Early Modern Tragicomedy (Studies in Renaissance Literature)

Early Modern Tragicomedy

Edited by Subha Mukherji and Raphael Lyne

Studies in Renaissance Literature Volume 22

EARLY MODERN TRAGICOMEDY

Studies in Renaissance Literature ISSN 1465–6310 General Editors David Colclough Raphael Lyne Sean Keilen

Studies in Renaissance Literature offers investigations of topics in English literature focussed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; its scope extends from early Tudor writing, including works reflecting medieval concerns, to the Restoration period. Studies exploring the interplay between the literature of the English Renaissance and its cultural history are particularly welcomed. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Dr David Colclough, School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS Dr Raphael Lyne, New Hall, Cambridge, CB3 0DF Dr Sean Keilen, English Department, University of Pennsylvania, Fisher-Bennett Hall, 3340 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104–6273, USA Boydell & Brewer Limited, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this volume

EARLY MODERN TRAGICOMEDY

Edited by Subha Mukherji Raphael Lyne

D. S. BREWER

© Contributors 2007 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2007 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 978–1–84384–130–2

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Pru Harrison, Hacheston, Suffolk

Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on Contributors

viii

Introduction Raphael Lyne and Subha Mukherji

1

1.

Aristotle and Tragicomedy Sarah Dewar-Watson

2.

The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy: Guarini’s Il pastor fido and its Critical Reception in Italy, 1586–1601 Matthew Treherne

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Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of the Commedia Dell’arte Robert Henke

43

3.

15

4.

The Minotaur of the Stage: Tragicomedy in Spain Geraint Evans

5.

Highly Irregular: Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France Nicholas Hammond

76

In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not To Lose Your Head: Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England Ros King

84

6.

59

7.

Taking Pericles Seriously Suzanne Gossett

8.

‘The Neutral Term’?: Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’ Gordon McMullan

115

Shakespeare by the Numbers: On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope

133

9.

101

10.

Turn and Counterturn: Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in Massinger’s The Renegado Michael Neill

11.

Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages Lucy Munro

13.

‘Betwixt Both’: Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy Deana Rankin

Index

154 175

193 209

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In April 2005 the editors of this book organised a conference on ‘Tragicomedy: Renaissance to Restoration’ at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Most of the essays in this book bear some resemblance to papers presented there, and it was as a result of that conference that we recognised the need for a book such as this. The other speakers at the conference deserve many thanks for making it such a stimulating event: Julia Briggs, Marguérite Corporaal, Kevin de Ornellas, Elizabeth Drayson, Kate Flaherty, Valerie Forman, Verna Foster, Vikki Forsyth, Paul Gleed, Robin Kirkpatrick, Simon Palfrey, Kevin Quarmby, Alvin Snider, Ben Spiller, Helen Wilcox, Rebecca Yearling. We are grateful to those who came to listen, especially Rebecca Beale, Tania Demetriou, and Douglas Paine, who were generous with their time and their help. The conference would not have happened without the encouragement provided by Pippa Berry at an early stage. The financial support of the Judith E. Wilson Fund in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, and the help of many people at Fitzwilliam College, are gratefully acknowledged. Since the conference, the contributors to this collection have shown stamina and patience, and an impressive ability to work to sudden and impossible deadlines. We are grateful to David Colclough and Sean Keilen (as series editors), Caroline Palmer (at Boydell & Brewer) and an anonymous reader for their parts in helping the book come to fruition.

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CONTRIBUTORS Sarah Dewar-Watson is a post-doctoral research fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. She has published articles on Shakespeare and Dryden and is currently working on a book which examines the reception of Greek tragedy in early modern England. Geraint Evans has taught at the Universities of Nottingham, London and Cambridge, as well as Tsinghua University, Beijing. He works mainly on early modern Spanish literature, particularly theatre. His research areas include gender, nation and religion, and he is currently working on concepts of Iberian nationality in the early modern period and in modern representations of the past. Suzanne Gossett is Professor of English at Loyola University, Chicago and a General Editor of Arden Early Modern Drama. She has edited many early modern works, including Pericles for Arden Three, Eastward Ho! for the Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson, A Fair Quarrel for the Collected Middleton, and Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania for Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Her recent articles include ‘Editing Collaborated Drama’, Shakespeare Survey 2006 and ‘ “Tell Thy Story”: Mary Zimmerman’s Pericles’, Shakespeare Quarterly 2006. Nicholas Hammond is University Reader in early modern French theatre and thought at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is the author of several books and articles relating to seventeenth-century France. Robert Henke is an Associate Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St Louis. He is the author of Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Delaware, 1997), and Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge, 2002). The recipient of fellowships from Villa I Tatti, Fulbright, and NEH, he is now working on a book-length study of representations of poverty in Italian early modern drama. Jonathan Hope is Reader in Literary Linguistics and Head of the Department of English Studies at Strathclyde University, Glasgow. His Shakespeare’s Grammar was published by The Arden Shakespeare in 2003, and Shakespeare viii

Contributors and Language will appear from the same publisher in late 2007. He is a member of the Scottish Institute for Northern Renaissance Studies (SINRS). Ros King is Professor of English Studies at the University of Southampton. A musician, theatre director and dramaturg, her books include The Works of Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in Sixteenth-Century England (Manchester, 2001), Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot, 2005) and the revised edition of The Comedy of Errors for the New Cambridge Shakespeare series (Cambridge, 2004). Raphael Lyne is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of New Hall. He is the author of Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses, 1567–1632 (Oxford, 2001) and Shakespeare’s Late Work (Oxford, 2007). Gordon McMullan is Reader in English at King’s College London and a general editor of Arden Early Modern Drama. The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (University of Massachusetts Press) was published in 1994 and his Arden edition of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII in 2000. He has edited or co-edited three collections of essays, including, most recently, Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (co-edited with David Matthews), forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. His monograph, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing, will be published, again by Cambridge, in 2007. Subha Mukherji is Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College. Her publications include Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2006) and several articles on English Renaissance drama. She is currently working on the poetics of doubt in early modern literature. Her other (related) interests include law, epistemology, the place – and representations – of the heart and its passions in the Renaissance, and John Ford. Lucy Munro is a lecturer in English at Keele University. Her publications include Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge, 2005), an edition of Edward Sharpham’s The Fleer (London, 2006), and various essays on early modern drama. She is a contributing editor to the RSC Complete Works of Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and to forthcoming major editions of the works of Richard Brome and James Shirley. Michael Neill is Professor of English at the University of Auckland: the author of Issues of Death (1996) and Putting History to the Question (2000), he has edited Anthony and Cleopatra and Othello for the Oxford Shakespeare. ix

Contributors Deana Rankin is Fellow in English at Girton College, University of Cambridge. She is author of Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenthcentury Ireland (Cambridge, 2005) as well as a number of articles on drama, history-writing, republicanism and Irish writing in the early modern period. Formerly a theatre manager, she maintains close links with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s education programme. Matthew Treherne is a lecturer in Italian at the University of Leeds. He is the author of articles on medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, co-editor of Dante’s ‘Commedia’: Theology as Poetry (forthcoming, University of Notre Dame Press), and is working on a monograph entitled Dante and the Liturgical Imagination. Michael Witmore is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University and Organizer of the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He is the author of Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford, 2001) and Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (forthcoming with Cornell, 2007). He is currently completing a study of Shakespeare’s ‘dramaturgical monism’ and the anti-Cartesian philosophical tradition entitled Shakespearean Metaphysics.

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INTRODUCTION It is a pastorall Tragic-comedie, which the people seeing when it was plaid, having ever had a singuler guift in defining, concluded to be a play of contry hired Shepheards, in gray cloakes, with curtaild dogs in strings, sometimes laughing together, and sometimes killing one another: And misling whitsun ales, creame, wasiel & morris-dances, began to be angry. In their error I would not have you fall, least you incurre their censure. [. . .] A tragie-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie: which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kinde of trouble as no life be questiond, so that a God is as lawfull in this as in a tragedie, and meane people as in a comedie. This much I hope will serve to justifie my Poeme, and make you understand it, to teach you more for nothing, I do not know that I am in conscience bound.1

This is how John Fletcher summarises the characteristics of tragicomedy for the readership of The Faithful Shepherdess (first performed 1608–09, printed c.1609). Its theatrical audience had not been won over by its version of the latest trends in Italian pastoral drama, so this is an attempt to answer their objections. As a brief rejoinder to some basic incomprehensions about what a tragicomedy might have in it, it serves its function, but as the most famous contemporary statement explicitly about this emerging genre on the English stage, it is partial and misleading. For there is nothing here that can keep track of, for example, the variety and sharp edges of The Winter’s Tale (where characters do indeed die), and nothing that can testify to the fraught, jagged tone of Measure for Measure or Troilus and Cressida. This mismatch between theory and practice lies behind this book: it is part of a persistent problem relating to tragicomedy, which is that its characteristics have indeed proved difficult to anatomise, especially in relation to examples in practice. In the chapters that follow many perspectives are explored, but the material often remains elusive – as if a counter-example, or a shift of emphasis, even a minute decision on the part of an actor, could unravel the best-laid critical plans. Accordingly, this book aims to be systematic in some ways, and to reflect expanding diversity in others. Broadly it divides into two sections, which to 1

John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in Fredson Bowers (gen. ed.), The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, 10 vols (Cambridge, 1976), III, pp. 483–612 (497).

1

Introduction some extent reflects the perspective of a particular set of implied readers: namely, readers of Shakespearean tragicomedy, and of other Jacobean and Caroline writers, Fletcher included, who have got far enough to realise that tragicomedy is not a simple thing, but who are not so sure of the contexts within which its lack of simplicity is situated. It is hoped, however, that the essays that have resulted from this initial brief prove to be useful to far more readers than these. This volume includes, for example, a rare chance to compare and contrast key ideas from England, France, Italy, Spain, and the classical world. The first group of chapters, which covers these various literatures, aims to explore crucial European contexts for the development of tragicomedy. They impinge on Shakespeare and his contemporaries to varying degrees, and they feed into one another, but they also offer up a series of related, connected problems and opportunities offered by tragicomedies in rather different theatrical environments at different times within the period covered by this volume. Sarah Dewar-Watson’s chapter goes back to the source of much Renaissance anxiety about tragicomedy. Aristotle’s Poetics, especially when revived and reinterpreted by Italian scholars, seems to set out rules of generic decorum that preclude a mixed genre. By rereading Aristotle, and particularly by reassessing the generic model offered by Homer’s Odyssey (and how that is described in the Poetics), Dewar-Watson establishes that many of the characteristics of tragicomedy as written in the Renaissance are anticipated by ‘happy-ending tragedy’ in Athens. The burden of classical theory, and how vernacular experiments can be reconciled with it, is central to Matthew Treherne’s chapter. Its main topic is the work of Giambattista Guarini, whose play Il Pastor Fido (written 1581, first printed 1589) sparks new interest in tragicomedy, not least because of the theoretical debate which follows its first performances and publication. As Treherne shows, Guarini’s play was as important for the discussions it caused as for its own literary impact. The central themes of the debate – decorum, emotional effect, and verisimilitude – are vital throughout the history of thinking about tragicomedy, and Guarini’s innovations in assessing how (for example) tragicomedy may have a claim to sufficient decorum, and to special levels of verisimilitude, are of great importance. Robert Henke’s chapter is also based in Italy, but rather than pursuing tragicomedy in the elite circles where Guarini’s play was discussed, it looks to the more popular tradition of commedia dell’arte. Those interested in Shakespeare will find here remarkable new connections between The Tempest and characters and situations from the commedia dell’arte – for example, the old mago (magician) who pays undue attention to the sexual lives of those around him. The chapter also makes a larger contribution to the collection by recognising the various forms and social levels in which aspects of tragicomedy, as it came to thrive in England, circulated in Europe. The other two chapters in this first section move away from the more established paths of tragicomedy between Italy and England, and fill in two closely 2

Introduction related but in some ways parallel manifestations of tragicomedy. Geraint Evans looks at the place of tragicomedy within the popular dramatic tradition of sixteenth-century Spain, and especially at the work of Lope de Vega. His central metaphor of the ‘minotaur’ genre captures the typical anxieties aroused by the notion of a mixed mode, but in practice Spanish tragicomedy proves an effective and energetic form. Although it is not possible to trace much direct influence between Lope and Shakespeare or Fletcher, Spanish theatrical culture shares some key characteristics with that of early modern England, namely, a mixed audience with a highly varied repertoire to match. The same cannot quite be said of the French scene described by Nicholas Hammond. The playfully hybrid world of Corneille’s early drama precedes, indeed induces, the zenith of French generic strictness and divergence in the tragedy of Racine and the comedy of Molière, but the controversy resulting from Corneille’s mixing of genres demonstrates the difference between France and England or Spain. In France theoretical condemnation could govern practice and popular acclaim. Ironically therefore, as Hammond polemically shows, we may ‘have tragicomedy to thank’ for Racine as well as Molière – for provoking realisations about the nature of genre that bear fruit in the achievements of the next generation. French uses of the genre and the generic label are shown to be symptomatic of the fluidity of the genre itself; a fluidity that was both the strength and the weakness of the form, a quality that enabled experiment and dynamic adaptation as well as its easy transposition into other forms, leading, in a sense, to a formal extinction. And at the root of this function is what Hammond identifies as ‘irregularity’ – that property which drew innovation as well as criticism, in France as, more familiarly to us, in England. One of the most curious features of this ‘irregularity’ in French drama, Hammond argues, is the way in which it became the form for sharp representations of same-sex love or desire, often implemented through the device of cross-dressing. What is the connection between this distinctive content and the tragicomic genre? Perhaps same-sex desire is a kind of transgression that can most easily, and needs must, be contained by a form that brings things right at the end while allowing for complication in the middle – so that cross-dressing becomes the dramatically unreal, yet affectively real, vehicle for a desire that is aroused but then dissolved with the desired man or woman turning out to be of the opposite sex after all. In that sense, it might be the equivalent of the desire that Evans talks about in the context of Spain: love between two people of irreconcilably different classes, which needs at once to triumph, to satisfy the need to believe that ‘love conquers all’, and to turn out to be ‘false’, and thereby reconcilable to society after all, and to the belief in the essential superiority of ‘noble blood’, for the lower-class character turns out after all to be high-born. This is a phenomenon that Evans calls a deceitful solution. Like the false incest in Beaumont and Fletcher, the false poison of Shakespeare’s Cornelius, and the illusory social transgressions of love in Lope’s plays, the homosexual 3

Introduction desire of French drama seems to point to a tendency inherent to tragicomedy, a fluidity akin to desire, or the genre itself, manifest in the delicate indeterminacy of, say, the pastoral scene in Cymbeline where the two brothers mourn over the ‘fairest lily’ that the cross-dressed Imogen/Fidele (now supposedly dead) was to them. Its potential for conformism or radicalism can vary significantly according to treatment; it can be as ‘safe’ or as ‘risky’ as a playwright or an acting ensemble or an audience decides. Despite crucial differences in the different national and cultural contexts, the formal propensities of tragicomedy seem to straddle France, Spain and England, producing distinct alchemies with the specific circumstances of production and reception. Indeed, the connections may be spread even wider: the implications of Hammond’s argument are echoed in a different context later in the volume, where Ros King connects the mixed genre of early modern England with the untroubled reception of ‘Evita B’, the cross-dressed persona of the politically radical comedian Pieter-Dirk Uys, in a politically troubled South Africa, so much so that Mandela was allowed to listen to ‘her’ radio show in prison. It did not strike the authorities that this would ‘sustain’ political prisoners. The doublethink that cross-dressing elicits and allows, in life and in art, is analogous to – and sometimes actually expressive of – the simultaneous real/unreal operation of tragicomedy. The second set of essays centres on, or radiates outwards from, the tragicomic drama of Shakespeare and his theatrical successors. It does not, however, spend an inordinate amount of time explicitly outlining the generic problems caused by the range of plays from the period that could be called tragicomic. Modern editors and critics of these plays have already illuminated many specific problems. The essays in this collection aim to illuminate the chronological fringes of the period, and also to consider from fresh angles certain key issues of taxonomy. In doing so they naturally build on critical works in which other paths through the theory and practice of tragicomedy have been taken. Verna Foster’s book The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy takes on an ambitious frame of reference that reaches to the present day.2 Marvin T. Herrick’s Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England covers some of the same territory as this book and is a very good introduction to some of the key issues.3 Frank Ristine’s older English Tragicomedy: Its Origin and History still has much to offer the scholar, tracing the history of the genre from c.1560 until c.1700, but also including a helpful list of all English tragicomedies.4 Collections of essays edited by Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, and also by Nancy Klein Maguire, fill out a sense of the political potential of tragicomedy, a theme this volume briefly broaches, but 2 3 4

Verna A. Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy (Aldershot, 2004). Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England (Urbana, 1955). Frank H. Ristine, English Tragicomedy: Its Origin and History (New York, 1910).

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Introduction does not significantly explore.5 Finally, the later end of the seventeenth century, which is only obliquely approached in this volume, is the subject of Nancy Klein Maguire’s Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660– 1671.6 This book does not replace any of these; rather it aims to offer most of its readers a more substantial grounding in the European tradition, alongside some adventurous possibilities as to how future criticism might reflect Shakespeare, Fletcher, and beyond. The essays by Ros King and Suzanne Gossett look in different ways at what came before Shakespeare. King looks back into earlier Elizabethan drama, with two very different main examples (Richard Edwards’ Damon and Pythias (1564), and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus) but a consistent and vital central thesis, that the presence of a mixed mode in English drama is widespread and long pre-dates the first adaptations of Guarini. This is only to be expected, given the combination of forms and genres characteristic of the mystery plays and other popular English traditions, but King’s chapter makes it clear that tragicomedy has the greatest potential not so much when it perverts the mood of comedy or resolves the problems of tragedy, as when it is ‘consistently mixed up’, as in Cymbeline. Thus the theatrically risky scene where Imogen wakes up next to the body of the headless Cloten, takes it to be her husband’s corpse, smears herself in stage blood and grieves in anguished poetry, embodies precisely that blend of humour and horror, pathos and danger, which allows for double-affect, for playful possibilities of simultaneous but disparate, even conflicting, impacts – giggles and shudders, embarrassment and poignancy, alienation and sympathy. Peter Hall, she claims, in erasing such organically mixed moments in his 1957 production of Cymbeline, committed theatrical suicide and generic escapism. This argument suggests the inclusiveness and paradoxical realism of tragicomedy, an idea that we shall observe emerging from several strands of argument in this volume. Suzanne Gossett takes a much closer-range look at one particular prehistory – the origins of the phase of Shakespearean tragicomedy initiated in Pericles and continued in Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest (and in his collaborations with Fletcher too). She does so by emphasising what Beaumont and Fletcher learned from the innovative work of George Wilkins, author of the first two acts of Pericles and quite possibly the initiator of more of it. The

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Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, eds, The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (London, 1991), and Nancy Klein Maguire, ed., Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics (New York, 1987). See also Zachary Lesser, ‘Mixed Government and Mixed Marriage in A King and No King: Sir Henry Neville Reads Beaumont and Fletcher’, ELH 69 (2004), 947–78, and Nicholas F. Radel, ‘Homoeroticism, Discursive Change, and Politics: Reading “Revolution” in Seventeenth-Century English Tragicomedy’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 9 (1997), 162–78. Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge, 1993).

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Introduction result of this is a fresh look at the dynamic exchanges that may well have spurred developments in the English version of tragicomedy. Two essays look even more directly at the late Shakespearean tragic canon. The essays by Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, and Gordon McMullan, aim to address the issues of taxonomy head on, but by strikingly different means. Hope and Witmore bring the analytical characteristics of discourseanalysis software to bear on generic classification in Shakespeare. To readers new to this approach to literary texts, the technique involved – statistical analysis of numerous basic features of language – may seem counter-intuitive. Nevertheless, the process suggests that there are stylistic fingerprints of comedy, tragedy, and history, and that ‘tragicomedy’ (especially the late plays) is an intense hybrid of the first two. This offers the possibility, perhaps in future developments of discourse-analysis software, of more concrete and refined stylistic distinctions between genres. It also brings a recognition of how quantitative analysis of linguistic features can be a tool of literary interpretation; how reading Shakespeare by the numbers can speak to such objects of conventionally literary enquiry as asides and reported action, tone and atmosphere. Indeed, it illuminates the whole question of what – in terms of dramatic strategy – constitutes generic groups. In a series of startling findings and polemical claims, this study makes the now-familiar effect of ‘tragicomedy’ seem wondrous in new ways. Gordon McMullan’s essay approaches the question of defining periods or phases or kinds of writing from a sceptical direction. He undermines the idea that calling the Shakespearean sequence from Pericles to The Tempest ‘the late plays’ evades the problems of terms such as ‘romance’ and ‘tragicomedy’. The idea of lateness in literary careers turns out to be a narrow imposition with repeating characteristics. However, the point of McMullan’s chapter is not only to question the boundaries critics draw in Shakespeare’s career. It also reveals that there is a telling affinity between tragicomedy and lateness. Tragicomedies can be seen as, and can indeed represent themselves as, sophisticated and urbane innovations. They are late in the sense that they acknowledge that tragedy and comedy preceded them, but they also open and inaugurate possibilities, rather than closing them off. The final group of essays in the collection does not attempt to account for the whole of the post-Shakespearean tradition any more than the previous essays attempted to account for all tragicomic possibilities within Shakespeare. Michael Neill’s essay takes one case – Massinger’s The Renegado (written 1624, first printed 1630) – and argues that its tragicomic structure connects with central patterns of thought in contemporary theology. The idea emerges that one aspect of this and other tragicomedies of the period may be their affinity with Protestantism, wherein salvation follows suffering but in an inscrutable way. This essay recognises the importance of providence in all tragicomedy, whether Protestant or not, and introduces the possibility that it is a particularly pointed form in which to explore what providence is and how it works. 6

Introduction The Christian narrative had already been presented as a drama in the mixed mode, as on the title page of Nicholas Grimald’s Christus Redivivus (1543).7 God’s workings were often seen as tragicomic in the providentialist literature of the period, and in sermons, most famously by Donne who calls the Book of Job ‘a Tragique Comedy, lamentable beginnings comfortably ended’.8 Neill’s essay intimates the concept that provides the literary complement to this more familiar idea – the theological affiliations of genre itself. But it is important to observe the difference between Guarini’s mingled mode and Grimald’s, or Dante’s for that matter: Grimald thinks that the story of the Passion is essentially a happy ending story – ‘comoedia tragica, sacra et nova’. Dante similarly calls his theological poem a ‘commedia’. Guarini’s third kind of drama, on the other hand, is not ‘a tragic comedy’ (or a certain sort of comedy), but ‘tragicomedy’. Does a play like Massinger’s follow in the theological tradition, or does it show signs of a different variety of mixing? The final two essays – by Lucy Munro and Deana Rankin – relate to tragicomedy in Ireland and exchanges between the theatres of Dublin and London. In addition to offering new insights into how certain tragicomedies of the period were incorporated into theatrical repertoires and received by different audiences, these essays both consider how tragicomedies change when they change contexts – how this form crosses borders. Indeed, Rankin proposes an organic link between geography and genre, arguing that Irish tragicomedy takes birth ‘inter-nationally’ and identifying in it a ‘poetics of between-ness’. For Munro, Dublin tragicomedy responds to a variety of English influences, including the predictable (Fletcher), and the less predictable (the popular tragicomic Saints’ lives of the Red Bull theatre). Both Rankin and Munro recognise how the complex tone of tragicomedy, and experimentation with that tone, enable political comment of a subtle and elusive kind. They also both quote and discuss the postscript to Henry Burnell’s Landgartha. This is the least celebrated, but by no means the least suggestive, of four iconic statements about tragicomedy that pertain to or arise from these early modern works, and which are all discussed more than once in this book. Although they are all quoted elsewhere in the volume, they are worth quoting here too. Burnell’s postscript focuses on the demeanour of tragicomic endings: Some (but not of best judgements) were offended at the Conclusion of this Play, in regard Landgartha took not then, what she was perswaded to by so many, the Kings kind night-imbraces. To which kind of people (that know not what they say) I answer (omitting all other reasons:) that a Tragie-Comedy sho’d neither end Comically or Tragically, but betwixt both: which Decorum I did my best to

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Nicholas Grimald, Christus Redivivus, comoedia tragica sacra et nova (Cologne, 1543). The Sermons of John Donne, ed. E.M. Simpson and G.R. Potter, 10 vols (Berkeley, 1953–62), IX, 132.

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Introduction observe, not to goe against Art, to please the ever-amorous. To the rest of bablers, I despise any answer.9

This is as simple, and as problematic, as Fletcher’s characterisation of the plot-matter of tragicomedy quoted above. Whereas the Faithful Shepherdess preface leads to factual objections, the problem with Burnell’s definition is the deceptive simplicity of ‘betwixt’. It is difficult to argue for a simple spectrum between comedy and tragedy, so the placing of tragicomedy at some mid-point begs more questions than it answers. Of course, the relationship with comedy and tragedy is very often at issue in the works discussed in this book, both theoretical and literary. The great challenge is to set up a definition of tragicomedy that can efficiently accommodate two very different phenomena: plays where tragedy and comedy combine in the form of one thing followed by the other (as in Pericles), or a hybrid, deliberately indeterminate form which gives us both things at the same time (Measure for Measure). This issue features centrally in Geraint Evans’s chapter: he takes from Ricardo de Turia an analogy from chemistry to assess whether tragicomedy is a ‘combination’ (compuesto) or a ‘mixture’ (mixto) – whether (as in the former case) the elements cohabit but are not transformed, or whether two things become one truly new entity. Neill, on the other hand, posits the idea of tragicomedy as ‘an inherently dialectical form’, lending itself ideally to the dynamics of late Jacobean and early Caroline theatre where plays were in conversation with each other – the intertextually allusive Renegado being an example. But there is scope to identify tragedy and comedy being in dialogue within a single artefact, pointing to the integral relation between the law of genre and the structures of experience. Another highly influential definition of tragicomedy proves similarly elusive despite its simplicity. In the early stages of Plautus’ Amphitryo the God Mercury addresses the audience about the play in progress: argumentum huius eloquar tragoediae. quid? contraxistis frontem, quia tragoediam dixi futuram hanc? deus sum, commutavero. eandem hanc, si voltis, faciam ex tragoedia comoedia ut sit omnibus isdem vorsibus. utrum sit an non voltis? sed ego stultior, quasi nesciam vos velle, qui divos siem. teneo quid animi vostri super hac re siet: faciam ut commixta sit: tragicomoedia. nam me perpetuo facere ut sit comoedia, reges quo veniant et di, non par arbitror.

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Henry Burnell, Landgartha: A Tragie-Comedy, as it was presented in the new Theater in Dublin, with good applause, being an Ancient story (Dublin, 1641), f. Kv.

8

Introduction quid igitur? quoniam hic servos quoque partes habet, faciam sit, proinde ut dixi, tragicomoedia. (51–63)10 I will set out the plot of this tragedy. What? Did you pull a face, because I said it was going to be a tragedy? I am a God, so I’ll change it, if you want. I shall make a comedy out of this tragedy, with all the same verses. Is that want you want or not? But that’s a bit silly of me – as if I didn’t know what you want, being a God. I know what’s on your minds. I’ll make it mixed: a tragicomedy! I don’t think it would be appropriate to make it a consistent comedy, when there are kings and gods in it. What do you think? Since a slave also has a part in the play, I’ll make it a tragicomedy, like I just said.

This is even more reductive than Fletcher in its emphasis on plot as the source of defining characteristics of dramatic modes. Mercury bases his distinction purely on what sort of characters a play contains – not even on what happens to them. Of course, the whole speech is comic and one aspect of its comedy is the God’s unsubtle and insouciant wielding of power – although his actual power seems minimal, his overconfidence perhaps paralleling the Landgartha postscript in thinking that plays can judge their reception absolutely from within. Nevetheless, the presence of the term in a classical work was a source of controversy, which extended even to the ways in which it was quoted. Hammond alerts us to the peculiar discrepancy in French dramatic culture between the exploitation and the conspicuous omission of the lines in the Prologue to Amphitryon where Plautus not only discusses the genre but actually uses the term ‘tragicomedy’, a coinage Dewar-Watson comments on. In fact it emerges that it is mainly the traditionalists who allude or refer to Plautus, usually to trivialise Plautus’ use of the generic word. D’Aubignac, for instance, declares the term ‘dead in the cradle’. What is striking about all these three statements about tragicomedy is that, despite their prominence, they are far too simple to contain even a few of the possibilities of the mode. Although these are only scraps of evidence, they suggest crucially how tragicomedy, though much discussed, is not easily contained by theory. Before the introduction of some of the key themes that run across the essays in this collection, it is worth mentioning one more iconic representation of tragedy that is addressed in more than one essay below. A figure representing tragicomedy stands at the top of the triumphant architecture of the title page of Ben Jonson’s Workes (1616). Tragedy and Comedy are there too, the two main supporting pillars of the page. This book presents completely different interpretations of this image. Sarah Dewar-Watson sees it as a ‘satirical comment on the recent inversion of the classical generic hierarchy’: by placing tragicomedy at the top, Jonson’s book indicates ironically that modern taste

10

Plautus, Amphitryo, in the Loeb Plautus, ed. Paul Nixon, 5 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1916), I, pp. 1–122, lines 51–63. The translation is our own.

9

Introduction has lost touch with permanent values. Gordon McMullan, on the other hand, sees the triumphal design as an indication that tragicomedy is ‘both later than and superior to the two foundational sisters of which she is an advanced synthesis, the contemporary summation of generic possibilities’. On the side of Dewar-Watson, it is pertinent that Jonson’s typical demeanour towards modern innovation is negative. On the side of McMullan, there is no sign in the figure of Tragicomedy that we should view it satirically. Perhaps some middle ground lies in the observation that Jonson may well have taken a practical view of monuments, recognising that the more important parts of the monument are those that do the supporting, rather than the thing supported. For the purpose of this volume, it remains suggestive that two scholars, with justification, take opposite views on another significant attempt to represent tragicomedy. Tragicomedies are among the most effective works of the period in any number of spheres – how they engage with political events, how they move their audiences, how they consider the nature of theatre, and so on – but tragicomedy, an extracted set of uniform characteristics, is remarkably hard to pin down. The scope of this book is essentially the period between two landmarks of early modern English criticism: Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (written c.1580, printed 1595) and John Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668). As has been said, there has been no attempt at exhaustively covering the range of significant plays in between – rather the point has been to illuminate the European context, and to suggest new ways of dealing with more familiar material. The issues that arise from a comparison between Sidney and Dryden are, to a large extent, those that emerge from the essays in this book. Sidney takes a negative view of this emerging kind of drama, as he seeks to regulate, in an Aristotelian manner, as well as to praise and defend his chosen art: But besides these grosse absurdities, howe all their Playes bee neither right Tragedies, nor right Comedies, mingling Kinges and Clownes, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in the Clowne by head and shoulders to play a part in majesticall matters, with neither decencie nor discretion: so as neither the admiration and Commiseration, nor the the right sportfulnesse is by their mongrell Tragicomedie obtained. I know Apuleius did somewhat so, but that is a thing recounted with space of time, not represented in one moment: and I knowe the Auncients have one or two examples of Tragicomedies, as Plautus hath Amphitrio. But if we marke them well, wee shall finde that they never or verie daintily matche horne Pipes and Funeralls. So falleth it out, that having indeed no right Comedie in that Comicall part of our Tragidie, wee have nothing but scurrilitie unwoorthie of anie chaste eares, or some extreame shewe of doltishnesse, indeede fit to lift up a loude laughter and nothing else: where the whole tract of a Comedie should bee full of delight, as the Tragidie should bee still maintained in a well raised admiration.11 11

Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (London, 1595), ff. K2r–K2v.

10

Introduction One of the key moments here is Sidney’s small concession to tragicomedy: the best writers mostly ‘never’ do it, but can get away with it ‘verie daintily’. Without the requisite daintiness there is a huge risk of ‘doltishnesse’. This suggests that while tragicomedy is in many respects indecorous, it also associates with sophistication: the enigma is that under certain circumstances it might seem like the height of delicacy, but without the right talent and context it can only be boorish. For Sidney this is a poignant reflection: he presents English writing as only capable of limited achievements. Dryden returns to the same themes in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie. He also is concerned with the examples set by classical and other precedents, and with the possible positive qualities of tragicomedy. His use of different voices in conversation enables some more adventurous opinions to be voiced. Neander is thought to be the speaker who most resembles Dryden’s own position, and he does indeed speak up for contemporary practice against the claims of the classics, the French, and earlier English writers. As Neander tackles Lisideius, the proponent of Racine and Corneille, he defends tragicomedy: As for their new way of mingling mirth with serious Plot I do not with Lisideius condemn the thing, though I cannot approve their manner of doing it. He tells us we cannot so speedily recollect ourselves after a scene of great passion and concernment as to pass to another of mirth and humour, and to enjoy it with any relish. But why should he imagine the soul of man more heavy than his senses? Does not the eye pass from an unpleasant object to a pleasant in a much shorter time then is required to this? And does not the unpleasantness of the first commend the beauty of the latter? The old Rule of logic might have convinced him, that contraries when placed near, set off each other. A continued gravity keeps the spirit too much bent. We must refresh it sometimes, as we bait upon a journey, that we may go on with greater ease. A scene of mirth mixed with Tragedy has the same effect upon us which our music has betwixt the acts, and that we find a relief to us from the best plots and language of the stage, if the discourses have been long. I must therefore have stronger arguments ere I am convinced, that compassion and mirth in the same subject destroy each other, and in the meantime cannot but conclude, to the honour of our nation, that we have invented, increased, and perfected a more pleasant way of writing for the stage then was ever known to the Ancients or Moderns of any Nation, which is tragicomedy.12

This is, in effect, an argument that the daintiness wished for by Sidney is present in the lively senses and ‘pleasant’ attitudes of Restoration England. Daringly Neander talks of an ‘old Rule’ and speaks against ‘continued gravity’, promoting the idea that the modern world needs, and has earned, a more sophisticated form of drama than is offered by ancient models of tragedy and comedy. The dialogic structure of the Essay means that this position, however 12

Keith Walker, ed., John Dryden (Oxford, 1987), pp. 70–130 (103).

