24 It presents itself as a real presence and not as a representation of fiction. I do not recall any other theatrical situation in which such a role would be bestowed on or attributed to a single spectator-actor. The function of the monarch is therefore very special and needs particular attention. By incorporating the monarch into the performance, he becomes the sign not of a fictional figure, but rather of his own inner qualities that have a direct and visible impact on the realm of the stage, and are revealed and shown in action, as in an experiment in physics. In this way an indexical relationship is established between the monarch and everything that is visual, acoustic or kinetic on stage. He initiates the cause and effect chain of events and establishes temporal and spatial contiguity with the metaphysical realm. Thus, the masque becomes a scientific, albeit magical, instrument through which the king’s powers are visualised and empirically ‘tested’. As a result of this test, chaos is transformed into harmony, ancient heroes, trapped in some captivity, are relieved and assume human shapes that are known to the audience, i.e. the shape of the real aristocrats taking part in the show, who are the monarch’s knights. In the same way the meta-physical realm enters into the physical world to guide the humans to peace and plenty, and, ultimately, to salvation. The empirical space of the court finds its continuation and extension in the worlds usually not accessible to the senses. Let me return to my earlier suggestion that the king is not an actor impersonating space and at a different time, but assumes the role of a ‘little god’, congruous with King James’s beliefs and writings. He remains himself, in the does not concentrate on the actor’s psychology, or his/her work on preparing a role, see, for instance, articles by Jiři Veltruský, ‘Contribution to the Semiotics of Acting’, in Sound, Sign and Meaning: Quinquagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle, ed. by Ladislav Matejka (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1978), pp. 553–606, ‘Acting and Behaviour: A Study in the Signans’, in Semiotics of Drama and Theatre: New Perspectives in the Theory of Drama and Theatre, ed. by Herta Schmid and Aloysius Van Kesteren (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1984), pp. 393–441; see also an intriguing article by Eli Rozik, ‘Acting: The Quintessence of Theatricality’, SubStance, 31, (2002), 110–24 and his latest book Generating Theatre Meaning (Brighton and Portland, 2008), pp. 78–89. 24. To some extent, as congitivists would have it, the king may be treated as the generic space, and what is seen and heard on stage, belonging to the human sphere, is an input space, with the metaphysical sphere being the other input space, and the spectator is invited to create the ultimate cognitive blend or emergent structure in his/her mind, which may lead to the understanding of the nature of royalty and the world. The process of blending involves composition, compression, completion and elaboration. See also Mark Turner, ‘Compression and representation’, Language and Literature, 15 (2006), 17–27.

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hic et nunc of the spectacle, and what we see is simply a display of his powers that normally remain concealed before the eyes of the mortals. In this he becomes a solo performer, revealing many features attributed to performance art, or to what is called the postdramatic theatre today. On this account the main masque may also be described in terms of court rituals or performativity. By definition, in theatre an actor/perfomer is someone who communicates something to someone else, usually by means of what in everyday language is called theatrical behavior.25 This of course implies the existence of two sides of the act of communication: there has to be a recipient, too. Usually, in theatre, the members of the audience are not performers,26 but here, in the masque, the king is singled out from the rest of the audience and in fact becomes an active element of the show. The other members of the audience do not concentrate on the events occurring on the raised stage only, but they also observe the monarch. And they do not merely do so because he is the VIP, but also because the whole show concentrates on him, or, rather paradoxically, because it emanates from the monarch. Without him the masque does not make sense, and cannot take place. Again, it is not because the absence of the king ruins the purpose of the presentation, but rather because the actual presence of the king makes the marvelous show appear in front of other people’s eyes. In this sense, he becomes a solo performer, closely observed by the members of the audience, as his superhuman capacities ‘produce’ the masque. Since the product is material and not fictional, and does not ask to be perceived as an illusion or representation of anything, it transgresses the traditional rules of the theatre, becoming an art form which may be described as a moving scenographic installation, or as a speaking picture — to use a contemporary phrase. 25. The difference between a performer and an actor (in the theatrical meaning of the word) is that the latter creates a layer of fictional present time: thus, acting may be seen as the ability to create dual present time. In theatre, the actor is a co-creator and material substance of the sign, and for that reason acting as a sign may be said to have two directions (of varying strength, one may say). The one aims at creating an image of a fictional figure in the spectator’s mind, the other is the actor him- or herself. This implies that the total ‘meaning’ of acting is not only the figure as such, but its relationship to the actor in his or her total physicality (and, of course, to other elements of a given production), resulting in a cognitive blend. The goal of acting therefore is not only to create an illusion of another human being, but also to present the ways and techniques of the act of creation. Thus, the true ‘meaning’ of acting, the stage figure, is not only referential but also aesthetic, a combination of the two. This alone shows that in theatre the relationship of the signified to the signifier is of uttermost importance. 26. With the possible exception of the stage audience in theatre-within-the-theatre. For a theoretical analysis of the convention see my essay ‘The Play-Within-The-Play: A Theoretical Perspective’, in Enjoying the Spectacle: Word, Image, Gesture, ed. by Jerzy Sobieraj and Dariusz Pestka, Festschrift for Professor Marta Wiszniowska (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2006), pp. 17–32.

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It must be stressed that the meanings generated by the monarch’s presence are not only social and political, which is often the case when the most important or famous person of the state is among the audience. For the most part these meanings are intrinsically connected with what is presented during the masque show, with the ideology and aesthetic presented during the masque show. In other words, meanings in the masque are generated by the complex network of relationships established between all the spectacle’s material components and the body and mind of the king.27 In the critical tradition the masque is often viewed as a minor and somewhat ‘inferior’ type of theatre. As I have pointed out, however, only the antimasque is theatrical in nature. The masque proper transgresses the rules of theatre and, as is often the case with postmodern productions or with performance art, it does not want to be perceived as fiction. This is signaled through the merging of the time and space of the presentation and the time and space of the audience. The masque performers recognise the Banqueting Hall as itself, they address the king directly, treating him as the cause of their appearance, and they notice the presence of the spectators, often complimenting the beauty of the ladies present. This means that the performers are not enacting some story that has already occurred in the past as happening in the fictional present time, which is the distinctive feature of theatre as art,28 but the events presented occur within the real time and the real present of the audience. As a consequence the temporal hiatus separating the two worlds, the one on stage and the auditorium, has ceased to exist, with the effect that the level of theatrical fiction and conventionality decreases or even evaporates. This level of fiction and conventionality is maintained only in the antimasque. At any rate in the masque proper the layers of fiction are structurally different from the systemic theatrical fiction. In theatre, fiction is made possible through the appearance of 27. As indicated above, this may also be described in terms of the theory of cognitive blending. In this sense, the king becomes a materialised generic space, which maps elements of the structure shared by the input spaces. Since in the masque proper there is usually no plot, the events and utterances that create individual scenes or ‘pictures’ do not explain themselves in their synchronic and diachronic appearance. It is the body and mind of the king that provides the codes necessary to bring coherence to the verbal and non-verbal components. In the cognitive process of perception, the blended space (the blend) arises, which inherits the partial structure from the input spaces and creates the new meaning of the emergent structure. 28. The difference between theatre and, say, performance art is that the latter does not create this layer of fictional present time: if it does, it then evolves into theatre. Of course, in postmodern art we find numerous examples of blurring the boundaries between the two mediums, and there are cases of performance art which are very theatrical and cases of theatre which are modelled along the rules of performance art. However, the temporal duality of theatre remains its distinctive feature.

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fictional time, which flows in a different stream and with a different tempo from the time of the spectators. The creation of fictional time makes it possible for the actors to create fictional figures, inhabiting the world beyond the fifth wall. Theatre as art usually wants to be perceived as an act of communication that uses a fictional component to generate meaning; in the masque, this rule is not observed. On the contrary, the masque does not desire to be perceived as fiction, but as a show involving a reality that is not readily available to the perception of ordinary humans. Not so much a mirror of the king’s mind, it rather demands to be perceived as a visualisation of the monarch’s powers. Of course, the intention of the show does not have to comply with logic, common sense or the laws of physics. Ultimately, the key issues here may be explained by the analysis of time structures employed in the masque. This, perhaps, needs some explanation. If we accept a general view that time is the relationship between various objects and phenomena (a relation such as movement, light, rhythm and the like), it is clear that objects and phenomena in the physical sense can exist on stage only. This state of affairs allows us to measure the time of the performance. By definition there are no real objects and phenomena in the fictional realm, which means that the relationships between them can be attributed at random and arbitrarily. This is why fictional time may slow down, may accelerate or even be suspended as in freeze scenes. Of course, in theatre, fiction may appear only as an imaginary construct in the mind of the spectator who in the process of cognitive perception blends not only different input spaces but also input times. Hence the fictional time has to be signalled by actors (through the dramatic text and staging), and we must take it for granted (it cannot be empirically verified), provided we accept the convention. This is why theatre as art may be created by live human beings only, for it is only humans that may signal the appearance and the changing tempo of fictional time. This enables the appearance of something that distinguishes theatre from other types of performance and human behaviour, namely, the fictional present time. Thus, in theatre we have a duality of present times, the biological present time of the actor (and of the audience) and the fictional present time of the figure. From this perspective, acting may be said to be the art of creating fictional present time, and all that is needed for theatre to come to life is the appearance of dual present time. Paraphrasing Peter Brook who has said that all he needed for his theatre was an actor, a bare stage and a watcher, I will say that all I need for my theatre is fictional present time. The ultimate meaning in theatre is created by the relationship between the two spheres set in two different time streams, the phenomenal sphere of the stage and the denoted fictional sphere, which may materialise only in the mind of the spectator.