11

Introduction boldly set out, is questionable. Indeed, the climactic tone of the last sentence is not quite rewarded by its final word, ‘tragicomedy’ – even its most committed sponsors might not easily accept Neander’s claim that it exceeds all others. So between Sidney and Dryden there is a large change in tone around the subject: the works of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and others are crucial in making the change possible. But the anxiety of Sidney is not completely assuaged in the Essay of Dramatick Poesie, and the same tensions are still simmering. One central tension is between the classical inheritance and the independent vernacular. Several of the essays in this collection encounter it. It lies behind the essays of Hammond (in France the burden of classical example was felt even more keenly) and Dewar-Watson (who looks at how some of this burden resulted from misunderstanding, or at least creative interpretation). Treherne states that ‘the flourishing literary critical culture of Renaissance Italy sat uneasily with the vernacular tradition that same period inherited and developed’. Henke’s essay goes further into exploring Italian traditions that have been rather neglected in favour of Guarini. This relates to another tension in the history of tragicomedy, between different cultural levels, as between the courtly elite circles where Guarini’s play was performed, and the more popular stages of the commedia dell’arte. In England, for example, the first impact of Guarini was felt on court and university stages; as has been seen in the example of Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess, the transition to the public stage was not easy. Gossett’s essay reconstructs how tragicomic themes might have passed around the public stages in the early seventeenth century, depicting a very different, practice-driven theatrical culture from that which is suggested by the theoretical debates of France or Italy. The Spanish environment described by Evans, as has been said, bears the closest resemblance to the English. Nevertheless, as Evans’s essay shows, the Spanish dramatic scene was no less possessed by debates about regularity and decorum than the French culture described by Hammond. Despite its closeness at times to rarefied discussions of the nature of dramatic representation, tragicomedy, as described in the essays that follow, emerges as a form in which adventurous thoughts can be fostered. We have noted Hammond demonstrating how comic conventions such as crossdressing can be transformed into sharper reflections on same-sex desire. Munro also explores the unorthodox forms of love that can result from cross-dressing, and how in different plays the frissons of sexual danger, and the revelations of true identities, can occur at very different times. In Shirley’s Rosania (1640), for example, the audience experiences cross-dressing in progress, whereas in Fletcher’s Philaster it is only revealed in retrospect. These variations and inflections, too, contribute to the experimental potential of the genre. The same applies to the idea of providence. This has already been mentioned, in relation to Neill’s essay, as a serious theological idea that tragicomedies work over, and it is also at issue in Evans’s essay, and Treherne’s. But it does not reign unquestioned. Treherne notes, for instance, a difference 12

Introduction between Tasso’s Aminta (written c.1573, first printed 1580) and Guarini’s Pastor fido on this vital territory: the former ends with the idea that happy endings may not justify the means, whereas Guarini celebrates the fact that happiness results from suffering – his play is more providential. Tragicomedies explore the boundaries of what kinds and degrees of providentialism can be accepted by audiences and readers – and, as King’s essay makes clear, mixedness of tone often most fully reveals itself in performance, and indeed the consequences of that mixedness can depend more than usually on how something is acted: how a particular line is said, or what unscripted gestures accompany it. Despite these there is a persistent emphasis on verisimilitude – a key Guarinian term – as a keynote characteristic of tragicomedy across disparate, even in some ways contrasting, contexts. As Treherne notes, the basis of Guarini’s polemical claim for tragicomedy against tragedy and comedy is its potential to represent the world more fully and truly. In an almost paradoxical analogy with the Italian scene, as Geraint Evans points out, Lope de Vega’s defiance of the artifice of theory in early modern Spain, where there was relatively little theorising about tragicomedy and much practice in the form of dramatic writing and performance, is itself connected to the argument for tragicomedy as a genre that accommodates all of life. Indeed, Ricardo de Turia, one of the very few apologists for the genre in Spain, and a rare example of a theoretical defender of drama, echoes Guarini in justifying tragicomedy’s allegedly monstrous mingling as a full, active reflection in art of life’s mixedness. It is a fertile paradox that the image of the hermaphrodite should be used by Turia to capture his idea of a true mixture, an embrace that is never followed by separation and reversion to individual selves. This use of hermaphroditism as a creative and affirmative metaphor for the genre provokes a connection with Hammond’s argument about an almost intuitive connection between mixed mode and cross-dressing in seventeenth-century France. The use of mimesis – the representation of reality – as a principle to justify tragicomedy is of central importance. Not only is it addressed here, as for example by Ros King in the context of Cymbeline, but earlier Shakespeare criticism has also recognised the link between generic mixedness realism. Samuel Johnson, looking back to Shakespeare with a combination of admiration and perplexity not unlike Dryden’s, commented: Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous or critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the

13

Introduction frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.13

Johnson does not use the word ‘tragicomedy’, but the closeness of his description of Shakespeare to Dryden’s view of tragicomedy is suggestive. But it also overlaps with W.B. Yeats’s observation that Shakespeare was ‘always a writer of tragicomedy’, for both Johnson and Yeats are noting that Shakespeare does not write tragedy or comedy in the strict and limited classical sense.14 In one case, the result is seen as a hybrid genre, in the other, ‘the real state of sublunary nature’. In fact, tragicomedy can very often be associated with a more realistic turn. For example, it could be that element in Bertram or Isabella that will not entirely yield to comedy; it could be that unspoken part of Leontes that lives on after the tragic crisis of The Winter’s Tale; or it could be that subjectivity in Imogen which resists, again and again, a complete assimilation into the architectonic end of the genre, and challenges the tragicomic habit of dicing with danger; it could even simply be Hermione’s wrinkles. Tragicomedies often rely on characters’ unwillingness or inability to compromise themselves entirely in the face of genre, or on a play’s own inscription of the cost of tragicomic plotting. Thus the affinity between tragicomedy and realism is considerable. This idea must, of course, contend with the manifest fact that tragicomedies are often the most contrived and ironic of plays. But this is typical of the form: the bodies of theory and criticism about tragedy and comedy are not simple, of course, but they are not so fundamentally paradoxical as that about tragicomedy. Raphael Lyne Subha Mukherji

13 14

Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ (1765), in Donald Green, ed., Samuel Johnson: The Major Works including Rasselas (Oxford, 2000), pp. 419–55 (423). W.B. Yeats, ‘The Tragic Theatre’, in Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), pp. 238–45 (240).

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1 Aristotle and Tragicomedy SARAH DEWAR-WATSON

A

RISTOTLE is, to modern thinking, a most unlikely champion of tragircomedy: for us, he is the tragic theorist par excellence. There are very few discussions of tragedy, even today, which do not register some debt to Aristotelian theory, and the Poetics has provided us with a set of terms and concepts which have become something of a fixture in our critical vocabulary. Here we might think of the ‘Aristotelian Unities’ – an idea which is not straightforwardly Aristotelian at all, but was first formulated in the terms that are now familiar to us by the Italian critic Lodovico Castelvetro (c.1505–71).1 Yet however secure our modern understanding of the Poetics might seem, it is only the most recent stage in a critical evolution in which many different cultural and aesthetic imperatives have been mapped onto it. In the sixteenth century the reception of the Poetics entered into a particularly active phase. During the period, it was not only Aristotle’s formulations of tragedy which generated great critical excitement: commentators were also interested in what the text might imply about other forms of drama, such as tragicomedy. Of course, this reading of the Poetics did not develop in isolation. Many of Aristotle’s Italian critics, in particular, maintained a strong sense of the relationship between theory and practice and were keen to identify classical texts which might endorse this kind of reading of the Poetics.2 Chief among these were the plays of Euripides – particularly his satyr play, the Cyclops – and Homer’s Odyssey, texts which were recognised as generically marginal or hybrid. For critics such as Pigna and Lenzoni, the Odyssey could be seen to exemplify many of the features typically ascribed to romance or

1

2

See Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizza et sposta (Vienna, 1570), and for an account of the text, see Bernard Weinberg, ‘Castelvetro’s Theory of Poetics’, in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, ed. R.S. Crane (Chicago, 1952), pp. 349–71. For a full account of the Italian critical reception of the Poetics, see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Chicago, 1961, repr. 1974).

15

Sarah Dewar-Watson tragicomedy, such as the inclusion of characters of different status, a complex plot, and a double ending.3 This identification of the Odyssey as a model for contemporary drama allowed critics to claim not only that there was a classical precedent for mixed genre, but that tragicomedy was, in some sense, one of the oldest – and therefore the most prestigious – literary genres of all. As an important corollary of this theoretical shift, epic itself came to appear a more heterogeneous form than had previously been thought to be the case.4 First of all, why the need for a defence of tragicomedy? Tragicomedy was, of course, enormously popular with sixteenth-century audiences, but even some of the most successful playwrights and theorists are quite sheepish about their association with the genre. One such exponent of tragicomedy, Giraldi Cinthio, writes in On the Composition of Comedies and Tragedies (1543): . . . I have composed some [plays] with happy conclusions . . . merely as a concession to the spectators and to make the plays appear more pleasing on the stage, and that I may be in conformity with the custom of our times.5 . . . n’abbiam composta alcuna a questa imagine . . . solo per servire agli spettatori, e farle riuscire piú grate in iscena, e conformarmi piú con l’uso dei nostri tempi.6

There is nothing all that new here. Aristotle makes a similar claim about audience predilection for happy endings in a key passage which will be considered shortly (Poetics, 1453a30–39).7 But as we can see from this, although Cinthio wrote a number of tragicomedies, such as the Altile (1543), the Antivalomeni (1549) and the Selene (1554), his comment acknowledges a deep ambivalence about the genre. Indeed, he avoids the term tragicommedia and prefers to use instead the variants tragedia di lieto fin (happy-ending tragedy) or tragedia mista (mixed tragedy), perhaps as a way of distinguishing his own plays from other dramatists working in a genre which enjoyed such mass appeal. But, as Cinthio recognises, in spite of this popularity – or perhaps partly because of it – tragicomedy lacked status. One of the central problems here was the absence of any recognised classical authority for the genre, and, without this, there was no context in which tragicomedy could be theorised. At a time when literary genres were undergoing a process of close critical scrutiny, the absence of an 3 4

5

6 7

For further discussion of Pigna, see Weinberg (1961), I, p. 445 and on Lenzoni, II, p. 824. This question has been explored in recent criticism by Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, 1993). Burrow goes further than both Aristotle and Renaissance critics in identifying both the Odyssey and the Iliad as generically mixed and as precursors of romance. Translated in Allan H. Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (New York, 1962), p. 256. All translations from Cinthio are taken from this edition. Other translations are my own except where stated. Giraldi Cinthio, Scritti Critici, ed. Camillo Guerrieri Crocetti (Milan, 1973), p. 184. References to the Poetics are taken from Aristotelis De Arte Poetica Liber, ed. Rudolph Kassel (Oxford, 1965).

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Aristotle and Tragicomedy established theoretical context had adverse implications for the way in which tragicomedy was perceived.8 At issue here is the premise that tragicomedy is distastefully ‘native’ rather than classical, a charge which is at the heart of Sidney’s attack on mixed genre in the Defence of Poetry (written c.1580, first printed in 1595). In fact, the term tragicomoedia is not a neoclassical invention but originates in antiquity. It is first coined by Plautus in the Prologue to the Amphitryo (59–61): I will make it a mixture: let it be a tragicomedy. I don’t think it would do to make it entirely a comedy, when we have gods and kings here . . . faciam ut commixta sit: sit tragicomoedia. nam me perpetuo facere ut sit comoedia, reges quo veniant et di, non par arbitror.9

As this shows, the ideas of social hierarchy and the status of the dramatis personae are key to Plautus’ conception of genre; here he is thinking in much the same terms as Sidney when he condemns ‘mingling kings and clowns’.10 But more significantly, it is clear from this passage that the very term tragicomoedia begins life not as part of a highly developed programmatic statement about mixed genre, but as a joke. Jonson deftly acknowledges this on the frontispiece of his First Folio (1616). The engraving by William Hole shows the parvenu form of Tragicomoedia standing triumphant over the demoted figures of tragedy and comedy – a striking iconographical gesture, given that the volume does not include a single tragicomedy.11 The image is designed as a satirical comment on the recent inversion of the classical generic hierarchy as Jonson adopts a pose of apparent deference to contemporary aesthetic priorities. And since the values which the title page declares are hardly congruous with the contents of the volume as a whole, we must suspect a note of irony. The classical references of the title page serve not to validate tragicomedy’s claim to this kind of authority but rather to undermine it: by dressing the figure of Tragicomoedia in ancient robes, Jonson seeks to expose it as a modern fake. To some extent, Jonson is right: the idea that tragicomedy had its origins in classical antiquity – at least as a dramatic form in its own right – is a Renaissance critical concoction. How, then, did critics set about retrospectively 8 9 10 11

On Renaissance attitudes to genre, see Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind; Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley and London, 1973). The quotation is taken from the Loeb edition of the play, Plautus with an English translation, ed. Paul Nixon, 5 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1916; repr. 1997), I. Philip Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poetry’, Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford, 1973), pp. 114–15. Some time after the publication of the Folio, Jonson experimented with pastoral tragicomedy with The Sad Shepherd, but the play was left unfinished at his death.

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Sarah Dewar-Watson reconstructing a tradition in which contemporary tragicomedy could be situated? Here we need to remind ourselves of the theoretical territory which the Poetics entered following its rediscovery. The earliest reliable edition of the Poetics was Giorgio Valla’s Latin translation of the text in 1498, but it was with the publication of the Aldine editio princeps in 1508 that an authoritative version of the Greek text entered circulation.12 Prior to the re-emergence of Aristotle, throughout the Middle Ages, the commentary tradition of Donatus-Evanthius had prevailed, and this had tended to characterise tragedy and comedy as diametrically opposed to one another: But many things distinguish comedy from tragedy, especially the fact that comedy is concerned with the average fortunes of people, the onset of moderate risks, and actions with happy endings. But in tragedy, everything is the opposite: great people, immense terrors, and deathly endings. Furthermore, in comedy what is stormy at first becomes smooth at the end; in tragedy the action has the opposite pattern. Then too tragedy presents the kind of life that is to be avoided, whereas the life of comedy is one which we are drawn towards. Finally, in comedy, everything comes from fictional plots whereas in tragedy, we often look to the facts of history. inter tragoediam autem et comoediam cum multa tum inprimis hoc distat, quod in comoedia mediocres fortunae hominum, parui impetus periculorum laetique sunt exitus actionum, at in tragoedia omnia contra, ingentes personae, magni timores, exitus funesti habentur, et illic prima turbulenta, tranquilla ultima, in tragoedia contrario ordine res aguntur; tum quod in tragoedia fugienda vita, in comoedia capessanda exprimitur; postremo quod omnis comoedia de fictis est argumentis, tragoedia saepe de historia fide petitur.13

This critical tradition continued to exert considerable influence in the way that ideas about genre were formalised and circulated long after the rediscovery of the Poetics, and indeed we find Donatus-Evanthius still being paraphrased by Heywood as late as 1612: Tragedies and Comedies . . . differ thus: In Comedies, turbulenta prima, tranquilla ultima, In Tragedyes, tranquilla prima, turbulenta ultima, Comedies begin in trouble and end in peace, Tragedies begin in calmes and end in tempest.14

As this suggests, Aristotle did not supplant the earlier critical orthodoxy. As is well known, there was considerable resistance from critics (including Sidney) 12 13

14

Aristotelis Rhetoricum ad Theodecten; ejusdem Rhetorica ad Alexandrum; ejusdem Ars poetica, ed. Demetrius Ducas (Venice, 1508). Evanthius, ‘De Fabula: Excerpta De Comoedia’, IV.2 9–17, Aeli Donati Commentum Terenti, ed. P. Wessner, 3 vols (Stuttgart, 1966), I. On the Donatus-Evanthius tradition, see also Henry Ansgar Kelly, Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1993). Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors, ed. Richard H. Perkinson (New York, 1941), f. F1v.

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Aristotle and Tragicomedy to ideas which began to emerge from the new commentary tradition. Instead of establishing a new orthodoxy, the Poetics promoted the diversification of different theoretical strands; these jostled alongside and often assimilated one another with surprising ease.15 In any case, it would be wrong to suggest that there is a rigid opposition between Aristotle and Donatus-Evanthius. Although the text of the Poetics was lost for many centuries, fragments of Aristotelian theory survived and mutated in other forms, and the work of Aristotle’s pupil, Theophrastus (c.370–c.285 BC), was an influential point of reference for the fourth-century grammarians. There is, then, a strong genealogical relationship between Donatus-Evanthius and Aristotle, although the two theoretical schools diverge from one another very considerably at an early stage of transmission.16 Although Aristotelian theory enjoyed some sort of currency, albeit in a travestied form, more or less continuously, the text of the Poetics, along with the texts of Greek tragedy, did not. This led to centuries of critics second-guessing what Aristotle might have said in the Poetics (as well as in the supposed lost second book of the Poetics on comedy), and also speculating what Greek drama – particularly Greek tragedy – might have been like.17 Critics were therefore thinking about Greek drama in a textual vacuum, and this inevitably gave rise to some fairly profound misconceptions about classical genres. This, in turn, did nothing to counter the false assumption that a hard, impermeable antithesis between tragedy and comedy was inherited from antiquity. As a consequence, there remained a steady commitment to the notion of turbulenta ultima, the unhappy ending, as one of the defining features of tragedy. In the first recorded reference to the Poetics in England, Roger Bacon attests to his reading of the Latin commentary on the text by Hermannus Alemannus, based on the work of the Arabic scholar Averroes.18 The manuscript from which Averroes was working was unreliable, and this meant that his commentary was flawed and misleading. He had little or no access to Greek dramatic texts, and therefore had barely any conception of what Greek tragedy might have been like. He resorts to offering analogies with Arabic literature in place of Greek, resulting in a highly distorted account of Aristotle, and of Attic tragedy itself. Meanwhile, Hermannus openly acknowledges his own limitations as a translator and admits that he was capable of translating only the commentary, leaving the text itself untouched. According to Bacon, texts such

15 16 17 18

On critical syncretism in the period, see Marvin T. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism 1531–1555 (Urbana, 1946). See A. Philip McMahon, ‘Seven Questions on Aristotelian Definitions of Tragedy and Comedy’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 40 (1929), 97–198. On the lost second book of the Poetics, see Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (Oxford, 1924). For a full reception history of the text in England, see Marvin T. Herrick, The Poetics of Aristotle in England (New Haven, 1930).

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Sarah Dewar-Watson as the Averroes-Alemannus commentary did more to impede understanding of Aristotle than to promote it: If I had the power over Aristotle’s works [sc. the medieval commentaries on them], I would have them all burned, since it is nothing but a waste of time to study them, as they are a source of misunderstanding and promote only ignorance . . . Si enim haberem potestatem super libros Aristotelis ego facerem omnes cremari, quia non est nisi temporis amissio studere in illis, et causa erroris et multiplicatio ignorantiæ . . .19

When Greek texts started coming into circulation, largely through the operation of the Aldine printing press from 1494, it was something of a revelation to discover that the drama was more nuanced and complex than tradition had come to assume.20 Plays such as the Ion and the Helen exhibit the kind of generic complexity which, even today, is regarded as the hallmark of Euripidean drama, although it is by no means confined to him.21 We might think of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, or even Aeschylus’ Eumenides as examples of happy-ending tragedy. There is of course a paradox here in that, on one level, Greek theatre sustained a very formal separation of genres: tragic and comic dramatists were involved in separate competitions, and we might expect that this would militate against any blurring of generic boundaries. At the close of the Symposium, Socrates argues that a tragic playwright could also write comedy, but Plato’s reporting of this claim shows that it is regarded as contentious.22 On the other hand, it is apparent that the two dramatic genres kept a very sharp eye on one another. Greek tragedy entertains its share of comic moments, as we see for example in the humorous depiction of the elderly Cadmus and Teiresias preparing to join in the Bacchic dance.23 We need only to think of Aristophanes’ fondness for parodying tragedy and his virtual obsession with Euripides – ideas which receive their most sustained expression in the Frogs and the Thesmophoriazusae – to realise that the genres stood in a close dialectic 19 20

21

22 23

Roger Bacon, Opera Quaedam Hactenus Inedita, ed. J.S. Brewer (London, 1859), p. 469. It should be added that Senecan drama, also coming into vogue at this time, conformed more straightforwardly to the turbulenta ultima model. Seneca’s tragedies were printed at Ferrara by Andrea Gallus about thirty years before the Aldine editions of Sophocles (1502) and Euripides (1503) respectively. On the reception of Senecan tragedy, see Bruce R. Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500–1700 (Princeton, 1988) and H.B. Charlton, The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy (Manchester, 1946). Other plays which fall into this category include the Iphigeneia in Tauris, the Helen and the Ion. For further discussion, see Bernard Knox, ‘Euripidean Comedy’, in his collected essays, Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater (Baltimore, Maryland and London, 1979), pp. 250–74. Plato, Symposium, ed. Kenneth Dover (Cambridge, 1980), 223d3–6. Euripides, Bacchae, ed. E.R. Dodds (Oxford, 1960), 170–214.

20

Aristotle and Tragicomedy with one another. Evidence concerning the structure and content of satyr plays is more fragmentary, and we still do not fully understand how these might have fitted into the emotional and aesthetic experience of ancient theatre.24 But we do at least know that even when individual tragedies typically conformed to the turbulenta ultima model, the tetralogies of which they were originally part manifested a very different kind of structural progression overall. The rediscovery of the Poetics helped to expose the presence of some of this middle ground. Of particular significance for the tragicomic theorists were Aristotle’s comments on happy-ending tragedy and tragic pleasure. In a crucial passage, Aristotle suggests that the Odyssey is a model for happy-ending tragedy: Second is the kind of composition which is said by some to be the best, that is, one that has a double composition like the Odyssey, and which ends with opposite fortunes for good and bad characters. It is held to be the best, because of the weakness of the audience, since poets follow the audience, and write according to what pleases them. But this is not the pleasure proper to tragedy, but rather to comedy; for in comedy those who are complete enemies throughout the story, such as Orestes and Aegisthus, become friends at the end and leave the stage, and nobody is killed by anybody. ´ legom3nh \p tinôn /stin sstasiv,
diplén te t§n deut3ra d’
prwth sstasin cousa kaq+per
’Odsseia kaÀ teleutôsa /x /nant8av to®v  ´ diœ thn tôn qe+trwn belt8osi kaÀ ce8rosin. doke® dŒ einai prwth !sq3neian. ‹ !kolouqo©si gœr o5 poihtaÀ kat’ ec§n poio©ntev to®v qeata®v. 1stin dŒ oc a^th !pà trag¥d8av
don§ !llœ m*llon tév kwm¥d8av o4ke8a. /ke® Ë an gœr oi ’Or3sthv kaÀ A6gisqov, f8loi Ó 1cqistoi æsin /n t¢ mθ¥, oion › genmenoi /pÀ teleutév /x3rcontai, kaÀ !poqnïskei odeÀv p’ oÕdenv. (1453a30–39.)

This passage serves to complicate Aristotle’s earlier characterisation of the relationship between drama and epic. At 1448b38–1449a1, he claims that both the Iliad and the Odyssey are prototypes of tragedy: ‘The Margites stands in the same relation to comedy as the Iliad and the Odyssey do to tragedy’ (< gœr Marg8thv !n+logon 1cei, sper ’Iliœv kaÀ
’Odsseia prÃv tœv trag¥d8av <_tw kaÀ outov prÃv tœv kwm¥d8av). Yet here he appears to › qualify or even contradict this earlier remark by suggesting that the Odyssey offers, in structural terms at least, a paradigm of comedy. It important to remember that Aristotle has strong reservations about the kind of happyending tragedy to which he refers, since in an adjacent passage, he makes clear his preference for unhappy endings (1453a12–15). But Renaissance critics

24

For a useful survey of the available evidence, see Dana F. Sutton, The Greek Satyr Play (Meisenheim am Glan, 1980).

21

Sarah Dewar-Watson tended to gloss over this, and the mere fact that Aristotle acknowledges the existence of happy-ending tragedy seems to have been taken as a kind of endorsement of it. Perhaps critics misconstrued the passage because of its proximity to another section in which Aristotle acclaims Euripides as ‘the most tragic poet’ and defends him precisely against the criticism that he makes his tragedies end in disaster (1453a29–30). Clearly, Aristotle’s approval is directed towards Euripides’ more conventional tragedies, such as the Bacchae, rather than the generically more complex plays which have already been mentioned: he appears not to recognise the Euripides so celebrated in early modern and indeed in contemporary criticism as an avant-garde experimentalist intent on deconstructing the form. Alternatively, critics may have assumed that Aristotle’s praise of Euripides was somehow transferable to a wider, or altogether different, group of plays than that which Aristotle originally had in mind. It may be that critics paid increasingly little attention to the detail of the passage, and failed to recall that Aristotle’s approving comment about Euripides is quite separate from what he has to say about the Odyssey. It should be noted that, in the Poetics, Aristotle does not explicitly recognise any particular connection between Euripides and Homer, as did later critics who elided the two separate passages, perhaps assuming that the Cyclops was evidence of strong common ground. The passage on the Odyssey interacts with another important passage in the Poetics, namely Aristotle’s discussion of catharsis, which follows on from this (1449b27–8).25 This intratextual link is implied by Aristotle’s reference to ‘the pleasure proper to tragedy’ which he mentions again in his discussion of catharsis. It is here, in the notion of tragic pleasure, that the point of collision between Aristotle and Donatus-Evanthius occurs. From this idea, commentators could identify a conflict between the structural goal of tragedy – the unhappy ending – and its teleological goal, identified by Aristotle as pleasure. This new emphasis on pleasure gradually assumed a greater priority in the way that tragedy was theorised, and one effect of this was to draw tragedy and tragicomedy into a much closer relationship than had previously been recognised. Cinthio is one of several critics who pick up on the idea that the Odyssey exemplifies some of the features typically ascribed to romance or tragicomedy. He writes: . . . from this can be seen how greatly they are deceived who have said that the Iliad gives us the form of tragedy and the Odyssey that of comedy, since both furnish an example of tragedy, the first of a tragedy ending unhappily, and the

25

A full consideration of tragic pleasure and catharsis lies beyond the scope of this essay, but among recent studies, see Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Princeton, 1992); A.D. Nuttall, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (Oxford, 1996; rev. edn, 2001) and Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (London, 2000).

22

Aristotle and Tragicomedy second of one ending happily. Critics fell into this error because they were of the opinion that there cannot be a tragedy which ends happily.26 . . . laonde si vede quanto si siano ingannati coloro che hanno detto che la Iliade ci dà la forma della tragedia e l’Odissea quella della comedia, dandoci insieme amendue l’esempio della tragedia: quella della tragedia del fine infelice: questa di quella del felice. Ma incorsero costoro in simile errore, perché furono d’opinione che non si potesse far tragedia che finisse in allegrezza.27

Cinthio’s interest in this topic is of particular significance because he is one of the most well-known Italian critics and writers outside Italy. Shakespeare, for example, used Cinthio as a source for Othello and Measure for Measure, and the fact that these are arguably two of Shakespeare’s most generically complex works invites the speculative thought that, besides reading the Hecatommithi and the Epitia, he also knew something about Cinthio’s dramatic theory.28 It is unlikely that Shakespeare read even parts of the Discorsi, although we cannot rule that out. But Cinthio addresses theoretical issues in several of the prologues to his plays, and this provides a possible conduit through which Shakespeare could have encountered some of Cinthio’s main critical ideas.29 But even if Shakespeare was not exposed to any of these explicit theoretical pronouncements, he was certainly influenced by Cinthio as a practitioner of tragedia di lieto fin, as we know from Measure for Measure. And here Shakespeare registers an important (if indirect) debt to Aristotelian theory and Renaissance critical accounts of the Odyssey. In spite of this interest in the Odyssey as a tragicomic model, attention to the poem itself seems to have remained fairly modest. This is partly because the majority of critics – like Cinthio – who concerned themselves with these questions were primarily interested in drama, rather than epic. Furthermore, attitudes to Homer remained quite ambivalent throughout the period, especially in England. Although Homer was revered by reputation, this was not matched by any real fondness for the poems themselves, an attitude which may have had something to do with the perceived harshness of Homeric Greek.30 In spite of his assiduous efforts as a translator, Chapman had only limited success in promoting the Homeric cause. Instead, some of the most innovative work focused on the Euripidean satyr play, the Cyclops. The action of the play 26 27 28

29

30

Gilbert, p. 259. Crocetti, p. 189. For individual source studies, see E.A.J. Honigmann, ‘Othello, Chappuys and Cinthio’, Notes and Queries, 13 (1966), 136–7 and F.E. Budds, ‘Material for a Study of the Sources of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure’, Revue de Littérature comparée 11 (1931), 711–36. On Shakespeare’s possible knowledge of Cinthio’s criticism, see Caroline Patey, ‘Beyond Aristotle: Giraldi Cinzio and Shakespeare’, in Italy and the English Renaissance, ed. Sergio Rossi and Dianella Savoia (Milan, 1989), pp. 167–85. Chapman refers to this prejudice in a commentary passage on Iliad I (1611). See Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (Princeton, 1957; repr., 2000), p. 42.

23

Sarah Dewar-Watson is loosely based on the Polyphemus episode in Odyssey Book 9 and this may have promoted a sense that, if Homer had been a dramatist, this is the play he would have produced. The Cyclops interested critics because of its juxtaposition of an heroic protagonist, of the kind normally identified with tragedy, with comic grotesques. The discovery that this practice had been adopted by Euripides, the playwright so highly commended by Aristotle, seemed to confer new licence. The Cyclops was translated in 1525 by Alessandro de’ Pazzi, who later published a translation of the Poetics in 1536. De Pazzi’s translation in turn influenced Cinthio’s satyr play, the Egle (1545). As this shows, the Poetics and the Cyclops appeared in a similar sort of intellectual and creative frame of reference in terms of their critical reception, although once again it would be wrong to infer that there is any inevitable or necessary connection between the two texts. Aristotle does not mention the Cyclops in the Poetics, and there is no evidence that he especially approved of it. In spite of this, in some circles, the Cyclops came to be to tragicomedy what the Oedipus Tyrannus was to tragedy. The Cyclops was known in England, although its reception outside Italy was more modest. William Gager used the Cyclops as the basis for his play, Ulysses Redux, first performed at Christ Church in 1591. On the title page of the printed text, Gager styles his version a ‘Tragedia Nova’ and prefaces the text with a letter Ad Criticum in which he cites Euripides’ Cyclops in defence of his decision to style the play as a tragedy. On one level, Gager’s play must be seen as a specialised and rather isolated response to the Cyclops, both because of its ambitious theoretical claims, and the context of its original performance as an academic drama. But this is not how Gager saw the play. Townspeople regularly attended such performances, and Gager claims that it is this section of the audience whom he had uppermost in his mind during its composition: Equidem ego hanc sive tragaediam, sive fabulam, sive narrationem historicam, sive quicquid eam dici ius fasque est, non ad exquisitam artis poeticae tanquam aurificis stateram, sed as popularis iudicii trutinam exigendam proposui, et effudi potius quam scripsi. (A7r) I myself intended this tragedy, or tale, or historical narrative, or whatever it is right and proper to call it, to be evaluated not on the exquisite goldsmith’s scales as it were of the poetic art, but on the balance of popular judgement, and I poured it out rather than wrote it.31

It is paradoxical that, in the prefatory material, Gager explicitly shuns critical context, and assumes a deliberate vagueness about what the play should be 31

William Gager, Ulysses Redux, quoted and translated by J.W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: the Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990), p. 130.

24

Aristotle and Tragicomedy designated. Yet the play is studiously observant of the contemporary theoretical concerns about which he professes to be so casual. It is a striking inversion of the usual tactic: as we have seen, critics such as Cinthio were at pains to demonstrate that tragicomedy was not a species of popular entertainment but a genre which could lay claim to its own place in high classical tradition. It is difficult to reconcile the play’s sophisticated theoretical basis with the author’s claim that he has the aesthetic preferences of the groundlings rather than the university scholars at heart (‘quaeque non tam doctissimis, quam imperitis placeat’, A7r). If Gager did indeed conceive of his play as a ‘Tragoedia Nova’ – in spite of the evasions we have just noted – we have to ask ourselves what this might have meant for the unlearned members of the audience he declares himself so anxious to please. On the other hand, Gager’s account of his poetic aims may suggest that popular audiences were more highly attuned to issues of genre than is often supposed. Even so, Gager’s work is rather far removed from the popular drama of the period. What, then, were the wider implications of these theoretical shifts for dramatists working for the popular stage? The readership of Greek texts in England was confined to a social and intellectual elite, and, in some ways, the Odyssey remained at the very rearguard of the English literary Renaissance. The first English translation of the Odyssey, by Chapman, was not published until 1614–15, and on the face of it, the poem seems to have had very little impact on the literature of the period. Yet the presence of numerous themes which are common to the Odyssey and English tragicomedy – sea voyages, kidnapping, piracy – invite us to think again. Above all, we might think of the importance of recognition scenes in the Odyssey (especially Books 19 and 23), a device which is exploited to such great effect in Renaissance tragicomedy.32 These Odyssean motifs help to define the distinctive texture of Shakespeare’s late plays; indeed it has been suggested that, following critical interest in Euripides’ Cyclops and the popularity of satyrs in contemporary masque, the figure of the satyr was influential in Shakespeare’s construction of The Tempest.33 Similarly, too, sea ventures form the basis of several works in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, such as The Island Princess (c.1619), The Custom of the Country (c.1619) and The Sea Voyage (1622).34 Critics typically account for the presence of these themes in terms of the influence of Greek prose romance, which is, without doubt, an important source.35 But, as this brief study has suggested, Renaissance critics 32

33 34 35

Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford, 1988) is the classic study. The statue scene in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (V. 3) exemplifies the recognition scene at its most imaginative. See Robert Henke, Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Newark, 1997), ch. 5. For further discussion, see Sarah Dewar-Watson, ‘Shakespeare’s Dramatic Odysseys: Pericles and The Tempest’, Classical and Modern Literature 25 (2005), 23–40. See, for example, Carol Gesner, Shakespeare and the Greek Romance: A Study of Origins

25

Sarah Dewar-Watson identified a close relationship between the Odyssey and the emerging form of tragicomedy, and we need to look further back into the literary genealogy of these narratives, which derive ultimately from Homer. This is not to suggest that the poems figure prominently as a direct source for English tragicomedy. But the influence of Homer in translation has surely been understated. The Odyssey was widely translated into Italian and other vernaculars, including Lodovico Dolce’s L’Ulisse, tratto dell’Odissea d’Homero (1573) and Giralomo Bacelli’s L’Odissea D’Homero tradotta in volgare Fiorentino (1582). Besides these editions, there was the Latin text by Spondanus, Homeri Quae Extant Omnia (1583), which Chapman himself used.36 Reference books and dictionaries such as Natalis Comes’ Mythologiae (1551) and Charles Estienne’s Dictionarium Historicum, Geographicum, Poeticum (1596) provided information about mythological characters, including those from Homer, in summary form.37 And if we widen our view of the field still further, there are versions of the Cyclops legend in popular Latin texts such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 14), and Virgil’s Aeneid (Book 3) which may have helped to promote interest in some of the main narrative episodes which appear in the Odyssey. Moreover, Homer was widely anthologised in commonplace books and florilegia, perhaps attesting to a greater willingness – or ability – to engage with the poetry in excerpted form than in the context of an entire epic.38 The presence of such a diversity of sources suggests that, in spite of the prohibitive linguistic challenges which a complete reading of the Odyssey might present, there were many other ways in which its main narrative contents would have been known. And given the centrality of the poem in the Renaissance project of theorising tragicomedy, there is a need for further work on the relationship between the Odyssey and the motifs which it shares with the drama of the period. Returning, then, to Aristotle, this essay has set out to show two things. First, the importance in the period of intertextual approaches to the Poetics, which we have seen in relation to the Odyssey, and Euripidean drama; and second, that the Poetics had the surprising effect of destabilising, rather than consolidating, orthodox conceptions of genre. It is easy now to think of the Poetics as a text which has generated some rather immoveable ideas about drama, and

36 37

38

(Lexington, 1970). F.D. Hoeniger, ‘The Function of Structure and Imagery in Shakespeare’s Last Plays’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 1954), comments on the role of Greek prose romance in the mediation of Odyssean motifs in Shakespeare’s late plays, pp. 304–6. For a bibliographical summary, see R.R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, 1954), pp. 516–17. The importance of these editions is argued by John Pitcher, ‘Some Call Him Autolycus’, in In Arden: Editing Shakespeare, ed. Ann Thompson and Gordon McMullan (London, 2003), pp. 252–68. I am grateful to Tania Demetriou for drawing my attention to the prevalence of Homer in texts of this kind.

26

Aristotle and Tragicomedy tragedy, of course, above all. But we should remind ourselves that the text is more flexible – indeed, more slippery – than that, and that what many Renaissance critics found when they read the Poetics differs in no small measure from what we find today.

27

2 The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy: Guarini’s Il pastor fido and its Critical Reception in Italy, 1586–1601 MATTHEW TREHERNE

A

S WAS SO often the case with debates over new literary works in rsixteenth-century Italy, the dispute over Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido (1581) engaged its participants in reflection on both the details of the text, and broader literary theory. Criticism of the two most widely debated works of narrative poetry of the period, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, for instance, had provoked discussion of broader questions over the validity of their respective genres, their moral utility, the role of pleasure in the reader’s experience, and the appropriateness of their linguistic style.1 At stake in this criticism, and always made explicit, were theoretical issues of considerable complexity, and about which agreement was often hard to reach: no easy distinction can be drawn between theoretical reflection and literary criticism as applied to individual texts in the Cinquecento (indeed, it is unlikely that such a distinction can be drawn in any context). Yet at the same time as literary theory was being transformed by the the late fifteenth-century rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics, and its transmission, which gathered pace around the middle of the Cinquecento, literary practice was challenging the categories and precepts which that text seemed to offer. It was not only new works which presented problems. Dante’s Commedia already constituted such a challenge.2 Its genre in particular was problematic to Renaissance readers. Dante’s decision to describe his work as a ‘comedy’ seemed to sit awkwardly with accepted understandings of the term: it 1 2

See Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Chicago, 1961), II, pp. 954–1073. On Renaissance responses to Dante, see for instance Deborah Parker, Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance (Durham and London, 1993), and Simon Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 2005).

28

The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy mixed linguistic styles, where comedy was supposed to be in a low style; it was not performed; it dealt with the actions of characters from a wide range of social backgrounds.3 The solution adopted by many critics was to consider it an epic. This tended to lead either to strained readings of the text, which insisted that it fitted into Aristotelian categories, and ascribed beginning, middle and end to its plot; or to the rejection of the text (at least as poetry: some insisted that the Commedia was no poem at all, but a work of moral philosophy) because it did not fit those categories.4 The flourishing literary critical culture of Renaissance Italy therefore frequently sat uneasily with much of the vernacular tradition that same period inherited and developed. By the end of the sixteenth century, when Guarini composed his Il pastor fido, his conception of the new genre of tragicomedy needed to be articulated against the backdrop of this Aristotelianism – which, as the range of responses to Dante shows, was manifested in criticism in myriad ways. In naming his work a ‘tragicommedia pastorale’, Guarini makes clear that it will transgress any clear-cut barriers between tragedy and comedy, and will moreover be identified in some way with the newly popular form of pastoral drama. How did Guarini’s play reconcile the expectations attached to tragedy, comedy and pastoral? How was it received in the context of the literary theory of the late Cinquecento? And how did Guarini defend his own text against the charges brought by its more hostile critics?