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However, as indicated above, in the Stuart court theatre the dual present time appears in the antimasque only, which in most instances is theatrical in nature. In the antimasque professional actors enact fictional figures, inhabiting fictional worlds, engaged in dialogical exchanges and plot sequences, and they are separated from the audience by time and space. They often stress the time gap, demarcating the two worlds. In the antimasque, the material world of the stage is a sign of a different space and different time in ways characteristic for theatre. The actors, through their gestures and utterances, signal to us that the fictional figures perceive reality in a different mode, different from the way we perceive what in the phenomenal sense appears on stage. For instance, in the antimasque of The Masque of Augurs (1622) there appear three characters, Notch, Slug, and Van-Goose on their way to the court with an intention of presenting something as a piece of entertainment. This means that the dialogues and action presented take place outside the court and at a time different from the time of performance. Thus, what we have in the antimasque is typical for theatre: at least two different models of perception are contrasted, that of the fictional figures and of the spectators, and through the contrast meaning is generated.29 This is also a sine qua non of theatricality. What we see and hear on stage is not what the stage figures see and hear — the two models of perceiving reality, that of the fictional figures and of the spectators, are constantly at play. Characteristically, even when the time of the antimasque merges with the time of the court hall, as is often the case at the antimasque’s conclusion, the antimasque figures cannot communicate with characters from the masque proper: they are usually scared or chased away by the appearance of the latter. The best they can achieve is to communicate some sort of a message to the monarch. The only communication in this tripartite world is possible between the court sphere and the metaphysical sphere, and between the 29. The appearance of split time, and split present in particular, on the stage makes everything we see and hear carry the same quality of duality, which is the basic feature of theatricality. This may be understood as the rise of a dual function: the phenomenological appearance along with the function and meaning known to the spectator from everyday life experience and knowledge of the world, and the acquired or denoted shape, function and meaning on stage, as signalled by the actors, which is not congruous with the former. Thus, theatricality is the appearance and juxtaposition of at least two models of perceiving reality, the fictional figures’ and the audience’s. For a slightly different approach see Eli Rozik, ‘Is the Notion of “Theatricality” Void?’, Gestos, 15 (2000), 11–30 and ‘Acting: The Quintessence of Theatricality’, SubStance, 31 (2002), 110–24. What in theatre is of major importance, however, is the established relationship between the denoted meaning and the material substance (the latter is usually inadequate from the point of view of knowledge and every-day experience of the spectator) used in the process of its creation, a relationship that is different in every production, even if the same dramatic text is used. This ultimately leads to the appearance of a cognitive blend in the mind of the spectator.

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court and the non-court. Ordinary humans from the theatre of the world are cut off from the metaphysical sphere, and need the mediation of the king. Thus, for instance, when Iris appears ‘above’ in the Masque staged at Coleoverton (1618?), all the antimasque figures ‘run out distractlie’. Similarly, in the Masque of Augures (1622) the antimasque figures are ‘frightened away’ by the appearance of Apollo. In the earlier Masque of Queenes (1609), during a wild dance of the Witches, ‘on the sodayne, was heard a sound of loud Musique, as if many instruments had given one blast. With which, not only the Hagges themselves, but their Hell, into which they ranne, quite vanish’d; and the whole face of the Scene altered’, by which twelve masquers were discovered in the House of Fame30. Thus the masque as a theatrical spectacle reveals its dual structure and marks a transition from the human world, as presented in the antimasque, to the metaphysical realm, as revealed in the main masque. This is corroborated and foregrounded by the evolution from the antimasque that follows the rules of the theatre, seen as a form appropriate to show the humans, to other forms of performativity in the masque proper, reminiscent of a court ritual or a court game (ludus), appropriate to the gods and their earthly equivalents. As soon as the antimasque is finished, and the theatrical figures are chased away, often blinded by the light emanating from the monarch, the antimasque evolves into the masque proper, the dual present time evolves into one, which is congruous with the time of the audience,31 and the distinct spaces of the stage and the auditorium merge into one. There is no juxtaposition any more of the two models of perceiving reality, the figures’ and the audience’s, for the stage figures signal continually that what they see and hear is what the spectators see and hear. Even when the figures sing their lines, as they usually do, we should not treat the song as a stage convention, a sign of ordinary speech or a state of mind and emotions of the fictional figures, but as a real song, the usual way of expression of the gods. This means that a theatrical performance, with which the show begins, evolves into another form of stage presentation, which is created with the aid of theatre technology and is performative in nature, but basically is non-theatrical. On the contrary, this show, i.e. the masque proper, is highly reminiscent of a play that children play or even of some trends in the so-called postdramatic theatre. Moreover, it shows close affinity to performance art. Actually, the similarities between the masque and the postdramatic as described by Hans-Thies Lehmann, are even closer

30. Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queens, in Court Masques, ed. by David Lindley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 35–53; the quote comes from p. 44. 31. The other possible interpretation is that the metaphysical timelessness is superimposed on the timespace of the court.

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than it seems on the surface.32 The metaphysical realm is not simply semiotically and metonymically represented on stage, but presents itself as the extension of the space of the court. What we hear and see does not occur elsewhere and at a different time; it is happening here and now. The aristocratic masquers, the deified heroes, always discovered at the end of the show in a cave or in the clouds, are not just mime actors who enact fictional figures: they are real, recognisable members of the Royal court, known to the spectators by name and personal history; they represent themselves, ‘offering their presence on stage for contemplation’,33 without playing a prescribed fictional role. And only their true nature is revealed in a sudden discovery that unveils some superior ontological order. Thus, the masque ‘becomes more presence than representation, more shared than communicated experience, more process than product, more manifestation than signification’.34 The masquers descend on to the human world, step down to the floor, and end the show by asking the ladies to dance. This act marks the final merger of the two spheres, and may serve as a good example of a loss of the time frame, which, again, Lehmann sees as a feature of the postdramatic. Thus, the spectators of the masque are participants in an act of non-fictional communication, which, again, Lehmann wants to see as the major feature of the postdramatic theatre. Consequently, in accordance with Lehmann’s definitions, the masque gets rid of what he calls ‘the trinity of drama, imitation and action’. On the other hand, the masque is unique in its focus on a single spectator who in fact, as I have attempted to show, ought to be seen as a silent solo performer, seated in the space that is also part of the extended stage — a solo performer whose presence makes the show possible. It is not the actors, who in theatre enact and construct the fictional realm, but it is the mere presence of the monarch which changes the laws of physics and transforms the stage into a magical instrument, opening up temporal and spatial contiguity and a communications channel with the metaphysical realm. He is the source of light, magic transformations and the marvellous. Messengers of the gods come to the court and convey messages. However, let me stress once again that what we see and hear does not present itself as being fiction. On the contrary, this is the reality inaccessible to ordinary humans, shown to exist and revealing spatial and temporal contiguity with King James’s court. One of the masques was significantly entitled The Masque of Truth; in it, the whole of humanity is shown to follow the king’s wisdom. In an apocalyptic scene, 32. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. by Karen Jürs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 33. Ibid., p. 135. 34. Ibid., p. 85.

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united under one religion and one monarch, it is led by King James through the gates of heaven to salvation.35 The vision that is being created here reveals basic features of a ritual, or a game that courtiers loved to play. Unfortunately, King James’s political and eschatological plans for the salvation of humanity failed to realise — with one exception. For in the well-known painting by Rubens, on the ceiling of the Banqueting House, it is no other than King James who ascends to heaven.36 This, too, is a solo ascension, for the painting does not show that any other humans follow the fluorescent monarch. Thus, he has left the stage of the world, ‘deified for his virtues’, exactly in the same manner as god’s messengers left the stage where the masques were presented. His son, Charles, continued the tradition, performing himself in some of the masques, and playing a role comparable to his father’s in these shows. Finally, he took an active part in what historians have labelled the king’s last masque, i.e. in his own execution, when he was beheaded in front of the Banqueting House. Again, what was presented then was no fiction, with the time and space of the show, and the spatial contiguity or indexical relationship between the king’s body and the axe being most real. Bibliography Anon., The Masque of Flowers, in A Book of Masques: In Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, ed. by Terence John Bew Spencer and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 149–77. Ashton, Robert, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1617–1619 (London: Public Record Office, 1969). Cunningham, Peter, Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson: Being the Life of Ben Jonson (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1853). Davenant, William, Britannia Triumphans, in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, ed. by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, 2 vols (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973) II, pp. 661–67. Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). —, ‘Blending as a Central Process of Grammar’ (1998) (accessed 21.06.2009). Goldberg, Jonathan, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Jonson, Ben, Oberon, in A Book of Masques, ed. by Richard Hosley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 43–70. 35. David Norbrook, ‘“The Masque of Truth”: Court Entertainments and International Protestant Politics in the Early Stuart Period’, Seventeenth Century, 1 (1986), 81–110. 36. For a detailed analysis of Rubens’s ceiling see, among other works, Roy Strong, Britannia Triumphans: Inigo Jones, Rubens and Whitehall Palace (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980) and O. Millar, Rubens: The Whitehall Ceiling (London: Oxford University Press, 1958).

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Jonson, Ben, Love Restored, in Court Masques, ed. by David Lindley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 66–73. —, The News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, in The Complete Masques, ed. by Stephen Orgel, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 292–305. —, The Masque of Queens, in Court Masques, ed. by David Lindley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 35–53. —, The Vision of Delight, in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, ed. by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, 2 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973) I, pp. 271–73. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Lehmann, Hans-Thies, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. by Karen Jürs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). Limon, Jerzy, Piąty wymiar teatru (Gdańsk: słowo obraz/terytoria, 2006). —, ‘The Fifth Wall: Words of Silence in Shakespeare’s Soliloquies and Asides’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 144 (2008), 47–65. —, The Masque of Stuart Culture (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1990). —, ‘The Play-Within-The-Play: A Theoretical Perspective’, in Enjoying the Spectacle: Word, Image, Gesture, ed. by Jerzy Sobieraj and Dariusz Pestka, Festschrift for Professor Marta Wiszniowska (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Universytatu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2006), pp. 17–32. McConachie, Bruce and F. Elizabeth Hart, ‘Introduction’, in Performance and Cognition. Theatre Studies after the Cognitive Turn (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 1–26. Marshall, Tristan, Theatre and Empire: Great Britain on the London Stages under James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Martin, Jacqeline, Voice in Modern Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Millar, O., Rubens, The Whitehall Ceiling (London: Oxford University Press, 1958). Norbrook, David, ‘“The Masque of Truth”: Court Entertainments and International Protestant Politics in the Early Stuart Period’, Seventeenth Century (1986), 81–110. Orgel, Stephen, Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965). —, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Peacock, John, The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Rozik, Eli, ‘Acting: The Quintessence of Theatricality’, SubStance, 31 (2002), 110–24. —, ‘Is the Notion of “Theatricality” Void?’, Gestos, 15 (2000) 11–30. —, Generating Theatre Meaning (Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic, 2008). Strong, Roy, Britannia Triumphans: Inigo Jones, Rubens and Whitehall Palace (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980). Townshend, Aurelian and Inigo Jones, Albion’s Triumph, in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, ed. by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, 2 vols (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1973) II, pp. 453–58. Turner, Mark, ‘Compression and representation’, Language and Literature, 15 (2006), 17–27. Veltruský, Jiři, ‘Contribution to the Semiotics of Acting’, in Sound, Sign and Meaning: Quinquagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle, ed. by Ladislav Matejka (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1978), pp. 553–606. Veltruský, Jiři, ‘Acting and Behaviour: A Study in the Signans’, in Semiotics of Drama and Theatre: New Perspectives in the Theory of Drama and Theatre, ed. by Herta Schmid and Aloysius Van Kesteren (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1984), pp. 393–441.

Turkish Brags and Winning Words Solo Performances in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great Ralf Hertel Eastern rhetorical flamboyance and verbal theatricality is a topos of Early Modern English drama that shows particularly well in Christopher Marlowe’s two-partite play Tamburlaine the Great. The bragging Easterner, as we find him embodied in the Turkish Emperor Bajazeth, and in a different form in the Scythian Tamburlaine, is, however, more than just another stock character, for the figure’s verbose vanity and wordy wickedness shed an illuminating light on English attitudes towards the East in general and on Anglo-Ottoman relationships in particular. In an era when England is about to become a global player on the stage of international trade, the monologizing Easterner betrays both English frustrations over a failure to engage the Ottomans in a dialogue at eye-level and a strategy to counter this very humiliation by presenting Ottoman glory as based merely on words. By analysing Marlowe’s play, the following essay aims to take a closer look at the Ottoman solo performer on the Elizabethan stage in order to reflect on a cultural encounter whose crucial importance for Early Modern English self-perception has long been overlooked.

Titles are revealing: dramatic explorations of the East are called, for instance, Antony and Cleopatra and reflect the East-West encounter in the meeting of two lovers; or they refer to East-Western military clashes such as George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar. In other words, they indicate East-Western relationships on the battlefield as much as in bed. Christopher Marlowe, however, will have none of this. Tamburlaine the Great — the title already indicates that it is going to be a one-man show. No amorous East-West talk here, no intercultural shilly-shallying — this is about Tamburlaine and nobody else. Indeed, Tamburlaine the Great is also Tamburlaine the great solo performer of Elizabethan drama. Practically single-handed, this Scythian shepherd transforms himself into the conqueror of the world. His first success sets the tone: a petty thief with no military force to speak of, he lures the leader of a mighty Persian army into desertion by displaying his golden booty and an unbending will. His opponent’s resistance is easily broken, and the leader of a thousand Persian horses soon exclaims: THERIDAMAS Not Hermes, prolocutor to the gods, Could use persuasions more pathetical. […] Won with thy words and conquered with thy looks,

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I yield myself, my men, and horse to thee […]. (Part 1, 1.2.210–29)1

Conquering looks and winning words — this mixture of theatrical display and rhetorical brilliance is the basis of Tamburlaine’s rising power. He chooses his role like the clothes he wears, and he will not be stopped by his lowly birth. This is a self-made mass murderer whose most powerful weapon is his charisma. This is renaissance self-fashioning with a vengeance. The monological East Beside a figure as commanding as Tamburlaine there is little space for anybody else, and there is no fitting counterweight to this great solo performer. Apart from Theridamas, in the course of the two plays Tamburlaine faces, and defeats, amongst others, the King of Persia, Mycetes, his brother Cosroe, the Emperor of Turkey and his son, the kings of Fez, Morocco, Argier, Arabia, Natolia, Trebizond, Soria, Jerusalem, and Amasia, the Sultan of Egypt, the governors of Damascus and Babylon, and the Viceroy of Byron — yet even this impressive army of powerful foes never amounts to a counterweight, neither in military nor dramatic terms. Instead, this plethora of opponents only serves to stress Tamburlaine’s singularity — he, a simple shepherd by birth, outweighs all of them, caging emperors for his entertainment or bridling kings to draw his chariot. With megalomaniac Tamburlaine, there can be no dialogue. On the battlefield, he carefully orchestrates the waning of communication. On the first day of a siege, he wears white ‘to signify the mildness of his mind’ (part 1, 4.1.52); if the city yields, there will be no blood. On the second day, he changes his colours to red, for blood must satisfy his rage. On the third day, he dresses in black, menacing ‘death and hell’ (part 1, 4.1.61). Then, not even the imploring words of his prospective father-in-law’s party sent through the mouths of innocent virgins can move him. He not only refuses dialogue with his opponents, however. He even denies the last and transcendental dialogue, the one between man and his maker. After seizing Babylon, Tamburlaine, historically a Muslim, burns the Koran in an act of public defiance. This is another ritual of severing ties: TAMBURLAINE In vain, I see, men worship Mahomet. My sword hath sent millions of Turks to hell, Slew all his priests, his kinsmen, and his friends,

1.

I quote Tamburlaine the Great Part I and Part II from the edition edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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And yet I live untouched by Mahomet. There is a God full of revenging wrath, From whom the thunder and the lightning breaks, Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey. So, Casane, fling them in the fire. [The books are burnt] Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power, Come down thyself and work a miracle. Thou art not worthy to be worshippèd That suffers flames of fire to burn the writ Wherein the sum of thy religion rests. (Part 2, 5.1.177–89)

By burning the word of Mahomet, who is mistaken for the Muslim God in a telling instance of Elizabethan ignorance of Islam, Tamburlaine manifests his absolute solo position. He will no longer heed his Muslim God or his powerless prophets. The only language he speaks is that of power and wrath, and while his enemies swear by Mahomet or ‘the holy Alcoran’, he swears by his own sword, the only source of authority he believes in (part 1, 3.3.82). The burning of the Koran is, however, also his last act of defiance. Soon afterwards, he dies from a sudden ‘distemper’. Has God given him the final answer, proving that He does exist, that He himself ends communication when He pleases? Commentators have spent much effort to demonstrate that ‘Tamburlaine’s malady’ should not be seen as divine retribution, arguing that he does not die out of moral necessity or because the wheel of fortune turns as it must, but merely because the play needs to come to an end.2 And how acceptable would the notion of a Muslim God proving his existence be to an Elizabethan audience? Edward Dowden may overstate the point when he argues that there is no construction in Tamburlaine and that the play ends from sheer exhaustion.3 Yet, it indeed appears as if Tamburlaine’s death was less a tribute to a transcendental framework from which even he could not escape but rather a tribute to the practical necessity of a theatre performance. Other critics such as David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen even believe that Tamburlaine’s death is self-inflicted, taking his line ‘Tamburlaine must die’ not as an expression of final resignation but as an ultimate command.4 Although

2.

3. 4.