3

4

For a discussion of the ways in which Dante’s work challenged medieval genre categories, see Zygmunt G. Baranski, ‘Dante Alighieri: experimentation and (self-)exegesis’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. A. Minnis and I. Johnson, 8 vols (Cambridge, 2005), II, pp. 561–82. The desire to categorise Dante’s poem persists: one recent edition and translation of the text explains that ‘Dante uses the word “comedy” to denote poetry written in a humble style in the vernacular, which ends happily’ (Dante, Inferno, trans. J.G. Nichols (London, 2005), p. 167); in fact he uses the term in a way which would have been unsettling to his medieval readers, and which implies a stylistic register which is all-encompassing. In the debate over Il pastor fido, Jason Denores was to endorse the view that Dante’s poem was a work of theology and of moral philosophy, not a poem (Apologia contra l’autor del verato di Jason Denores di quanto ha egli ditto in un suo discorso delle tragicommedie e delle pastorali (Padua, 1590), p. 358). An example of a wholesale condemnation of Dante’s text is Bellisario Bulgarini’s Repliche alle risposte del Sig. Orazio Capponi sopra le prime cinque particelle delle sue Considerazioni (Siena, 1585), which argues that Dante’s text mixes genres, does not imitate action in the manner set out by Aristotle in the Poetics, and does not have unity of plot (p. 72). This leads him to reiterate his view, expressed in a text published in 1583 (but dated 1576) that Dante’s poem fails to meet the criteria of any specific genre, and is therefore no poem at all. For a full account of Bulgarini’s views, see Weinberg, pp. 853–860.

29

Matthew Treherne

Il pastor fido: Tragicomedy and the Space of Pastoral5 The text of Il pastor fido was circulated in manuscript form and first performed in 1581, being first published in 1589, and eventually printed in its final form in 1602. Its pastoral setting links it to the increasing popularity of the pastoral in the sixteenth century, which began with Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, a set of pastoral poems framed within a prose narrative and first published in 1501. Arcadia was written for, and makes frequent reference to, the Neapolitan court; but it was in Ferrara that pastoral developed as a dramatic form. Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio’s Egle, first performed in 1545, marked a key stage in this development. Although the characters are not human shepherds, the play establishes the theme of a central female character who wishes to avoid the love of a male suitor in favour of the pleasures of hunting. The most popular work of the 1570s, Torquato Tasso’s Aminta, also treats this theme, presenting the relatively simple plot of the nymph, Silvia, who wishes to devote her life to hunting, and who rejects Aminta’s advances. The famous words, ‘if it is pleasing, it is permitted’ (‘s’ei piace, ei lice’ (681)) of the first chorus suggest some of the hedonism of the play, although the play’s sensuality is played out in the words spoken, rather than in any onstage action.6 There is no great virtue made of the suffering undergone on the way to the play’s happy ending: the play concludes with the thought that the turbulence of the drama may not be fully compensated for by the fortunate outcome: ‘I do not know if the bitterness which this man has felt serving, loving, weeping and despairing, can be fully sweetened by any present sweetness.’7 Il pastor fido invites numerous contrasts with Aminta. Most obviously, it was considerably longer, at 6862 lines compared with Tasso’s play’s 1996 – a fact which made it subject to substantial cuts in its actual performance. The hedonism of Aminta is tempered in Il pastor fido by a tension between moral authority and sensual desire in the play. Crucially, as the following summary shows, the plot is considerably more complex, drawing on both tragic and comic elements. Montano, the chief priest of Arcadia, plans to marry his son Silvio to Amarilli, with a view to fulfilling a prophecy and ending the sufferings of Arcadia which had followed the betrayal of Aminta years before. There are problems, however: Silvio is more interested in hunting than in love; and

5

6

7

For useful surveys of Renaissance pastoral drama, see for example Richard Andrews, ‘Theatre’, in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 277–300 (especially pp. 292–300); Marzia Pieri, La scena boschereccia nel rinascimento italiano (Padua, 1983). Quotations from Aminta are taken from Torquato Tasso, Aminta. Il re Torrismondo. Il mondo creato, ed. Bruno Basile (Rome, 1999). Throughout this essay, translations from Italian are my own. ‘Non so se il molto amaro, / che provato ha costui servendo, amando, / piangendo e disperando, / raddolcito puot’esser pienamente / d’alcun dolce presente’ (Act V, 141–45).

30

The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy Amarilli is secretly loved by Mirtillo. To complicate matters further, Dorinda loves Silvio. At the same time, the wicked Corisca wishes to seduce Mirtillo, and rejects Satiro, an old man who has been in love with her; Satiro plots revenge. Corisca gains the trust of Amarilli, and suggests that she free her from the obligation to marry Silvio. Although Amarilli spurns Mirtillo’s advances, she reveals in soliloquy that she is secretly in love with Mirtillo; this soliloquy is overheard by Corisca. Corisca spins the lie to Amarilli that Silvio is in love with Lisetta, a nymph, and that they will meet in a cave. This offers hope to Amarilli: if she catches the couple together, she can escape marriage to Silvio. Corisca then tells Mirtillo that Amarilli will be meeting a shepherd in the same cave; seeing her, Mirtillo resolves to follow her, catch her with her lover, kill them both, and then kill himself. But Satiro spies Mirtillo entering the cave, and wrongly concludes that Mirtillo is going to meet Corisca there. He blocks the cave with a rock, before going to fetch the priests. Amarilli is condemned to death for debauched behaviour, and it seems that Corisca will triumph. Silvio, meanwhile, wounds Dorinda in a hunting accident, and is spurred by pity to love her. Mirtillo insists that he should die in place of Amarilli, until his father, Carino arrives. A set of revelations follow: Amarilli’s innocence is demonstrated, and it emerges that Mirtillo’s father is in fact Montano, the priest. With this latter revelation, it becomes clear that Mirtillo is, after all, the man who should marry Amarilli; through their union the prophecy can be fulfilled. Corisca is converted from her evil ways by the sight of the happiness of the two lovers. This plot summary demonstrates Guarini’s attempt to create a plot which is single and whole, coming close to a tragic ending in the fourth act, yet producing a comic ending by way of developments which are necessary, yet surprising. The characters are from various ranks of society, ranging from the noble lovers to Satiro. There are several comic moments, such as ‘il gioco de la cieca’ in Act III – a sort of blind man’s buff, or perhaps blind nymph’s buff – played by Amarilli and a chorus of nymphs, into which Mirtillo attempts to intervene. There is occasional double entendre, as in Act II, scene 2, when Dorinda responds to Silvio’s offer of two golden apples by offering him apples of her own – in other words, her breasts. Such a plot summary also suggests the sheer escapism of the genre: it takes its audience to a point at which they fear for a tragic ending, before restoring order. In one sense, the pastoral setting seems to be entirely in keeping with such escapism. It enables a projection out of the courtly setting into an idealised Arcadia; with such projection came a certain amount of liberation from the constraints of normal morality and courtly decorum. The abundance of time for otiose reflection in Arcadia also lends itself to graceful discourse, transposing an ideal of the courtly life into this other setting. Such discourse takes the form of complex and Latinate syntax, and a classicising register which often recalls Petrarch (as some of Guarini’s critics would comment, such a register moves the speech of the shepherds of Il pastor fido far from that of real shepherds). And, whereas Tasso’s 31

Matthew Treherne Aminta had concluded with the thought that a happy ending need not compensate for any suffering encountered on the way, Il pastor fido ends with the idea that true happiness is precisely that which comes after suffering, and which is born out of virtue: ‘quello è vero gioire / che nasce da virtù dopo il soffrire’ (1612–13). Where the conflict of Aminta had been played out between two forms of pleasure-seeking – between Silvia’s love of hunting, and Aminta’s love of Silvia – Il pastor fido sets its conflicts in the context of a broader tension between the authority of the Arcadian society’s elders, and the desires of individuals within that society. That tension, and the micro-tensions within it, are all resolved in the play’s ending. Arcadia becomes a place where not only are individuals’ desires reconciled with each other, but those sensual desires are themselves reconciled with moral authority. But it would be wrong to see the pastoral space of Il pastor fido – or indeed of pastoral literature in the Renaissance as a whole – as wholly escapist. Arcadia inevitably evokes notions of Eden; yet even the most harmonious and escapist representation of Arcadia has an audience of fallen humans. And indeed a sense of exile permeates much of the pastoral literature of the Italian Renaissance. The narrator of Sannazaro’s Arcadia (published at the very start of the Cinquecento – ambiguously named ‘Sincero’ – is himself a character caught between the two worlds.8 He reveals his identity in a brief allusion to homesickness, in a moment when the shepherds are particularly satisfied with their pastoral lot (p. 106). The text ends with his reference to the sheer impossibility of communicating Arcadian life in the court: the music of Arcadia sounds false in the palaces of the city (p. 239). Arcadian happiness can only ever be glimpsed from the outside: it is not a happiness which can be shared. The ambiguous status of the audience is clear, moreover, from the beginning of the book, in which the audience is addressed as though they were a part of the pastoral setting; yet such an address is presented in highly erudite terms: the author talks of playing ‘the humble flute of Corydon’ (‘la umile fistula di Coridone’, p. 55), but at the very instant of affirming the humility of his discourse he uses the highly Latinate term ‘fistula’ and makes a Virgilian reference. Even at the moment when the audience is invited to feel part of the simpler, harmonious world of Arcadia, it is reminded that it is a courtly audience and therefore estranged from that world. Indeed, the last two chapters of the text describe the narrator’s rejection of the pastoral in favour of city life.9 In the case of Il pastor fido, this sense of estrangement is integrated into the relationship between text and audience in a slightly different, but equally powerful way. The action of the play is located in a postlapsarian age, in which an act of transgression (caused by the temptation of a woman) must be atoned by sacrifices until it is purged by the willing self-sacrifice of a good 8 9

I use Francesco Erspamer’s edition of the text (Milan, 1990). On Sannazaro’s Arcadia, and its ambivalent attitude towards the pastoral life, see William J. Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (Hanover and London, 1983), pp. 96–148.

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The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy shepherd. The happy resolution of the play represents the return to the blissful state before Arcadian sin. Other elements in the play invite us to draw a link between the plot and providential history: not least Mirtillo’s story, which has him rescued as a baby and saved by intervention from being ritually sacrificed. If the play offers this overview of providential history, then the audience must find itself doubly estranged from its action: first, by virtue of the distancing effect of its Arcadian setting, and then by the resolution of its plot into a time beyond their earthly lives. This is not necessarily a negative estrangement: the happy ending of the play implies the destination of the virtuous soul in the restoration of union with God. But to describe Il pastor fido as ‘escapism’ is not enough, and the happy resolution of the tragicomic plot is perhaps more ambiguous when performed for an audience than it might seem. It is worth noting at this stage a further effect of the relationship between the pastoral and the tragicomic plot. The emphasis in the pastoral on the leisurely rejection of courtly life might sit uneasily with the need for unity of plot. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the pastoral interlude of Canto VII of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), the epic poem narrating the first Crusade, in which the character Erminia regains her strength under the care of a group of shepherds. In many ways this episode represents an ambiguous presence in the poem. The pastoral is at the same time a place of escape, and a focus of critique: the pastoral life has been willingly chosen as a release from courtly life, and from the demands of acquisition and war (8–13). Yet the Gerusalemme liberata places both poetic and moral importance on the military progress of the crusaders. That military progress provides the dominant narrative shape of the poem – a shape which Tasso conceives according to the precepts of Aristotle’s Poetics, as having unity, and beginning, middle and end: precepts which are also evident in the plot of Il pastor fido. And that progress is also the dominant moral scheme of the poem. Spatial progress to Jerusalem is also progress towards the Holy Sepulchre; and it is God himself, at the very opening of the poem, who condemns the stasis of the armies in favour of the forward motion of military advance. Yet in Canto VII, Tasso presents the shepherds as possessing wisdom: following one shepherd’s critique of military values, the authorial voice describes him as ‘that wise man’ (‘quel saggio’). The choice of a pastoral life is a choice to leave the beginning, middle and end of Tasso’s plot. Indeed, in Tasso’s heavily religious rewriting of the Gerusalemme liberata, the Gerusalemme conquistata (1593), this episode is eliminated, as part of Tasso’s general drive to remove distractions from his poem. In many ways, the pastoral setting enables Guarini to develop key aspects of his tragicomedy. Its distance from a real setting enables him to represent comic as well as noble action; he can represent various levels of society without worrying about compromising verisimilitude. By allying his tragicomedy with the fashionable genre of pastoral drama, he also taps into the popularity of 33

Matthew Treherne pastoral, ensuring performances of the play in prestigious settings.10 But in making his play a ‘tragicommedia pastorale’, with a complex plot moving towards a clear conclusion, he does alter some of the expectations which his audience might have had of the pastoral. As we shall see, bringing the pastoral, tragic and comic together in one play was to prove controversial, and would lead to multiple criticisms by more conservative members of Guarini’s audience, who rejected what they saw as the unsatisfactory hybridity of this new genre.

Critical Resistance to Tragicomedy The circulation and early performances of Il pastor fido quickly led to a dispute over its worth – a dispute which touched upon issues central to Renaissance literary theory. The debate can be summarised in three related questions. First of all, was it possible to mix the comic and tragic genres or (to use the contemporary term) ‘species’ of literature? In other words, was a ‘tragicomedy’ simply an imperfect and unwarranted mixture of the two, or was it a third species, perfect in its own right? This problem was further complicated by the ambiguous status of the pastoral, a relatively new type of drama which had never been clearly defined in criticism. Second: what was the moral purpose of literature: should it teach by example, or might it have some other way of improving the morals of its readers and viewers? The third question, which was never far from the other two, concerned the way in which Aristotle’s Poetics ought to be understood. Did this work set out rules for all literature, for all time, or did the ideas it contained need to be adapted for a different age? None of the major participants in the debate rejected the authority of Aristotle; the issue was rather how that authority should be used. The major texts produced in opposition to the notion of tragicomedy were Jason Denores’s Discorso,11 and Apologia contra l’autor del Verrato (1590); Faustino Summo’s Discorsi poetici (1600);12 and Giovanni Pietro Malacreta’s Considerationi (1600).13 Guarini’s intervention in defence of Il pastor fido is largely constituted by the two texts entitled Verrato (1588 and 1593), published anonymously, most of the contents of which appear later in the 10

11

12 13

For a meticulous discussion and analysis of one such performance, see Lisa Sampson, ‘The Mantuan Performance of Guarini’s Il pastor fido and Representations of Courtly Identity’, Modern Language Review 98: 1 (2003), 65–83. Discorso di Jason Denores intorno a que’ principi, cause, ed accrescimenti che la commedia, la tragedia ed il poema eroico ricevono dalla filosofia morale e civile e da’ Governatori delle Reppubbliche [1586], printed in Guarini, Opere (Verona, 1737), pp. 151–206. Discorsi poetici ne’ quali si discorreno le piu principali questioni di poesia, e si dichiarano molti luoghi dubbi e difficili intorno all’arte del poetare (Padua, 1600). Considerationi di Giovanni Pietro Malacreta sopra il Pastor Fido tragicomedia pastorale del molto illustre Sig. Cavalier Battista Guarini (Vicenza, 1600).

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The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy Compendio della poesia tragicomica (1601).14 He was by no means alone in defending the work: texts broadly supportive of Guarini’s position and Il pastor fido included Paolo Beni’s Risposta alle considerationi del Malacreta (1600),15 and Orlando Pescetti’s Difesa del Pastor fido (1601).16 The opening gambit in this dispute was Denores’s first Discorso, which claims in the first instance not to be concerned with tragicomedy, but to be a study of the ways in which tragedy, comedy, and heroic poetry derive from moral and civil philosophy. He is keen to emphasise that he has no desire to attack any author or text in particular; but his entire argument leads to the dismissal of the notion of ‘tragicommedia pastorale’, and it was perfectly clear to Guarini who Denores had in mind. As Guarini points out in the first Verrato, ‘in all of poetic art [. . .] you will find no more than one pastoral tragicomedy’: his own.17 Denores’s argument stems from a interpretation of the Poetics in which the forms of poetry were determined by philosophers, ‘in order to generate good behaviour [buoni costumi] in their republics, and to bring them to happiness’.18 This public function was solely didactic, in the sense that the viewers would imitate the great actions they saw depicted. It was with this aim in mind that three types of poetry were developed, always in the service of the republic, and each with a distinctive purpose. The heroic poem set out the example of a legitimate prince, to show citizens how such a prince would labour for the good of his subjects; tragedy, by contrast, was intended to make citizens afraid of tyranny; and comedy was developed in order to dispose them well towards popular life (p. 155). Aristotle’s concern was solely with the civic utility of poetry: he only wrote of those forms of poetry which ‘by either receiving his rules and principles, or by not receiving them, could lead respectively to good or bad habits and customs in the souls of citizens’.19 It is for this reason that the pastoral was of no interest to Aristotle, for the habits of shepherds and of country folk, their songs, their love affairs, could in no way teach urban dwellers to live well; and it is for this reason that pastoral drama remained worthless in the current age (pp. 199–200). 14

15

16

17 18 19

The Verrato texts appear in Guarini, Opere. The most recent edition of the Compendio, from which I cite in this essay, appears in Il pastor fido e il Compendio della poesia tragicomica, ed. Gioachino Brognoligo (Bari, 1914). Risposta alle considerazioni o dubbi dell’Eccellentissimo Signor Dottor Malacreta sopra il Pastor Fido, con altre varie dubitationi tanto contra detti dubbi e considerazioni, quanto contra l’istesso Pastor Fido (Padua, 1600). Orlando Pescetti, Difesa del pastor fido tragicommedia pastorale del molto Illustre signor Cavalier Battista Guarini da quanto gli è stato scritto contro da gli Eccellentissimi signori Faustin Summo, e Giovanni Pietro Malacreta (Verona, 1601). ‘in tutta l’arte poetica [. . .] non troverete più d’una tragicommedia pastorale’ (p. 305). ‘per generar buoni costumi nelle loro reppubbliche, e per inviarle alla felicità’ (p. 154). ‘che ricevendoli [his rules and principles], o non ricevendoli, potevano generar; o buoni; o cattivi costumi negli animi de’ cittadini’ (p. 199).

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Matthew Treherne Having established the respective civic roles of tragedy, comedy and epic poetry, Denores turns to the question of tragicomedy – a question to which he has been building throughout his treatise. Given his belief in the civic utility of poetry, and in the clearly demarcated roles of the different genres of poetry, it is unsurprising to find that he dismisses the very notion of the genre. Comedy and tragedy are fundamentally incompatible entities, both in terms of the type of action they depict, the reversal of fortune they show, and the type of character they involve.20 The only way in which tragicomedy could exist would be to have a plot which was double, ‘one depicting private individuals, which must finish in happiness; and the other, representing the actions of illustrious persons, which must finish in adverse circumstances’.21 But such a double plot, lacking the Aristotelian virtue of unity, would be unsatisfactory. The belief that Aristotle’s categorisation set out universal precepts was also the basis for Faustino Summo’s arguments against tragicomedy in general, and Il pastor fido in particular, in his Discorsi poetici. Aristotle was ‘a most diligent investigator of the possible species of poetry’, who ‘would have provided some indication’ of the possibility of the tragicomic.22 That tragicomedy might be permissible under an Aristotelian scheme is therefore a priori an ‘assurda opinione’ (p. 82), for the Poetics presents universal and immutable principles. In principle, then, there is little reason to give credence to the notion of tragicomedy; and in the twelfth of his Discorsi, Summo develops his critique with detailed reference to Il pastor fido. He attacks any notion that tragicomedy might successfully combine tragedy and comedy. Guarini’s plot, Summo argues, can in no way be said to be tragic. Mirtillo is not a tragic figure, nor is his action tragic: for the story of someone killing themselves for love is an everyday story, whereas a tragedy requires the action of a great man, who falls into misfortune through a small failing of character (p. 87). Nor can it be comic: for Summo refuses to see anything humorous in those elements which he supposes ought to make the audience laugh. Moreover, Summo does not see how, even if they had been funny, they could have been truly tragicomic, since they would not be affected or tempered in any way by the tragic.23 In pushing his logic in different directions, Summo wishes to show how Guarini’s

20

21 22 23

‘essendo in un certo modo la comedia contradittoria alla tragedia, ed avendo per soggetto azion di permutazion di fortuna, e di persone contrarie, dovendo la favola dell’una terminar in allegrezza, e la favola dell’altra terminar in infelicità’ (p. 200). ‘l’una delle persone private, che per sua natura deve finir in allegrezza; e l’altra delle persone illustri, che per sua natura deve finir nell’avversa fortuna’ (p. 200). ‘Aristotile diligentissimo investigatore delle specie possibili della poesia n’avrebbe dato qualche indizio’ (p. 83). Discorsi, p. 88. Summo uses the term ‘ridicolo’ for ‘funny’: he is drawing on a notion which was generally understood to refer to laughing at an object which is ‘mixed with some ugliness’ (I paraphrase Richard Andrews, who cites Gian Giorgio Trissino, Scripts and Scenarios: the performance of comedy in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 208–16).

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The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy tragicomedy is devoid of both tragedy and comedy, and how the notion of tragicomedy is meaningless. Implicit in Summo’s discussion of individual moments in the plot is the idea of character consistency and appropriateness. The attempt to mix tragic and comic elements means that Guarini has had to introduce inappropriate behaviour in some of his characters. One example, to which Summo spells out his objections in laborious detail, is the conversation between Dorinda and Silvio of Act II, scene 2. Silvio has lost his hound, Melampo; Dorinda, claiming to have it, asks Silvio for a sign of his love in return for the dog. The humour in this scene derives from Silvio’s inability to understand the innuendos used by Dorinda, who wishes to preserve her modesty; and by the mismatch between Silvio’s love for his hound (whom he addresses as a lover when he is found again) and Dorinda’s love for Silvio. But when Summo comes to analyse the scene, he finds Dorinda’s innuendos unacceptable. For instance, he criticises the moment when Silvio offers Dorinda two golden apples in return for his dog, and Dorinda responds: ‘I am not short of apples; I could give you some of those which are perhaps the most flavoursome and beautiful, if you did not scorn my gifts.’24 ‘Is this not a modest response from a maiden?’ asks Summo. ‘Is this not a fine way for a nymph to behave [. . .]? Who cannot realise that with these words she signals to him that she wants to give him [. . .] the apples of her breasts?’25 Giovanni Pietro Malacreta makes criticisms of the examples of character in the play, without explicitly relating this to the question of genre. Whereas Summo had focused on the appropriateness of comic behaviour in a maiden, Malacreta’s objections focus largely on the moments in which the comic elements in the plot demand that characters act in inconsistent ways. Thus Silvio is criticised for being inconsistent for changing his mind about love. Corisca’s repentance, which completes the happy ending of the play, is also implausible: from being an immoral woman, ‘she becomes the best, most chaste, most virtuous [. . .] that has ever been found’.26 In both of these cases, although Malacreta does not make the point explicit, the inconsistency he identifies can be directly associated with the avoidance of a tragic ending to the play, in favour of the comic conclusion. Not only is Corisca’s conversion improbable, but it also sets an immoral example: ‘there is nothing less tolerable for a poet to do, than to make a wicked person have a good and happy ending’.27 24 25

26 27

‘A me poma non mancano; potrei / a te darne di quelle che son forse / più saporite e belle, se I miei doni tu non avessi a schivo’ (418–21). ‘Non è questa una modesta risposta di una Vergine? Non questo un bel costume [. . .] di una Ninfa? Chi non s’accorge tantosto che con quelle parole gli accenna di volergli donare [. . .] le poma del suo seno?’ (p. 92). ‘diviene la miglior donna, la più casta, la più honesta [. . .] che mai si trovasse’ (p. 73). ‘non è cosa men tolerabile ne i poeti, che ‘l far, che persona scelerata sortisca buono, e felice fine’ (p. 73).

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Matthew Treherne In addition to the problem of the mixing of tragic and comic, a recurrent theme in the criticisms of Il pastor fido was the problematic nature of the link between the tragicomic and the pastoral. Much debate centred on the title of the play: ‘Pastor fido, tragicommedia pastorale’. As we saw, Denores’s belief in the didactic importance of poetry for urban dwellers helps him to explain why Aristotle did not discuss eclogues. Indeed, Denores goes on to argue, pastoral drama with a happy ending could have the dangerous effect of encouraging city-dwellers to leave the towns and move to the countryside: ‘if [the playwright] makes the pastoral plot with a turbulent beginning, and a prosperous ending, this is a tacit invitation to men to leave the city, and to fall in love with peasant life’.28 For Summo, on the other hand, the problem was one of style. Given that a dominant association with the pastoral was with love lyrics, performed outside of the demands of plot, it is unsurprising that Guarini’s style is described as being ‘entirely lyric, and unsuitable for dramatic composition [. . .]. It is suitable only for singing of love to the sound of the cithara’.29 In an impressive display of pedantry, Malacreta went so far as to say that it would have been better not to have described Mirtillo as a ‘pastor fido’, because the phrase could only refer to the behaviour of a person in their dealings as a shepherd, such as offering their wool for sale at an honest price. Nor did he like the tautology of the title: obviously a play called ‘pastor fido’ was bound to be a pastoral. More importantly, the language used by the characters is implausible when spoken by shepherds. The characters of Il pastor fido speak in fine terms, using, for example, phrases ‘more worthy of some Platonic philosopher, than of a lowly shepherd’.30 Any effort by Guarini to confer eloquence upon his characters is bound to be improbable.

Guarini’s Defence of Pastoral Tragicomedy The multiple criticisms which emerged in the responses of Denores, Summo and Malacreta reflect some of the ways in which Guarini’s play challenged the assumptions of Renaissance Italians. Not all Guarini’s audience were as shocked by the play as these three readers, of course: Guarini is able confidently to assert in the first Verrato that in criticising his play ‘you [Denores] blame that which the world commends; despise that which it respects; mock that which is dear to it’.31 But the criticisms provide a focus for Guarini’s 28

29 30 31

‘se egli costituisce la favola pastoral col principio turbolento, e col fine prospero, questo è un tacito inviter gli uomini a lasciar le città, ed ad innamorarsi della vita contadinesca’ (Discorso, p. 202). ‘Tutto lirico, e mal confaceuole a componimento rappresentativo [. . .] è atto solamente a cantar amori al suon di cithera’ (p. 93). ‘degno più tosto di qualche Filosofo Platonico, che di basso pastore’ (p. 74). ‘Biasimate quello, che tutto ’l mondo commenda, sprezzate quel, ch’egli stima, schernite quell che gli è caro’ (Primo Verrato, p. 307).

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The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy development of his theory of tragicomedy, and sharpen key points in relation to the intellectual climate of the late Cinquecento. The first step in achieving this is in refuting Denores’s mode of Aristotelianism. Two points in particular are crucial to Guarini’s argument. First is the belief that Aristotle did not set out rules of poetry for all time, but rather attempted to bring together the best of the poetry of his time, those works which were praised in his day.32 (This was why Aristotle had not mentioned genres of poetry such as those exemplified by Dante’s Commedia, or Ariosto’s Orlando furioso.) Secondly, Guarini sets out the need to distinguish between rules of nature, and secondary rules. There are basic rules of poetry, which have the status of rules of nature, and which must always be obeyed: ‘someone who does not imitate, who does not write in verse, who does not speak with decorum, who does not give delight, who does not instruct, is a bad poet, or is not a poet; and these things must be done in all species of poetry’.33 Other rules, however, are secondary, and can be adapted. This distinction enables Guarini to justify his development of a third genre. The crucial point which needed to be argued was of the validity of the third genre, which Denores had found monstrous. First, on the level of plot, a tragicomedy is not simply a yoking together of a whole tragedy with a whole comedy, to such an extent that one could separate the two; it is to create a third type of play, ‘perfect in its type’,34 which takes those aspects of tragedy and comedy which can be combined without jeopardising verisimilitude, and creating a single plot. The aim is to determine which elements in the two genres are ‘repugnanti’ and which are ‘conformi’ (p. 225). Tragedy and comedy in any case have much in common: for instance, a limited timescale, a dramatised story, verisimilitude, recognition, and reversal (p. 225); although there are differences, it is important to determine which differences are so incompatible that it would be impossible to combine them. The major difference between them is in character, and the type of action: tragedy imitates great personages, serious action, terror and commiseration; comedy, instead, private affairs of private individuals, and laughter. However, Guarini insists that there is no violation of the laws of nature or of the poetic arts in introducing into one plot characters who are great and not great. To make his point, he draws on classical antecedents, but also on real life. ‘So maybe princes are always in majesty? Don’t they ever deal with private affairs?’35 Based on real life, there is no reason to suppose that there is something improbable about 32 33

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‘erano in pregio a suo’ tempi’ (Primo Verrato, p. 234). ‘Chi non imita, chi non versifica, che non parla con decoro, chi non diletta, chi non giova, è mal Poeta, o non è poeta, e questo si dee fare in tutte le spezie di poesia’ (Primo Verrato, pp. 233–34). ‘perfetto in suo genere’ (Compendio, p. 224). ‘Stanno forse i prencipi sempre in maestà? Non trattano essi mai di cose private?’ (Compendio, p. 226).

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Matthew Treherne mixing private actions with public personages. Only some elements are incompatible: terror cannot coexist with laughter, so that must be excluded from tragicomedy. The creator of tragicomedy therefore ‘from [tragedy] takes the great characters, and not the action; the plot which is verisimilar, but not true; affects moved, but measured; pleasure; danger, not death; from [comedy] he takes measured laughter, the modest pleasantries, the false knot; the happy reversal; and above all, the comic order’.36 Tragicomedy can be therefore seen as a legitimate genre insofar as it is perfectly reasonable to bring together certain elements from tragedy and comedy without offending the immutable laws of nature which can be gleaned from Aristotle. In addition, Guarini is insistent on the moral function of tragicomedy. However, in distinction from Denores’s view of that function, Guarini does not see it as straightforwardly didactic. He sets out the ‘instrumental’ and ‘architectonic’ ends of the genres, building up his discussion on Aristotelian categories. Each genre has instrumental and architectonic aims. Comedy’s instrumental end is the imitation of the actions of private men, who with their failings move the viewers to smile. Guarini concedes that Aristotle did not mention the architectonic end of comedy, but he is confident as to what he would have said it was, had he dealt with the issue in the Poetics: to purge melancholy (Compendio, p. 234). As for tragedy, its structural aim is to imitate tragic actions; in its architectonic aim it recalls the soul from its daydreaming and complacency, through the purgation of terror and compassion (p. 235). The term purgation has two senses: first, ‘the elimination of a sentiment’; second, ‘purification and cleansing’. Compassion and terror are not inherently bad things; they are indeed necessary for a good life. But nor are they always good: for too much of either can cloud moral judgement. ‘These things therefore need to be purged, that is, brought to a virtuous temperateness, and this is what tragedy does.’37 Guarini’s controversial view that Aristotle had written the Poetics, not as a set of universal precepts, but as a distillation of the principles he found evident in the best of the poetry of his time, also opens up the important observation that audiences change, and that consequently the effect of theatre on the audience is bound to change too; the architectonic end of a play is inevitably subject to adjustment by the playwright. The value of a play, therefore, is not intrinsic to the work itself, but rather is found in its effect on the audience. And in the modern age, neither tragedy nor comedy is able to fulfil its architectonic purpose. Tragedy is unnecessary in the Christian age: ‘what need do we have of 36

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‘Dall’una prende le persone grandi e non l’azione; la favola verisimile, ma non vera; gli affetti mossi, ma rintuzzati; il diletto, non la mestizia; il pericolo, non la morte; dall’altra il riso non dissoluto, le piacevolezze modeste, il nodo finto, il rivolgimento felice, e sopratutto l’ordine comico’ (Compendio, p. 231). ‘Hanno dunque bisogno questi due affetti d’esser purgati, cioè ridotti a virtuoso temperamento, e questo fa la tragedia’ (Compendio, p. 237).

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The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy purging terror and compassion with tragic sights, when we have the sacred teachings of our religion, which teaches us to do this through the words of the Gospels?’38 In truth Il pastor fido lends itself to this argument rather more strongly than anything inherent in the tragicomic genre as described by Guarini: the play’s broad scheme encompasses providential history, from the fall through an act of sin to a redemptive act of sacrifice; if one imagined a tragic ending to this plot, it would negate the Christological dynamic which is strongly suggested in this scheme, whereas the happy ending we have involves the full-scale redemption fitting to Christian doctrine. But if tragedy is no longer an appropriate genre in the Christian age, nor does comedy fulfil its role. Guarini dismisses the genre wholesale, arguing that it ‘has come to such boredom and despisal that, if it is not accompanied by the marvels [maraviglie] of the intramezzi [interludes with music and dancing], there is no longer anybody today who can stand it’.39 Before he has even argued these points about modern audiences, however, Guarini suggests that tragedy and comedy were in any case likely to be second-rate genres: tragedy showing ‘the atrocity of chance, blood and death, which are horrible and inhuman things to see’, and comedy making us ‘dissolve into laughter to such an extent that we sin against modesty and the decorum of a well-mannered man’.40 Guarini’s own defence of the pastoral depends on the negation of the idea that the term ‘pastorale’ should refer to the quality of the narrative. When he named the play a ‘tragicommedia pastorale’, he did not intended the latter term as a substantive, referring to a type of plot separate from tragicomedy, but rather as an adjective qualifying the term ‘tragedy’; ‘the term “tragicomedy” shows us the quality of the narrative, and the term “pastoral” the quality of the people which are represented in it’.41 Moreover, Guarini draws on the nobility of the figure of the shepherd to justify his choice. Biblically, divine providence was made known to shepherds, and so the pastoral is a mode of being which is capable of engendering human greatness (Compendio, p. 271). He does not linger over the continuity between the pastoral and the Christian – a continuity which the play itself emphasises, with a plot which shows how the redemptive self-sacrifice of a good shepherd can set right the wrongs of an original sin – but instead is concerned with the critical notion of verisimilitude. He emphasises shepherds’ capacity for good, 38

39

40 41

‘che bisogno abbiamo noi oggidì di purgare il terrore e la commiserazione con le tragiche viste, avendo i precetti santissimi della nostra religione, che ce l’insegna con la parola evangelica?’ (Compendio, p. 245). ‘La commedia è venuta in tanta noia e disprezzo, che, s’ella non s’accompagna con le maraviglie degli “intramezzi”, non è più alcuno che sofferire oggi la possa’ (Compendio, p. 245). ‘’l’atrocità de’ casi, il sangue e le morti, che sono viste orribili ed inumane’; ‘si dissoluti nel riso, che pecchiamo contro la modestia e ‘l decoro d’uom costumato’ (Compendio, p. 233). ‘la voce “tragicommedia” ci dimostra la qualità della favola e la voce di “pastorale” quella delle persone che in essa si rappresentano’ (Compendio, p. 274).

41

Matthew Treherne and their importance to Christianity, not because he wishes to make his readers read a Christian allegory into the plot, but because he wants to show that his shepherds are true to life. As throughout, it is an Aristotelian value – verisimilitude – which guides his argument. The Compendio therefore presents a justification for tragicomedy as a single plot, which aims to temper the emotions. More than a claim for the legitimacy of this new genre, it is a statement of its superiority in comparison with the genres of tragedy and comedy. Although much of the debate over Il pastor fido focused on details of the text, Guarini’s defence of the poem is primarily concerned with setting out the possibilities of a new genre. This required a dismantling of the conservative Aristotelianism of Denores, although it should be remembered that Guarini does not reject Aristotle, but rather redefines the ways in which Aristotle’s Poetics should be read. In presenting tragicomedy as a whole genre, complete in its own right, Guarini is insistent upon its dignity within the principles set out by the authority of Aristotle. Finally, in freeing tragicomedy from any expectations of didacticism, Guarini sets out a different utility value for the genre. Tragicomedy may not have particular lessons to teach, but in balancing the extremes of tragedy and comedy, it does ensure a seemly moderation in the viewer. It is these conceptual developments, as well as the success of Il pastor fido itself, which constitute the achievement of Guarini’s notion of tragicomedy.