See Johnstone Parr, ‘Tamburlaine’s Malady’, in Marlowe: Tamburlaine the Great, Edward the Second and The Jew of Malta. A Casebook, ed. by John Russell Brown (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 113–27. Extracts from Fortnightly Review by Edward Dowden, reprinted in Marlowe, ed. by John Russell Brown, pp. 34–38 (p. 35). David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, ‘Introduction’, in Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great Parts I and Part II, Doctor Faustus, A- and B-Texts, The Jew of Malta, Edward II,

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this seems exaggerated, it shows how strong the idea of Tamburlaine as solo performer is among the critics: to many, it is conceivable enough that Tamburlaine might ultimately even control his own end, performing his death solo, without divine assistance. Indeed, even the ultimate dialogue, the one with God, fails in Tamburlaine. This is true not only for the eponymous protagonist; when the Turkish Emperor Bajazeth and his wife Zabina call to their Muslim God and Mahomet to revenge their humiliating treatment at Tamburlaine’s hands — he uses the Turkish Emperor as a footstool to climb his throne and keeps him in a cage to feed him with the scrubs of his table — they remain unresponsive. There is no answer to Bajazeth’s and Zabina’s pleas, and their attempts to enter into a dialogue with God remain monologues, and monuments, of religious homelessness. More generally, all the curses and invocations of God to stop Tamburlaine by his enemies — and there are many such curses — remain unanswered. Not only Mahomet is ‘sleepy’ and ‘cursèd’ (part 1, 3.3.269–70); no God or transcendental power whatsoever puts an end to Tamburlaine’s monstrosities. In this regard, Tamburlaine as a play is as outrageous as the actions of its bloodthirsty protagonist. Whereas conventional Tudor drama fulfils expectations of divine retribution, Tamburlaine is anti-homilectic, insisting that the dialogue with God — whatever God — is, in fact, a soliloquy: ‘the gods are silent, unlistening, asleep — passive and unheeding at best; at worst, nonexistent’.5 Tamburlaine gets what he wants, and he gets away with it, for there is no transcendental power to check his. Here lies the atheism of the play, an atheism that was recognised already by Marlowe’s contemporary audience — the playwright and poet Robert Greene speaks of ‘daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlaine’ — and that was, predictably, to bring his author into trouble.6 At the same time, Tamburlaine’s atheism serves to foreground his singularity: who could, in the eyes of the Elizabethans, be more alone and perform more solo than somebody bereft even of all transcendental company? While Tamburlaine is proud to fight alone, his enemies find it impossible to accept that this ‘Scythian shepherd’ should defeat them without heavenly assistance. If Tamburlaine escapes divine retribution, he must be ‘the scourge of God’ sent to punish their own sins — an epithet he only too readily appropriates. The scourge of God? To the Elizabethans, this role was already occupied, namely by the Ottoman Turks. With their armies advancing deep into

5. 6.

ed. by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. vii–xxiv (p. xii). Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570– 1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 56. Quoted in Marlowe, ed. by John Russell Brown, p. 23.

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the European heartland, they were perceived as a most imminent threat to Christendom. In 1453 they had taken Constantinople, in 1529 they had laid siege to Vienna, and in 1571 they had conquered Cyprus; at the time when Marlowe was writing, their advance seemed almost unstoppable. Yet, despite all vilification, or precisely because of it, the concept of ‘the Turk’ was rather vague. 7 This might explain why Tamburlaine, despite fighting prominent Ottomans, is likened to the raging Turk. Indeed, Tamburlaine calls himself not only the scourge of God but also the ‘terror of the world’ (part 1, 3.3.45; part 2, 4.1.153) — another phrase reserved for the Ottomans. Prominently, Richard Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turkes of 1603 begins with the statement: ‘The glorious Empire of the Turkes, the present terror of the world, hath amongst other things nothing in it more wonderfull or strange, than the poore beginning of it selfe.’8 Not only is this a verbatim echo of Tamburlaine’s epithet, it also indicates further parallels between him and the Ottomans. The description oscillates between admiration for ‘the glorious Empire of the Turkes’ and its vilification as ‘the present terror of the world’. It displays the same fascination for the Turks as Marlowe arouses for his cruel yet glorious protagonist. Furthermore, Tamburlaine, as Marlowe fashions him, shares with the Turks ‘the poor beginnings’; like them, he grows from obscure origins into a superpower.9 While the historical Tamburlaine, or Tamerlan, originated from the ruling class of khans, Marlowe turns his hero, or anti-hero, into a ‘Scythian shepherd’. In the hands of the dramatist, the historical military leader thus turns into an agent provocateur and a devilish figure in the tradition of the Vice: Tamburlaine is the shepherd that challenges, and defeats, not only kings and emperors but also usurps social order — an offence weighing heavily with an Elizabethan audience to whom order and stability are cherished values. Tamburlaine also shares with the Turks his geographi-

7.

8.

9.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘Turk’ as ‘a member of the dominant race of the Ottoman empire; sometimes extended to any subject of the Grand Turk or Turkish Sultan, but usually restricted to Muslims’. The dictionary employs Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 1 as example: ‘The Turke that two and fiftie Kingdomes hath, / Writes not so tedious a Stile as this’ (4.7.73). This not only demonstrates the broad definition of Turkishness, covering all the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire and intermingling with religious definitions, but also hints at the stereotype of the bragging Turk central to this paper. Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, from the first beginning of that Nation to the rising of the Ottoman Familie: with all the notable expeditions of the Christian Princes against them (London: Adam Islip, 1603), p. 1. For the allegedly obscure beginnings of the Turks see also Stephen Wyther’s 1563 translation of Johann Sleidanus’s Latin history of empires and Ralph Carr’s dedicatory epistle to The Mahumetane or Turkish Historie (1600). Both are quoted in Vitkus, Turning Turk, p. 66.

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cal origins; they, too, were believed to stem from the Scythians.10 In addition, Tamburlaine’s sons represent two opposing stereotypes of the Turk: two are bloodthirsty warriors, and one is a ‘dissolute sybarite’.11 It seems that Tamburlaine, historically the enemy of the Ottoman Turks, can only be imagined as an even fiercer version of the Turk — he defeats them because he is even better at being a Turk than the Turks themselves, i.e. crueller and even more devious. Indeed, when Marlowe’s contemporary Joseph Hall speaks of ‘Turkish Tamburlaine’, this is a clear indication of Tamburlaine’s turning Turk in the Elizabethan imagination.12 The Turk was a prime figure of otherness not only in Elizabethan England but in post-Reformation Europe in general. According to Catholic propaganda, the Protestants were the ‘New Turkes’, the new unbelievers — an insult the Protestants only too readily returned. They paralleled the Catholics with the Turk propagandistically, and Martin Luther is quoted in Table Talk saying: ‘Antichrist is the pope and the Turk together. A beast full of life must have a body and soul; the spirit or soul of antichrist is the pope, his flesh or body the Turk. The latter wastes and assails and persecutes God’s church corporally, the former spiritually […].’13 War against the Pope meant war against ‘the second Turk’.14 Clearly, the equation with the Turk in both cases serves to make the enemy seem alien. If, then, Tamburlaine is deliberately paralleled to the Turk, this is a strategy of making him appear even more foreign and even less accessible. Indeed, his solo performance is underlined by a frequent failure of communication — with Tamburlaine the absolute Other, there can be no negotiations. Accordingly, the play is characterised by a monological style that rejects dialogue like Tamburlaine rejects all entanglement. Again and again, soliloquies mark the end of communication; in fact, excluding the prologues, all are deathbed speeches preceding ultimate speechlessness. All but one: one solil10. After discussing various theories concerning the origins of the Ottoman Turks, Knolles reaches the conclusion that ‘the Turks (to the trouble of the world) left their naturall seats in the cold countrey of Scythia, to seeke themselves others in more pleasant and temperat countries’ (p. 2). Roger Ascham also points to the Scythian origins of the Turks: ‘After them the Turkes hauing an other name, but yet the same people, borne in Scythia.’ Toxophilus, The Schole of Shootinge (1545), in Roger Ascham: English Works, ed. by William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), p. 48. 11. Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), p. 84. 12. Joseph Hall, lines from Virgidemiarum (1597–98), 1.3. Printed in Marlowe, ed. by John Russell Brown, p. 25. 13. Martin Luther, Table Talk, ed. by The Lutheran Publication Society, updated and revised from a translation by William Hazlitt (Gainsville: Bridge-Logos, 2004), p. 287. 14. Vitkus, p. 61.

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oquy is not followed by death, and it comes, tellingly, from Tamburlaine.15 It immediately follows the most outrageous cruelties he commits: the slaughter of the virgins imploring him to spare Damascus, the hoisting of their carcasses on the walls, and the command to raze the city. Immediately after his soldiers have left, he voices a soliloquy that could not contrast more starkly with his cruel command. Abruptly, he changes to musing on beauty, invoking his beloved: ‘Ah, fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate!’ (part 1, 5.1.135). This soliloquy comes as an utter surprise. It is a piece of perfect courtly rhetoric, complete with learned allusions to the Muses, elaborate conceits (Zenocrate’s tears fall on the earth like ‘resolvèd pearl in showers’ and sprinkle on her ‘shining face’ like ‘sapphires’; part 1, 5.1.142–43), and lilting alliterations of softness (‘Fair is too foul an epithet for thee / That, in thy passion for thy country’s love / And fear to see thy kingly father’s harm, / With hair dishevelled wip’st thy watery cheeks […]’, part 1, 5.1.136–39, my emphasis). Is this Tamburlaine, musing on the possibility of showing mercy at Zenocrate’s request to spare the city of her birth, the same man who has brought apocalyptic destruction over the world in this ‘Marlovian holocaust’, as Richard Wilson terms it provocatively?16 Is this to show us Tamburlaine as a torn figure? The truth is harsher: Marlowe opens up the prospect of a humane Tamburlaine only to reject it. For soon, Tamburlaine checks himself: ‘But how unseemly is it for my sex, / My discipline of arms and chivalry, / My nature, and the terror of my name, / To harbour thoughts effeminate and faint!’ (part 1, 5.1.174–77). From the temporal surfacing of doubt he emerges only the more resolved not to give in to the trappings of love. As Alan Sinfield pointedly observes, his musings on love and beauty occur ‘during the slaughter of the rest of the people of Damascus, so he is scarcely succumbing to thoughts effeminate and faint’.17 His soliloquy need not be cast as a deathbed speech because he is lost to the world already and dead to all feelings of love, compassion, or mercy. By choosing the form of solo speech, Marlowe sums up the essence of a solitary hero who is beyond all human, and even divine, exchange.