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3 Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of the Commedia dell’Arte ROBERT HENKE

E

ARLY MODERN tragicomedy was an international genre, originally remanating from the particular alchemy of theory and practice that distinguished sixteenth-century Italian humanist drama, and in large part sustained by the professional companies whose zenith in Italy closely corresponded to Shakespeare’s lifetime. An international, Italian, perspective on tragicomedy, which this essay aims to provide, can cast the dramaturgy, motifs, character system, and emotional registers of English tragicomedy in a new light, especially in regard to Shakespeare, who among English early modern playwrights has the most affinity with Italian dramatists if we consider genre systems and theatrical structures, as opposed to merely individual plays. A continental perspective italicises the peculiar historical use of pastoral in Renaissance tragicomedy and the important role of the commedia dell’arte in transporting tragicomedy, as well as comedy, across geo-linguistic frontiers. It is the contention of this essay that the commedia dell’arte was just as important as were famous Italian dramatists such as Guarini and Tasso in conveying ‘pastoral tragicomedy’ to Shakespeare. Whereas no line of linear influence can be directly identified, this essay argues for the likelihood of a general, systemic transmission based on two factors: (1) the fact that Shakespeare was aware of the commedia dell’arte and (2) the striking similarity (with regard to dramaturgy, generic configuration, and theatrical systems) of a group of commedia pastoral tragicomedies with several of Shakespeare’s works. Like other English dramatists of the period, Shakespeare was familiar with the commedia dell’arte. Frequent uses of arte roles in early comedies and Jacques’ iteration of several commedia maschere in his ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech (As You Like It) demonstrate that he was cognisant of the most important form of professional theatre in continental Europe. He had several ways of learning about the commedia dell’arte: through Italians living in London such 43

Robert Henke as John Florio who owned several commedia della’arte scenarios,1 Englishmen who had travelled to Italy, fellow actors such as Will Kemp who probably acted with Italian professionals,2 or associates such as Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson who were clearly aware of this theatrical phenomenon. Probably as a result of English ambassadors viewing the commedia dell’arte in France in 1571 and 1572, the professional actors came to England several times in the 1570s, most notably (for our purposes) in 1574 when they performed a pastoral play in Reading before Queen Elizabeth.3 Except for one tantalising reference to the well-known actor Drusiano Martinelli performing ‘within the Cittie and the Liberties’ of London in 1578,4 the documents of the 1570s all refer to court activity. Thomas Norton’s 1574 denunciation of female performers may indicate a general disapproval of companies that included actresses,5 and the actors appear to have found Spain and France more congenial sites of performance during the 1580s. There are several references to the commedia dell’arte in the early 1590s, however, and they appear to indicate a specifically technical interest in the professional theatre on the part of English dramatists and actors just when Shakespeare was beginning his career: Thomas Nashe’s 1590 account of a conversation he had with an Italian Arlecchino,6 and the praise of Italian actors in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy for being ‘so sharp of wit / That in one hour’s meditation / They would perform anything in action’.7 Most striking are the stage ‘platts’ found among the papers of Edward Alleyn, and used between 1590 and 1592 by several actors who would become part of the Lord Chamberlain’s men in 1594. These ‘platts’ or ‘plotts’ resemble commedia dell’arte scenarios in several respects, and the plays themselves feature Pantalone and other commedia-like characters.8 Although early English imports of continental tragicomedy, such as Samuel Daniel’s 1605, The Queen’s Arcadia and John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8

R.C. Simonini, Italian Scholarship in Renaissance England (Chapel Hill, 1952), p. 102. Like Shakespeare, Florio was in the service of Southampton. For a study of Will Kemp’s relationship to the commedia dell’arte, see Louis B. Wright, ‘Will Kemp and the Commedia dell’Arte’, MLN 41 (1926), 516–20. For early commedia dell’arte travel to England and other countries, see E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford, 1923), II, pp. 261–65, and Kathleen Lea, Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte, 1560–1620, with Special Reference to the English Stage, 2 vols (Oxford, 1934), II, pp. 352–58. Acts of the Privy Council of England, n.s., X, 1577–78, ed. John Roche Dasent (London, 1895), p. 144 and Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, IV, p. 277. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, p. 354, who quotes Norton’s letter at length. The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford, 1958), III, p. 342. IV.i.164–66. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J.R. Mulryne (New York, 1970). Andrew Grewar, ‘Shakespeare and the Actors of the Commedia dell’Arte’, in Studies in the Commedia dell’Arte, eds. David J. George and Christopher J. Gossip (Cardiff, 1993), pp. 13–47. For facsimiles and transcriptions of the ‘platts’, see W.W. Greg, Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses: Stage plots, Actors’ Parts, Prompt Books (Oxford, 1931).

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Transporting Tragicomedy (1608–09), followed the Italian practice of coupling the genre of tragicomedy with the mode of pastoral, most English playwrights – including Fletcher himself – did not sustain this particular conjunction that had served the Italians so well in the second half of the sixteenth century.9 The forest scenes of Philaster are not essential but accidental; they do not bring the characters, topoi, symbolically resonant places, characteristic plot modules, and emotional registers of pastoral to bear on the generic problems of tragicomedy as shaped by Beaumont and Fletcher, which (in Eugene Waith’s still important study) stage a rhetorical and hypothetical engagement with illicit sexuality and with ‘the danger not the death’.10 The tragicomedies of Marston, Middleton, and Massinger do not engage pastoral in any serious way, even if Marston in The Malcontent appears to have been partly influenced by Italian tragicomedy as developed by court and academic poets, chief among whom was the late sixteenth-century Ferraran courtier Giambattista Guarini.11 It is in the late romances or tragicomedies of Shakespeare – Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest – that pastoral in its most elastic sense is most fully used among English dramatists as a generically transformative mode.12 Whereas Guarini and his famous play Il pastor fido did in fact directly influence the above-mentioned plays by Daniel, Fletcher, and perhaps Marston, the traditional model of source and influence has limited use generally when applied to Shakespeare’s work, and particularly when directed to his late plays. The fame of Guarini’s Pastor fido and Torquato Tasso’s Aminta has led literary-based critics to take them as the generic norm for early modern Italian pastoral, but a fuller survey of the extant Italian texts, and an examination of the full theatrical context that includes the professional companies, reveals Tasso’s and Guarini’s plays to be unrepresentative of general Italian practice. Most of the pastoral tragicomedies performed in venues ranging from the court to the piazza by both amateur actors and professional companies differ from the two canonical Italian works in several ways, embodying a fuller range of action than characterises Tasso’s narratively based play, or lacking the heavy Sophoclean substructure and theoretical apparatus of Guarini’s pastoral. And as one might expect, the Arcadian plays performed by the commedia dell’arte abound with the kinds of comic routines that draw them closer to Shakespeare’s late plays than to those of Guarini and Tasso, even as the professional actors were still capable of the kinds of tragicomic, pathetic, and melodramatic registers that Shakespeare’s late plays also possess. Examining the overall 9 10 11 12

For the distinction between genre and mode, see Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge Mass., 1982). Eugene Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven, 1952). For possible Guarinian connections to Marston’s The Malcontent, see G.K. Hunter, ‘Italian Tragicomedy on the English Stage’, Renaissance Drama, n.s., 6 (1973), 123–48. Robert Henke, Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Newark, 1997).

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Robert Henke system of Italian tragicomedy calibrated to an Arcadian register, especially filtered through the professional vehicles that most likely provided Shakespeare his most direct contact with the genre, will demonstrate a range of ‘theatregrams’, or theatrical moving parts, that Shakespeare could have deployed.13 Frank Kermode, after a careful and interesting survey of the possible influence of commedia pastoral plays on Shakespeare’s Tempest, ultimately dismisses them as ‘jocose pantomime[s]’ that Shakespeare would not have needed as inspiration for his serious play.14 Such a conclusion neither acknowledges the many serious, modally tragicomic, moments in these plays nor the ways in which the commedia dell’arte was highly literary and closely connected to practical and theoretical developments in late sixteenth-century Italian drama. Before we examine the tragicomic nature of the Arcadian arte scenarios themselves, it is important to consider the general resonance and function of Italian pastoral tragicomedy, of which the commedia dell’arte was fully aware. Italian tragicomedy emerged from the general context of humanist Italian theatre, for which Ferrara was particularly important from the late fifteenth century because of the ruling Estense family’s keen interest in discovering, editing, translating, performing, and adapting (to an Italian idiom and situation) classical drama. Beginning in the decade of the 1540s, editions, translations, and commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics sparked a wave of theoretical inquiry that was more innovative than has generally been thought, especially when general principles of Aristotle were conjured to justify, after the fact, literary and theatrical practice.15 The great debate at the end of the century between Guarini and Giason Denores on the legitimacy of a mixed genre such as tragicomedy was a natural outgrowth of Italian humanist inquiry into the nature and use of the ancient dramatic genres tragedy, comedy, and the much-discussed satyr play, taken by Guarini and others to be a classical prototype for genera mista (even as Guarini emphasised tragicomedy as a new genre for the Christian era, with Hellenic fate transformed into providence). Whereas for Denores the genres of tragedy and comedy were like immutable Platonic forms, each governing and even ontologically drawing on a different theological-political order, for Guarini the different genres and their constituent elements (character, character system, plot, plot modules, place, topoi, emotional register, intended effect on the audience) were plastic materials, 13

14 15

Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven, 1989). See Clubb for a magisterial account of the full range of Italian pastoral drama in the second half of the sixteenth century. Frank Kermode, ed., William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1954; London and NewYork, 1958), pp. lxvi–lxx. See the articles of Daniel Javitch: ‘Self-Justifying Norms in the Genre Theories of Italian Renaissance Drama’, Philological Quarterly 67 (1988), 195–218; and ‘Pioneer Genre Theory and the Opening of the Humanist Canon’, Common Knowledge 3 (1994), 54–66.

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Transporting Tragicomedy capable of being detached, reconfigured, reversed, recalibrated, and transformed. For Guarini, this magisterial power of generic transformation rested with the supreme authority of the dramatist, and although Guarini was involved with productions of his play, his perfectionism tended to delay production.16 Not under Guarini’s authority (and in fact in defiance of his explicit attacks on the professional players), his Sophoclean pastoral tragicomedy was in fact performed several times by the commedia dell’arte. But even more important than their frequent performances of literary icons such as Il pastor fido and Aminta was the fact that the commedia dell’arte – just like Shakespeare – seemed to have perfectly understood the Guarinian principle that genres and their elements were pliant creative materials rather than essential forms. After the first two decades of organised professional activity in the 1540s and the 1550s, when this initially all-male theatre appears to have in fact privileged comedy and physical farce, the advent of the actress in the 1560s immediately broadened the generic repertoire. Innamorate (‘lovers’) such as Vincenza Armani and a certain ‘Flaminia’, who respectively led two troupes that engaged in a lively theatrical rivalry in the summers of 1567 and 1568 in Mantua, brought the high literary registers, musical skills, and familiarity with fashionable genres such as pastoral into the mix of the commedia dell’arte, and it was never the same afterwards. On 1 July 1567, Mantuan ducal secretary Luigi Rogna reported that Flaminia’s troupe performed the tragedy of Dido (probably that of Ludovico Dolce) ‘mutata in tragicommedia’ [changed into a tragicomedy].17 The professional actors were therefore conversant with courtly, academic, and humanist literature, but did not regard it as sacrosanct, and genera mista were the natural result. Demonstrating again their opportunistic use of literature, the actors also dramatised a bloody narrative filched from Ariosto that served up unadulterated tragedy, but generally the Orlando Furioso, with its magicians, metamorphoses, hermits, enchanted fountains, and amorous intrecci, was most readily repackaged for that strain of magical pastoral that, this essay argues, links Shakespeare with Italian drama. The wave of pastoral drama that swept through the courts of Ferrara and other northern Italian cities, beginning with Giraldi Cinthio’s 1545 Egle and Agostino Beccari’s 1551 Il sacrificio, frequently employed supernatural transformations, in this regard both differing from Guarini and Tasso’s plays (both are governed by a neoclassical concern for verisimilitude) and resembling those of Shakespeare. And when, in fact, Vincenza Armani and Flaminia’s troupe turned to pastoral proper in the various intermezzi that they performed,

16 17

See the introduction to Battista Guarini, Opere di Battista Guarini, ed. Marziano Guglielminetti (Turin, 1971). Alessandro D’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, 2 vols (Turin, 1891), II, p. 449. All translations from Italian are my own.

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Robert Henke supernatural metamorphosis was the order of the day. So Rogna’s account for 5 July 1567: Then yesterday, the two troupes performed competing intermezzi at the same time. In Vincenza’s intermezzo Cupid appeared, who liberated Clori, a nymph who had been turned into a tree. One could see Jove, who with a thunderbolt from above ruined the tower of a giant, who had imprisoned several shepherds. After the sacrifice was made, Cadmus sowed the dragon’s teeth, and saw them grow into armed men who then battled each other. The intermezzo displayed Jove’s responses, then Pallas Athena in her armour, and finally the city began to be built.18

Almost from the very beginning of the commedia dell’arte, and only three years after the first recorded Italian professional actress, the troupes are performing ‘magical pastoral’: plays set in an Arcadian landscape in which typically pastoral characters, such as nymphs, are transformed Ovidian style into trees and freed by other supernatural powers. The actor-writer Adriano Valerini, in a funeral oration written for Vincenza Armani a year after her mysterious death by poison in 1569, confirmed the generic virtuosity that she had demonstrated in the Mantua performances, and the fact that the commedia dell’arte worked in the tripartite system of ‘tragical-pastoralcomical’ (as Polonius would put it) that would be the basis of so much early modern tragicomedy.19 In the hands of sophisticated actresses such as Armani, pastoral was affectively tragicomic, establishing new generic terrain by carefully calibrating a tertium quid of audience response: a sweet smile rather than the raucous belly laugh of unadulterated comedy, the pathos elicited by false death rather than the terror aroused by the irrevocable death of tragedy, a register of melos and amorous sentiment poised halfway between the two generic extremes. Not only did the commedia dell’arte draw on courtly academic pastoral, as the 1567–68 Mantua performances demonstrate, but the latter absorbed theatregrams from the former. Luigi Pasqualigo, in his 1581 Gl’intricati, imports three commedia-style parti ridicole into a magic Arcadian world presided over by a maga, who terrifies the buffoons with unseen voices and wields power with magic liquor and a book.20 Famous professional companies such as the Gelosi and the Confidenti frequently performed at court, and courtly academic playwrights like Pasqualigo would have had ample opportunities to enjoy commedia lazzi. 18 19

20

D’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, II, p. 451. See Valerini’s account of Armani’s skill in tragedy, comedy, and pastoral in Oratione d’Adriano Valerini Veronese, in morte della divina signora Vincenza Armani, Comica Eccellentissima (Verona, 1570), printed in Ferruccio Marotti and Giovanno Romei, eds, La Commedia dell’Arte e la società barocca: La professione del teatro (Rome, 1991), pp. 35–36. Luigi Pasqualigo, Gl’intricati, pastorale (Venice, 1581).

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Transporting Tragicomedy The printing, in Paris, of Bartolomeo Rossi’s 1584 La fiammella, which mentions the performance of the play by various arte actors who were on a French tournée, bespeaks the continued popularity of magical pastoral among the professional actors, as does the publication of Flaminio Scala’s 1611 Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, a collection of fifty scenarios that, despite some literary embellishments and an eye to the reading public, was meant by the then middle-aged Scala as a retrospective ‘encyclopedia’ or memory theatre of the kinds of plays that Scala had performed with the Gelosi and the Confidenti over past decades.21 The last ten scenarios in Scala’s collection are all generically multiform in the capacious manner of Renaissance tragicomedy, with labels such as ‘pastorale’, ‘tragedia’, ‘opera mista’, ‘opera regia’, and ‘opera eroica’, and they share strikingly similar dramaturgical features (as well as a large Mediterranean reach in their cultural geography) with Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest: plays almost exactly contemporary with the publication of Scala’s work. The title of the forty-second scenario (or ‘giornata’ in Scala’s Boccaccian frame) is called ‘Gli avvenimenti, comici, pastorali, e tragici, opera mista’ [Comic, Pastoral, and Tragic Events, a Mixed Work] and it thus bespeaks the tripartite division of genre and place that structures The Winter’s Tale.22 All three acts of Scala’s scenario are set in the general area of Sparta, but the first act, regarding the ‘comic events’, is staged in the bourgeois setting of Pantalone and Gratiano’s houses, where a felicitous romantic arrangement is finally achieved; the second, pastoral, section is represented in the woods outside of Sparta. There the children of Pantalone and Gratiano’s servants explore the affective and tragicomic registers of the pastoral mode (just as it is the children of Leontes and Polixenes who dominate the pastoral section in The Winter’s Tale). The third, tragic, act is set back in Sparta but in the royal court of Oreste, the King of Sparta, where the erotic passions and rivalries that unfold with the Kings of Athens and Mycenae generate tragic bloodshed. If Renaissance, like classical, drama, was socially coded, then Italian tragicomedy required a certain mobility of rank: the Italian analogue to the social paradox of the shepherdess-queen Perdita (and of the ‘gentlemen’ shepherds at the end of the play) is the social elasticity of Pantalone and Gratiano, who in their capacity as ambassadors to the Spartan king are ‘vestiti nobilmente’ [dressed nobly] in the final, tragic, section of the play. ‘Rosalba incantrice, opera eroica’ (Day 44), combines salient aspects of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. In the tragic antefatto of the play, recounted in the ‘argomento’ (dramaturgically cognate with Prospero’s tragic story of fratricidal usurpation to Miranda), enmity between two rival magicians who

21 22

Flaminio Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, ed. Ferruccio Marotti, 2 vols (1611; Milan, 1976). Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, II, pp. 433–46.

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Robert Henke each rule different islands causes one (Artano) to murder the other (Arimaspo). As in The Winter’s Tale, the tragic rift in the older generation is healed by an amorous alliance between their children: in the final act of the play Almonia, son of Arimaspo, marries the now ruling enchantress Rosalba, daughter of the murdered Artano, with Arimaspo receiving Rosalba’s pardon. Pastoral scenes, tropes, and elements figure in several of Scala’s ten genera mista: in ‘L’Alvida, Opera regia’ (Day 43), a magician withdraws himself to the forest after a traumatic experience in the court and there detains the king of Egypt and the sultan of Persia in order to ‘rimediar tutti i disordini’ [heal all disorder]. One of the final scenarios, ‘L’albore incantato, pastorale’ (Day 49), is fully set in a pastoral landscape, featuring an intreccio of frustrated lovers, an omnipotent mago who manipulates his subjects with magical spells that transfix them or transform them into trees and fountains, a savage man who serves the magician, tempting food that emits terrifying flames when one approaches it, false deaths, plaintiff registers of amorous grief, and buffoonish characters who attempt to steal things from the magician’s grotto. This scenario in particular, which in the combination of the four-person amorous circle and the omnipotent mago combines many elements of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, points to a large group of pastoral plays that scholars have known since the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawing from five different manuscript collections, in 1913 Ferdinando Neri published five scenarios of ‘magical pastoral’ with very striking similarities to The Tempest.23 Several of them come from a twovolume collection compiled by the Roman writer and amateur theatricalist Basilio Locatelli, and are now housed in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome.24 The compilation was done between 1618 and 1622, several years after The Tempest, but Locatelli claims in his introduction that he is merely recording the kinds of plays that have long been performed, and indeed they resemble the 1567 Mantuan pastorals, Pasqualigo’s court play, Rossi’s La fiammella, and Scala’s one fully pastoral play. Neri also draws from a scenario collection located in the Biblioteca Corsiniana in Rome, which date variously from the first half of the seventeenth century but are memorial in the manner of the Locatelli scenarios, and he includes one scenario from Naples. Kathleen Lea, in Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte 1560–1620, also published five commedia pastoral plays from the Locatelli and Corsini collections not printed by Neri.25

23 24 25

Ferdinando Neri, Scenari delle maschere in Arcadia (Castello, 1913). MSS 1211–12 in the Casanantense Library, Rome. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, pp. 555–67, 610–42. There are more extant scenarios, in Locatelli, that if not fully Arcadian contain elements of the genre: ‘Le teste incantate’ (vol. 1, number 8), ‘Fonte incantato’ (vol. 1, number 44), ‘Li incanti amorosi’ (vol. 2, number 20), and ‘Li ritratti’ (vol. 1, number 3).

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Transporting Tragicomedy Taken together, the general plot of these Arcadian plays has been deftly summarised by Richard Andrews as follows: An isolated island is ruled by a magician, whose power within his territory is limitless. A range of characters find themselves on the island, against their will – they include lovers and others from gentlemanly classes, and more ridiculous figures from improvised comedy. By the end of their encounters with each other and with the magician, reconciliations both sentimental and comic have been achieved: these solutions may involve the magician himself, in relation to his past life.26

The relevance of this plot to The Tempest, a play whose ‘sources’ are less identifiable than practically any other Shakespearean play, is obvious, although Frank Kermode questions the connection because there is no one scenario that exactly matches the plot of The Tempest and because the scenarios post-date Shakespeare’s play. But the fact that the scenarios post-date The Tempest does not exclude the possibility that this kind of play, with its constellations of typical theatregrams and lazzi, was a deep source for The Tempest, as long as we do not limit ourselves to the traditional literary notion of a source, and remember that Locatelli as well as the Corsini editor state that they are merely recording scenarios that have long been in existence. As Richard Andrews puts it, ‘an accumulation of “analogues” can arguably take on the character of a “source”, particularly in a theatrical culture where performance ideas were constantly being transmitted orally and by direct experience from one practitioner to another’.27 In order to build the case, argued by Neri, Lea, and Andrews, that Shakespeare was influenced by the general system and form of Italian tragicomedy as performed, in a pastoral mode, by the commedia dell’arte, I propose a more detailed reading of the Arcadian scenarios than has been previously done. Although The Tempest will provide the most affinities, it is also important, when comparing Shakespeare’s work to the commedia dell’arte pastorals, to consider A Midsummer Night’s Dream sub specie magical pastoral, and The Winter’s Tale under the aspect of pastoral tragicomedy.28 26

27 28

Richard Andrews, ‘Shakespeare and Italian Comedy’, in Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond, eds, Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe [Arden Critical Companions] (London, 2004), pp. 123–49. (For the above quote, see p. 131.) My arguments against Kermode are indebted to those of Andrews. Andrews, ‘Shakespeare and Italian Comedy’, p. 132. It may be objected that A Midsummer Night’s Dream should be excluded from this grouping of ‘tragicomic magical pastoral’ on generic grounds (as a comedy and not a tragicomedy) and The Winter’s Tale because of its (ultimately) insistent verisimilitude. The threat of death imposed by the blocking parents and the deployment of the Romeo and Juliet theme in the former play does however introduce tragicomic registers, and in The Winter’s Tale, the illusion and the spectre of the supernatural is invoked by the oracle of Delphi, as well as in Paulina’s apparently ‘magical’, Ovidian transformation of Hermione.

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Robert Henke Generally, the Italian magical pastoral scenarios combine the chief conceits of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, and we will begin by examining some affinities of the Arcadian scenarios with Shakespeare’s earlier play.29 The arte plays stage a circle of frustrated lovers (A loves B, who loves C, who loves D, who loves A), usually four as in Shakespeare, whose amorous vicissitudes in the forest are governed by magical objects (usually either a garland worn on the head or an apple that is consumed) that can instantaneously induce hate or love in the person beholding the bearer or consumer of the object. Various erotic permutations are played out until the proper alignments are achieved, with the young innamorati finally realising that all of their confusions – as well as their resolutions – have been caused by a higher power. The connection to Dream appears particularly salient when the erotic confusion is caused by a combination of the magical object and sleep. In the Locatelli scenario ‘La nave, comedia pastorale’,30 Silvio loves Clori but dons the magic garland and falls asleep. Waking up to behold her he instantaneously despises the object of his former affections. In the Arcadian scenarios, characters frequently fall asleep in the forest, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in ‘Arcadia incantata’,31 sleep even becomes a comic lazzo, as Silvana fends off four amorous characters by promising herself to the one who has the best sleep (predictably, fleeing them all when they perform to her bidding). To a greater extent than A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but in ways that are still comparable, the Scala, Locatelli, Corsini, and Neapolitan pastoral scenarios are modally tragicomic, achieving registers of pathos and melos performed in commedia dell’arte pastorals as early as in Vincenza Armani’s Mantuan performances. As in Shakespeare’s play, the commedia scenarios feature dreams as psychologically significant vehicles of occult knowledge, as when Tirsi in ‘Gli avvenimenti comici, pastorali, et tragici’ prays to the god Sonno to see Fillide’s image in a dream, or when, in ‘Pantaloncino, comedia pastorale’,32 Fausto falls in love with a nymph in a dream, and comes to the ‘Bow of Desire’ (‘L’arco del desiderio’ – the deep source of psychological revelation throughout the play) to find out who she might be. Whereas Shakespeare (in alignment with modern taste) treated the amorous pathos of shepherds or exiles in the forest as a parodic, comic theme, in As You Like It, as well as in Dream, pastoral love is taken more or less seriously in the commedia

29

30 31 32

For a fuller discussion of similarities and differences between Italian pastoral drama and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see Richard Andrews, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Italian Pastoral’, in the forthcoming Transnational and Transcultural Exchange in Early Modern Drama: Theatre Crossing Borders, eds Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (Aldershot, 2008). Locatelli, II, number 26, and similar to Corsini, II, number 33. Printed in Neri, Scenari and Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, pp. 658–62. Neapolitan MSS II, number 3. Printed in Neri, Scenari, pp. 87–93 and in Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, pp. 670–74. Locatelli, II, number 50, printed in Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, pp. 631–42.

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Transporting Tragicomedy dell’arte scenarios, as it was in court and academic Italian pastoral drama. (And it is worth noticing that when Shakespeare returns to the theme in The Winter’s Tale he lends it a higher register, certainly when filtered through Perdita’s perspective.) Oneirically generative sleep, madness inflected with psychological depth, and the extended grief of lovers, are all amplified by the serious role of music in the scenarios, including the explicit use of madrigals as a formal channelling of pathos and grief.33 Whereas the arte scenarios, in their pathetic registers, may realise a tragicomic register to a greater extent than Dream, they match Shakespeare’s play comically in one very specific theatregram: the preposterous love, induced by the magic object, between a ridiculous character and one of higher station (in Dream, Titania’s infatuation with Bottom ‘translated’ into an ass). In ‘Il gran mago, comedia pastorale’,34 as in several other scenarios, the higher-class innamorata Clori falls in love with the Gratiano-Dottore figure (one of the central parti ridicole in the commedia dell’arte) when she beholds him after donning the magic garland. In ‘Li tre satiri, favola pastorale’,35 Filli falls in love with Burattino by virtue of a magic fountain with which the angry mago transforms the ridiculous arte character into a woman. As with Bottom’s transformation in Dream, the ridiculous characters are frequently changed into animals (represented by masks noted in the props lists), usually when they drink or eat a forbidden substance. (In ‘L’albore incantato’, Arlecchino is transformed into a crane.) Although the metamorphoses of the parti ridicole clearly carry a comic effect (and exploit the zoomorphic affinities of the arte maschere), transformation in the Arcadian scenarios resonates with psychological effect, the line between animate and vegetable or inanimate being easily crossed in the forest. In ‘L’albore incantato’, Clori, whose love for Corinto is not reciprocated, ‘dice voler pianger tanto sin che ella si converte in fonte’ [says that she wants to cry to the point where she is transformed into a fountain].36 As in Dream, strange and unpredictable metamorphosis, in the psychological as well as supernatural sense, governs the realm of love, and the discourse of the scenarios poses an implicit connection between the supernatural metamorphoses transpiring in the forest and the changes of the heart. Although Oberon’s commands to Puck, and Puck’s confusions, are the nominal agents of erotic imbroglio in Dream, the characters experience their

33

34

35 36

In ‘Gli avvenimenti comici, pastorali, e tragici’, for example, Tirsi ‘canta le bellezze di Fillide con alcuni madrigali’ [sings the beauties of Fillide with several madrigals]. See Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, II, p. 440. Locatelli, II, number 23 and Corsini, I, number 5, printed in Neri, Scenari, pp. 57–68, and Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, pp. 648–57. The Corsini version contains several amplifications to the Locatelli scenario. Locatelli, II, number 28, printed in Neri, Scenari, pp. 77–86, and Lea, II, pp. 663–69, and similar to Corsini, I, number 9. Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, ed. Marotti, p. 509.

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Robert Henke vicissitudes as governed by an unseen, invisible power, whereas the agency of power is all too clear in The Tempest. In the Arcadian scenarios, an omniscient and apparently omnipotent magician holds sway over the spirits, savages, and other native inhabitants of an island, where the infusion of dramatic lighting effects in a rough maritime and forest landscape lend it a material resonance very similar to that of Shakespeare’s island. ‘La nave’ lists the following elements of scenic decor: ‘wood, grotto, tower, stone equipped with fire rockets, fires, sea, ship, sky, clouds, ray of light or lightning, dolphin, lion, fountain, swords for the moresca, wine, bread, magic staff and conjuring book for the magician’.37 As with The Tempest, the mago’s omnipotent sway over his immediate environment lends the plays a metatheatrical dimension: aided by various ‘infernal’ spirits or by savage denizens of the island, he wields thunder, lightening, and flames, and generally is a master of special, theatrical effects. For example, in ‘L’albore incantato’, the magician Sabino commands ‘Selvatico’ to bring him the ‘acqua dell’oblio’ [water of forgetfulness], whereupon the magician ‘la fa spargere per tutta la scena; in quello si sentono grandissimi strepiti; in quello sparisce la prospettiva di mezzo, e subito comparisce e sorge una Cappa marattima’ [disperses it {the water} throughout the set; in this part of the stage are heard loud cries; in that part the perspective in the middle of the stage vanishes, and suddenly appears and rises a sailor’s cloak].38 The mago indeed wields great power, dominating and harnessing that particular combination of natural wildness and supernatural power (with occult, supersensory awareness) that characterises the local inhabitants and the genius loci of Prospero’s island (Caliban’s hypersensitivity to music may be a vestige of this). In ‘Li tre satiri’, the mago is particularly proud of his power over ‘savage nature’, boasting ‘del suo sapere, et valore et come l’inferno l’ubbedisce, et che li spiriti in forma di selvaggi lo servano, et fanno cio che lui li commanda’ [of his knowledge, and of his power and how hell obeys him, and that the spirits in the form of savage men serve him and do what ever he commands].39 The mago transfixes his subjects with immobilising spells; he physically chastises them with invisible torments; he imprisons them inside trees and rocks, or plainly transforms them into trees or fountains in Ovidian style; he tempts the strangers with alluring water or succulent meals that suddenly appear from nowhere, only to vanish suddenly or to change the unsuspecting consumers into animals; and he haunts them with disembodied strange voices. Metamorphosis, really the controlling engine of these magical pastoral scenarios, dominates the theatrical present of these plays instead of being referred to as both past trauma and future threat as it is in the initial exchange between Prospero and Ariel. The mago’s great power pre- dictably

37 38 39

Neri, Scenari, p. 69. Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, ed. Marotti, p. 510. Neri, Scenari, p. 78.

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Transporting Tragicomedy elicits hostility both on the part of the native islanders and the shipwreck victims; in ‘Il gran mago’, Pantalone and Gratiano plan to kill the magician, and in ‘Li tre satiri’ Pantalone and Zanni have robbed the magician of his magic book (as Caliban urges Stephano to do). No recourse to a post-colonial context (altogether lacking in the Italian plays) is necessary to render the Italian mago morally ambiguous; not only does he call on the powers of hell, but his power is frequently revealed to be less than full, framed and trumped by the powers of Jove and other pagan deities, and he occasionally relinquishes his power at the end of the play. The commedia mago is impetuous, petulant, petty, and inordinately fixated on the sexual practices and erotic intrigues of his inhabitants, which he manipulates like a puppeteer. In ‘Il Gran mago’ he sees in the younger generation’s ‘mingling of the bloods’ an ‘evil that has befallen him’ because it will spell the end of his rule. As in The Tempest, this is in fact true because the reconciliations between the families ensuing from the new unions will be concurrent with the end of his dominion of the island. Protecting against the ‘mingling of bloods’, he therefore casts spells against it, and is generally hostile to sexuality, if at the end of the play finally submitting to the inevitable power of eros. In the Arcadian scenarios, action is precipitated by the shipwreck of a group of strangers (sometimes explicitly from Italy) on his island, and sometimes the shipwreck is directly caused by the magician. The magician is aware that the arrival of the strangers will somehow entail the end of his reign. The shipwreck victims are frequently split into two groups (‘Li tre satiri’), or one member is separated from the other and taken for dead. The reuniting of the separated groups, potentially a serious theme, usually generates opportunities for comic business on the order of the Stephano-Trinculo reunion in The Tempest. In ‘Arcadia incantata’, Coviello and Polchinella’s recognition scene is completely filtered through comic routines: ‘si accorgono un con l’altro, fanno lazzi di paure; infine, dopo lazzi di toccarsi, si chiariscono esser salvi’ [they recognise each other, performing lazzi of fear, then lazzi of touching, and realise that they have been saved].40 If such lazzi worked best between two actors, the optimal number for improvisation, skilled actors could expand it to four, as in this very play, when Tartaglia and the Dottore join in: ‘ogni uno lamenta la perdita de compagni; dopo lazzi si accorgono l’un l’altro, fanno la scena de spaventi in quattro; dopo lazzi chiariscono esser salvi’ [each lament the loss of their companions, after lazzi they recognise each other; they play the scene of fear in four, after these lazzi they recognise that they have been saved].41 Locatelli’s shorthand clearly reflects acting practice, coded in technical terms such as ‘la scena de spaventi in quattro’; comparable is the three-person recognition scene among the ridiculous characters in The Tempest. Oddly

40 41

Neri, Scenari, p. 88. Neri, Scenari, p. 88.

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Robert Henke reminiscent of the gaberdine that first joins Caliban and Trinculo and then creates, if through Stephano’s drunken lens, a fabulous sea monster that ‘vents Trinculos’, is the ‘cappa magica’ of ‘L’albore incantata’, under which Timbri hides. The verisimilar lazzo of Trinculo’s miraculous deliverance has its magical analogue in ‘Li tre satiri’, when a whale belches out Burattino.42 Insistently scatological and material (more so than in Shakespeare) is the recognition of Burattino and Zanni in the same scenario: Zanni, who had been imprisoned in a rock by the angry mago, is delivered from his imprisonment when Burattino urinates upon the stone, Bakhtin’s ‘lower-body stratum’ trumping the arcane book-knowledge of the mago. Hunger, thirst, and a general sense of material constraint more pervasively affect the characters of this physically based theatre than they do in Shakespeare, although Gonzalo’s complaints against the physical hardships of Prospero’s island deploy the same theatregram. The shipwrecked characters are persistently, inexorably hungry. In ‘Il mago, pastorale’ (Corsini), hunger even trumps love, as Selvaggio, ‘dicendosi morirsi di fame’ [saying that he is going to die of hunger], rejects Filli’s love (‘lui parla di mangiare, lei di amore’ [he speaks of eating, she of love]).43 The theme of hunger has technical ramifications: usually the props lists include food (‘robbe da mangiare’ [things to eat]) and the shipwrecked characters in ‘Il gran mago’ perform what might be called ‘theatregrams of hunger’: ‘Pantalone, Gratiano, Burattino di A, fanno azzi dicendo di essere affamati’ [Pantlone, Gratiano, and Burattino from entrance A perform lazzi of hunger]. The religious temple, mistaken as an inn by Zanni in ‘Li tre satiri’, is recast as a locus of material desire, as the famished shipwreck victims directly beseech the pagan gods for food, or disguise themselves as the gods themselves (Stephano’s feigning to be a ‘god’ to Caliban in The Tempest is a version of this) in order to receive from the gullible shepherds the alimentary ‘sacrifice,’ or gifts of the pastoral harvest. In ‘Proteo, favola pastorale,’44 Zanni’s child Zannolino (engendered, in Bakhtinian fashion, from his previously sterile wife’s urine) leaps out of the cradle as the epitome of hunger: ‘fa azzi che bastona il padre ordina che il sia dato da mangiare’ [performing lazzi of beating his father, he orders that he give him something to eat].45 The physical hardships such as hunger and thirst dramatised in the scenarios join the larger picture of ‘hard pastoral’ that both belies the potential

42

43 44 45

Burattino claims to have played tricks [burle] inside the whale, and boasts that he would have made a nice meal of the whale’s organs if he had had the proper cooking utensils: ‘dice che se haveva fuoco gli voleva frigere tutto il fegato’ [he says that if he had had a fire he would have fried the whale’s liver]. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, p. 611. Locatelli, II, number 41; Corsini, I, number 45; and printed in Lea, Italian Popular comedy, II, pp. 621–30. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, p. 623.