15. Mycetes’ soliloquy (part 1, 2.4.) is also, strictly speaking, not a deathbed speech. Yet, it accompanies his hiding of the crown and thus signals his ‘death’ as king and his wish to purge his body natural from the body politic. Thus, this soliloquy, too, prefigures an end of sorts, and indeed, Mycetes disappears entirely from the play after this scene. 16. Richard Wilson, ‘Visible Bullets: Tamburlaine the Great and Ivan the Terrible’, in Christopher Marlowe, ed. by Richard Wilson (Harlowe: Longman, 1999), pp. 120–39 (p. 129). 17. Alan Sinfield, ‘Legitimating Tamburlaine’, in Christopher Marlowe, ed. by Richard Wilson (Harlowe: Longman, 1999), pp. 111–19 (p. 112).

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This is Tamburlaine’s only soliloquy — despite T.S. Eliot’s claim that he voices two ‘famous soliloquies’.18 Eliot refers to another one beginning with the line ‘Nature compounded of four elements’. There is no line like this, though, at least not in recent editions available.19 Instead, there is a speech with the words ‘Nature, that framed us of four elements / Warring within our breasts for regiment, / Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds’ (part 1, 2.7.18–20). It is, however, not a soliloquy at all; Tamburlaine addresses dying Cosroe, his former ally whom he has betrayed, and Techelles, Theridamas, Usumcasane, and further supporters of Tamburlaine are present. It is not even a monologue proper in the sense of a speech directed not at another figure, for Tamburlaine expressly addresses Cosroe when he explains what moved him ‘to manage arms against thy state’ (part 1, 2.7.16). Even in the wider sense of a person speaking alone, this is hardly an impressive monologue, for Tamburlaine is constantly interrupted by others. Nonetheless, it is revealing that Eliot, who obviously did not go back to the text to check the exact wording and situation, misremembered this as a soliloquy — even when Tamburlaine is not alone on the stage, he speaks as if in soliloquy. Without any real partner for dialogue, without any interlocutor at eye-level, without any real engagement with others, his style is bound to be monological. The scene Eliot mistakes for a soliloquy provides a good case in point. It is of an almost musical quality, with Tamburlaine playing the part of a soloist accompanied by an orchestra of supporters. Despite the fact that this short scene unites five major speaking parts and a vociferous multitude of soldiers, it does not present us with a polyphony of voices but with a homophony. Tamburlaine the verbal soloist sets the tune, and the others join in. They all sing the same tune — the praise of Tamburlaine. Cosroe alone is excluded because ‘death arrests the organ of [his] voice’ (part 1, 2.7.8) — he, who used to play in tune with Tamburlaine when they were fighting side by side against the Persian king Mycetes, can no longer hold the tune. What we are presented with here is not so much a variety of voices but Tamburlaine acting as the leader of the band, orchestrating the utterances of his followers. This almost musical unison shows in the responses of Tamburlaine’s followers to his exhortation on the necessarily amoral virtue of aspiring minds.

18. T[homas] S[tearns] Eliot, ‘Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (Methuen: London, 1960), pp. 86–94 (p. 91). 19. Neither older editions potentially available to Eliot, such as A.H. Bullen’s The Works of Christopher Marlowe (London: John C. Nimmo, 1885) nor critical editions such as J.S. Cunningham’s Tamburlaine the Great (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981) refer to the line as Eliot remembered it.

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After Tamburlaine has sung the praises of a Machiavellian desire for power, Theridamas, Techelles, and Usumcasane fall in with the following responses: THERIDAMAS And that made me to join with Tamburlaine, For he is gross and like the massy earth That moves not upwards nor by princely deeds Doth mean to soar above the highest sort. TECHELLES And that made us, the friends of Tamburlaine, To lift our swords against the Persian king. USUMCASANE For as when Jove did thrust old Saturn down, Neptune and Dis gained each of them a crown, So do we hope to reign in Asia If Tamburlaine be placed in Persia. (Part 1, 2.7.30–39)

That they take up Tamburlaine’s tune is clear from the anaphoric ‘and’ introducing Theridamas’s and Techelles’s responses; they do not voice a new opinion but continue Tamburlaine’s melody. They fall in with the same tone, even the identical words, as the parallelism makes clear (‘And that made… Tamburlaine… to…’). ‘And that made me to join with Tamburlaine’: their joining like instruments Tamburlaine’s rhapsody to power verbalises and makes audible their alliance to him, whom they serve as instruments of his military ambitions. At the same time, the orchestration broadens with each new voice just as Tamburlaine’s power grows: from Theridamas’s single voice (‘And that made me to join with Tamburlaine’, my emphasis) to Techelles’s plural (‘And that made us, the friends of Tamburlaine…’, my emphasis), to the crescendo of all-embracing mythological truth in Usumcasane’s simile (‘as when Jove’), intensified only by the tutti of ‘all’ joining in the praise of Tamburlaine with an ecstatic finale shouting ‘Tamburlaine! Tamburlaine!’ (part 1, 2.7.57). Indeed, Tamburlaine’s name serves as a leitmotif, and the growing intensity with which it is voiced reflects the growing power of the protagonist himself: the word ‘Tamburlaine’ is chanted in each response by Theridamas, Techelles, and Usumcasane before the chorus of ‘all’ picks it up. ‘Long live Tamburlaine, and reign in Asia!’ (part 1, 2.7.64), chorused in unison by all, practically enthrones Tamburlaine before the protagonist himself has the final note. Despite the multitude of voices, the scene is monological in the strict sense of the word: there is only one person speaking, although through various mouthpieces.20 In other words, Eliot is only technically wrong 20. This might also explain its slight oddity and anti-climax noted by critics such as Stephen Greenblatt. Why should Tamburlaine, aspiring to rule the entire world and to defy even God Himself, humble himself by reducing his ambitions to ‘the sweet fruition of an earthly crown’? The answer might lie, at least partly, in the peculiar structure of this scene: because

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when he mistakes this scene for a soliloquy; concerning the intention, and effect, of this scene he is right. It is a dramatic dia- or even polylogue that functions as a soliloquy, verbally enacting Tamburlaine’s power. My purpose is not to exonerate T.S. Eliot, though, but to show how Marlowe’s monological style strengthens the image of Tamburlaine as solo performer. The refusal to enter into dialogue can be traced even to the temporal aspect of Tamburlaine’s words; he proclaims that ‘“will” and “shall” best fitteth Tamburlaine’ (part 1, 3.3.41). The future mode indicates his determination to make his words come true as if by natural law. ‘I speak it, and my words are oracles’ (part 1, 3.3.102), he proclaims, and, as with an oracle, one does not argue with him. This, of course, implies the rejection of all dialogue. Indeed, after his victory over Bajazeth there follows a speech of ‘will’ and ‘shall’ (244–60) that impressively verbalises his solo position: TAMBURLAINE […] from the east unto the furthest west Shall Tamburlaine extend his puissant arm. The galleys and those pilling brigantines That yearly sail to the Venetian gulf And hover in the straits for Christians’ wrack Shall lie at anchor in the Isle Asant Until the Persian fleet and men-of-war, Sailing along the oriental sea, Have fetched about the Indian continent, Even from Persepolis to Mexico, And thence unto the Straits of Jubalter, Where they shall meet and join their force in one, Keeping in awe the Bay of Portingale And all the ocean by the British shore. And by this means I’ll win the world at last. (Part 1, 3.3.246–60)

Tamburlaine’s speech not only broaches the issue of world dominance but performs it — his run-on lines appear as unstoppable as Tamburlaine himself, and the syntax employed is as all-embracing as his projected might. The mode of ‘will’ and ‘shall’ leaves no space for doubt: he shall and will be the one and only.

this is the melody his followers can sing along with. An earthly crown is not so much his own ambition — which rises higher — but that of his followers, as Usumcasane’s response states explicitly. Thus he can unite the many voices of his followers and turn them into his mouthpieces. Mirror-images of Tamburlaine who shapes them in his own image, they become, in the words of dying Cosroe, indeed ‘the strangest men that ever nature made!’ (part 1, 2.7.40). See Stephen J. Greenblatt, ‘Marlowe and Renaissance Self-Fashioning’, in Marlowe, ed. by John Russell Brown, pp. 207–29 (p. 219).

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The use of monologue renders this audible by denying all others a say in the matter. As Tamburlaine alone reigns the word, so he alone will reign the world. Monological drama is, however, a contradictio in adjecto: drama is dialogical by definition.21 This violation of genre conventions shows most clearly how singular Tamburlaine is. He is so strong-willed that not only his foes but even the rules of genre must bend to his will, and polyperspective drama turns into a one-man show. C.L. Barber takes this as an indication of deficiency; for him, Tamburlaine ‘is deeply naïve, a drama written partly in defiance and partly in ignorance of the limits of art’.22 Yet, the blatant disregard of the dialogical nature of drama is less a sign of naivety than a manifestation of the unconditional nature of Marlowe’s art — he would not have the embodiment of absolute individualism bow to the constraints of genre. Was Tamburlaine to defy all the powers of this world and all the gods beyond only to succumb to the rules of drama? The monological drive and rhetorical artistry not only foreground Tamburlaine’s solo performance but at the same time evoke the stereotype of the theatrical East. In Marlowe’s play, the East is a place where words are power, and the play makes this clear from its very first line. Here, Mycetes is introduced as a powerless and foolish king who is not in command of his words but needs others to express what he wants to say: MYCETES Brother Cosroe, I find myself aggrieved, Yet insufficient to express the same, For it requires a great and thund’ring speech. I know you have a better wit than I. (Part 1, 1.1.1–4)

By delegating speech to others, he loses the chance of having a say in the interpretation of events, as his brother’s insults make clear immediately. Mycetes is a man of few words and less power, and his verbal impotence mirrors his political weakness. Cosroe does not fare any better, though. After he has successfully disposed of Mycetes to be crowned king himself, Tamburlaine betrays him. Significantly, the loss of power is equated with the loss of speech, as we have seen: ‘Death arrests the organ of my voice’ (part 1, 2.7.8). The power of words is alluded to throughout the two parts of the play: Callapine, son to Bajazeth, wins his jailer Almeda by promising him ample reward, ‘[…] paint[ing] in words what I’ll perform in deeds’ and assuring 21. For the dialogical nature of drama see my entry on ‘Dramentextanalyse’, in Handbuch Literaturwissenschaft: Gegenstände, Konzepte, Institutionen, ed. by Thomas Anz, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007) II, pp. 121–39 (pp. 134–35). 22. C.L. Barber, ‘The Death of Zenocrate: “Conceiving and Subduing both”’, Literature and Psychology, 16 (1966), 15–26 (p. 16).

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him that he will be ‘as good as [his] word’ (part 2, 1.2.10); words wound Zenocrate (part 1, 3.2.35); and the words announcing Zenocrate’s death pierce Tamburlaine’s soul (part 2, 2.4.125). Foolish Mycetes has a moment of wit when he puts the message of the play in a nutshell and observes: ‘words are swords’ (part 1, 1.1.74). The entire play is replete with martial rhetoric, and in the logic of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, there is indeed a direct line from the mastering of the word to that of the sword to that of the world. Unsurprisingly, Tamburlaine, the most powerful warmonger, also proves to be the most powerful wordmonger. He is as good, or rather, as bad, as his word, and his verbal vigour reflects his military might — he has winning words indeed. This is made clear even before he enters the stage when the prologue promises to lead us ‘to the stately tent of War’ where we ‘[…] shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine / Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms’ (part 1, prologue 3–5). There is, however, always the danger that brilliant rhetoric is taken for nothing but wordiness, and elaborate performance for mere theatricality. Marlowe’s play, abounding with ‘high astounding terms’ and dazzling displays of power, is particularly predisposed to elicit antitheatrical resentments. In point of fact, Hall’s response demonstrates this. For this Marlovian contemporary, Tamburlaine is ‘some upreared, high-aspiring swain’, strutting with ‘stalking steps’ and ‘wide-strained mouth’ issuing ‘terms Italianate, / Big-sounding sentences and words of state’ onto his ‘fained’ and ‘hired stage’ in order to ravish the ‘gazing scaffolders’.23 Verbal and theatrical vigour turns even more clearly into base braggadocio in Tamburlaine’s enemies. Whereas Tamburlaine lets deeds follow his speeches, his enemies do not live up to their words at all. The Ottoman emperor is a case in point: the verbal bombast erupting from ‘the mouth of mighty Bajazeth’, ‘the high and highest monarch of the world’ (part 1, 3.1.20 and 26), is quickly followed by his poor military performance. To all the verbal demonstrations of power on the part of the Ottomans, Tamburlaine merely replies: ‘Tush, Turks are full of brags / And menace more than they can well perform’ (part 1, 3.3.3–4). Without exception, his verdict proves true. By having this ‘Scythian shepherd’ expose a plethora of important Turkish opponents as shams, the play calls up more specifically the prominent Elizabethan stereotype of the bragging Turk. Their words, be it their threats preceding battle or their curses after defeat, 23. Hall, p. 25. Richmond Barbour even sees uneasy parallels between Tamburlaine and Elizabeth I. He reads Tamburlaine not last as a comment on, and parody of, the showiness of Elizabethan theatricality: ‘Though distanced in a Tartar conqueror and energized by male homoeroticism, the strategy — consolidating the loves and expectations of subjects by theatre — recalls Elizabeth’s’. Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 55.

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prove utterly powerless. As Richmond Barbour puts it, ‘“the East” is Tamburlaine’s theatre of conquest because its resistance proves merely theatrical’.24 The bragging Turk is not just another stock character but reveals deep English anxieties. To be more specific, the figure betrays a frustration over the failure to engage the East in a dialogue at eye-level — the bragging Turk on the theatre stage is a reflection of the Ottoman Turk on the stage of Early Modern diplomacy. Here, too, he appeared to the English as a solo performer of sorts, hardly taking note of them at all. The frontispiece of Knolles’s Historie of the Turkes (1603) visualises this frustration (illustration 1): while the Englishman gazes at the Turk, either wary of him or ready to engage in an exchange, the Turk simply turns away, not even noticing him. Indeed, in the diplomatic discourse with the Ottomans, the English hardly managed to get a word in. This is the Ottoman Emperor Amurath III granting Elizabeth’s request for trade privileges — and it is only the first sentence of his letter: We most sacred Musulmanlike Emperor, by the infinite and exceeding great power, by the everlasting and wonderful clemency, and unspeakable helpe of the most mighty and most holy God, creator of all things, to be worshipped and feared with all purenesse of minde, and reverence of speech, The prince of these present times, the only Monarch of this age, able to give sceptres to the potentates of the whole world, the shadow of divine mercy and grace, the distributer of many kingdoms, provinces, townes and cities, Prince, and most sacred Emperour of Mecca, that is to say, of Gods house, of Medina, of the most glorious and blessed Ierusalem, of the most fertile Egypt, Iemen and Iouan, Eden and Canaan, of Samos the peacable, and of Hebes, of Iabza, and Pazra, of Zeruzub and Halepia, of Caramaria and Diabekiruan, of Dulkadiria, of Babylon, and of all the three Arabias, of the Euzians and Georgians, of Cyprus the rich, and of the kingdomes of Asia, of Ozakior, of the tracts of the white and blacke Sea, of Grecia and Mesopotamia, of Africa and Goleta, of Alger, and of Tripolis in the West, of the most choice and principall Europe, of Buda and Temeswar, and of the kingdomes beyond the Alpes, and many others such like, most mightie Murad Can, the sonne of Emperor Zelim Can, which was the sonne of Zoleiman Can, which was the sonne of Zelim Can, which was the sonne of Mehemed Can, etc. We most mightie prince Murad Can, in token of our Imperiall friendship, doe signifie and declare, that now of late Elizabeth Queene of England, France and Ireland […] sent her letters […]: therefore as wee have entered into amitie, and most holy league with the most excellent kings and princes our confederates, shewing their devotion, and obedience of services towards our stately Porch (as namely the French king, the Venetians, the king of Polonia and others) so also we have contracted an inviolable amitie, peace and league with the aforesaid Queen.25

24. Barbour, p. 47. 25. Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, made by Sea or overland, to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the Earth, at any time within the compasse of these 1600 yeres, 3 vols (London: George Bishop, Ralph Newberry, and Robert Barker, 1599) II, 1, p. 143.

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Illustration 1: Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes (London, 1603), title page engraved by Lawrence Johnson. This item is reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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One can imagine that dialogue might have proved difficult with Amurath. This is, indeed, not so much an offer of diplomatic discourse as an insidious insult, a demonstration of power and an act of belittling the English. The role the Great Turk assigns to them is the one Tamburlaine the Great assigns to everybody else: they may witness the grandiloquent monologue but they may not interfere. While Amurath’s power bestows on him a title so long that it defeats the most expert geographical knowledge as well as the longest breath, Elizabeth’s is embarrassingly short. She is just one suitor among many, not any better than the Polish king. Verbal power functions as an indication of political power, and this passage does not just call up Ottoman grandiosity but performs it in an orgy of words. The syntactical imbalance reflects the actual imbalance of power: Amurath grants rights to trade magnanimously, and the fact that these treaties were called ‘the English capitulation’ says all about the position of power the Ottomans occupied. As a matter of fact, in the 1580s, England was no match for the Ottomans. Spanning Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Ottoman Empire was fifty times the size of England. It was the major force in the Mediterranean Sea and controlled trade between the East and the West. Its armies penetrated into Europe, and its fleet seemed almost invincible.26 In short, the Ottoman Empire was a, if not the, super-power of the 16th century. England, on the other hand, was very much the opposite: geographically marginal, religiously isolated, ruled by a woman that had turned from a Virgin Queen into an old spinster with a dubious claim to the throne and no issue, it was not exactly well connected. Thus, the English had to bear the humiliation at the hands of the Ottomans with patience. Possessing no colonies of their own and yet without a mercantile fleet reliable enough to circumnavigate Africa, they had to deal with the Turk if they wanted to enjoy the riches of the East. In this context, employing the stereotype of the bragging Turk is also a strategy of compensating for a specifically English inferiority complex: this strategy explains the Eastern power away as mere show. Marlowe’s play must hence have come as a comfort to the audience, despite all its cruelty. If the Ottoman Turk is feared as the terror of the world, Tamburlaine shows that even this terror can be terrorised. At the same time, the drama functions as a form of self-empowerment: here an Englishman — the playwright — dictates the words of the Turk. The power balance is turned upside down, and the Turk is, for once, in the position the English were used to finding themselves in, i.e. on the receiving end. This is not yet the time of an Orientalism as postulated by Edward Said which ‘[…] puts the Westerner in a whole series 26. The victory of the Holy League at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 had provided only short relief from Ottoman dominance of the seas.