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Transporting Tragicomedy critique that the plays are merely escapist fantasy and links them to the rough pastoral elements in The Winter’s Tale as well as in Cymbeline. The shipwreck itself is usually represented less as a virtuosic feat of magic, as in The Tempest (although it is occasionally rendered so), than a terrifying event that exposes one to the danger of the wilds as well as to hunger. Recalling the young shepherd’s apprehensions in The Winter’s Tale, in ‘Le tre satiri’ the shipwrecked Pantalone ‘ha paura che le fiere non se lo mangino’ [is afraid that the wild beasts might devour him], as he looks out to the sea where the ships appear and then disappear on the horizon.46 In ‘Il gran mago’, Zanni has come to the island and raised his master’s children as a foster parent; in an interesting return to his rural Bergamask roots – to the legend that before his urban displacement to Venice he tilled the soil – he works as a peasant, with real pigs and real land. Agricultural, pastoral festivities, whose telegraphically glimpsed theatrical value in the scenarios can be imaginatively enhanced by considering The Winter’s Tale’s sheep-shearing festival, frequently occur in the scenarios.47 In ‘Proteo’, Zanni plays a successful and legitimate version of Autolycus, selling cheeses, hides, fleeces, and horns to the well-off Pantalone and other characters. The social discrepancy, implicit in the character system of the commedia dell’arte, between the cultured innamorati and the parti ridicole, generates social dramas and social fantasies similar to those of Shakespeare’s late plays. The mago’s facetious transformation of the ridiculous character Polcinella into the ‘King of Arcadia’ in ‘Arcadia incantata’, replete with crown, sceptre, and magic book, momentarily realises the kinds of utopian fantasies indulged by Stephano in The Tempest. If Stephano passes himself off as a god to Caliban, so do the commedia dell’arte characters in ‘Le tre satiri’ and ‘Arcadia incantata,’ as they don costumes found in the temple and impersonate the pagan gods for the credulous local inhabitants, who naively give them food. Or the ridiculous characters, after having seized the magic book, command the local inhabitants to bring them food, which then bursts out in flames as soon as they touch it (‘Li tre satiri’). Many of the Arcadian plays end with the shipwrecked characters recognising their children, whom they had thought dead, and with the confirmation of amorous alignments between them. Often the magician is forced either to recognise the limits of his own power (the pagan gods are acknowledged to be superior), or to renounce his own power in favour of accepting his common humanity, as at the end of ‘Pantaloncino’: ‘Mago dice non voler essercitar piu quell’arte ma voler vivere insieme con loro, butta via la verga et il libro’ [The magician, declaring that he no longer wishes to practise his art but wants to live

46 47

Neri, Scenari, p. 78. See, for example, the popular dance led by Cavicchio in ‘Gli avvenimenti comici, pastorali, e tragici’, and the pastoral festival in ‘Il gran mago’.

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Robert Henke with the others, throws away his magic staff and book].48 ‘Li tre satiri’ ends with the shipwreck victims declaring that they will soon set sail for Venice. The present essay cannot offer any conclusive proof that Shakespeare was directly influenced by any one scenario or play. Nor is such proof likely to be found. My purpose has been to provide a thick description of analogues between the magical pastoral plays of Shakespeare and those performed by his professional counterparts in Italy, the most internationally established professional actors in Europe and those with whom Shakespeare and associates such as Thomas Nashe and John Florio had direct as well as indirect contact. If one hypothesises that Shakespeare could have bifurcated, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, the two arte conceits of the circle of frustrated lovers and the omnipotent mago, a certain critical mass of analogues can, as Andrews argues, function like a source. The analogues can be located on several different dramatic and theatrical levels, which might be categorized as follows: 1. Dramatic content, both on a macro and micro scale A. Obvious and striking plot affinities. B. Comic lazzi. 2. Dramaturgy A. Shakespeare’s interesting return to the unities in The Tempest compared with the arte’s regular use of them, with retrospective antefatti similar to Prospero’s initial tale to Miranda. B. Playing different versions of the supernatural, from outright magic (magic transformations, objects, unseen voices) to fraudulent magic practised (or desired) by the buffoons to a supernaturally resonant pagan temple as a locus of the pagan gods. C. Regular alternation (especially if one considers Dream along with The Tempest) of ‘higher’, pathetic-affective registers with ‘low’ comic buffoonery, with the consequent bathos, status inversions, and utopian fantasies implicit in such a character system. 3. Genre The pastoral mode, which provides a symbolically resonant place (replete with a certain vocabulary of scenic decor) both establishes the matter and the dramaturgical manner of the play, acting as a generic hinge between tragedy and comedy on the levels of effect (and audience response), plot, and character system.

A systemic and generic comparison of magical pastoral in the most famous professional actors of the day and the exactly contemporary playwright with the greatest historical legacy, such as has been attempted here, demonstrates a transnational theatrical intertextuality that, in demonstrating Shakespeare’s great affinity with Italian theatrical practice, is more important than the positivistic identification of the ‘smoking gun’ of a single source. 48

Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, p. 635

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4 The Minotaur of the Stage: Tragicomedy in Spain GERAINT EVANS

T

RAGICOMEDY, notoriously difficult to define, is fundamental to early modern Spanish theatre, and especially to the period of its greatest success, which corresponds closely with the writing careers of the three best-known playwrights: Lope de Vega (1562–1635), Tirso de Molina (real name Gabriel Téllez, 1583–1648) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81). However, the often vague classification given on printed editions means little, for the general term for plays was simply comedia, a term which did not preclude tragic content, and a play could be referred to simultaneously as comedia and tragicomedia.1 While this is comprehensible, there are also more confusing references to the same play as both tragedia and tragicomedia.2 Even if they are described simply as comedia, one reason for considering many plays as tragicomedies is that they combine danger, laughter, grief and happy endings, while juxtaposing high and low social orders with correspondingly high and low linguistic styles to produce an artform which appealed to a wide cross section of the public, but appalled prescriptive theorists of theatre. As Melveena McKendrick points out, the failure to classify Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna as tragicomedy simply shows the inconsistency of seventeenthcentury classification.3 As in other countries, classicising critics objected to the crossing or muddling of generic boundaries and what they saw as the pandering to popular taste.4 Lope de Vega responded to his critics in the New Art of Writing 1

2 3 4

For a list of plays by Lope which were classified in printed versions as tragicomedia, see Edwin S. Morby, ‘Some observations on Tragedia and tragicomedia in Lope’, Hispanic Review 11 (1943), 185–209, pp. 187–9. For example, the following three plays by Lope: Adonis y Venus, El laberinto de Creta and El duque de Viseo. See Morby, pp. 187, 188. Melveena McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, 1490–1700 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 281, n. 14. For a summary of critics, see Margarete Newels, Los géneros dramáticos en las poéticas del siglo de oro (London, 1974), pp. 125–52.

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Geraint Evans Plays in This Age (Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, 1609).5 This was a verse piece of 389 lines, read out at a literary academy, where the habitual entertainment comprised contests of verse written on predetermined topics and recited amid an atmosphere of festivity. While the emphasis was thus on fun and wit rather than intellectual rigour, the New Art is nevertheless the most widely quoted piece of drama theory from early modern Spain, displaying Lope’s knowledge of the theatre, and as it was written by the writer who almost single-handedly shaped the comedia into a form which was successful both in terms of contemporary audiences and the literary criticism of posterity, its arguments are worth hearing:6 When I have to write a play I lock away the precepts with six keys, and remove Terence and Plautus from my study to stop them speaking to me. I then write for the art invented by those who, like me, wrote for the applause of the crowd, because as the crowd pays, it is only fair to speak foolishly to please them. (lines 40–8) Those learned critics should now shut their mouths. I mix the tragic with the comic and Terence with Seneca, even though the result be another Minotaur of Pasiphae. One part will be serious, another risible because this variety causes much delight. Nature gives us such a good example, for its beauty derives from its variety. (lines 174–80) Y cuando he de escribir una comedia, encierro los preceptos con seis llaves saco a Terencio y Plauto de mi estudio para que no me den voces, que suele dar gritos la verdad en libros mudos, y escribo por el arte que inventaron los que el vulgar aplauso pretendieron porque como las paga el vulgo, es justo hablarle en necio para darle gusto.

(pp. 284–5, lines 40–8)

Cierren los doctos esta vez los labios. Lo trágico y lo cómico mezclado, 5

6

The translation given here is my own. For a full translation, see Lope Félix de Vega Carpio, The New Art of Writing Plays (written c.1604–08, printed 1609), trans. William T. Brewster (New York, 1914). For the Spanish original, see Lope Félix de Vega Carpio, Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, ed. Juana de José Prades (Madrid, 1971). For an account of Lope’s influence on the theatre, see McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, especially chapters 3 and 4.

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Tragicomedy in Spain y Terencio con Séneca, aunque sea como otro Minotauro de Pasife, harán grave una parte, otra ridícula, que aquesta variedad deleita mucho. Buen ejemplo nos da naturaleza, que por tal variedad tiene belleza.

(pp. 291–2, lines 174–80)

The references to nature and the importance of the audience speak of a response to life in its multiplicity rather than the artificial categories of human theory, while the intriguing term minotaur suggests many possibilities of how Lope regarded his art and might be compared with Philip Sidney’s term ‘mongrel tragicomedy’.7 This play-as-minotaur acknowledges the classical heritage of theatre while representing the playwright as one who gives birth to this monstrous form. But of course, this is a form which is monstrous only to those who see through a lens of idealism or who wish to maintain a barrier between genres and, given the link between comedy and the lower orders, a barrier based on social rank. Lope’s term is thus ironic. One of the few prose defences of the theatre against its critics was written by the Valencian playwright Ricardo de Turia (real name Pedro de Rejaule y Toledo). In his Apology for Spanish Comedies (1616), much of which plagiarises Guarini, he argues that the theoretical attacks are misguided because their arguments are based on theories of tragedy and comedy, whereas what is being produced in Spain in the seventeenth century is tragicomedy: The classicising critics of our time condemn all the comedies written and performed in Spain, accusing them of being monstrous in invention and disposition as well as improper in their speech. They claim that comic poetry does not permit the introduction of grave characters such as kings, emperors, monarchs and popes.8 Suelen los muy críticos terensiarcos y plautistas destos tiempos condenar generalmente todas las comedias que en España se hacen y representan, así por monstruosas en la invención y disposición, como impropias en la elocución, diciendo que la poesía cómica no permite introducción de personas graves, como son reyes, emperadores, monarcas, y aun pontífices. (Turia, pp. 147–8)

He then makes a further claim which expands on Lope’s term for mixing genre (see New Art, line 174): Not one of the comedias now performed in Spain is in fact a comedy. They are in reality tragicomedies, a mixture formed of the comic and tragic. From tragedy they take serious characters, lofty action, terror and pity, while from comedy 7 8

On Sidney, see the Introduction, pp. 10–11. The translation given is my own. For the Spanish original, see Ricardo de Turia, Apologético de las comedias españolas, in Preceptiva dramática española del renacimiento y el barroco, eds Federico Sánchez Escribano and Alberto Porqueras Mayo (Madrid, 1965), pp. 147–53.

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Geraint Evans they take individual affairs, laughter and wit. Nobody should regard this mixture as improper, as there is nothing unseemly in mixing grave and humble characters, either in life or in poetic art. Ninguna comedia de cuantas se representan en España lo es, sino tragicomedia, que es un mixto formado de lo cómico y lo trágico, tomando déste las personas graves, la acción grande, el terror y la comiseración; y de aquél el negocio particular, la risa y los donaires, y nadie tenga por impropiedad esta mixtura, pues no repugna a la naturaleza y al arte poético que en una fábula concurran personas graves y humildes. (Turia, pp. 148–9)

Like Lope he justifies the mixing of styles by recourse to the audience: Those who write do so to satisfy the taste of those they write for [. . .] it is wrong to think that not following the rules is a sign of ignorance of those rules [. . .] The Spanish character demands in plays what it demands in fashion, where we see new styles of clothes every day. Los que escriben es a fin de satisfacer el gusto para quien escriben [. . .] y hace mal el que piensa que el dejar de seguillas nace de ignorarlas [. . .] Pues es infalible que la naturaleza española pide en las comedias lo que en los trajes, que son nuevos usos cada día. (Turia, pp. 150–1)

The citing of public taste as a justification is perhaps consciously balanced by his drawing on the classics to back up his points. To stress the uniqueness of tragicomedy he refers to Aristotle’s writing on chemical change, developing this into the poetic image of the hermaphrodite: The Philosopher, in his On Generation and Corruption, explains the difference between a mixture and a combination. In a mixture the parts lose their form and create a third material which is very different, whilst in a combination each part is preserved as it was before [. . .] We can compare a mixture to the fabulous Hermaphrodite, while a combination is similar to a man who embraces a woman, and when they separate, each reverts to their own self.9 Doctrina es del filósofo en el primero de Generatione, muy vulgar, donde muestra la diferencia que hay entre lo mixto y lo compuesto. Porque en lo mixto las partes pierden su forma y hacen una tercer materia muy diferente, y en lo compuesto cada parte se conserva ella misma como antes era, sin alterarse ni

9

I have translated the terms ‘mixto’ and ‘compuesto’ as ‘mixture’ and ‘combination’ as this is how Aristotle’s terms are translated in modern editions. See Aristotle, On Coming-to-be and Passing-away [On Generation and Corruption], in On Sophistical Refutations, On Coming-to-be and Passing-away, On the Cosmos (London, 1955), pp. 253–63, I.10.327a 30–328b 20. Turia’s ‘compuesto’ would be closer etymologically to the English ‘compound’, but strictly speaking the distinction made in modern chemistry is in fact the opposite: ‘mixture’ denotes a combination of substances which are brought together while retaining their original qualities, while ‘compound’ denotes the production of an entirely new substance. I am indebted to Victor Dixon for pointing this out.

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Tragicomedy in Spain mudarse [. . .] Lo mixto podemos comparar (porque ejemplificando declararemos mejor nuestro concepto) al fabuloso Hermafrodito [sic]. [. . .] Lo compuesto es semejante a un hombre que se abraza con una mujer, y desasidos, cada uno vuelve en su ser. (Turia, pp. 149–50)

Turia’s concept of the mixture is obviously taken from Guarini but, while his analogy is evocative, he unfortunately does not explain in detail what such a mixture might be. On the whole, the Spanish playwrights did not theorise what they did, they simply did it, and thus genre terminology usually lacked precision. McKendrick points out that when the Spanish term tragicomedia is used, it tends to mean a tragic play with an ending which was satisfactory for some characters, or a light-hearted play with a tragic ending.10 Spanish writers were certainly aware of Guarini’s work: Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa twice put Il pastor fido into Castilian (1602, 1609), a translation praised by Cervantes in Don Quijote.11 Calderón collaborated on an adaptation of the play which was performed before the monarchs on at least three occasions, as well as writing by himself a religious play (auto sacramental) with the same title for the festival of Corpus Christi in 1678.12 The influence of Guarini’s drama can be seen in several other Calderón plays, for example the misreading of an oracle which leads to conflict between father and son, and the lament by Amarili that brute animals have more liberty than human beings, are both found in La vida es sueño (1634–35).13 However, Guarini insisted that tragicomedy should end in joy, not punishment, an idea avoided by Turia, perhaps conscious that Spanish theatre was decidedly unlike that of Guarini’s ideal in this respect. Guarini looks to tragedy for the movement of feelings but not the disturbance of them, for the serious pleasure of tragedy but not its sadness, for its danger but not its death. From comedy, he is prepared to take laughter but not excessive laughter. Following Lope, most Spaniards wrote with one eye on the crowd, and far from pursuing a gentle mean, they revelled in extremes. The rest of this chapter will offer examples of how such revelling might produce a mixture, in Turia’s sense, rather than a combination.

10 11

12

13

McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, p. 79. Giovanni Battista Guarini, El Pastor Fido, Traduzida de Toscano en Castellano por Christoval Suarez de Figueroa (Valencia, 1609). Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote, trans. John Rutherford (London, 2000; repr. 2003), Part II, chapter 62, p. 915. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Antonio Solís and Antonio Coello, El pastor fido [c.1651], ed. Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, in Biblioteca de Autores Españoles XIV (Madrid, 1899), pp. 489–515. For its relation to Guarini’s play, see A.J. Valbuena Briones, ‘Calderón y su relación con la tragicomedia de Guarini’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 70 (1993), 165–73. For royal performances, see N.D. Shergold and J.E. Varey, Representaciones palaciegas: 1603–1699. Estudio y documentos (London, 1982), pp. 71, 238, 253, 256. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El pastor fido [auto sacramental], ed. Fernando Plata Parga (Kassel, 2003). For other examples of influence, see Valbuena Briones, esp. pp. 166, 171–2.

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Geraint Evans Although the term tragicomedy goes back to Plautus, in Spain it is associated above all with the dramatic dialogue La Celestina (sometimes translated into English as The Spanish Bawd), written by Fernando de Rojas. Published as the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea in 1499, its title was changed for a further edition several years later, now presented as the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea to reflect the new serious ending. The work as we know it can be seen as tragicomic in two ways. Firstly, it contains both high and low characters, whose social rank is reflected in their speech. Secondly, the initial coarse humour and farce lead us eventually to a tragic and moralistic ending, as the lustful male lover Calisto falls to his death, closely followed by that of his grief-stricken lover Melibea, who throws herself from a tower. Although La Celestina is too long to be easily performed on stage, it could be read aloud in groups, and its influence on Spanish literature has been profound.14 This mixture of high and low characters becomes an important aspect of Spanish public theatre, for as the life of Calisto is bound up with that of his servants, so the typical male protoganist of the urban comedia is accompanied by his lackey. This master-servant relationship would be a staple of Spanish theatre and it would even influence the major prose work of the period, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615), which is striking for the interrelation of its two protagonists: Quijote, an hidalgo or lesser noble, and Sancho Panza, a peasant. In turn, the comic double act of this novel influences the social dynamics of the stage. In both Don Quijote and the popular theatre, while decorum requires that linguistic register be appropriate to the social order of the speaker, this does not prevent the juxtaposition of different discourses. Humour comes from the servant whose words and actions frequently offer ironic commentaries on the life of his noble master and the values of his social rank. This mixture of high and low was important in a commercial theatre which had above all things, as Lope suggested in the New Art (see above, p. 60, lines 44–7), to appeal to a cross section of the population. The cheapest entry was for men who stood in the patio, while most women, who could form up to a third of the audience, sat in a balcony. Benches by the stage, or the boxes on the first or second floors, were more expensive and occupied by wealthier or more educated spectators. Plays not only appeal on different cultural levels, moving swiftly from coarse humour to erudite reference, but also explore the social dynamics of Spanish society: a society represented in microcosm within the auditorium. Servants and peasants are often crucial to the meaning of the play,

14

Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina / The Tragicke-comedy of Calisto and Melibea, trans. James Mabbe [1631], parallel text ed. Dorothy S. Severin (Warminster, 1987). For a modern translation see Fernando de Rojas, Celestina, The Spanish Bawd, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth, 1964). The text has been adapted for the stage, notably at the Edinburgh Festival in 2004 in a production directed by Calixto Bieito.

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Tragicomedy in Spain and the mixed audience would identify in complex ways with the social conflicts portrayed on stage.15 Some of the most interesting mixing of social rank is found in Lope’s Fuenteovejuna, a play set towards the end of fifteenth-century Spain, as the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella are busy uniting the Crown of Aragon to Castile and thus, so the mythology of the later centuries would read, initiating the ascent of Spain into its Golden Age.16 The villain of the piece is Fernán Gómez, an aristocratic commander of the military order of Calatrava, who transgresses acceptable norms of conduct in two ways. Firstly, he rebels against Ferdinand and Isabella, an act of treason which forms the sub-plot. Secondly, he mistreats the people of the town of Fuenteovejuna for whom he is responsible, stealing from the townspeople and sexually abusing the women, thereby precipitating the main action of the play in which the town rises in revolt and kills the commander. There is thus a plot which concerns the rights and duties of ordinary people and their lords, with a sub-plot which involves the higher aristocracy against royalty.17 But more importantly we have a serious play of lofty issues such as political rebellion and abuse of power, themes theoretically held to be suitable for higher-ranking protagonists, but the protagonists of the play are both low and high. As is common in Spanish theatre, there is both the constant threat of death and a great deal of coarse humour from the peasants. But significantly, these elements are combined and developed in a way which might relate to Turia’s sketched concept of the mixture. Mengo is a country bumpkin who conspicuously rises from the depths of crude comedy to the higher realms of selflessness in the face of death. Because the town has illegally killed the aristocratic commander, the queen sends an investigator to extract information from the inhabitants by torture. The townspeople refuse to give the names of those most guilty, and in response to interrogation reply with just three words which have gone down in Spanish folklore: ‘Fuenteovejuna did it’ (‘Fuenteovejuna lo hizo’). At the beginning of the play Mengo had made jokes at the expense of others and his professed credo was one of self-love. Yet under torture this crude figure, expected by everyone to yield, exhibits bravery in resisting torture, thus behaving in a lofty manner. Of course, this being the comedia, he then brings us back down to earth with jokes about how red and sore his bottom is after the torture, even in the presence of the monarchs, but this only strengthens the mixture of high and low.18 15 16 17

18

For more on the social make-up of the audience, see McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, ch. 7, pp. 178–208. Lope de Vega, Fuente Ovejuna, trans. and ed. Victor Dixon (Warminster, 1989). As Valbuena Briones points out, regarding the need for a sub-plot to be inextricably linked to the main plot, Lope uses the word ‘inserta’ which corresponds to Guarini’s term ‘innestare’. See Lope de Vega, New Art, lines 181–7, and Valbuena Briones, p. 168. Lope de Vega, Fuenteovejuna, Act II lines 1650–1, Act III lines 2426–9.

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Geraint Evans I would now like to look at endings, which, while not mentioned by Turia, perhaps because he was well aware that they did not conform to Guarini’s model of disaster avoided, are crucial to an understanding of what a mixture of the comic and tragic might be. Let us imagine a spectrum or scale running from comedy to tragedy. Towards one end are plays considered to be comic, but in which there are hints of alternative tragic endings beyond the timescale of the events shown on stage. At the other end there are tragic endings which suggest the lost possibilities for comic resolution and happiness or contain a parody of comedic elements which serve only to emphasise the horror. I will look briefly at one play from either end of the scale, and then look at two plays which could be seen as falling between those extremes, plays which might more comfortably sit within a definition of tragicomedy. When David Johnston’s translation of The Dog in the Manger by Lope was directed by Laurence Boswell for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2004, the production contained a wealth of comedic elements which appealed to the modern audience and would certainly have appealed to the early modern public:19 the jokes of the gracioso (comic servant) with the music and dancing, notably that which accompanied the closing marriage. But critical opinion has produced various interpretations of its comic status, with E.M. Wilson and Duncan Moir even calling this play a ‘dark comedy’, for beneath the surface there are many aspects which hint at danger and disaster.20 Objections to tragicomedy were partly a reaction to a perceived threat to social stratification: where the the high language and noble deeds of tragedy were thought suited only for the higher social orders, the cruder humour of comedy was thought appropriate for the lower orders. While linguistic appropriateness is maintained, The Dog in the Manger threatens social decorum and stasis by dramatising love and sexual desire across boundaries of social rank. There are three social strata in the play: firstly, the countess Diana and her aristocratic suitors; secondly, the higher palace employees, including Teodoro the secretary, who eventually marries Diana; and thirdly, the lower orders, including Teodoro’s own servant, Tristán. The hints of darkness begin in the opening seconds through classical topoi: as Teodoro escapes from a nocturnal tryst with the servant Marcela, Tristán extinguishes a light with his hat, causing the feathers to burn. This leads into several implicit and explicit references to

19

20

See various reviews by Michael Billington et al. in Theatre Record, 24.8 (2004), pp. 508–13; 25.3 (2005), pp. 122–4. Lope de Vega, El perro del hortelano, ed. Victor Dixon (London, 1981). For the performed translation, see Lope de Vega, The Dog in the Manger, trans. David Johnston (London, 2004). E.M. Wilson and D.W. Moir, A Literary History of Spain, The Golden Age: Drama 1492–1700 (London, 1971), pp. 52–3. For a summary of critical interpretations of its comic or serious qualities, see J.W. Sage, ‘The Context of Comedy: Lope de Vega’s El perro del hortelano and related plays’, in Studies in Spanish Literature of the Golden Age presented to Edward M. Wilson, ed. R.O. Jones (London, 1973), pp. 247–66 (249).

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Tragicomedy in Spain Icarus and then Phaeton, symbols of ambition and over-reaching for the early modern audience who consequently wonder whether Teodoro will be the Icarus who falls to his death after daring to aspire to the heights of Diana’s love. The danger becomes more real when the aristocratic suitors Ricardo and Federico jealously plot to have Teodoro murdered, and although this is presented humorously, it does contribute to the ambiguity and threat of the ending. In early modern plots, love across social rank is commonly resolved via a last minute revelation that one of the two lovers is in reality of high blood but was separated from their true family in infancy. This device superficially reconciles two incompatible desires: the need to believe that love may conquer all and the desire to believe in the essential superiority of noble blood, while perhaps also appealing to the Freudian family romance in the spectator. In this case the solution is deceitful, engineered by the servant Tristán who invents a false life story for his master Teodoro. Count Ludovico had lost his son as a boy, so Tristán devises a plan to convince the count that this son is in fact our Teodoro, who is thus able to marry Diana, now his social equal. But the final words of the play, in which the servant Tristán begs us the audience to keep this secret, remind us of the fragility of the arrangement, for revelation of the truth would mean death for the upstart husband. Near the end of the play, three characters apostrophise Fortune, asking her to stop the turning of her wheel, yet as the early modern audience knew, Fortune does not hold her wheel. This foregrounding of the lovers’ precarious position invites us to go beyond the play’s formal end towards thoughts of a possible disaster should the truth be known, and thus to muse on social values and the barriers against social movement. Of interest is the fact that Lope always resented his lack of integration into higher circles and for a while was himself, like Teodoro, the secretary of an aristocrat, the Duke of Sessa.21 In her exploration of the complications of tragicomedy, Verna Foster refers to Bernard Beckerman who distinguishes between the theatrical experience and the memorial experience of a play.22 The Dog in the Manger inspires an initial theatrical response, in this case to the laughter and jollity of the end, but the subsequent memorial response picks up the subtleties and implicit meanings. The possibility of tragedy beyond the last lines complicates our response, encouraging a critique of the social values which restricted Diana, forming a memorial response which could be regarded in terms of Turia’s mixture rather than combination. At the other extreme is Calderón’s El medico de su honra (written c.1633–35), usually translated as The Surgeon of His Honour or The Physician of

21 22

For more on his life, see Hugo Rennert, The Life of Lope de Vega, 1562–1535 (Glasgow, 1904). Verna A. Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy (Aldershot, 2004), p. 4. Bernard Beckerman, Dynamics of Drama: Theory and Method of Analysis (New York, 1979), p. 131.

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Geraint Evans his Honour.23 In a plot often compared with Othello, the jealous Gutierre arranges the death of his innocent wife, Mencía; but this Calderonian wife-murderer does not kill himself, and in the closing scene the king, the symbol and voice of justice, arranges for him to marry again. Marriage is the creator of personal and social harmony, bringing into union body and soul, as well as uniting different families in social alliance. Comedias typically end with marriage, in some cases even double or triple marriages, yet they often play ironic variations on this theatrical convention. The woman to whom Gutierre is finally forced to give his hand is Leonor, an ex-lover he had jilted after seeing a man leave her house and wrongly assuming her to be unfaithful. When subsequently married to Mencía he again misinterprets evidence, becomes pathologically jealous, and this time has the woman killed. So at the end of the play when he is betrothed to Leonor, the audience understands that a marriage to the woman whom he has already suspected before the play opened will almost certainly end the same way as his first marriage: Leonor will die. The physical symbol of theatrical comic resolution is the hand offered in marriage but the hand that Gutierre offers and which she accepts is bloodstained. This closing marriage, in its incongruity, unwelcomeness and apparent lack of poetic justice, presents to the audience the possibility of a further tragedy in the second marriage beyond the confines of the play. While this play is very much a tragedy rather than a tragicomedy, my point is to show that playwrights did manipulate genre expectations for effect, as will be seen in the next two plays.24 Moving into the middle ground of tragicomedy, the ending of Fuenteovejuna, discussed above, also contains a provocative ending. The killing of the commander by the peasants takes place more than five hundred lines before the final bows; but the play is not allowed to end here, for the peasants have acted illegally and the monarchs are duty-bound to examine the killing of an aristocrat. The official interrogator is unable to extract a confession out of the townspeople, and so informs the king that there are two possibilities: either the whole town should be executed, or all should be pardoned. In the remarkable closing scene the entire peasant cast appear before the monarchs to pledge their allegiance. It is only this humble self-abnegation which persuades the king, who again stresses that they have committed a crime, but agrees to pardon them. The plot contains a trajectory which alone justifies consideration as tragicomedy. The action moves through political sedition and rebellion to eulogies of rural peace, to violence inflicted by a noble upon peasants 23 24

Pedro Calderón de la Barca, The Physician of his Honour / El médico de su honra, trans. Dian Fox with Donald Hindley (Warminster, 1997). For debates on the validity of the term tragedy as applied to Spanish theatre, see McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, pp. 78–83. For a discussion of peculiarly Spanish approaches to tragedy, see A.A. Parker, ‘Towards a Definition of Calderonian Tragedy’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 39 (1962), 222–37.

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Tragicomedy in Spain (including rape), to a wedding scene of bucolic harmony which is interrupted by the commander who abducts the bride, to peasant rebellion and the killing of the local lord, to a final resolution which allows the villagers to survive and the newly-wed peasants to live together in a once again united Spain. We thus have a tragic climax of rebellion followed by a comic ending. Yet the happy ending is in doubt until the last lines are spoken and it is only the final decision of the king which allows justice to be done. The precariousness of the tragic/ comic outcome is, like The Dog in the Manger, a veiled comment on the justice that reigns in the real world beyond the walls of the corral theatre.25 Another ambiguous ending can be found in Calderón’s The Mayor of Zalamea (El alcalde de Zalamea, 1642–4?).26 The drama presents the conflict between a peasant family and soldiers who are billeted in the western town of Zalamea as the army are marching towards Portugal. After Captain Álvaro Ataide has raped Isabel, the daughter of Pedro Crespo, a wealthy peasant, Crespo considers vengeance against the captain, but then receives the news that the townspeople have elected him mayor. The office of alcalde, mayor, also included that of magistrate, so it is now his responsibility to deal with the rapist as a representative of justice, without the interference of personal vengeance. Crespo begs the captain to marry Isabel, and only after the captain has arrogantly refused does Crespo give the order for his execution. But in so doing, the mayor has acted illegally, as soldiers had the right to be tried by a military tribunal. Enraged, the army commander now advances on the town, with the intention of burning it to the ground. Zalamea is only saved by the arrival of King Philip II, who acknowledges Crespo’s fault but agrees that the captain’s crime merited the punishment. The play can be seen to be problematically tragicomic in two ways. Firstly, the text had opened in comic mode, with jokes, song, and an alfresco scene where Crespo and the Commander dine together. But with the rape, the tone changes and the play seems to be moving towards tragedy. The captain is garrotted, and although the execution takes place offstage, the curtain of the discovery space is drawn back to present the audience with his lifeless corpse. The subsequent threat from the army is very real, as the early modern Spanish audience would have known by first or second hand.27 The town and the lives 25

26

27

The richness of the play has given rise to various interpretations, including ones which have stressed the revolutionary aspects: in Tsarist Russia; by Federico García Lorca during the Spanish Second Republic; and an adaptatation by Alan Sillitoe during the heady days of the late 1960s: All citizens are soldiers / Fuenteovejuna, trans. and adapted by Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe (London, 1969). For a survey of theatrical interpretations, see Teresa J. Kirschner, ‘Sobrevivencia de una comedia: historia de la difusión de Fuenteovejuna’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos I (1976–77), 255–71. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El alcalde de Zalamea, ed. Peter N. Dunn (Oxford, 1966; repr. 1968). For an English translation see Calderón, Six Plays, trans. Edwin Honig (New York, 1995). For accounts of destruction wreaked by Spanish soldiers on the civilian population of Flanders

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Geraint Evans of its inhabitants are saved, but as in other Spanish plays of the period, the fact that it took a deus ex machina (the arrival of the king) to save them reminds us that without this fortuitous intervention, the town would have been destroyed. Once again there is a strong memorial experience, prompting considerations of social justice, or the lack thereof. Secondly, although there is peace at the end it is marked with loss. Reputation, often expressed in terms of honour, is defined and cherished by many of the protagonists, but at the end of the play all have lost honour. No longer a virgin, Isabel enters a convent without ever having expressed a religious vocation. The army commander, who defended the right of soldiers to try their own, has seen his authority compromised by peasants and the king, while Crespo has seen his family split up, and the captain is dead. Order, associated with comic resolution, is restored but at a cost. This discussion of tragicomedy has paid close attention to the audience, an awareness seen in Guarini, who, as Verna Foster shows, distinguished between the instrumental and the architectonic end. The instrumental end is what is imitated, the type of action, while the architectonic end is the effect. So tragedy might imitate terrible or pitiable action, which is the instrumental end, but the architectonic end is the effect of that action on the audience.28 However, Guarini’s concept of tragicomedy is of limited relevance to the Spanish comedia. As Foster reminds us, Guarini’s aim of mixing subordinates tragic effect to comic effect in that the architectonic end of tragicomedy is similar to that of comedy, the purgation of melancholy. As we have seen, Spanish tragicomedy is often darker. Guarini believes in an integration of comic and tragic, but his ideal is different, more gentle. In Spanish theatre we tend to find greater extremes of laughter and danger, which begs the question whether it is possible to integrate effects which encompass such extremes. Foster shows how, in England, John Dryden and Samuel Johnson had suggested that fully comic and tragic responses might be created in alternation, or what Johnson refers to as ‘combination’, but this implies separate effects and not integration.29 Foster then points out that J.E. Schlegel and G.E. Lessing, the latter a Hispanist responsible for creating interest in Spanish drama among German Romantics, theorised a fusion of tragedy and comedy whereby there is a dual perspective, and the spectator is affected emotionally in two ways simultaneously.30 Foster discusses examples of how such effects are created in secular plays before embarking on a historical exploration of tragicomic effects in religious drama,

28 29 30

see Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567–1659 (Cambridge, 1972) pp. 179–81. Crimes by soldiers included rape, as in this play. Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, p. 19. Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, pp. 22–4. Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, pp. 24–6. For the importance of Spanish theatre for Lessing, see Henry W. Sullivan, Calderón in the German Lands and the Low Countries: His Reception and Influence, 1654–1980 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 128–42.

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Tragicomedy in Spain for in Western culture there is indeed a tradition of art which is simultaneously comic and tragic, and which has its roots at the centre of Christian faith.31 The Passion, telling of Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection, is both loss and hope for the future, both death in life and rebirth in God. The patterns that Foster traces through the religious drama of medieval and early modern England can also be seen in the martyr plays of Spain, a genre to which Lope contributed fourteen plays.32 Martyrs die for their faith in the certainty of salvation, so what may be interpreted as tragedy on a worldly level becomes joy on the eternal one. These Christian plays are by no means a simple unordered combination, and neither are they what Sidney would call mongrel tragicomedy, for the Christian message imposes an order on events. The double vision of tragicomedy is here formed of two perspectives, that of the characters and that of God. Bruce Wardropper has discussed the concept of cosmic irony in Spanish drama as a development of dramatic irony.33 In ordinary dramatic irony, the audience is placed in a privileged position, able to perceive meanings in the spoken words of which the speakers are unaware. With cosmic irony, the characters do not understand the full import of their speech, but God does, and if we the audience are also allowed to understand the full meaning, we are being encouraged to share the viewpoint of God, seeing events not from a human but from from a global or rather heavenly perspective. Further, even though life might seem to lack purpose for the characters on stage, God does indeed see a purpose which gives meaning to life, so we can link cosmic irony to Providence. Wardropper writes of Calderon’s martyr play, The Prodigious Magician (El mágico prodigioso, first version 1637), that whereas the other characters are either completely blind to the truth or only glimpse it, the Christian martyr Justina sees God’s plan from the beginning, as indeed the spectator is encouraged to do. Cosmic irony thus concerns not only individual moments of dramatic irony, as in a secular play, but we become aware of a divine plan which permeates the entire play. Similarly, in Acting is Believing (Lo fingido verdadero, c.1608), Lope’s dramatisation of the martyrdom of St Genesius, a play published as a tragicomedy and studied for its metatheatricality, a double perspective is encouraged.34 Metatheatrical devices suggest the wider perspective; references to bread move from the literal to the transubstantiated; the

31 32 33

34

Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, pp. 35–51. For a full study of Lope’s hagiographic plays, see Elaine Canning, Lope de Vega’s ‘Comedias de tema religioso’: Re-creations and Re-presentations (Woodbridge, 2004). Bruce Wardropper, introduction to Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El mágico prodigioso (Madrid, 1985), pp. 45–50. For a translation, see Calderón de la Barca, The Prodigious Malician / El mágico prodigioso trans. and ed. Bruce W. Wardropper (Madrid, 1982). Lope de Vega, Lo fingido verdadero, in Obras Escogidas III (Madrid, 1974), pp. 169–204. There are two translations: Acting is believing, trans. Michael D. McGaha (San Antonio, 1986), The Great Pretenders / The Gentleman from Olmedo, trans. David Johnston (London, 1992).