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of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand’.27 Rather, Tamburlaine betrays English awe with regards to an East that is hardly accessible and beyond all dialogue. Or so it seems. The monological East? Reading Tamburlaine as an embodiment of Eastern solo performance is flawed for a simple reason: there are no solo performers. In fact, the very expression ‘solo performer’ is a contradiction in terms: you can only perform in front of others. In a double sense, Tamburlaine requires an audience. His power would be invisible if it could not materialise in the shape of his enemies’ fear and the humiliation of his prisoners. He relies on those he despises and gains significance only in contrast with, and in relation to, others. While the conqueror attempts to create a monologic voice of power, authorized from above and distinguished from below, […] the play integrates his voice dialogically into an imperialist interplay. Though Tamburlaine triumphs at the end of part 1, Marlowe undermines his singularity, showing us that in the game of empire, supremacy is not given but made — and made, ironically, out of others’ visions and voices.28

Indeed, Tamburlaine is made out of others’ visions and voices — and not only in the limited sense Emily C. Bartels has in mind here. He is not only shaped by the expectations of other characters but also by those of the spectators. Conceived by an English playwright and impersonated by an English actor for an English audience, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is, of course, not an Oriental but a specifically English fantasy. It thus comes as no surprise that, at a closer look, he is not quite so entirely ‘other’. The 1590 title page is revealing (illustration 2) — here, he does not look very Asian at all. He does not sport the typical emblems of the Oriental such as the moustache or the turban. Instead, with curly hair and a thick trimmed beard, he looks very much like a European — in fact, he looks surprisingly similar to the Englishman on Knolles’s frontispiece. Tamburlaine is European not only in looks but also in deeds. He speaks perfect English and is of impeccable classical learning. Tamburlaine’s Islamic identity is first ignored and then repudiated in the burning of the Koran, and he intends to free the Christian slaves on Ottoman galleys (part 1, 3.3.44). As Bajazeth predicts, Tamburlaine’s triumph over the Ottomans is a cause for celebration among the ‘Christian miscreants’ (part 1, 3.3.236). More specifically, Tam27. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 7. 28. Emily C. Bartels, ‘The Double Vision of the East: Imperialist Self-Construction in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Part One’, Renaissance Drama 23 (1992), 3–24 (p. 3).

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Woodcut portrait from the title page of Tamburlaine the Great (London, 1597). This item is reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

burlaine is a projection of English mercantile ambitions. The play explores the geography of English trade interests, covering exactly the area the newly founded Levant and Muscovite companies operated in; the locations of the second part in particular — Balsera, Aleppo, Babylon — are places of English mercantile interest.29 Tamburlaine redirects Persia’s ‘course from uncontested 29. See Bartels, p. 4, and Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 136. For situating Tamburlaine the

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mastery of India’, so that Europeans are not excluded from the riches of the East.30 Tamburlaine’s ambitions are those of Marlowe’s England: conquering the unknown, facilitating trade, enjoying the riches of the colonies, and extending imperial power. As Stephen Greenblatt notes, [i]f we want to understand the historical matrix of Marlowe’s achievement, the analogue to Tamburlaine’s restlessness, aesthetic sensitivity, appetite and violence, we might look, not at the playwright’s sources, not even at the relentless power-hungry Tudor absolutism, but at the acquisitive energies of English merchants, entrepreneurs and adventurers, promoters alike of trading companies and theatrical companies.31

In particular, he teaches self-confidence with regards to the Ottomans and shows that they are not beyond reach. Indeed, despite all its pomp, the correspondence between Amurath and Elizabeth does demonstrate an interest in dialogue. As Burton shows, the letters of both monarchs play down religious differences, linking ‘Protestantism and Islam together in ersatz kinship’.32 Thus, they make the other acceptable as a potential partner. Amurath never mentions Mahomet; instead, he calls on ‘the most mighty and most holy God, creator of all things’, a formulation that carefully avoids all potential for religious controversy. In the 1580s, the time at which Marlowe wrote his play, Anglo-Ottoman relations were indeed forming quickly. The correspondence between the monarchs instigated a profitable trade, and even a military alliance was envisaged in order to crush the Catholic, and more specifically the Spanish, forces. In 1588, only months after Tamburlaine was premiered, the English Queen appealed to Amurath to attack Spain; after the defeat of the Armada at England’s coast she hoped the Ottomans might render their common enemy a decisive blow.33 Thus, despite all talk of the Turk as the infidel threatening Christianity — a motif Tamburlaine cites in Orcanes’s siege of Constantinople —, Anglo-Ottoman reality was highly complex. The English were cut off from indirect trade with the East after the harbour city of Antwerp, their main market for goods imported from the Orient, fell to the Spanish in 1572, and Venice, weakened by a ruinous war against the Ottomans, became unreliable as an intermediary. For these reasons the English sought to establish direct links with the Ottomans.

30. 31.

32. 33.

Great, and Marlowe the author, in the context of the Muscovite company see Wilson, ‘Visible Bullets’, p. 124. Burton, p. 72. Greenblatt, p. 208. Also see the introduction to Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. by J.S. Cunningham and Eithne Henson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 1–32 (p. 14). Burton, p. 64. See Amurath’s letter to Elizabeth in Knolles, p. 1006–1007.

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What the English had to offer in return for Eastern riches was literally explosive. They provided the Ottomans with metal — metal for ammunition. Particularly bell metal was in plentiful supply in the wake of the English Reformation and the demolition of Catholic churches — tellingly, Elizabeth’s first letter to Amurath was transported aboard The Prudence which supposedly carried bell metal for Ottoman ammunition.34 Transformed into canon balls and bullets, the bell metal of English Catholic churches was then fired at the European Catholics forces. This scenario was not inconvenient for the English — by strengthening trade ties with the Ottomans, they could, at the same time, damage their Catholic enemies without open aggression. Apparently, England occupied a highly ambivalent position with regards to the Ottomans. While propagating anti-Turkish stereotypes based on the conception of a united Christendom, in reality it followed a policy of rapprochement dictated by the logics of realpolitik. In the words of Burton, ‘[…] from its foundation, England’s policy on trade with the Ottoman Empire depended upon saying one thing and doing another’.35 The portrayal of Tamburlaine, oscillating between conflation and rejection, between Other and brother, reflects this. When Marlowe wrote his play, the English simply did not quite know yet what to make of the East in general and of the Ottomans in particular. While anti-Turkish stereotypes persisted, the knitting of ties with the Ottomans soon made necessary a more balanced image of the Turk. A new conception of the East was needed that was no longer mono- but dialogical. Tamburlaine the Great, composed at an early stage of Anglo-Ottoman relations, still presents the East as a monological place. Yet, here already, cracks can be perceived in the monolithic opposition towards the East and the Ottomans — cracks that were to widen considerably in the Oriental plays of the following decades. Bibliography Barber, C.L., ‘The Death of Zenocrate: “Conceiving and Subduing both”’, Literature and Psychology, 16 (1966), 15–26. Barbour, Richmond, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Bartels, Emily C., ‘The Double Vision of the East: Imperialist Self-Construction in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Part One’, Renaissance Drama 23 (1992), 3–24. Bullen, A.H., The Works of Christopher Marlowe (London: John C. Nimmo, 1885). Burton, Jonathan, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 34. Burton, p. 61. 35. Ibid., p. 59.

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Dimmock, Matthew, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Eliot, Thomas Stearns, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1960 [1929]). Greenblatt, Stephen J., ‘Marlowe and Renaissance Self-Fashioning’, in Marlowe: Tamburlaine the Great, Edward the Second and the Jew of Malta. A Casebook, ed. by John Russell Brown (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 207–229. Hakluyt, Richard, Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, made by Sea or overland, to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the Earth, at any time within the compasse of these 1600 yeres, 3 vols (London: George Bishop, Ralph Newberry, and Robert Barker, 1599). Hertel, Ralf, ‘Dramentextanalyse’, in Handbuch Literaturwissenschaft: Gegenstände, Konzepte, Institutionen, ed. by Thomas Anz, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007) II, pp. 121–39. Knolles, Richard, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, from the first beginning of that Nation to the rising of the Ottoman Familie: with all the notable expeditions of the Christian Princes against them (London: Adam Islip, 1603). Luther, Martin, Table Talk, ed. by The Lutheran Publication Society, updated and revised from a translation by William Hazlitt (Gainsville: Bridge-Logos, 2004). Marlowe, Christopher, Tamburlaine the Great Part I and Part II, Doctor Faustus A- and B-Texts, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, ed. by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). —, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. by J.S. Cunningham and Eithne Hanson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). —, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. by J.S. Cunningham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981). Parr, Johnstone, ‘Tamburlaine’s Malady’, in Marlowe: Tamburlaine the Great, Edward the Second and the Jew of Malta. A Casebook, ed. by John Russell Brown (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 113–27. Said, Edward, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1995 [1978]). Sinfield, Alan, ‘Legitimating Tamburlaine’, in Christopher Marlowe, ed. by Richard Wilson (Harlowe: Longman, 1999), pp. 111–19. Vitkus, Daniel, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Wilson, Richard, ‘Visible Bullets: Tamburlaine the Great and Ivan the Terrible’, in Christopher Marlowe, ed. by Richard Wilson (Harlowe: Longman, 1999), pp. 120–139. Wright, William Aldis, ed., Roger Ascham: English Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904).

Notes on Contributors UTE BERNS is currently Acting Professor of English Literature at the University of Hamburg. She previously held positions at the Technical University and the Free University of Berlin, where she took her PhD and obtained her Habilitation (post-doctoral thesis). Her publications include Mikropolitik im Englischen Gegenwartsdrama (1997) and The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2007, co-edited); she currently prepares the monograph Science, Politics and Friendship in the Work of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2010). Fields of research include Early Modern drama, Romantic and Victorian literature, and 20th century drama with publications focusing, e.g., on political discourse, constructions of inwardness, and life science in literature and culture. MARGRET FETZER studied English and German Literature at the University of Tübingen, the University of Cambridge, and the Free University Berlin. During her studies, she has received scholarships from Evangelisches Stift Tübingen, Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst and Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. She graduated from Tübingen University in October 2005 with an MA thesis on ‘Reading as Creative Intercourse: Ulysses – Mrs Dalloway – The Hours’, and completed her PhD on John Donne’s Performances: Sermons, Poems, Letters, and Devotions at the University of Munich in January 2009. She has published on Shakespeare and contemporary drama and is currently working on Walter Scott as well as on autobiography in the 20th and 21st century. RALF HERTEL is Juniorprofessor (Assistant Professor) at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Hamburg. Before this appointment, he was a member of the research centre ‘Performative Cultures’ at the Free University Berlin. His fields of research include the contemporary novel, the sensuousness of reading, and Early Modern theatre and culture, in particular their relation to an emerging national identity. His publications include Making Sense: Sense Perception in the British Novel of the 1980s and 1990s (2005) and Tanztexte und Texttänze: Der Tanz im Gedicht der europäischen Moderne (2002), a comparative study of dance and poetry in the Fin de siècle. He is co-editor of Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions (2008). RUI CARVALHO HOMEM is Professor of English at the University of Oporto, Portugal. His research interests and publications include Early Modern Eng-

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lish drama, Irish studies, translation, and word-and-image studies. He is also a literary translator, and has published versions of Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra and Love’s Labour’s Lost), Seamus Heaney, and Philip Larkin. His latest book is Poetry and Translation in Northern Ireland: Dislocations in Contemporary Writing (2009). ANDREW JAMES JOHNSTON is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern English Literature at the Free University Berlin. He is the author of Clerks and Courtiers: Chaucer, Late Middle English Literature and the State Formation Process (2001). He has co-edited Anglo-Romanische Kulturkontakte (2002), Language and Text (2006), and Clerks, Wives and Historians (2007). Though his research focuses mainly on Medieval and Renaissance literature, he has also written on Brecht, Tolkien, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, and film director David Fincher. He has published two novels in German. His latest book is entitled Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (2008). WERNER VON KOPPENFELS was until recently Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Munich University. He has published widely on English Renaissance to Englightenment literature in its European context. His books include Bild und Metamorphose (1991) and a study of Menippean Satire Der Andere Blick (2007). He has translated, among others, Thomas Nashe, John Donne, Francisco de Quevedo, Sir Thomas Browne, and Emily Dickinson, and co-edited anthologies of French and English poetry. His latest publication is a ‘European’ anthology called Barocke Gärten der Literatur (2007). JERZY LIMON is a full Professor of English at the English Institute, University of Gdańsk, Poland. His research includes the history of English drama and theatre in the 16th and 17th century, and various theoretical aspects of theatre. His output comprises three academic books published in English (Gentlemen of a Company (1985), Dangerous Matter (1986), and The Masque of Stuart Culture (1990)), and five books that have appeared in Polish. Limon’s The Chemistry of the Theatre is to be published in 2010, and he is preparing a book on King James I’s secret service. Limon’s literary output includes four published novels and translations of plays by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Philip Massinger, and Tom Stoppard. He also runs a theatre project in Gdańsk, which aims at reconstructing an Elizabethan-in-style theatre there, and organizes an annual international Shakespeare Festival. ROGER LÜDEKE studied English, Spanish, and Comparative Literature in Munich, Sevilla, Mexico City, London, and Paris. In 1999, he received his PhD (Henry James’s System of Revision (2002)), and in 2006 he finished his post-

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doctoral dissertation (Habilitation), entitled Aesthetic Sovereignty and the Political Imagination of the Eighteenth Century: William Blake’s Art of Writing (2010). From 2006 until 2008 he worked as a full member of the research group ‘Beginnings of/in Modernity’ (LMU Munich). Since 2008 he has been Chair of Modern English Literature at Düsseldorf University. He also published in the fields of Early Modern and contemporary drama, 19th century fiction, contemporary pop novels, 18th century poetry, literary theory, interart/intermedia studies, film, and the concept of ‘world literature’. ANDREAS MAHLER teaches English Literature and Intermediality Studies at the University of Graz. His publications include questions of early modernity, literary theory, and the carnivalesque. WOLFGANG G. MÜLLER is retired Professor of English Literature at the University of Jena. He received his academic education at the universities of Mainz, Manchester, and Leicester. His fields of research include lyric poetry (Rilke’s ‘Neue Gedichte’ (1971), Das lyrische Ich (1979)), balladry (Die englisch-schottische Volksballade (1983)), Shakespeare and Renaissance literature (Die politische Rede bei Shakespeare (1979), Dialog und Gesprächskultur in der Renaissance (2004), an edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2005)), and the theory of style (Topik des Stilbegriffs (1981)). He has published articles on, among other topics, the tradition of Don Quixote in English literature, narratology, intertextuality, the letter as a genre, and detective fiction. MANFRED PFISTER taught English at the Free University of Berlin and is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Among his more recent book publications are ‘The Fatal Gift of Beauty’: The Italies of British Travellers (1996), Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice (1999), Laurence Sterne (2001), A History of English Laughter (2002), Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen und Diskursstrategien (2007), Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Transactions (2008), and Shakespeare’s Sonnets Global (2009), an anthology celebrating the quartercentenary of their first publication and documenting their success story across languages and media. MARIA DEL SAPIO GARBERO is Professor of English Literature at Roma Tre University. She has written extensively on Shakespeare, Romantic and Victorian literature, women’s writing, the culture of the Fin de siècle, Modernism, and Postmodernism. Her works on Shakespeare include Il bene ritrovato: Le figlie di Shakespeare dal King Lear ai Romances (2005); and as editor, La

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traduzione di Amleto nella cultura europea (2002) and Identity, Otherness and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome (2009). INA SCHABERT is Professor Emerita of English Literature at the University of Munich. She is author of a history of literature which experiments with gender as a category of literary historiography: Englische Literaturgeschichte aus der Sicht der Geschlechterforschung (2 vols., 1997 and 2006). Her essay on ‘Narrative and Gender in Literary History’ was published in Comparative Critical Studies 6, 2 (2009). From 2000 to 2006 she edited the Shakespeare Jahrbuch; she is also editor of the Shakespeare Handbuch (1972; 5th edn 2009). Most recently she has edited a book on the German anglicist Wolfgang Clemen (2009). JÜRGEN SCHLAEGER is Professor Emeritus for ‘The Literature and Culture of Great Britain’ and coordinator of the bicentenary of the Humboldt University Berlin. Until 2008 he was director of the Centre for British Studies. His main research areas include: English literature from the 18th to the 20th century; life-writing, literature and emotions, structures of cultural transformations, as well as literature and cognition. GÜNTER WALCH until his retirement held the Chair of English Literature at Humboldt University in Berlin. He has published widely on English narrative art, genre theory, and, above all, Shakespeare. He has edited The Tempest and the Sonnets, and is the author of Shakespeare und kein Ende: Hamlet (2004). He has also written on and edited works by a whole range of authors, including Bunyan, Mandeville, Kipling, Wilde, Conrad, Stephenson, E.M. Forster, and Henry James. RICHARD WILSON is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University and has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris III (Nouvelle Sorbonne) and a Visiting Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. He gave the 2001 British Academy Shakespeare Lecture and the 2006 Shakespeare’s Globe Fellowship Lecture. Among his many books are Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean authority (1993), Secret Shakespeare (2004), Shakespeare in French Theory (2007), and Shakespeare’s Book (2008).