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Geraint Evans Empire of Rome prefigures that of Christ; the image of the phoenix suggests both death and rebirth; the inability of the Emperor to comprehend events foregrounds the cosmic irony seen by the audience, for whom the tragedy of execution is also a comedic rebirth in heaven. Returning to Turia and Guarini, does the experience of death followed by rebirth constitute a combination or a mixture? One might argue that the events of Good Friday are followed by the Resurrection on the third day and that the sequential knowledge of one event followed by another is a combination. But the Christian spectator who witnesses a representation of the Passion is in a unique position, knowing the whole story, experiencing the tragic in the expectation of the ending, and then experiencing the Resurrection conscious of the pain and loss to the world. The spectator is encouraged to take a cosmic view. Foster thus writes of how in English medieval religious drama the historical perspective of the characters is different from the perspective of the audience which is aligned with the eternal perspective of God.35 She shows how this ironic departure from the historical or literal is encouraged in many ways: linguistic irony or wordplay; the use of the future tense; typology, where future actions are prefigured by present ones, as events in the Old Testament may prefigure events in the New; anachronisms which place a modern reference in a past context, and thus encourage us to view the past through the lens of the future, or rather through the lens of the eternal. The potential tragedy of the historical is thus seen through the comic perspective of eternity and Providence. Lope’s The Last Goth in Spain (El último godo de España, c.1599–1603) is a historical play which contains many of the tragicomic elements associated with martyr plays.36 It retells the myth of Spain’s fall to the Muslim invader in AD 711: King Rodrigo, the last Visigothic king of Spain, rapes Florinda (known to posterity as La Cava), whose father Count Julián seeks revenge by allying with the Muslims of North Africa to invade his homeland. The audience possess a knowledge of history which leads from this defeat through Islamic rule, the long centuries of reconquest and the eventual recapture of Granada in the annus mirabilis of 1492. The text manipulates this knowledge, dropping clues into the mind of the audience to provide pleasure in the recognition of the whole story. Anachronisms such as the reference to the two Indies (I, p. 643a) may seem strange in a play set nearly eight centuries before the departure of Columbus, but remind the audience of more glorious days to come. The scene in which portraits of medieval Spanish kings are discovered similarly refers to the

35 36

Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, p. 36. Lope de Vega, El último godo, in Obras Escogidas III (Madrid, 1974), pp. 635–65. The play has also been published as El postrer godo. The translations given are mine.

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Tragicomedy in Spain Reconquest which followed the fall (III, p. 665a). The audience gains pleasure from recognising these ironies, which on one level are dramatic but on another cosmic, given early modern Spain’s official view of itself as the providential guardian of Christianity in a world of Protestants, Muslims, heathens and Jews. Bearing in mind Foster’s discussion of typology, it is interesting to see how the play’s biblical references suggest a trajectory of Fall and Resurrection. After the rape, Florinda accuses Rodrigo of having eaten her fruit in lines which liken the Fall of Spain to the Fall of Humanity: FLORINDA Custodian of my garden, with such false and cunning treason you have eaten my fruit and left the tree barren. FLORINDA Guarda de jardín, que has hecho traición tan falsa y astuta que, comiéndote la fruta, dejas el árbol deshecho. (II, p. 649a)

Following this there comes reference to the flood, with the claim that it is the punishment of God, inviting the cosmic perspective: ARSINDO

RODRIGO ARSINDO

RODRIGO

The whole of Africa seems to be landing fearlessly in Spain. Or else Noah is opening his Ark to increase the numbers. [. . .] This is the punishment of heaven. Toda la África, señor, Parece que desembarca En España sin temor. O que abre Noé su arca Para número mayor. [. . .] Del cielo ha sido el castigo (II, pp. 653b, 655b)

But as humanity will be redeemed by Christ who is heralded by John the Baptist, so the salvation of Spain is stressed by recurrent references to John. When we first see the Moors they are celebrating the eve of St John; they are then shipwrecked on the day itself; and when the Moor Abembúcar converts to Christianity he intends to change his name to Juan (III, p. 657b). All this seems to prefigure a sequence of events similar to the Passion, which must also include a Resurrection. Count Julián, the Spaniard who has brought the Moors across the Straits, is likened by Rodrigo to Judas (II, p. 653b). Julián has 73

Geraint Evans played Judas to Spain itself, which will die spiritually in AD 711 and be resurrected as the leader of Christendom. The mythological phoenix is thrice linked to the Asturian warlord Pelayo, who towards the end directly addresses the allegorical figure of Spain. We may infer that, from Pelayo, the new spirit of Spain will rise. However, comic and tragic effects depend upon perspective, and the story of the fall and reconquest of Spain has two sides, the Christian and the Muslim, as is pointed out by Elizabeth Drayson.37 She develops ideas of Melveena McKendrick, who in a study of political drama analyses the concept of ‘saying without saying’ (‘decir sin decir’) expounded by the late seventeenth-century writer Francisco Bances Candamo.38 So far we have considered the Christian perspective on the play, but on another level we are invited also to identify with the Muslims who are largely presented as trustworthy and loyal in contrast to the Christians: the wilful Rodrigo, the treacherous Julián, the renegade Bishop Orpaz. After the opening scene which portrays the political machinations of the Spanish, the second scene is more sympathetic, presenting the dancing and singing of the Africans. But although the Muslims are apparently the victors of the historical events, aspects of the drama also suggest the subsequent humiliation and erosion of Muslim identity. As in plays discussed above, a memorial experience is created based on knowledge of history. This is significant because, as Drayson reminds us, when the play was being written, politicians were discussing a possible expulsion of the Moriscos, a possibility which between 1609 and 1614 became fact when up to 300,000 Muslims were forced to leave Spain.39 Again, wordplay invites the audience to see two levels. When news of Pelayo arrives from the north, it is brought by a messenger described as an Old Christian (cristiano viejo) (III, p. 657b). He is indeed an old man, but in early modern Spain ‘Old Christian’ referred to a Spaniard free of the taint of Jewish or Moorish blood, whose family had not converted to Christianity. The pun thus anachronistically suggests the racist neologism of hierarchy which when applied to converts equated ‘New Christian’ with second class. As Drayson points out, when Zara is brought to court following the shipwreck, Rodrigo tells her she can stay if she converts, as was later the case for Muslims in Spain. We then see Zara wearing Christian dress, which had been one of the conditions of the Pragmatic which sparked the Revolt of the Moriscos in the Alpujarras in 1568. Abembúcar wants to marry Zara but he 37

38 39

Elizabeth Drayson, ‘Reading against the grain: tragicomedy as a vehicle for cultural ambivalence, ambiguity and subversion in El postrer godo de España by Lope de Vega’, paper presented at ‘Tragicomedy: Renaissance to Restoration’, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, 15 April 2005. Melveena McKendrick, Playing the King: Lope de Vega and the Limits of Conformity (London, 2000), pp. 105–26. Henry Kamen, Spain 1469–1714: A Society of Conflict, 2nd edn (London, 1991), p. 221.

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Tragicomedy in Spain also must convert to Christianity, and fearing his Muslim colleagues will find out, Zara tells him to arrange a clandestine baptism, suggesting the conversion of convenience employed by Muslims and Jews (III, p. 657b). All these details remind the audience of the second-class status of the Moriscos in early modern Spain. The changing balance of cultures is reflected in Abraydo’s complaints (and this is the eighth century) that the Christians are establishing themselves in the north and showing signs of superiority by wearing better clothes (III, p. 663b). The announcement of Christian resistance, and descriptions of Moors fleeing, can be related to the final result of this, the potential expulsion from Spain. The multiplicity of tragicomic form explored here reflects the development of a genre which was not theorised fully in Spain but was nevertheless a crucial part of the popular theatre. Perhaps the most important aspect of tragicomedy is what Foster refers to as double vision, a term that demands we think in terms of the audience.40 Irony is an important part of any popular art form which also aspires to intellectual appeal, and irony within Spanish drama results from manipulating expectations of comedic and tragic potential. The double vision is particularly pronounced in many of the endings, indeed in El último godo what was initially a double vision of tragedy and comedy for the Christians has been doubled again to include the reverse: comedic victory followed by tragedy for the Muslims. This complicated quadruple vision could truly be seen as a mixture rather than a combination.

40

Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, p. 36.

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5 Highly Irregular: Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France NICHOLAS HAMMOND

F

RENCH tragicomedy is a strange fish. If its impact were to be measured by the number of seventeenth-century tragicomedies which are still performed today, one could only conclude, to continue the angling metaphor, that tragicomedy is the one that got away. After all, the only tragicomedy from the period which everybody knows about, Corneille’s Le Cid, suffered the indignity (or should it be dignity?) of being renamed a tragedy by Corneille himself a number of years after the first performance. Yet, to assess tragicomedy on these terms alone would seriously underestimate the importance of the role it played in the development of drama and indeed in the many debates between ancients and moderns over the course of the seventeenth century. At a time when French drama was being discussed and theorised as never before, tragicomedy was by far the most popular genre. Between 1628 and 1634, for example, fifty tragicomedies were published, whereas only sixteen comedies and a mere ten tragedies appeared in that time. Moreover, the heyday of French tragicomedy, the 1630s, coincides precisely with some fundamental changes within French culture, with the furious debates which raged around Le Cid, known as the Querelle du Cid, and of course the founding of the Académie Française. Whenever tragicomedy was discussed then and indeed when it is still analysed now by many critics, questions of regularity remain an ongoing concern in France which do not seem to intrude quite so incessantly into debates on the theatre in other countries.1 In 1637, the year that Le Cid completely transformed French perceptions of the theatre, there appeared within a few days of the first performances of Le Cid another play, which was to make significant waves of its own in the seven-

1

I take ‘regularity’ here in its sense of conforming to rules as defined by rule-making bodies, such as in this case the Académie Française.

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Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France teenth century.2 Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin’s comedy Les Visionnaires revolves around the three daughters of Alcidon. The first daughter, Mélisse, is in love with Alexander the Great, which, given the fact that he has been dead for centuries and that all subsequent suitors do not measure up to his prowess or reputation, makes her chances of finding true love somewhat slim. Daughter number two, Hespérie, on the other hand, is convinced that every man on the planet is in love with her. When a potential lover comes to call, such is her concern for the many men she would be rejecting if she were to choose just one man, her odds of getting hitched become higher by the minute. As she exclaims, ‘Unceasingly I am importuned by a thousand lovers, And I believe that Heaven has destined me to this torment’ (II, 2, 433–4).3 And then there is Sestiane, who is passionately devoted to the theatre, to the exclusion of all else. During the course of Les Visionnaires she provides a commentary on and indeed becomes a living metaphor for many preoccupations of the theatre at the time, not least the debates which were raging around Le Cid. In Act II, scene 4, for example, Sestiane discusses with the poet Amidor the merits of the three unities as formulated by what she calls ‘these critical and severe minds’ (577). Amidor replies by pleading for diversity in drama: he argues, ‘Diversity both pleases and surprises us’ (600). Sestiane then provides him with the subject matter for a piece of drama which transgresses every unity and rule governed by regularity: ranging over many lands and many years, incorporating orphans, tigers, giants, kings and princesses, and including enough material for twenty plays, as Desmarets tells us in his preface to the play (vol. 2, p. 406), her description is interrupted by Amidor, who declares: This subject-matter is very beautiful, serious yet soothing, magnificent; And, if I am not mistaken, it is tragi-comic. (653–4)

Amidor’s perception of tragicomedy lies very much on the side of those who located its roots in the irregularity of the traditional romance. Yet, in case we are tempted to associate Amidor’s point of view with that of the playwright, we should bear in mind Desmarets’ description of Amidor in the preface to the play as ‘a bizarre poet’, who is so in love with the language of the ancients that he does not realise that it is not readily comprehensible to the people of his own age (vol. 2, p. 405). The major confusion concerning tragicomedy was that, given the relative lack of examples within ancient literature or theory, nobody could agree on what precisely it was. Perhaps the first quarrel which concerned traditionalists 2

3

Although the exact date of the first performance of Le Cid is not certain, it is generally thought to have been in January 1637; see J.-M. Civardi, La Querelle du Cid (1637–1638) (Paris, 2004), p. 25, footnote 1. The first performances of Les Visionnaires took place between 15 February and 6 March 1637; see J. Scherer and J. Truchet, eds, Théâtre du xviie siècle (Paris, 1986), vol. 2, p. 1357. All translations from French into English are my own.

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Nicholas Hammond and modernists alike was over the one identifiable ancient source for the genre, Plautus’ prologue to his play Amphitryon: Nam me perpetuo facere ut sic comoedia, Reges quo veniant et di, non par arbitror. Quid igitur? Quoniam hic servus quoque partes habet, Faciam sit, proinde ut dixi, tragicomoedia. For to write a comedy from one end to the other where kings and gods appear is not a good idea. What therefore should one do? Since a slave also has a role in it, I will make it, as I have said, a tragicomedy.

As Hélène Baby has pointed out, both the contradictory exploitation and the lack of mention of this quotation effectively sum up all the ambiguities surrounding the theoretical discourse on tragicomedy.4 There are some theorists, primarily those like Mareschal and Ogier, arguing for the irregularity of drama, who choose not to mention Plautus at all. Mareschal and Ogier see themselves as modernists, and the omission of Plautus from their discourse shows perhaps their wish to emphasise the modernity of the term. Ogier, whose treatise on irregular drama appeared as a preface to Schelandre’s 1628 tragicomedy, Tyr et Sidon, is not in the least backward in showing off his erudition, and it is very likely that he knew of the passage from Plautus. However, instead, he puts forward the argument that the ancients did indeed write tragicomedies but that they simply did not use the term; Euripides’ Cyclops, for example, is in his view a perfect tragicomedy because of the way in which it mingles wine and jokes with blood and rage (and I am using Ogier’s own terminology here). As he adds, ‘The thing is therefore ancient while the name is new.’ Corneille himself only refers to Plautus at the moment that he definitively moves on from tragicomedy as a genre, and I will return to this later. Interestingly, it is above all those who espouse traditional and regular drama who refer most often to Plautus, principally to undermine and question his use of the term. The abbé d’Aubignac, whose influential theoretical work La Pratique du théâtre is as illuminating as his own attempts at writing theatre are stultifying, follows Scaliger in interpreting Plautus’ use of the word as simply a joke which should not be taken seriously. As he states, ‘Plautus at no point named his Amphitryon a tragicomedy, but because the Gods and Kings that he introduces in the play hardly act at all according to their dignified status [. . .], he boldly calls his play a Comedy in several places of his Prologue.’5 Tragicomedy for d’Aubignac is located as resolutely modern and therefore should be condemned as such. He goes on to say about Plautus:

4 5

H. Baby, La Tragi-comédie de Corneille à Quinault (Paris, 2001), p. 48. D’Aubignac, abbé de, La Pratique du théâtre (Paris, 1657, written in 1640s), ed. P. Martino (Geneva, 1996), I, x, p. 151.

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Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France That he is the only one [of the ancients to have used the term] cannot be doubted; and so the Moderns were unable to support their argument from any other Latin author while the language remained alive in Italy; it therefore follows that it is a term which Plautus delivered and which nobody since wished to adopt, as it was dead in the cradle long before the death of the Latin language.6

Given the lack of accord over Plautus’ appellation, it is hardly surprising that there were diverging interpretations of what the genre itself constituted. Many of the earlier writers of tragicomedy stress epic romance as the inspiration of its subject matter, very much in the lineage of what was considered to be the first French tragicomedy, Garnier’s Bradamante of 1582 (which is drawn from Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso). Others, mainly practitioners of the genre like Jean Mairet in the preface to his 1631 tragicomedy La Silvanire and Georges Scudéry in his Observations sur le Cid, see the genre as a composite of both tragedy and comedy, thereby mingling both noble and lesser characters, but usually veering more towards comedy than tragedy. Scudéry, himself the author of nine tragicomedies, in criticising Le Cid, stresses that the spectator of tragicomedy must be kept in suspense by some kind of intrigue which can only be resolved at the end.7 As he emphasises, in a statement which could almost be that of Desmarets’ Almidor, in Le Cid ‘no diversity and no intrigue is to be found’.8 Others, mainly theorists like La Mesnardière and D’Aubignac, see the tragicomic genre as more akin to tragedy with a happy ending. In fact, D’Aubignac is so keen to debase the idea of tragicomedy as a genre at all that he devotes a whole chapter of his Pratique du théâtre to attempting to prove that tragicomedies are simply tragedies in disguise. Tragedy, according to him, is better suited to the high seriousness and regularity of the French as opposed to comedy of the morally dubious Italians. As he states, As for Tragedy, it has been better preserved by us, because as the morals of the French are heroic and serious, they have preferred to see the adventures of heroes on stage and have been less disposed to suffer that mixture of different kinds of buffoonery which the Italians like.9

Although D’Aubignac is correct in asserting that tragicomedies generally have happy endings, another of his statements is more contentious: ‘in the plays for which we use this term composed of the words Tragedy and Comedy, there is no sense of Comedy; everything in it is serious and marvellous, nothing popular or farcical’.10 D’Aubignac, writing in the 1640s (and therefore just 6 7 8 9 10

Ibid., p. 149. J.-M. Civardi, La Querelle du Cid (1637–1638): édition critique intégrale (Paris, 2004), pp. 374–5. Ibid., p. 375. D’Aubignac, La Pratique du théâtre, I, X, p. 147. Ibid., p. 148.

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Nicholas Hammond when the vogue for tragicomedy was in decline), clearly has a model like Corneille’s Le Cid in mind. Indeed, Corneille is the playwright to whom he referred most frequently until a squabble between the two resulted in D’Aubignac, in a fit of pique, crossing out all references to Corneille in drafts for a future edition of the Pratique. However, even with Le Cid as D’Aubignac’s model here, he is wrong to assert that there is no sense of comedy in it. Although the characters within the play are noble, there are a few episodes more akin to comedy than tragedy, such as the verbal virtuosity of certain scenes and the feigned death of Rodrigue. Even the ways in which Corneille flouts the unity of place, stretches to its limit the unity of time, and veers away from unity of action by including the seemingly superfluous figure of the Infanta, suggest a malleability which tragicomedy afforded him. It should be added that, even though Le Cid is the face that launched a thousand diatribes, other tragicomedies with similar concerns appeared in the very same year. Laure persécutée (first performed 1637, published in 1639), for instance, which is a reworking of a Lope de Vega play by a prolific writer of tragicomedies, Jean Rotrou (he wrote twelve in all), manages to contain comic devices like disguise and quiproquos (characters speaking at cross-purposes) in the midst of tragic situations. Indeed, at the very time that boundaries of taste, decorum and aesthetics were becoming more and more rigidly defined, tragicomedy’s lack of clear borders gave it a flexibility and a freedom which would not be seen again on the French stage within the seventeenth century. I have already mentioned the way in which the irregularity of tragicomedy is heralded by writers such as Ogier and Mareschal. As far as the subject matter of tragicomedies is concerned, I would argue that there is a similar flexibility. Same-sex desire, for example, which exists only in the margins of gossip (in letters, memoirs, journals etc.) and not in officially sanctioned literature, manages somehow to rear its head within tragicomedy with greater ease than in other genres.11 Because of the early modern period’s phallocentric and procreative notion of sexuality, desire between women is often alluded to or explored on the stage (usually through mistaken identity or disguise) but is not treated as transgressive in the way that desire between men is. In the 1634 tragicomedy, Cléagénor et Doristée by Rotrou, for example, the character Diane concludes the play with a reflection on the fact that she fell in love with the female Doristée cross-dressed as Philémond: ‘I found myself giving in to love and I hoped for everything of her’, she tells us, before correcting herself 11

While one can discern homoerotic subtexts in a comedy like Molière’s Tartuffe (where the father of the household, Orgon, is obsessed by the religious impostor, Tartuffe) or a tragedy like Racine’s Bérénice (where the friendship between Titus and Antiochus forms part of the shared history of the three protagonists), they are never more than suggestions. The possibilities afforded by the greater number of cross-dressed parts in tragicomedies of the time would seem to allow a more overt display of same-sex desire on the stage.

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Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France and saying, ‘But nature came to my aid’ (V.7). As Joseph Harris in his excellent book on cross-dressing in seventeenth-century France, Hidden Agendas, states of this scene, ‘what Diane desired of “Philémond” is the one thing that “Philémond” naturally lacks’.12 As far as same-sex desire between men is concerned, there are a number of tragicomedies where the possibility is alluded to. Corneille’s 1632 tragicomedy, Clitandre (another play he later renamed a tragedy) includes a scene between the prince Floridan and his favourite, the eponymous Clitandre, where it is left deliberately ambiguous whether it is the branches of the elm tree or the limbs of the two men which are ‘interlaced’ (II.4). In a number of other tragicomedies, such as Desfontaines’s Eurimédon (1635), Durval’s Agarite (1636), Mareschal’s La Cour bergère (1640) and Sallebray’s L’Amante ennemie (1642), desire between men is hinted at through cross-dressing even if all accompanying risks of actually acting upon such impulses are effectively neutralised by the denouement. It should be remembered that, unlike in England, almost all female roles in seventeenth-century France were played by women, so the transgressive potential of cross-dressed roles is perhaps greater for the very reason that they were less pervasive. If we were to reinterpret some of Joseph Harris’s data (he does not explicitly discuss the connection between tragicomedy and crossdressing), it is perhaps illuminating to find that between 1629 and 1650, of thirty plays which feature cross-dressing, seventeen are tragicomedies, the other genres being ballets, pastorales, comedies or tragedies. This might be seen to correlate numerically to the popularity of tragicomedy as a genre, but, if we consider the period when it declined sharply in popularity, between 1639 and 1650, the same preponderance can still be found: five of the eight plays to include cross-dressing are tragicomedies. Given the infinite scope for variety and innovation within tragicomedy, the question remains why it was so short-lived as a genre in France. Undoubtedly custom plays a part: tragicomedy simply fell out of fashion. One can see the traces of this, for example, as early as 1639 when Desmarets, in the prefatory material to his play Scipion, admits that the reason he chose to call it a tragicomedy was largely in order ‘to follow the fashion such as it is’.13 Corneille, as I mentioned earlier, refers to Plautus’ Amphitryon at the moment that he definitively rejects tragicomedy as a plausible genre. Justifying his decision to call his new play Don Sanche d’Aragon (1647) a ‘heroic comedy’, he remarks in the prefatory epistle, ‘You know how the French are: they love novelty’; he then goes on to criticise Plautus’ reasons for using the term ‘tragicomedy’, claiming, in a clear echo of Aristotle’s Poetics (1450a15), that the Latin playwright was ‘deferring too much to the characters and paying too little consideration to the

12 13

J. Harris, Hidden Agendas: cross-dressing in seventeenth-century France (Tübingen: Biblio 17, 2005), p. 169. Desmarets de Saint Sorlin, Scipion (Paris, 1639), Epître.

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Nicholas Hammond action’.14 It perhaps comes as no surprise that by the time Molière wrote his own version of Amphitryon in 1668, the vogue for tragicomedy was so outmoded that he had no hesitation in calling his play a comedy. Despite Corneille’s claim that his new genre of heroic comedy was only an interim measure in his attempts to write great tragedy, in fact, while he never wrote another tragicomedy, two of his final plays, Tite et Bérénice (1670) and Pulchérie (1672) were named heroic comedies. But, to return to the question of tragicomedy’s demise, I would suggest that there are more important reasons than fashion alone. In a sense, a condition of tragicomedy’s success was its eventual failure. The very fluidity of definition and experimentation within the genre might have given it a dynamism and freshness which appealed to audiences and playwrights alike, but it also made tragicomedy so flexible as to transpose itself easily into other forms such as heroic comedy, as we have seen with Corneille. Even though in the 1630s tragicomedy had some general features, such as its roots in traditional romance and happy endings, this was not always the case. In the 1630s, for example, there are three tragicomedies (Chabrol’s L’Orizelle and La Selve’s Léandre et Héron from 1633, and Dorothée De Croy’s Cinnatus et Camma of 1637) which have unhappy endings. But even comedies seem to have had the freedom to defy conventions which would be more closely observed later in the century. Desmarets’ comedy Les Visionnaires, which I discussed at the beginning of this paper, is an example of this, as it refuses to resolve itself with the expected comic ending of multiple marriages. All three deluded daughters remain resolutely unmarried. The fact that a comedy could end with all central characters persisting in their fantasies proved too much to bear for a Jansenist moralist like Pierre Nicole, who branded dramatists like Desmarets as ‘public poisoners’,15 and became engaged later in the century in a vigorous debate with Jean Racine over the moral status of the theatre. Before the Querelle du Cid, other genres were able to encroach upon the tragicomic territory. Looking back at his 1636 metatheatrical comedy L’Illusion comique, for instance, Corneille’s description in 1660 makes its hybridity seem more akin to a tragicomedy than a comedy: ‘The first act seems only to be a prologue, the three following acts make up a play which I am unable to define: its outcome is tragic; [. . .] but the style and characters are entirely comic. [. . .] The fifth is a rather short tragedy [. . .]. All this woven together makes a comedy, the action of which lasts no longer than the performance of it.’16 By casting this retro14

15 16

‘Tragedy is mimesis not of persons but of action and a life [. . .] It is not in order to provide mimesis of character that the agents act; rather, their characters are included for the sake of their actions.’ Poetics 1450a15. P. Nicole, Traité de la Comédie et autres pièces d’un procès du théâtre, ed. L. Thirouin (Paris, 1998), p. 219. P. Corneille, L’Illusion comique (Paris, 1639, first performed 1636), Examen (first published 1660).

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Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France spective glance at what he admitted was an ‘extravagant piece of theatre’, it is amusing to see how he tries to apply a certain veneer of respectability by showing how it still conformed to the unity of time. To conclude, therefore: tragicomedy at its height, highly irregular as it was deemed to be by some critics, had the effect that tragedy and comedy were forced to define themselves all the more rigorously and as a result became ever more separate from one another. Even if Corneille tried out new forms of heroic comedy, interestingly he never achieved the success of his earlier theatre: the stylish innovation of his early explorations in tragicomedy attracted the attention of theatre-goers in a way which his heroic comedies did not. It is fascinating to see how the great comic writer and the great tragic writer of the latter half of the seventeenth century, respectively Molière and Racine, negotiated their own theatre in reaction to the various debates which focused on tragicomedy. Molière made a virtue of exploiting the many influences of comedy, not least the commedia dell’arte of those buffonish Italians so excoriated by D’Aubignac, resulting in a wonderfully rich theatre which shocked those critics who thought one could not mix high and low comedy. Racine, on the other hand, who possessed a copy of D’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre, moved in the opposite direction, creating a pure theatre which rigorously observed the various conventions and unities and yet which, because of rather than in spite of those restrictions, managed to attain poetry and drama of transcendent beauty. It is not far-fetched to say that we have tragicomedy to thank for them.

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6 In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not to Lose Your Head: Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England ROS KING

T

HIS CHAPTER traces a journey that began for me in 1996 at the Globe Theatre in London when I became dramaturg for a production of Richard Edwards’s play, Damon and Pythias. This, the first designated tragicomedy to be written in English, had its likely first performance at court by the children of the Chapel Royal during Christmas 1564–65. It is thus twenty years earlier than Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, and more than forty years earlier than The Faithful Shepherdess, John Fletcher’s version of Guarini, and the play with which most critical accounts of tragicomedy in England begin.1 Edwards’s play, by contrast, has nothing whatsoever to do with shepherds. Instead, it owes its genesis and literary theory to the city plays of Terence and Plautus, and to the urbanity of Horace’s Defence of Poetry, whose authority is acknowledged and appealed to in the Prologue: ‘If this offend the lookers-on, let Horace then be blamed’ (D & P, Prologue 24). It is, however, set in Sicily which, ever since Theocritus wrote his Idylls, has seemed the natural home of the pastoral poetry with which tragicomedy has been most often associated because of Horace’s brief, rule-breaking reference to the allowability of mixing humour and tragedy in satyr plays.2 Edwards thus seems aware of the issues and negotiates a minefield of classical and contemporary literary theory with wit and aplomb. My journey progressed via work on The Comedy of Errors and Cymbeline,3 1

2 3

See Robert Henke, Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Newark, 1997); Nancy Klein Maguire (ed.), Renaissance Tragicomedy; Explorations in Genre and Politics (New York, 1987); Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (eds), The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (London, 1992). Horace, Ars Poetica, tr. Ross S. Kilpatrick in The Poetry of Criticism: Horace, Espistles II and Ars Poetica (Edmonton, 1990), ll. 220–5. See my revision to T.S. Dorsch (ed.), The Comedy of Errors (Cambridge, 2004); dramaturgy for a production of Cymbeline (dir. Danny Scheie, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, 2000); Ros King,

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Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England and this chapter will end with Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, but in the bathetic nature of tragicomedy it had its comically cathartic moment while I was driving to work, listening to the radio, when I encountered Evita Bezuidenhout for the first time.4 This lady describes herself as wife of Dr J.J. de V. Bezuidenhout, MP for Laagerfontein; intimate friend to H.F. Verwoerd, Tini Vorster and Eliza Botha; and South African Ambassador to the Independent Black Homeland Republic of Bapetikosweti. Often billed as ‘The most famous white woman in South Africa’, and in receipt of an award previously given to Hilary Clinton and Mother Teresa, she is of course ‘a man in a frock’, the creation of comedian Pieter-Dirk Uys. His analysis of how he managed to evade the censorship laws struck a chord. The censors were only concerned if the words ‘fart’ and ‘God’ appeared in his work. The fact that he was speaking damning truth about the politics of apartheid in South Africa was somehow overlooked, partly because, in the persona of Evita, this truth came out of the mouth of someone who was blissfully unaware of the actual implication of what she was saying, and partly because it was just a man in a frock. According to Uys, censorship in such regimes is ‘a ridiculous embrace of the literal in a parody of due process’ . . . ‘Cross-dressing puts the censor in a spin’ . . . ‘You just can’t take drag literally’. Photographs show a very gorgeous, mature woman, extremely glamorous, but not too much over the top.5 And that is the reason, I think, that in her audiences, whether black or white, ‘The women recognised the woman and the men forgot the man.’ It is a subtle distinction because it means that, beguiled by her appearance, while knowing her to be a charade, audiences register the truth of what ‘she’ is inadvertently saying. Tellingly, Nelson Mandela was allowed to listen to her radio show while in prison because his jailors thought it was not important. Mandela later told Uys how sustaining it had been to him and the other political prisoners. Evita got – and, under the present South African government, continues to get – her topical, political laughs because her logic is undeniable and because of the gap between what she evidently intends and the only possible interpretation. I find her interesting partly because Uys is indeed hilarious because so politically astute, and partly because of the analogy we can draw with Elizabethan and early Stuart drama. I am suggesting that the cross-dressed element of this drama, which we have recently been taught is a problem of sexual discrimination, actually functioned in much the same way as Uys’s Evita. The ludicrousness of the means of theatrical production, epitomised by cross-dressed boys and men, but also reflecting the subversive play of household servants (the status of all professional actors) literally ‘dressed up’ as their betters,

4 5

Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot and Burlington, 2005). I am indebted to Ashgate for permission to reuse certain sections of that book for part of this chapter. Simon Fanshawe (presenter), Laughter from the Edge, BBC Radio 4, Tuesday 1 February, 2005. See accessed 27.04.07.

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Ros King fostered in England a peculiar form of mixed-genre entertainment that was eminently enjoyable, but also socially and politically useful. It is precisely because theatre is just play that it can tackle serious issues with a measure of impunity. In a cross-dressed theatre in particular, it is not clear who is speaking, and therefore it is a matter of discrimination and even deliberate choice whether anything of importance has actually been said at all. The mixed-genre form, incorporating all the elements of ‘theatricality’ – song, dance, slapstick, surprise and melodramatic horror – is inherently popular, indeed its elements can be found in English medieval popular drama, but in elite domestic and educational circles in England it developed in full knowledge that it was contravening classical laws of writing for the theatre. It exploits this transgression and is frequently outrageous in its combination of horror and humour to the extent that it can still leave critics bewildered.

Damon and Pythias: tyranny and friendship The title page of the printed edition of Edwards’s play, published five years after his death, states that it is ‘the same’ as was performed before the queen, ‘except the Prologue that is somewhat altered for the proper use of them that hereafter shall have occasion to plaie it, either in private, or open audience’. The extent of this alteration is unknowable, although it need be no more than the omission of some specific reference to the presence of the queen in the audience. The opening ‘Prologue’, an intriguing mixture of voice, recent real life event, and literary antecedent and theory, raises further questions. Here, we are told, is a play written by someone who, it seems, is something of a maverick. With more than a nod to the personal political difficulties expressed by the Prologues in the plays of Terence, this Prologue states that the ‘author’ has written plays for the court on many occasions, although the last one caused great offence. We are not told why. Perhaps it was too satirical; perhaps merely scurrilous. He pleads pardon: A sudden change is wrought, For lo, our author’s muse, that masked in delight, Has forced his pen against his kind, no more such sports to write. [. . .] seeing that he did offend, Of all he humbly pardon craves – his pen that shall amend. (D & P, Prologue 6–12)6

Whatever the reason, the Prologue promises that this time the author is going to mix ‘mirth and care’, and produce something he is calling a ‘tragical 6

All quotations from Damon and Pythias are taken from the edition in Ros King, The Works of Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in Sixteenth-Century England (Manchester, 2001).

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Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England comedy’. This label, and the disclaimer ‘We speak of Dionysius’ court, we mean no court but that’ (D & P, Prologue 38, 40) is a disingenuous invitation for his audience, including Elizabeth herself, to see themselves and to apply the essential lesson of the play: that under an autocracy, friendship between subjects and monarch is the only defence against tyranny on the one hand and assassination on the other. As the closing song puts it: The strongest guard that kings can have Are constant friends their state to save. True friends are constant, both in word and deed, True friends are present and help at each need, True friends talk truly, they glose for no gain, When treasure consumes, true friends will remain, True friends for their true prince, refuse not their death, The Lord grant her such friends, most noble Queen Elizabeth.

Damon and Pythias, followers of the philosopher Pythagorus, are on a grand tour of the classical world. They arrive in Syracuse, a Greek city-state which, under the dictatorships of the two Dionysiuses, father and son, was a byword for tyranny in Elizabethan England. Damon is duped, arrested as a spy, and sentenced to death. The play reaches a terrible climax in a scene in which the two friends argue with each other in front of Dionysius for the right to die for the sake of the other. The very extremity of their feeling for each other is intensely moving. But the insistence with which they make their demands, kill me – no kill me – no kill me, combined with the matter-of-fact caustic observations of the hangman, Groano, who grumbles that he could cut off lots of heads if only those in authority would get themselves organised, is blackly funny – particularly if Groano is played, as is likely, by a little boy with a very large sword. After witnessing this spectacle, the tyrant has a sudden recognition of the power of theatre to change hearts – marked by a break from the highly irregular verse form in which most of the play is written into regular syllabic measures: O noble gentlemen, the immortal gods above Has made you play this tragedy, I think, for my behove. Before this day, I never knew what perfect friendship meant, My cruel mind, to bloody deeds was full and wholly bent. My fearful life, I thought with terror to defend, But now I see there is no guard unto a faithful friend, Which will not spare his life at time of present need – O happy kings, within your courts, have two such friends indeed. (D & P, Scene 15, 217–24)

He pleads with them, in a ludicrously touching way, to ‘make [him] a third friend’ (line 228). We do not really believe it, though we wish it could be true. 87

Ros King But the implication is clear: on both sides, friendship is a way of ensuring that you do not lose your head.

Audience response: the giggle factor Seeing Damon and Pythias in performance in front of an audience of nine hundred people at the Globe was a revelation. We had a cast of professional actors, but in order to explore the sense of dislocation between actor and character that might have arisen in its original performance by seasoned boy players, they were, deliberately, all women; all the characters are male.7 The actors were dressed as men and played the characters with conviction but were careful not to mimic any generalised notion of masculinity. The circular arrangement of the audience around the stage at the Globe in the same light conditions inevitably heightens audience consciousness of theatricality. This is no ‘suspension-of-disbelief’ theatrical experience. I have never found that to be a particularly convincing explanation as to why and how we submit ourselves to a theatrical experience, but it is peculiarly inappropriate for drama written before the time when the auditorium lights were switched off for performance. Those Elizabethans used to seeing plays in performance were not unsophisticated about the process. The one extensive eyewitness account of audience response to a play in the entire period – a performance before the queen at Oxford in 1566 of Edwards’s evidently spectacular and sadly lost last play, Palamon and Arcyte – shows a range of reactions from wonder, to disapproval, to game-playing interactions between stage and audience, and between different sections of that audience, but all firmly rooted in the reality of their present moment.8 Whereas in the afternoon dress rehearsal at the Globe in 1996, a few guests of cast members scattered round that vast auditorium had experienced the play as individuals in terms of the emotion of the story and the conventions of fourth wall theatre, the populous evening audience who could all see each other as clearly as they could see the actors on the stage, saw the pathos but also the ridiculousness of the story. They giggled – as the only appropriate response to the overblown language. But they also squirmed because the actors held on to the real horror of the situation, resisting the pressure to send it up. The tension between the will of the audience and that of the actors made for exciting spectator sport. Giggling is a common response to a shock, and to any event that seems to occur ‘inappropriately’ or at odds with the mood of the moment. We can often find ourselves giggling at such discrepancy or dislocation even while knowing 7

8

Damon and Pythias, Globe Theatre, London, Gaynor MacFarlane (dir.), Maureen Beattie (Damon), Patricia Kerrigan (Pythias), reviewed in The Guardian, and The Scotsman, 10.9.1996. King, Works of Richard Edwards, pp. 78–85.

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Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England that the event is serious, even terrible. Such a response is acutely embarrassing and often only results in an increased desire to giggle. The emotion is perhaps akin to ‘rubber-necking’ while driving past an accident. There is a fascination in the horror of the scene because of the tension between that, the ever-present danger to oneself, and one’s current safety. Taking a stern moral line against such behaviour is a denial of the complex emotional ways in which we interact with the world around us, and, in terms of literary criticism, is akin to insisting that dramatic forms should be ‘clean’ – either comic or tragic, but not a mixture of both.

Amphitruo, Jack Juggler and The Comedy of Errors: identity and duality Damon and Pythias may be the first designated tragicomedy in English but the only play to claim that label in the classical repertoire, Plautus’ Amphitruo, had already found its way into English consciousness in the comedy Jack Juggler, which is again probably by Richard Edwards.9 The Amphitruo concerns Jupiter’s adultery with Alcmena. He has disguised himself as her husband and is making love to her while Mercury, disguised as the family slave, Sosia, guards the door. Most of the humour in the play derives from the real Sosia’s puzzlement and frustration at coming face to face with his double who refuses to let him into his master’s house. It is this centrality of the slave’s role in a play about the god Jupiter, which necessitates Plautus’ ironic coinage of the term ‘tragicocomoedia’. What’s that? Are you disappointed To find it’s a tragedy? Well, I can easily change it. I’m a god, after all, I can easily make it a comedy, And never alter a line. Is that what you’d like? . . . But I was forgetting – stupid of me – of course, Being a god, I know quite well what you’d like, I know exactly what’s in your minds. Very well. I’ll meet you half-way, and make it a tragicomedy. [tragicocomoedia] It can’t be an out-and-out comedy, I’m afraid, With all these kings and gods in the cast. All right, then, A tragicomedy – at least it’s got one slave-part. (Amphitruo, Prologue, 50–60)10

Jack Juggler was evidently written to be performed at Christmas, since Jack’s opening speech calls on Christ, Saint Steven, and Saint John, celebrated on 25, 9

10

Jack Juggler is most commonly ascribed to Nicholas Udall, but in terms of prosody is quite unlike the comedy Ralph Roister Doister (ascribed to him by Thomas Wilson in The Rule of Reason). See King, Works of Richard Edwards, pp. 10, 13–15. Plautus, Amphitruo, trans E.F. Watling in The Rope and Other Plays (Harmondsworth, 1964).

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Ros King 26 and 27 December respectively. But its references to four deaths seven years previously, and to being ‘washed in warme blod’ (364–8) mean that it is not just a bit of seasonal fun. Like Damon and Pythias, it starts by making claims about what it is not: the play is ‘not worthe an oyster shel’; it will treat of ‘mattiers of non importaunce’ (l.54); no-one should ‘looke to heare of mattiers substancyall / Nor mattiers of any gravitee’ since such things are not appropriate for ‘litle boyes handelings’ (ll.73–6).11 As with the reference to Dionysius’ court, these protestations work as both disclaimer and pointer, in this case to the play’s play on language, which will allow audiences to hear it as a metaphor for the most ‘substantial’ matter of the sixteenth century: the question as to whether the bread and wine of the communion service came to ‘represent’, to ‘carry the memory of’, or to ‘be’, the body and blood of Christ. In October 1551, some ten months after what I believe was the first performance of Jack Juggler, Archbishop Cranmer himself cited Alcmena’s deception by Jupiter in Amphitruo as an example of ‘an illusion of our senses, if our senses take for bread and wine that whiche is not so indeed’.12 Plautus’ Amphitruo also forms an important source for what is probably Shakespeare’s earliest experiment with the mixed-genre form, that curious, broken-backed, but greatly undervalued play, The Comedy of Errors. This play contains an extraordinary number of Christian references that have previously puzzled critics, although recently several commentators have suggested that it too forms a commentary on religious difference.13 The comedy, Jack Juggler, may offer a firmly Protestant line in accordance with Edwardian politics, but the tragicomedy, The Comedy of Errors, seems much more ecumenical; its solution to the very real dangers of confused identity is the acknowledgement and welcoming of both difference and equality: We came into the world like brother and brother And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another. (C of E, 5.1.429–30)

The last word goes to the slaves, not the masters. Similarly in Damon and Pythias, it is Stephano, the slave, who has the job of finishing off the main story, celebrating not just the happy resolution of his masters’ trials, but his

11 12

13

All quotations from Jack Juggler are taken from Three Tudor Classical Interludes, ed. Marie Axton (Cambridge, 1982). An Answer of the most reverend . . . Thomas archebyshop of Canterburye . . . unto a crafty and sophisticall cavillation devised by Stephen Gardiner . . . late byshop of Winchester (London, 1551), cited Axton (1982), p. 20. See Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Comedies (Newark, 1993); Richard Dutton, ‘The Comedy of Errors and The Calumny of Apelles: an exercise in source study’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Comedies, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford, 2003), pp. 316–17; compare Laurie Maguire, ‘The Girls from Ephesus’, pp. 361–5 in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert Miola (New York and London, 1997).

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Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England own future as a newly freed man, and even wishing his court audience a future lived in friendship: O most happy, pleasant, joyful, and triumphant day! Poor Stephano now shall live in continual joy – Vive le roi – with Damon and Pythias in perfect amity. [Exeunt all but STEPHANO.] Vive tu Stephano, in thy pleasant liberality, Wherein I joy as much as he that has a conquest won – I am a free man, none so merry as I now under the sun. [To audience] Farewell my lords, now the gods grant you all the sum of perfect amity And me long to enjoy my long desired liberty. (D & P, Scene 15. 264–72)

A dramatic form that allows us to see gods, masters and slaves rubbing shoulders on equal terms, even if we do not quite believe it, has the potential to be very subversive indeed.

Cymbeline: royalty and the law The marriage of danger and humour that I am outlining likewise operates in Cymbeline. This is a play that has excited very mixed reactions and tends to go down better with audiences than with readers. Its central, most notorious, scene is one in which the Princess Imogen grieves over a headless body that she believes to be the husband who had tried to murder her. We know it is the suitor (the queen’s son, her father’s stepson), who wanted to rape her. Either way it is an affront to ordinary human sensibility. Readers of the play are likely to be caught up by the pathos of her speech, hearing only her distress. But for audiences, the physical presence of the ‘body’ serves to distance the grief. It constantly reminds us that she has got the wrong person, while its very headlessness also means that we sit there considering how well wardrobe and/or props have pulled off the effect. The intensity of the character’s emotion in these circumstances is embarrassing, slightly distanced, and therefore bound to make us laugh. The turning point in the scene is when she dips her fingers into what we know can only be a gobbet of stage blood positioned within a false neck, and then smears that paint on her face in a macabre version of the body painting which even the Elizabethans knew was Celtic custom. At that moment, our imagination of what that physical act might actually feel like takes over, and giggles turn to genuine horror. Few productions of the play – and none that I know of in England – have dared to give full reign to its gruesome humour. We have been too wedded to the concept of the play as a romance. The Victorians may have thought they loved it, but that was only because their acting versions had cut out most of the 91

Ros King blacker humour and turned Shakespeare’s spirited princess (Cymbeline’s daughter Imogen) into the epitome of middle-class wifely virtue. A glance at the prompt books for both of Peter Hall’s productions – the first in 1957 with the fifty-year-old Peggy Ashcroft playing Imogen and the second in 1988 with Geraldine James – reveals that right from the very first scene he cut lines that are likely to raise a laugh.14 The inimitable Kenneth Tynan, reviewing the first of these productions along with Peter Brook’s Titus, proposed a new company for the two Peters, ‘Hall and Brook Ltd; the Home of Lost Theatrical Causes, collapsing plays shored up, unspeakable lines glossed over, unactable scenes made bearable’.15 Giving examples of the precise words cut by both directors, he observed ‘when Caius Lucius exclaims: “Soft ho! what trunk is here without his top?” Mr Hall deletes the last three. This is inexcusable cowardice. Those who devote themselves to making silk purses out of sows’ ears are in duty bound to go the whole hog.’ I would rather say that the action is not so much cowardice as suicide since it removes the context that enables the extremity of this scene to work. Nevertheless, in describing Harriet Walter’s performance in Bill Alexander’s production for the RSC, Michael Billington wrote that ‘the true test of her power is that when she daubed her cheeks with the blood of a headless corpse not a titter, as Frankie Howerd might say, ran through the house’.16 The reference to the stand-up comedian widely loved in Britain for his outrageous double entendres, and at that time most famous for his role as the slave and continually thwarted ‘Prologue’ in the TV sitcom Up Pompeii, is perhaps more appropriate than Billington intended. But the titter is only a problem if the production is single-mindedly in romance mode throughout, where of course salacious or irreverent laughter is out of place. Rather more perceptively, Paul Taylor described the same production as ‘incapable of doing more than one thing well at a time which, with Cymbeline, is an enormous handicap. Harriet Walter expertly pulls out all the pathos in this corpse scene, but somehow does not leave an audience a space for a contrary, irreverent perception to slide in.’17 Walter herself, however, said later, ‘I learned to dare to give a pause [. . .] just long enough to let the audience know that they can laugh – that I the actress intend the joke, though the character is innocent of it – a challenging knife-edge to tread.’18 In Cymbeline, Shakespeare outrageously stages the cutting off of a semiroyal head as black humour in order to explore issues of succession, marriage,

14 15 16 17 18

These prompt books are held by the Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon, and the National Theatre Archive, respectively. The Observer, 3 July, 1957. The Guardian, 24 March, 1988. The Independent, 24 March, 1988. Harriet Walter, ‘Imogen in Cymbeline’ in Players of Shakespeare 3: Further Essays in Shakespearian Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, ed. Russell Jackson (Cambridge, 1993), p. 213.

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Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England law, religious observance and British independence. Forty years after the play was written, Charles I would have his head chopped off for setting himself above the law and attempting to rule without parliament. But his father, James I, had already embarked his family on that journey. In the year Shakespeare’s play was first performed, he told his parliament ‘Kings are not only God’s Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods’. One of those who heard him wrote to a friend that this two-hour-long speech ‘showed great learning, admirable memory, and exceeding piety, to the great contentment of all parties; only the most strictly religious could have wished that his highness would have been more sparing in using the name of God, and comparing the Deity with princes’ sovereignty’.19 The MP was justifiably worried about the threat that James’s views on kingship posed to the traditional liberty of speech enjoyed by the English parliament. As a king and a god, James repeatedly claimed the right to exercise law but not to be subject to it, arguing that he was ‘above the law, as both the author and giver of strength thereto’.20 In the play, the royal figure who loses his head is an odious blockhead, but Shakespeare has given him a significant name: Cloten. In Holinshed’s Chronicle, one of the sources for the play, Cloten is the name given to an ancient king of Cornwall, father of Mulmutius who, as Shakespeare’s Cymbeline proudly tells the ambassador from Rome, was not only the first British king to wear a crown but the first to set down the laws of the country. Holinshed says that Mulmutius’s laws, translated first into Latin, and then by Alfred the Great into Anglo-Saxon, have passed into English common law ‘albeit that we know not certainly how to distinguish them from others, that are in strength amongst us’.21 While the historical Cloten, as Mulmutius’s father, could be considered to be above the law in a genealogical sense, Shakespeare’s Cloten believes that he is above the law because he is ‘the Queen’s son’. It is a typically generous Shakespearean joke, since those who do not know their Holinshed will be contented with the pun on ‘clot’. As such, the character bullies and swaggers his way through the play until he eventually meets his death in Wales at the hands of Guiderius, the long-lost heir to the British crown. The dark twist to this desired outcome is that the rightful prince, though brave and fearless, also acts without thought – without using his head – and even without caring very much. It is a pretty thuggish prospect for the future government of the country. Guiderius With his own sword Which he did wave against my throat, I have ta’en His head from him – I’ll throw’t into the creek 19 20 21

Letter from Sir John More, 24 March 1610, in Sir Ralph Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I (London, 1725), vol. 3. C.H. McIlwain (ed.), The Political Works of James I (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), p. 63. Raphael Holinshed, The Historie of England, 15.b.34–9, also The Description of England, pp. 176–7, in Holinshed, Chronicles (London, 1574), vol. 1.

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Ros King Behind our rock, and let it to the sea, And tell the fishes he’s the queen’s son, Cloten. That’s all I reck. (4.2.150–55)

The play’s setting on the geographical and temporal edge of the Roman empire at the time of the birth of Christ, during a period of epochal change for ancient Britain and for the Mediterranean world, is used by Shakespeare to re-imagine analogous changes in process at the time of writing: the rise of competing western European empires, and the split in Christianity. Its mixed tragic and comic structure expresses a whole gamut of opinions and positions, thus allowing the peculiar logic of the play world to interact with the opinions of its audiences. This is an important function, and not only for the governed. The government too needs to hear these issues rehearsed – playfully. It is part of the central business of counsel which characterises Tudor and early Stuart England. The uneasy peace at the end of the play in which Roman and British flags ‘wave friendly together’ even while, in an ominously Clotenesque phrase, the ‘crooked smokes’ of sacrificial offerings waft up to the ‘nostrils’ of the gods, might even allow its original audience to question whether the nation state that James was inadvertently creating, while trying fairly unsuccessfully to impose his will as an autocratic monarch, was actually at odds with his other great project, which was to bring ecumenical peace to a Europe riven by religious war. The play thus confronts problems that are still with us, and offers startling opportunity for reinterpretation in modern performance precisely because it deals so deftly and metaphorically with the (literally) burning issues in the culture of its own time and place.

Dr Faustus: hollow laughter and received religion In all of the plays I have mentioned, an understanding of the local significance of the play at the time of writing is dependent on the literary identification of the mixed genre, the ‘tragedy with comedy’, which is the literal meaning of Plautus’ tragicocomoedia. I do not really want to use the term ‘tragicomedy’ because that has come to signify a play which, like The Comedy of Errors, starts tragically and turns out well. Shakespeare came to realise that the genre had greater possibilities if it was more consistently mixed up. The plays I have discussed all share the quality of being, in Posthumus’s words, ‘a senseless speaking, or a speaking such as sense cannot untie’ but nevertheless, like the prophecy in Cymbeline to which he refers, there is something about them which rings true to our ordinary cycles of aspiration and disappointment: ‘Be what it is, The action of my life is like it’ (Cymbeline, V.iv.149–50). This dynamic between the outrageous and the real, which corresponds to what Aristotle terms the ‘likely impossibility’, and which he accurately states is more the hallmark of effective theatre than the ‘unconvincing 94

Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England possibility’,22 sets up a space in which surprising things can be thought – things which may be far outside the normal moral injunctions of one’s society. Due attention to the mixed-genre form thus enables us to recognise the organisational structure of some otherwise very problematic plays. Almost all criticism of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, for example, downplays everything but the serious aspects of Faustus’s pact with the devil, virtually ignoring the Rafe and Robin conjuring scenes by claiming that they are, in execution at least, likely to be by an author other than Marlowe. It also neglects the extensive humour which involves Faustus himself, not just in the notorious slapstick scenes with the Pope or the horse courser, but the black comedy that arises throughout the play by virtue of its dramaturgical structure. As with Cymbeline, this humour can be difficult to gauge, or even to identify, from the printed page. Susan Snyder’s rather grudging remarks that Faustus works ‘as spectacle’ is the most that is usually said about this aspect of the play.23 Comedy and spectacle have always contributed to the success of Faustus on the stage. Henslowe knew this when he tried to prolong its popular life by paying good money for Birde and Rowley to make their ‘adicyones’ to the text in 1602.24 It is now generally accepted that these alterations probably included the extended scene of anti-Papal propaganda found in the B-text of the play, which reduces theological questioning to narrowly sectarian certainty; an increase in the incidence of dragons, devils and fireworks; extensions and repetitions to the horse courser and stag’s head incidents; and added moralising dialogue in the later scenes. These combine to overbalance and obscure the structure I am trying to describe here. My argument, therefore, is confined to the A-text, which alone (and significantly) states that divinity is ‘basest’ of the various arts, ‘Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile’ (Faustus, A-text, 1.1.110–11).25 In the preface to their edition, David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen offer a scrupulous and detailed account of the polarisation in criticism of the play between those who take an orthodox religious line on Faustus’s rejection of salvation and those who stress the tragedy of the non-fulfilment of his humanist intellectual aspirations. But whereas the German Faustbuch and its earliest English translation are careful to describe Faust’s story and actions as

22 23 24 25

Aristotle, Ars Poetica, 24.1460a, ed. and trans Ingram Bywater, Aristotle on the Art of Poetry (Oxford, 1909). Susan Snyder, ‘Doctor Faustus as an inverted Saint’s Life’, in Doctor Faustus, ed. David Scott Kastan (New York and London, 2005), p. 320. The Henslowe Papers, ed. R.A. Foakes (London, 1977), f. 108v. Christopher Marlowe and his Collaborator and Revisers, Doctor Faustus: A- and B-texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester, 1993), pp. 64–77. All quotations are taken from this edition.

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Ros King damnable, declaring Faust to be an ‘enemy unto all man-kind’,26 Marlowe’s play, at least in the A-text, seems designed from the outset to encourage diametrically opposed interpretations. A sixteenth-century audience is likely to have been far more acutely aware than we are of the inadequacy both of Faustus’s knowledge of that in which he is supposed to be expert, and of the bargain that he makes for himself. As every editor notes, he misascribes On kai me on (‘being and not being’) to Aristotle rather than to the sceptic, Gorgias of Leontini, and omits the promise of salvation that should form the antithetical second part to each of his quotations from the Bible in that scene (1.1.12, 39–44).27 Selective biblical quotation to make a point is, of course, nothing unusual. As a student at a medieval university, Faustus has been trained in the ability to argue as required on either side of a problem in philosophy with equal and opposite precedent and citation. Anxiety concerning the intellectual sterility of such scholastic disputation, however, led in the late sixteenth century to new editions of the account of ancient Greek, Pyrhonnian scepticism by Sextus Empiricus (c. AD 160–210), whose Adversus Mathematicos (‘Against the Schoolmasters’, vii.66) indeed cites On kai me on. Since scepticism entails religious agnosticism, the decision to publish these editions was defended on the grounds that if it is not possible to trust the evidence of our senses, and if all human knowledge is therefore derived from logical argument and thus capable of logical refutation, the only certainty is Christian faith.28 For the benefit of the censor, Marlowe’s play similarly appears to be perfectly on message: just the right amount of anti-Catholic satire and an apparently clear insistence, in line with the later Elizabethan English Church, on salvation through the simple fact of Christ’s sacrifice. The Good Angel and the Old Man, among others, repeatedly remind Faustus of this, but he knows that for him it is impossible: his worldly bargain logically prevents it, and his only salvation from an eternity of torment would be complete physical disintegration, ‘dissolv’d in elements’ or like a ‘foggy mist’ (5.2.111, 91). The Good and Bad Angels are regularly described in criticism as a feature borrowed from medieval morality drama, although Marlowe in fact may not have known the play The Castle of Perseverance, in which they occur.29 Dramaturgically in Dr Faustus, however, their arguments demonstrate the

26 27

28 29

The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, trans. P.F. (London, 1592), f. A4v. His quotation from Romans 6:23, ‘For the wages of sin is death’, should continue: ‘but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord’. Similarly, ‘If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and truth is not in us’ (1 John 1:8–9) continues: ‘If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness’. Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (New York, revised edition, 1968), p. 35. Bevington and Rasmussen, Doctor Faustus, p. 9.

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Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England sceptical position: their equal and opposite assertions cancel each other out, although the Bad Angel is also always left with the last word. The Good Angel, ironically, in urging Faustus to ‘lay that damnèd book aside’ reinforces his sense of the inadequacy of received knowledge, the knowledge that is to be found in books, whereas the Evil Angel in urging him the way he is going – ‘Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art / Wherein all nature’s treasury is contained’ – offers him a glimpse of empirical knowledge as well as a promise of worldly power (1.1.72–9). The play thus dramatises a philosophical question: the nature of the criterion for truth. Books, or perhaps rather the authority of the allowed written word, are very much the problem. Faustus’s dissatisfaction with the state of received human knowledge is presented both linguistically and visually as he sets aside the tomes that represent the summation of each academic discipline. He knows enough to be dissatisfied by the limitations of rhetorical argument and is desperate for concrete experiential knowledge that would cut through his mass of contradictory thoughts culled from an array of philosophers and traditions. He follows a straightforward question about the precise location of Hell in a mediaeval cosmology, for instance, with an incredulous ‘Think’st thou that Faustus is so fond / To imagine that after this life there is any pain?’ (2.1.136–7), an Epicurean idea that he might have found in Lucretius’ comforting poem De Rerum Natura, with its triumphant hymn on the mortality of the soul and hence the impossibility of punishment after death.30 For his part, Mephistopheles can do nothing but tell Faustus ‘truths’ that he and most members of the audience not only already know, but may also know as rather out of date. Faustus’ tacit acceptance of what Mephistopheles tells him, although he knows it to be inadequate, again calls into question the validity of all received knowledge. Mephistopheles, of course, knows about the relationship between knowledge and experience: ‘Ay, think so still, till experience change your mind’ (2.1.131), although in this statement he is claiming that conventional belief in the existence of hell will be proved by experience. Having sidestepped Faustus’s direct questions, Mephistopheles gives him a book. In the circumstances, this is comfortingly familiar territory and the B-text Faustus is content. In the A-text, however, Faustus then asks for a book that will let him conjure spirits when he pleases. Mephistopheles merely turns the pages. Faustus again asks for another book that will show him the movement of the planets. Again, Mephistopheles turns the pages. Now Faustus pleads for ‘one book more’ detailing all plants and trees – and Mephistopheles turns the pages (2.1.162–82). All of creation in the one book? All already written down? The repetition of demand and page-turning means that we can see it coming. We can smile. Faustus, however, is no further forward and, 30

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1947), III. 912–77.

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Ros King given his terrible bargain, his comment ‘O, thou art deceived’ (2.2.181) is arguably the most tragic moment in the play. The play thus presents a situation in which what God and the Devil have to offer in this life are equally unsatisfactory. The Devil gives you what you know to be a dubious account of cosmology, a show of seven fairly unpleasant and unalluring deadly sins, and a devil with a firework, instead of a wife. This last might entertain a packed theatre with misogynistic thoughts of a nagging ‘her indoors’, but Helen of Troy she ain’t. God in the person of the Old Man, on the other hand, offers blood and tears. No wonder Faustus turns to despair. The audience safe in the theatre, observing this story, and enjoying its staging, can observe the problem but is not forced down the same emotional road. Our experience of the play is that each scene that shows Faustus grasping after demonstrable truth while being fobbed off with conventional a priori argument is followed by a scene in which Rafe and Robin reduce that particular aspect of the problem to absurdity.31 Their comic antics likewise depend on the use of books. For the present argument, it does not matter who wrote these scenes, only that they work dramaturgically. The brief is that they should turn the tragic scenes on their head, which they do very effectively. Robin’s horizons are more limited than Faustus’s, but one knows that he is just as likely to be disappointed: ‘Here I ha’ stol’n one of Doctor Faustus’ conjuring books [. . .] Now will I make all the maidens in our parish dance at my pleasure stark naked before me, and so by that means I shall see more than e’er I felt or saw yet’ (2.2.1–5). The scene ends bathetically with him going to clean his boots. The next time we see him he has forgotten his impossible dream about naked girls and got a more down-to-earth idea for a spell that he thinks will make him a fortune in his trade as an ostler. It is therefore interesting that once Faustus is in command of his own magic choices (although of course he is entirely dependent on Mephistopheles for their execution) the nature of the desired show changes. He reports that he has flown round the world, seeing first hand the wonders of the natural world and, no less marvellous, the cities built by man: Trier, Paris, Naples, ‘Venice, Padua and the rest’ (3.1.1–20). The shows with which he delights other people are visions of human aspiration, achievement and love: Alexander and Darius; Helen of Troy; and grapes grown by humans in accordance with nature – albeit on the other side of the world. Thus it is that the first Chorus’s protestations that the author has left aside the themes of war, love and aspiration that he had covered in Tamburlaine and Dido are demonstrated as being disingenuous. Rather, this play is a continuation of these central aspects of the human 31

I have here accepted Bevington and Rasmussen’s argument (Doctor Faustus, pp. 287–8) that the long scene in the A-text, in which Faustus finally sells his soul to the devil, should be intercut with the first of the two consecutive Rafe and Robin scenes that are misplaced later in the printed text, possibly as a result of being the work of a collaborator and therefore written on a separate sheet and inserted out of place in the manuscript.

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Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England condition, but in another form. Faustus’s intellectual aspirations are reduced to tricks on the body – the legerdemain of the conjurer, or the stage manager – discomforting those who fail to take him seriously or try to get one over on him. He places horns temporarily on the head of the disparaging knight in the Emperor’s court and appears to lose not his head but his leg to the horse courser. Just as the carrier and the horse courser fail to outwit Faustus in their bargains with him, so we know that Faustus will be kept to his horrific bargain with the devil. And we enjoy both. Faustus’s final speech is an agony of conflicted theology, accepting the possibility of salvation, denying it, flirting briefly with Pythagorean metempsychosis and cursing his parents; no, himself; no, Lucifer (5.2.99–115). Although the speech occurs in both versions of the play, it is easier to read as a real psychological problem in the A-text as it has not been preceded there by yet another argument between the Good and Bad Angels, as occurs in B. Instead the A-text has a scene (not in B) in which the Old Man confronts the devils, claiming victory over them, although since they exit simultaneously by different doors, the visual message as to who is fleeing whom is ambiguous: ‘Hence, hell! For hence I fly unto my God’ (5.1.119). Faustus never gives up his very human struggle, demanding both ‘God, look not so fierce on me’ and ‘Ugly hell, gape not’ before trying a last ditch bargain ‘I’ll burn my books’ (5.2.120–3). Whether his final ‘Ah Mephistopheles’ is despair or ecstatic recognition is a production choice that does not have to be determined by the final Chorus’s conventional summing up. It is the mixed-genre experience, not the simple moral message, which provides endless fascination. The structure gives the audience the opportunity to ask themselves not just whether they would want to lose their heads, their lives, their supposed eternal lives, in the way Faustus does, but what would make it worth it – for them. Marlowe poses the question which neither religion nor law enforcement dare ask: not just why people risk so much for so little, but what the emotional payback is that makes them want to do it. All the questions that previous critics have raised are of course still there, but attention to the mixed-genre structure means that we no longer have to plump for one side, one angel, or the other. Faustus’s aspiration as the child of relatively unprivileged parents (and in that he must correspond not just to the author but also to most of those who have ever read or seen the play) is to make sense of a world which is not actually what we are told it is by teachers, or religious and political leaders. The fact that he fails does not mean that we will, or should, ever want to give up trying. In identifying the political potential for the mixed genre we can therefore progress beyond the dichotomising effects of much recent criticism, which has tended to characterise drama as alternately elitist or subversive. Much like Edwards before him, who was probably a groom of the Chamber, as well as a gentleman and later Master of the Chapel Royal, Shakespeare, as a member of the Chamberlain’s company of actors and later as one of the King’s company, 99

Ros King was in part, at least, a royal servant, paid in that tangled mix of public private finance peculiar to the Tudor and Stuart courts. As a very secret servant of the government, Marlowe’s life was a blacker version of that same transaction. But as licensed men, the job of all three was both to entertain and, in that resounding phrase, ‘speak truth to power’ – provided that the public expression of such truth was sufficiently distanced by setting or character, or in the case of Dr Faustus, overt moral structure. The archetypal V-shape of later conceptions of tragicomedy has a certain pre-ordained certainty about it and is easily applied to the shape of the Christian story with mankind’s descent into sin and to hell followed by Christ’s redemption and resurrection. That particular form of tragedy-then-comedy is perhaps best understood as the reassertion of the status quo but in ameliorated form. Everything’s OK really. The Elizabethan mixed-genre form has the capacity to be a much darker beast. All the plays I have considered in this chapter explore and take delight in a complex, even contradictory, sense of good and evil. The false philosopher, Carisophus, the cause of all the trouble in Damon and Pythias, is whipped out of the court by Eubulus (Good Counsel) in the final scene of the play but has no doubt that he will be back (Scene 16. 10). And we, of course, knowing what we do about princes’ courts, are certain of it. In drama, ‘truth’ derives from the complex emotional process of reception in which audiences make sense for themselves through a combination of their own prior experience, and their understanding of the current significance of the old story they see being played out before them. In this ‘remembered present’, the adaptive capacity of the brain to link prior and current experience in imagining a future,32 it is the amused knowledge that it certainly isn’t all right really, that might – just might – encourage us to try to make a difference.

32

Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (Harmondsworth, 2000), pp. 102–10.

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7 Taking Pericles Seriously SUZANNE GOSSETT

Every literary work changes the genres it relates to.1

S

OMETIME in the early winter months of 1609 two young men must have had a rather unhappy and worried conversation. Perhaps for mutual support both emotional and physical they had it in the bed they so famously shared – as it was no doubt cold, and the conversation was largely about failure. As the new year began Francis Beaumont (b. circa 1585) was about twenty-four; his good friend and collaborator John Fletcher (b.1579) was turning thirty. They had worked hard since coming to London and had already written, separately and together, at least four and possibly as many as six plays, all for children’s companies: certainly The Woman Hater (1606), The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), Cupid’s Revenge (1607–08), and The Faithful Shepherdess (1608–09), and perhaps also The Scornful Lady and The Coxcomb.2 But prospects were very bleak. First of all, their two most brilliant and individualistic plays, The Knight of the Burning Pestle and The Faithful Shepherdess, had notoriously failed. Next, they were losing their institutional outlets. Paul’s Boys, which had produced The Woman Hater, had closed in 1606; the variously titled Blackfriars’ Boys, who had produced The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Cupid’s Revenge, and The Faithful Shepherdess, by March 1608 had finally overreached themselves in performing satire, leading the king to swear that ‘they should never play more, but should first begg their bred’.3 And, most immediately, after a brief respite that ran from April through June of 1608, the 1 2

3

Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 23. The Scornful Lady is often dated 1608–10, but the title page says it was acted by the Children of her Majesties Revels, which went out of business in 1608. The Coxcomb is also dated 1608–10 by Philip Finkelpearl, Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (Princeton, 1990), pp. 115–27. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford, 1996), p. 354.

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Suzanne Gossett plague had returned in full force, closing all the theatres, a situation that, although the collaborators could not yet know this, would last until early 1610. As Philip Finkelpearl has demonstrated, these apparently well-connected young men had no ‘personal ties of dependency or even of friendship with the great Jacobean courtiers and patrons’.4 Instead their circle consisted primarily of intellectuals and writers, largely impecunious like themselves, and their only prospect of support lay in the plays they could write. Hence, I propose, as they sat together to construct what would prove their first great success, Philaster, they set themselves a dual goal: to write for adult actors, modifying those elements of their style that had been adjusted for the boys, and to write a play that would please specifically the King’s Men, who had reclaimed the lease to the Blackfriars in July 1608 when the Queen’s Revels boys went under. Beaumont and Fletcher were professionals: soon after coming to London they knew ‘everyone’; they wrote copiously, under whatever circumstances were possible; as is particularly evident in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, they were almost tactilely aware of the latest in dramatic fashion. Perhaps in their early years as authors this sense of the market was especially true of Beaumont. Fletcher, after all, had initiated his solo career with The Faithful Shepherdess, and both his preface ‘To the Reader’ and the commendatory poems that appeared with the play reiterate that the audience had not understood how to frame the play generically. It was all very well for Fletcher to tell Sir William Scipwith that his aim had not been to gain ‘greater name’ nor to make the play ‘serve to feed / at my neede’, but the angry pedagogical tone with which he explains pastoral, shepherds, and tragicomedy probably grew from a recognition that he could no longer afford to share Nathan Field’s reassuring contempt for ‘Opinion, that great foole’.5 Fletcher’s play had not succeeded, to use Alastair Fowler’s terms, partly because the audience had failed to grasp its generic ‘domains of association’. Genres, as Fowler notes, are necessary to ‘adjust a reader’s mental set and help in selecting the optimally relevant associations that amount to a meaning of the literary work’.6 The Faithful Shepherdess had failed to provide sufficient help, and its meaning had escaped its desired audience. Fletcher’s early blindness to the range of possible communicative codes in tragicomedy is the more striking because he was not the first to bring elements of Guarini’s Il pastor fido to the English stage. Marston’s 1604 Malcontent borrows from Sir Edward Dymock’s translation, yet nothing could be less like The Faithful Shepherdess. Completely unpastoral, containing no god, set at 4 5

6

Finkelpearl, p. 47, italics in original. Fredson Bowers, ed., The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1966–96), III, pp. 490–5. All quotations from Beaumont and Fletcher plays are taken from this edition, unless otherwise stated. Alastair Fowler, ‘The Formation of Genres in the Renaissance and After’, New Literary History 34 (2003), 185–200 (190).

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Taking Pericles Seriously court rather than among ‘familiar people’, and including four false deaths that violate Fletcher’s rule that in tragicomedy there be only ‘such kinde of trouble as no life be questiond’ (III, 497), The Malcontent right up to its final masque keeps threatening to turn into a Jacobean revenge tragedy. In the Induction added for the King’s Men, Sly calls it a ‘bitter play’, and Condell elaborates that ‘’tis neither Satyre nor Morall, but the meane passage of a historie’ (A3v). Yet the play was entered in the Stationer’s Register as a ‘tragiecomedia’7 and, as the collaborators could see, had so attracted the King’s Men that, after some now obscure hanky-panky by the boys, the men had violated the ground rules that usually obtained in the Jacobean theatre and produced Marston’s play despite ‘another company having interest in it’ (A4r). The Malcontent, therefore, had done just what the collaborators wished for themselves, transferring successfully from the boys’ to the men’s company. Stimulated, then, by a desire to capitalise on the trajectory initiated by The Malcontent, and perhaps sustained by professional praise despite Fletcher’s infuriating failure, the two young authors still hoped to discover the elements necessary to the ‘coded structure . . . or matrix’ for tragicomedy.8 At this point, I suggest, they made a list. Their information was almost certainly better and more complete than ours, because they knew about plays now lost and they had access to gossip from theatrical circles. But basically, given their hopes, they would have considered as primary the plays the King’s Men had newly presented between the arrival of King James and 1608. Revivals did not count; their object was a sale. As Roslyn Knutson shows, this list of new plays was heavily weighted toward tragedy.9 Among the fresh tragedies the King’s Men had acquired from their resident playwright were Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens; from Jonson they had purchased Sejanus and the only partly comical Volpone; from others they had bought A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Devil’s Charter, and the lost Gowrie. Two new plays from the most recent seasons, 1606–07 and 1607–08, stood apart from the overwhelming prevalence of tragedy: The Miseries of Enforced Marriage and Pericles. And these, I want to argue, form the immediate backdrop to the change in the collaborators’ fortunes. Both Miseries and A Yorkshire Tragedy are based on the unfortunate Walter Calverley’s attempted murder of his wife and slaying of his two young sons.

7

8 9

G.K. Hunter, in his edition of Marston’s The Malcontent (London, 1975), p. lxii, suggests that ‘Tragiecomedia in the Stationers’ Register refers to Marston’s programmatic attempt to reconstruct this genre in English’; Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, eds, The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (London and New York, 1992), p. 19, n. 18, point out that the first instance of ‘tragicomedie’ in the Stationers’ Register comes in 1598 from Samuel Brandon’s ‘tragicomedie of the Virtuous Octavia’. Fowler, ‘Formation’, p. 190. Roslyn Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company (Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1991), pp. 106–7.

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Suzanne Gossett Although Miseries was printed in 1607 and A Yorkshire Tragedy in 1608, Yorkshire Tragedy, now attributed to Middleton, was apparently the earlier play. It adheres closely to the June 1605 pamphlet’s recounting of events, and it ends with the wife on her way to plead for Calverley’s pardon; later it would probably have capitalised on Calverley’s August execution for a scene of gallows repentance.10 Miseries, on the other hand, was printed in 1607 with the title-page claim to present the play ‘As it is now playd by his Maiesties Servuants’. Ernst Honigmann has shown that more than once Wilkins unscrupulously sold his plays simultaneously to the actors and to a publisher; ‘now’ probably accurately represents Miseries’ appearance in both forms in 1607.11 Miseries provides a rationalisation of Calverley’s actions. Rather than blaming ‘demoniac possession’,12 Wilkins picks up on a hint from the opening scene of A Yorkshire Tragedy. There the servants allude to a ‘young mistress’ who ‘keeps such a puling for her love’ but does not know that ‘he’s married, beats his wife, and has two or three children by her’ (1.35–44). None of the characters in this scene reappears, and no more is heard of the forsaken young woman. The scene’s connections to the remainder of the play are never articulated. But in Miseries it is explicitly the hero’s horror at being forced to marry after he has betrothed himself elsewhere that starts him on his prodigal path, and his despair is confirmed when Clare, his fiancée, kills herself. A familiar discomfort with tragicomedy is obvious in Glenn Blayney’s suggestion that, in its present form, Miseries was not ‘consistent with [Wilkins’s] first and best intentions’ but was revised from a tragedy in which, rather than the prodigal surviving, sparing his children, and receiving a generous bequest from the guardian who had enforced his marriage, the guardian dies early and the children are murdered.13 This, in Blayney’s view, would ‘have given realism and fine unity of theme, action, and feeling’ (p. 39). Instead, the play in its current form has a happy ending, largely brought about by the family butler who finds means of support for the other siblings – including a highway robbery – and keeps the hero from murder. Bibliographically Blayney is convincing. That something happened in the course of the printing is indicated by altered speech prefixes and the removal

10

11 12 13

On authorship see Roger Holdsworth, ‘Middleton’s Authorship of A Yorkshire Tragedy’, Review of English Studies 45 (1994), 1–25. For a date shortly after the murder see A.C. Cawley and Barry Gaines, eds, A Yorkshire Tragedy (Manchester, 1986), pp. 1–2. Holdsworth, however, wants to move the date to ‘late 1605 . . . some five months later than that usually assumed’ (p. 6), on the basis of borrowings from King Lear. E.A.J. Honigmann, The Stability of Shakespeare’s Text (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1965), pp. 178–80. Stanley Wells, ed., A Yorkshire Tragedy, in The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford, forthcoming), p. 2. Glenn Blayney, ‘Wilkins’s Revisions in The Miseries of Inforst Mariage’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 16 (1957), 23–41 (23).

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Taking Pericles Seriously of a leaf (H4) just after a soliloquy in which the hero, Scarborrow, in despair, may refer to his guardian’s death: Nay, euen the greatest arme, whose hand hath graft, My presence to the eye of Maiesty, shrinkes back, His fingers cluch, and like to lead, They are heauy to raise vp my state, being dead.14

But these lines remain ambiguous, and Wilkins’s ‘intention’ – based on appraisal of the theatrical market rather than a desire for aesthetic perfection – seems to have been to build a tragicomedy around the complications of private betrothals and the abuses of wardship. Like The Winter’s Tale after it, Miseries includes a real death, that of Clare, and a great deal of dangerous trouble. Blayney contends the play has been modified from tragedy from the beginning of what seems to be the fifth act (H3v), but it is precisely here that Wilkins fulfills Fletcher’s injunction to ‘want deaths yet bring some near it’. For example, the younger brother sets out to confess to the highway robbery, expecting to be hanged ‘on the tree of shame’ (2618); the wife attempts to calm Scarborrow by presenting their children, but he is ‘troubled in his mind’ (2604) and threatens to kill them all: ‘These for thy act should die, she for my Clare, / Whose wounds stare thus vpon me for reuenge’ (2792–3). Only at the last minute does his entire family arrive, full of forgiveness and good news about the generosity of the guardian who ‘knew / Your sinne was his, the punishment his due’ (2840–1). Watching Miseries at the Globe, audience members who recognised the notorious Calverley source might well have anticipated a tragic ending. Jean Howard points out that dramatic genre has to be ‘materialised’ during performance;15 Wilkins works to adjust audience expectations by varying his tone throughout, so this is not just a tragedy with a happy ending. The early scene in which Sir John Harcop mourns his daughter’s death is touching. He begs, Lift vp thine eyes, and looke vpon thy father, They were not borne to loose their light so soone, I did beget thee for my comforter, And not to be the Author of my care. . . . I prethee speake to me? Thou art not ripe for death, come backe againe, Clare, my Clare, If death must needs haue one, I am the fittest, prethee let me go, Thou dying whilst I liue, I am dead with woe. (885–98)

But it is hard to find tragic the Butler’s tricks or his Falstaffian commentary as 14 15

Blayney, Glenn, ed., The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (Oxford, 1964), 2244–8; H3v. Howard, Jean E., ‘Shakespeare and Genre’, in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Kastan (Oxford, 1999), 297–310, p. 302.

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Suzanne Gossett he watches the inept younger brothers during the robbery: ‘A man had better lyne a good handsome payre of gallows before his time, then be born to do these sucklings good, their mothers milke not wrung out of their nose yet, they knowe no more how to behaue themselues in this honest and needeful calling of Purse-taking, then I do to peece stockings’ (1540–44). Ultimately, as Leanore Lieblein notes, in Miseries, unlike most domestic tragedies, ‘economic realities have ceased to provide the context for domestic strife and have become instead the subject’.16 Murder, death on the gallows, marital rejection: all evaporate with the guardian’s bequest. General reconciliation occurs in fewer than seventy lines. Yet the play is surprisingly powerful, its popularity confirmed by reprinting and, probably, revival, in 1611.17 I am not persuaded that its remaining deficiencies were caused by externally forced revision. It seems more likely that Wilkins did his best to create a version of the latest form, and that his efforts were noticed by Shakespeare, who proceeded to take him on as a collaborator in his own first effort at a new type of tragicomedy. Together the two produced the wildly popular Pericles. The popularity of Pericles is worth insisting on. The play was first produced at the Globe, in all likelihood between April and June of 1608. Audiences included members of the diplomatic corps and the more ordinary combination of ‘Gentiles mix’d with Groomes’, in such large numbers as to be recalled by an anonymous pamphleteer a year later. Once the theatres had closed and the play became unavailable for viewing, publishers eagerly provided alternate means of transmission. By late 1608 Wilkins had produced The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, a short novel that proclaims itself – presumably to entice frustrated theatre buffs – ‘the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient Poet John Gower’, that is, not merely as a prose version of a familiar tale but as a recounting of the suppressed dramatic performances. In 1609 a quarto of ‘THE LATE, And much admired Play, Called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true Relation of the whole Historie, aduentures, and fortunes of the said Prince: As also, The no lesse strange, and worthy accidents, in the Birth and Life, of his Daughter MARIANA’ became available. This is the notoriously deficient first quarto, which nevertheless must have sold out rapidly and justified the publisher’s investment, because later in the same year Gosson brought out a second quarto.18 The popularity of Pericles was manifest both in publication – six quartos by 1635 – and performance. In the public theatre and at court, performances lasted throughout the Jacobean and Caroline period and recommenced when Pericles was the first Shakespeare play presented in the reopened theatres in 16 17 18

Leanore Lieblein, ‘The Context of Murder in English Domestic Plays, 1590–1610’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 23 (1983), 181–96 (195). Knutson, pp. 138–9. If Gosson confused Marina with the Mariana of Measure for Measure, he must have been remembering a performance, as that play was not published until the First Folio.

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Taking Pericles Seriously 1660. None of this popularity is surprising to the theatre companies that have produced the play, nor is it unfamiliar to scholars. But in commentary on Shakespeare’s romances, tragicomedies, or late plays, critics tend to pass over Pericles as rapidly as possible, if they do not ignore it entirely. One reason is that the play is anomalous. Whatever pattern the critic identifies in these plays, Pericles tends to stretch beyond recognition, and this has, I believe, hindered our ability to enter into the mindset of Beaumont and Fletcher in early 1609. Even in one of the best attempts to think about Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher together, Lee Bliss acknowledges the play only to exclude it. In a brief paragraph she describes Pericles’ ‘archaic flavor . . . episodic sweep . . . fabulous events . . . flat characterization . . . [and] Gower’s . . . old-fashioned language and apparent naiveté’. However, her attention soon narrows to ‘the structural and thematic features that allow Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, and Tempest, on the one hand, and Philaster, Maid’s Tragedy, and King and No King, on the other, to epitomize the passing of one order and establishment of the next’.19 Pericles is nowhere in sight. The critical slighting of Pericles has been assisted by uncertainties about the dating of the six plays just mentioned. Central to a discussion that presumes Beaumont and Fletcher were studying the King’s Men’s latest offerings is the question of the priority of Cymbeline and Philaster. In 1901, when Ashley Thorndike radically proposed The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare, and suggested that from Philaster Shakespeare learned how to write Cymbeline, his argument was disparaged or dismissed in an atmosphere of bardolatry.20 In his 1969 edition of Philaster Andrew Gurr hedged, claiming that both plays developed in parallel out of Sidney’s Arcadia.21 But recent scholarship has rethought the matter. The Oxford Shakespeare editors, for example, date The Winter’s Tale in 1609, Cymbeline in 1610, and point out that ‘Beaumont and Fletcher could only have been influenced by Shakespeare’s play through performance, and the London theatres were closed because of plague . . . perhaps until January or February 1610’. Yet topical allusions date Philaster to 1609. On the other hand, ‘as sharer and primary dramatist for the King’s Men Shakespeare would almost certainly have seen the manuscript of Philaster before it was performed; he would have had the opportunity to read the entire text, without being dependent on memories of performance.

19

20

21

Lee Bliss, ‘Tragicomic Romance for the King’s Men, 1609–11’, in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan: Change and Continuity in the English Dramatic Tradition, ed. A.R. Braunmuller and J.C. Bulman (Newark, 1986), 148–64 (149–51). See A.H. Thorndike, The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare (Worcester, Mass., 1901; repr. New York, 1966). For a powerful example of the reaction to Thorndike’s claims, see Harold Wilson, ‘Philaster and Cymbeline’, in English Institute Essays 1951 (New York, 1952), pp. 146–67. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Philaster, or Love Lies-a-bleeding, ed. Andrew Gurr (London, 1969).

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Suzanne Gossett Moreover, he might have seen the text months before it was performed’.22 In his 2005 Cambridge edition of Cymbeline, Martin Butler concurs that Philaster came first and adds new evidence that Cymbeline was probably being written in May/June of 1610 or shortly afterward, with its first performances in December 1610.23 The logical inferences of this sequence are rarely pursued. Obviously, if Cymbeline is a model for Philaster, then Pericles, especially because of its formal peculiarities, becomes less significant. But if Cymbeline had not yet appeared when the two young men were contemplating the King’s Men repertoire, popular Pericles was a key consideration. And Pericles is a play that seems to have stayed with Fletcher, in particular, a long time. A clue to the depth of his lingering reaction is found in brief reminiscences embedded in his later plays. Two are especially revealing. The first is from The Woman’s Prize, written in 1611, only a couple of years after Pericles. In its last act this comedy, constructed as a response to The Taming of the Shrew, unexpectedly invokes Pericles. Two servants are carrying Petruchio’s chests to the sea so that he can flee his second wife Maria: Now could I wish her in that Trunk . . . For in the passage if a Tempest take ye, As many doe, and you lie beating for it, Then, if it pleas’d the fates, I would have the Master Out of a powerfull providence, to cry, Lighten the ship of all hands, or we perish; Then this for one, as best spar’d, should by all means Over-board presently.

22 23

Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987), p. 132. Martin Butler, ed., Cymbeline (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 3–6. In an unconvincing attempt to date Cymbeline a year earlier, to Christmas 1609, Ros King denies that the mention in Philaster of the hero’s visit to the ‘new platform’ is a reference to the ‘great platform’ on which Phineas Pett constructed a model of Prince Henry’s ship, the Prince Royal, and which King James went to visit in May 1609. Instead she argues that the reference is to the lower deck or orlop of the ship, into which a child fell in September of 1610. However, the OED finds no use of the term ‘platform’ for this section of a ship until sixty years later. The ‘platform’ was clearly new in 1609; a year later a topical reference might have taken a different form. It is also unlikely that Philaster or any prince would make a special visit to the ‘new platform’ if that were merely a hidden part, a lower deck, of a ship. King assumes her conclusion in stating that if Philaster were written no later than December 1609, ‘this in turn would mean that Cymbeline could have been written no later than the summer of 1609’. That is only true if Cymbeline came before Philaster. In any case, if Cymbeline were produced at court in late 1609 while the theatres were closed, it would have been inaccessible to Beaumont and Fletcher and they would have continued to think about Pericles as they contemplated their new play. See Ros King, Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot, 2005), p. 40.

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Taking Pericles Seriously Jacques replies with language recalling the fisherman scene (Pericles 2.1) and Pericles’ particular enemy, the ‘masked Neptune’ (3.3.37):24 But believe me Pedro, She would spoyle the fishing on this coast for ever, For none would keepe her company, but Dog-fish, As currish as her selfe; or Porpisces, Made to all fatall uses: . . . She would make god Neptune, and his fire-forke, And all his demi-gods, and goddesses, As weary of the Flemmish channell Pedro, As ever boy was of the schoole. (V.ii.11–33)

The combination of Lucina, mentioned earlier, throwing one’s wife overboard in a chest, and Neptune sounds like unconscious recollection of Pericles. Less unconscious is Evanthe’s angry reply to the corrupt servant who has betrayed her to the king in A Wife for a Month from 1624: ‘I had rather thou hadst delivered me to Pirats, / Betraid me to uncurable diseases, / Hung up my Picture in a Market place, / And sold me to wilde bawds’ (I.ii.116–19), a rapid summary of Marina’s experience of being carried off by pirates and sold to the brothel, where one customer ‘brought his disease hither’, ‘the little baggage’ made another ‘roast meat for worms’, and Bolt reports to the Bawd that he has ‘cried her through the market . . . drawn her picture with my voice’ (Pericles 4.2.102–3, 20–2, 84–7). These recollections, spanning Fletcher’s career, suggest that when the younger dramatists thought about Pericles, they concentrated not on the archaic flavor, episodic sweep, fabulous events or Gower’s language. Instead they noticed the unplayful sexuality in the incest and brothel scenes; the social commentary; and the moments of powerful emotion, all elements suited to adult actors and also prominent in The Malcontent. Particularly remarkable in Pericles were the tone and the radical division of attention between two central figures, father and daughter. Such a division of attention and a similarly complex tone are notable in Philaster. The unheroic protagonist recalls – not in specific action but in what Fowler calls family resemblance – Pericles’ weakness, his early flight from danger, his almost catatonic withdrawal at Marina’s apparent death. More critical is the revised treatment of the collaborators’ female figures. Fletcher’s willingness to focus on women was already apparent in The Faithful Shepherdess, which centres on Clorin and whose major plot – major enough for bits to be reworked into Philaster – divides its attention equally between Amoret and Perigot, the unchaste Amaryllis and the Sullen Shepherd. But in The Faithful Shepherdess and Cupid’s Revenge, women who choose for themselves

24

All citations from Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett (London, 2004).

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Suzanne Gossett and woo are blind or wicked, where the women of Pericles are strong but admirable. Thaisa takes the initiative in wooing Pericles and later sends her father word of her unalterable choice. In this she prefigures Arethusa choosing, wooing, and marrying in despite of her father. Similarly, in A King and No King, Panthea, like Marina, rejects a powerful wooer whom the situation marks as sexually transgressive. Recollections of Marina’s angry speeches to Lysimachus and Bolt are transferred to the other heroine, Spaconia, who tells her straying lover that he is ‘more unconstant / Then all ill women ever were together’ and then unexpectedly echoes Marina speaking about her birth in Pericles (4.1.51–63): The wind is fixt to thee, and sooner shall The beaten Marriner with his shrill whistle, Calme the loude murmurs of the troubled maine, And strike it smooth againe; then thy soule fall To have peace in love with any. (IV.ii.48–57)

Echoes of Pericles continue as Spaconia’s father finds her imprisoned with Tigranes. Treating her as a prostitute, he sounds like Lysimachus questioning Marina: ‘Are you in private still, or how? . . . Doe you take money? are you come to sell sinne yet? . . . O thou vild creature, whose best commendation is, that thou art a young Whore’ (V.ii.31–5). Compare, ‘Now, pretty one, how long have you been at this trade?’ and, when Marina replies, ‘E’er since I can remember’, ‘Did you go to’t so young? Were you a gamester at five, or at seven?’ (Pericles 4.5.70–80). Another link between Pericles and Beaumont and Fletcher’s early tragicomedies is the complex and multiple vision of family. Bliss exaggerates, I believe, in claiming that for Beaumont and Fletcher, ‘the interaction between generations holds no interest. Philaster’s King exists only as political tyrant and blocking father figure for Arethusa’s intended romantic comedy’.25 But even in Cupid’s Revenge both plots had been based in just that familial interaction. In Philaster the moment when the king demands that the courtiers produce the lost or strayed Arethusa – ‘I doe command you all, as you are subiects, / To shew her me’ – is so often analysed in terms of the political debate over whether subjects’ obedience can be limited to ‘things possible, and honest’ that critics tend to forget the king is frantic because ‘y’haue let me loose / The Iewell of my life’, that is, his daughter (H1v).26 The loss and finding of a daughter is reiterated in the second plot, where Euphrasia’s father Dion’s recognition of her in the 1622 good quarto is a clear echo of Pericles identifying Marina (5.1.75–170):

25 26

Bliss, 152–53. All citations from Philaster are from the 1622 quarto.

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Taking Pericles Seriously Di.

Bel. Di. Bel.

But thou speak’st As like Euphrasia as thou dost looke, . . . draw neere That I may gaze vpon thee, art thou she, Or else her murderer? where wert thou borne? In Siracusa. What’s thy name? Euphrasia. (L2r)

Generational conflict develops further in A King and No King, where a continuing plot line is the unexplained hostility of Arbaces’ mother, Arane, who since his father’s death has repeatedly tried ‘To take by treason’ his ‘loathed life’ (1.1.469). Eventually it emerges that Arbaces is not Arane’s real child and hence is blocking her natural child’s right to the throne – another echo of Pericles, where Dionyza’s murderous hostility to her foster daughter, Marina, arose because ‘She did distain my child, and stood between / Her and her fortunes’ (4.3.31–2). In both cases the child is innocent but the mother a serious threat. It is the difficult-to-describe tone, more than anything else, that the young collaborators could study in Pericles. Tone, I think, had been the critical problem in their earlier plays. For example, Cupid’s Revenge is ostensibly tragedy, although many of its plot elements reappear in Philaster. The emphasis on a form of cross-generational incest – the prince’s mistress becomes his father’s wife and hence, as he repeatedly says, his ‘mother’, but she keeps begging him to lie with her – is even stronger than in Pericles. But, despite the eventual deaths of all the major characters, it is hard to be moved. The princess’s love for a hideous dwarf, the king’s absurd attempts to make himself seem younger, Urania’s countrified simplicity, are close to grotesque, while Urania’s self-sought death is pathetic rather than tragic. In the final scene, when it seems that the prince’s virtue will finally be rewarded, he is suddenly stabbed by the lustful queen. Logically this completes the revenge that Cupid seeks, but dramatically the climax appears coincidental. The play’s failures of mood and structural coherence show why the collaborators needed to find a new framework that could integrate their talents for comedy, action, and dangerous passion. That the framework could not be Italianate pastoral tragicomedy they had learned from The Faithful Shepherdess. The problem there, as Finkelpearl argues, is that the play is ‘excruciatingly boring’, its poetic strength vitiated by ‘static pace’ and ‘overwrought rhetoric’.27 This is true even when the action is closest to Pericles, as for example when Amoret is flung into the well to her death but unexpectedly rises in the arms of the river god who, like Cerimon reviving Thaisa, discovers ‘shee’s warme . . . shee pants’ (3.1.379, 387). 27

Finkelpearl, p. 111.

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Suzanne Gossett Unfortunately we are without feeling for Amoret, or, in fact, for any of the characters in The Faithful Shepherdess. In contrast, the emotional effect of Pericles is not only well attested in modern performance history but revealed anew in a contemporary comment recently discovered by Tiffany Stern. A 1636 jest book recounts that ‘Two Gentlemen went to see Pericles acted, and one of them was moved with the calamities of that Prince that he wept, whereat the other laughed extreamely. Not long after the same couple went to see the Major of Quinborough, when he who jeered the other at Pericles now wept himselfe, to whom the other laughing, sayd, what the Divell should there bee in this meery play to make a man weep. O, replied the other, who can hold from weeping to see a Magistrate so abused? The Jest will take those who have seene these two plaies.’28 Despite varying responses, then, clearly the ‘calamities’ of Pericles could arouse a strong emotional reaction. Notice, by the way, that it is not at Pericles that the second man laughs, but at his companion, and that it is the man who jeers at becoming emotionally moved by Pericles but then misses the satire in Middleton’s The Mayor of Queenborough who is the eventual butt of the joke. Weeping at Pericles – not a ‘merry play’ – is fitting. The influence of Pericles has been slighted partly from scepticism about collaborative composition but more specifically from disdain for the work of George Wilkins. Yet, as Miseries shows, Wilkins was engaged in the shared effort to create the new tragicomic form. Perhaps inspired by working with Shakespeare, in the first acts of Pericles he came closer, tonally, than he had previously managed alone. The opening scenes of incest threaten death, but Pericles escapes with danger; the deaths of Antiochus and his daughter will only be reported. The scene of the fishermen is comic in diction, but Pericles’ address to the elements that shipwreck him, while it does not achieve the full Shakespearean range heard in the next storm, approaches it: Yet cease your ire, you angry stars of heaven! Wind, rain and thunder, remember earthly man Is but a substance that must yield to you, And I, as fits my nature, do obey you. Alas, the seas hath cast me on the rocks, Washed me from shore to shore, and left me breath Nothing to think on but ensuing death. (2.1.1–7)

Wilkins even rewrites bits of his earlier play for Pericles. For example, before Scarborrow goes wooing Clare, his friends parody an eager father who leaves a courting couple alone long enough for the young woman ‘to aske, but Sir, will you marry me, and thou in thy Cox-sparrow humor replyest, I (before God) as I am a Gentleman wil I, which the Father ouer-hearing, leaps in, takes you at

28

Tiffany Stern, ‘Re-patching the Play’, in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke, 2004), 151–77 (151–2).

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Taking Pericles Seriously your word, sweare hee is glad to see this; nay he will haue you contracted straight, and for a need makes the priest of himselfe’ (108–12; A3v). In Miseries these jokes about paternal manipulation are inappropriate; they clash with Scarborrow’s affection for Clare and his eventual grief. But in Pericles, Simonides’ jocular trickery to bring Thaisa and Pericles together (2.5) reflects their own attraction to each other and strengthens the structural contrast between the dangerous paternity of Antiochus and the warmth of the Pentapolian monarch. Even in the heartbreaking moment when Pericles carries off Thaisa’s body, both collaborators may have remembered not only Lear but Scarborrow carrying Clare to her grave: This to my armes, my sorrow shall bequeath, Tho I haue lost her, to thy graue Ile bring, Thou wert my wife, and Ile thy Requiem sing: (995–7; D3r)

Thomas Pavel usefully distinguishes two kinds of generic definition: formal, as for the sonnet, and ‘Terms like “tragedy” and “comedy” [that] have a moral and existential meaning’.29 We find such meaning in the four conventionally grouped tragicomedies of Shakespeare. Beginning with Pericles, all are based on a fantasy of recovery from loss: morally and existentially, tragic suffering gives way to comic renewal when a child assumed dead, and sometimes a wife as well, is miraculously recovered. The children in The Miseries of Enforced Marriage are similarly recovered from the tragic fate that impends and that the audience knew awaited their real models. Beaumont and Fletcher’s first successful tragicomedy, Philaster, approximates this pattern. All three of the main characters are imprisoned and condemned, but Philaster warns the king, who has rejected paternal care and threatened to kill his daughter, ‘If you haue a soule, / Thinke, saue her, and be saued’ (K1r). The restoration of child to father is reiterated in the discovery of Euphrasia, not dead but lost. The Q2 conclusion, in which Euphrasia rejects marriage and will ‘be laide in earth / Without an Heyre’ (L3v), again recalls the tragicomic complexity of the end of Pericles. There, just at the moment when Thaisa recovers her husband, child, and the future son-in-law who will guarantee posterity and social recovery, she informs Pericles, ‘Lord Cerimon hath letters of good credit, sir, / My father’s dead’ (5.3.78–9). In Philaster, in Shakespeare’s tragicomedies, in Wilkins’s Miseries, death is admitted and families are permanently fractured even when there is restoration – for Prospero, ‘every third thought shall be my grave’. Our young authors needed to begin where Shakespeare began, with Pericles. But the tragicomic tone was hard to establish and maintain. The 1620 first 29

Thomas Pavel, ‘Literary Genres as Norms and Good Habits’, New Literary History 34 (2003), 201–20 (203–4).

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Suzanne Gossett printed version of Philaster, reflecting, I believe, a censored performance text, had ‘dangerous and gaping wounds’, as Thomas Walkley, publisher of both quartos, informs the reader of Q2. One was the greatly reduced recognition between Euphrasia and her father (‘I should know this face; my daughter.’ ‘The same sir.’ [Q1 I4v]); another was the marriage rapidly arranged for her; a third eliminated the threats of torture.30 All move the play away from tragicomedy and away from Pericles. Soon Beaumont and Fletcher would be setting the example, themselves moving away from existential meaning. The end of A King and No King includes a weak recollection of the fantasy of recovery as Arbaces finds his true father. But it is more important that the king loses his title. What the young collaborators modelled from Pericles as they moved to the King’s Men was the power of sexuality to disturb the state, the mixture of social classes, the strong, virtuous heroine, and most of all the ability to move audiences. These would recur throughout their plays.

30

For full discussion of the texts of Philaster see my forthcoming edition.

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8 ‘The Neutral Term’?: Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’ GORDON MCMULLAN

I

C

RITICS SEEM largely to agree that the problems involved in calling the rgroup of plays in the Shakespeare canon from Pericles to The Two Noble Kinsmen ‘tragicomedies’ or ‘romances’ are sufficiently substantial that it is best to avoid doing so altogether. Both terms are seen as too limiting and exclusive adequately to embrace the plays’ extraordinary generic dependencies and possibilities. There are exceptions, though. Alison Thorne’s recent ‘New Casebook’, for instance, in calling the plays ‘Shakespeare’s Romances’, sustains the legacy of E.C. Pettet, Northrop Frye, Stanley Wells, Howard Felperin, Robert Uphaus and others who have championed ‘romance’, though she is careful to qualify the term and acknowledge the issues in her helpful introduction. There is also Barbara Mowat who, despite having spent the first section of her essay on the last plays in Richard Dutton and Jean Howard’s Companion to Shakespeare’s Works explaining why neither of the terms ‘romance’ or ‘tragicomedy’ is adequate, in fact goes on to provide the most convincing recent analysis of the plays as romances by offering a detailed demonstration of their roots in the kind of sixteenth-century dramatic romance that had notoriously frustrated Philip Sidney yet was visibly still alive and well on the Jacobean stage in the shape of Mucedorus, an old play which was revived in 1606 and again in 1610 in time to provide an impetus for late Shakespeare.1

1

Shakespeare’s Romances, ed. Alison Thorne, New Casebooks (Basingstoke, 2003); E.C. Pettet, Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition, with an introduction by H.S. Bennet (London, 1949); Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York, 1965); Stanley Wells, ‘Shakespeare and Romance’, in Later Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 8 (London, 1966),

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Gordon McMullan But Diana Childress’s 1974 essay ‘Are Shakespeare’s Last Plays Really Romances?’ marks the moment after which such arguments must necessarily seem, to some extent at least, defensive. ‘Romance’, after all, is not technically a term for a dramatic genre and is arguably better viewed as modal rather than generic, signifying tone, style and narrative rather than dramatic form per se, its very malleability undermining its usefulness. To call the last plays ‘romances’ is to beg the question of the nature of their engagement with earlier textual forms, to leave the extent of their generic self-irony unaccounted for, and to assume that the plays as a group are characterised by the kind of benign clarity once thought to be their hallmark but which readings over the last few decades – postcolonial readings of The Tempest being the most obvious instance – have suggested is simply not an adequate way to understand the impact of these plays in their first contexts. Once the ironic and alienated nature of the deployment of the romance materials apparent in these plays comes under close scrutiny, it becomes harder and harder to think of the plays themselves simply as ‘romances’. Childress provides a helpful summary of the issues. ‘[I]t is the later meanings added to “romance” ’, she argues, that have made the term so plastic. Any poet who draws his inspiration from medieval romance is assumed to be writing romances, even though he may be using romance materials to quite different ends – for an allegory, an epic, or a play.2

And she lists a series of features that keep the plays distinct from romance: irony, estranging humour, grotesqueness. These are elements that could, she acknowledges, be derived from or absorbed into romance, but for her it is their conscious deployment by Shakespeare for distancing purposes that resists his last plays becoming romances in any adequate sense. Though clearly a highly significant influence on all the plays of the final period, then, ‘romance’ is perhaps more useful in thinking about the episodic, itinerant Pericles, as Suzanne Gossett implies in the introduction to her excellent recent Arden

2

pp. 49–79; Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton, 1972); Robert Uphaus, Beyond Tragedy: Structure and Experience in Shakespeare’s Romances (Lexington, 1981); Barbara A. Mowat, ‘ “What’s in a Name?” Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, 4 vols, vol. IV: ‘The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays’ (Oxford, 2003), pp. 129–49. See also Marco Mincoff, Things Supernatural and Causeless: Shakespearean Romance (Newark, 1992; first published Sofia, 1987); Robert M. Adams, Shakespeare: The Four Romances (New York, 1989); Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare’s Romance of the Word (Lewisburg, PA, 1990); and, most recently, Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004), who offers a series of valuable caveats. Diana T. Childress, ‘Are Shakespeare’s Late Plays Really Romances?’, in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow, ed. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod (Athens, OH, 1974), pp. 44–55 (45–6).

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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’ edition, than it is for some of the others – The Tempest, for one, unromantically obedient to the unities as it is, and certainly Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, which may engage in several ways, not all of them ironic, with romance but which are certainly not themselves adequately represented by the term. ‘Romance’ certainly tells us a good deal about the last plays but, in Robert Henke’s words, it ‘hardly exhausts the plays’ dramaturgy’.3 Henke is himself a proponent of ‘tragicomedy’ as the key generic label for the late plays, building on work by Ashley Thorndike, Frank Ristine, Marvin Herrick, Joan Hartwig and others in reading the plays through the lens of the writings of the highly influential Italian theorist Giambattista Guarini, who defended the genre against charges that, in its hybridity, it constituted a travesty of decorum.4 Guarini argued for a generic flexibility rejected on humanist grounds by his peers, reading tragicomedy as the legitimate offspring of the classical genres, tragedy and comedy, offering historically appropriate new possibilities for theatre, and insisting that genre is not fixed but responsive to changing contexts. The critical motivation for considering ‘tragicomedy’ rather than ‘romance’ as a cohering generic label for Shakespeare’s last plays is thus obvious enough. As Hartwig observes, [a] certain uneasiness arises from viewing the plays in terms of the romance tradition alone because the strictures of classification occasionally impose limits on what Shakespeare was free to do with the romance conventions.5

Tragicomedy appears enough of a broad church to encompass the various traits critics have noted in the late plays which do not themselves constitute an adequate generic ascription yet which require acknowledgement and incorporation into whichever overarching title is chosen. These include not only the presence of pastoral but also the influence of the masque. Moreover, by necessarily post-dating its constituent originary genres, tragicomedy assumes a sense on the part of its target audience of theatrical history, an ability to recognise and appreciate the conscious redeployment of earlier modes. Without this recognition and appreciation, the irony of the redeployment is 3 4

5

Robert Henke, Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Newark, 1997), p. 40. Ashley Thorndike, The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakspere (Worcester, MA, 1901); Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy: Its Origins and Development in Italy, France, and England (Urbana, 1955); Frank H. Ristine, English Tragicomedy: Its Origin and History (New York, 1963); Joan Hartwig, Shakespeare’s Tragicomic Vision (Baton Rouge, 1972). Guarini’s theories are expounded in his Compendio della poesia tragicomica, tratto dai duo Verati, per opera dell’autore del Pastor Fido, colla giunta di molte cose spettanti all’arte (Venice, 1601), but the first attack on Guarini appeared, long before he had published either his pastoral tragicomedy Il pastor fido or the Compendio, in Jason Denores’s Discorsi di Iason DeNores intorno à que’ principii, cause, et accrescimenti, che la comedia, la tragedia, et il poema eroico ricevono dalla philosophia morale, e civile, e da’ governatori delle repubbliche (Padua, 1586). For more on Guarini and Denores, see Matthew Treherne’s chapter in this volume. Hartwig, p. 11.

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Gordon McMullan lost. Tragicomedy, for Henke, requires ‘an audience sophisticated and experienced enough to recognize the codes of the historically prior dramatic genres’ and is thus a term which, in its belatedness, has a certain appropriateness for the works of a playwright not only writing for an audience of knowledgeable theatregoers but also, arguably, negotiating the end of his own career.6 Yet from Ristine onwards these critics, even as they argue for ‘tragicomedy’ as the term best suited to the task of encompassing the complex intersection of generic, ideological, cultural and historical forces that combine to produce the last plays, are forced to acknowledge that Shakespeare’s practice in those plays meshes at best uncomfortably both with Guarinian theory and with the developing English practice of, on the one hand, John Marston and, on the other, John Fletcher in tragicomic form. Shakespeare did of course write tragicomedies, plays that mix tragic and comic elements and that offer a range of political and aesthetic possibilities quite other than the conservatism traditionally assigned to them. But his experiments include material a long way beyond the range of Guarini’s ideas (Measure for Measure, for instance, which, while providing a fascinating precursor for Prospero, is a very different kind of tragicomic drama from that described in the Compendio) and it was the tragicomedies of his late coadjutor Fletcher, at least as much as Shakespeare’s own, that set the agenda for the theatrical future both before and after the Civil War. This eventuality does not provide, for certain Shakespeareans, the right comic outcome to the tragedy of the closing of the theatres and has, for the most part, been elided. Yet to point out that Marston, Daniel, (Beaumont and) Fletcher and others were, in the second decade-and-a-half of the seventeenth century, in various ways experimenting with and creating a genre that reaches far beyond, and is ultimately shaped rather differently from, the Shakespearean late plays – which are, after all, only one manifestation of a genre in, to use Ristine’s term, ‘transition’ – is not to deny either Shakespeare’s own experiments or their subsequent impact, but rather to place them in an appropriately broader context. Moreover, both generic ascriptions for the last plays, ‘romance’ and ‘tragicomedy’ – and I use ‘ascription’ deliberately for its echoes of authorship attribution, since it seems to me that at times the desire to establish a single clear generic label for these plays is akin to the determination to prove that a given play was written by a clear, unequivocal individual, a desire rooted in contextually inappropriate assumptions about the respective merits of hybridity and unity – have come to evoke a conservatism that many current critics would choose to reject, seeing no need to create readings which are, in David Norbrook’s phrase, ‘more royalist than the King’s Men’. 7 ‘Romance’ in 6 7

Henke, p. 17. David Norbrook, ‘ “What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King?”: Language and Utopia in The Tempest’, in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, ed. Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (London, 1992), pp. 7–24.

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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’ particular is lined up alongside the influence of the masque to ascribe a reactionary politics to the plays, a trend still apparent, for instance, in David Bergeron’s essay in the Dutton and Howard Companion: ‘As spectacle complements state and majesty in masques,’ he tells us, ‘so it completes romance in Shakespeare’s last plays.’8 Particularly by way of colonial accounts of The Tempest, but also through, for instance, readings of Cymbeline in the context of archipelagic history, critics have chosen to resist this equation of masque and romance as intrinsically conservative forms and to emphasise instead the complexity and multiplicity of political viewpoint in the last plays.9 Equally, it is clear that, as Henke notes, ‘Italian tragicomedy was mainly a courtly phenomenon, and the powerful, mysterious, and providential harmonies wrought in the final act of tragicomedies like Il pastor fido surely reflected the power of ducal courts like that of Ferrara.’10 Though Guarini’s play directly inspired the first overt Jacobean foray into Italianate pastoral tragicomedy, Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess, critics are understandably chary of imposing without qualification a political model of this kind onto the emergent English form.11 For a range of reasons, then, critics who happily refer to Hamlet as a tragedy or Twelfth Night as a comedy have in recent years avoided the generic terms ‘romance’ and ‘tragicomedy’ (or the hybrid ‘romantic tragicomedy’) as an overarching way of gathering into a single group the plays Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, along, increasingly often, with Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. This is not always simply a ducking of the issue. For Ruth Nevo, the plays, in their numinous lateness, have a post-generic quality. ‘In his later plays’, she argues, Shakespeare, like late Yeats, like late Picasso, yields to his themes, loosens or even

8 9

10 11

Dutton and Howard, eds, p. 213. The obvious essays on The Tempest are Paul Brown, ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester, 1985), pp. 48–71, and Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘ “Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish”: the discursive con-texts of The Tempest’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London, 1985), pp. 191–205. More recently, Cymbeline criticism has profitably switched the focus, reading the play as a representation of reverse colonialism, that is, of the colonisation of Britain by the Romans, thereby problematising Jacobean ‘Golden Age’ ideology: see, for instance, Jodi Mikalachki, ‘The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism’, Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995), 301–22, and Valerie Wayne’s forthcoming Arden Shakespeare edition of the play. Henke, p. 24. In any case, as Jonathan Hope and I argued in our introduction to The Politics of Tragicomedy, pp. 1–7, Fletcher’s prefatory note, ‘To the Reader’, in the quarto of The Faithful Shepherdess does not represent the form of tragicomedy as it subsequently developed in his work with Beaumont and, later, Massinger and/or others, which is at best obliquely related to pastoral and frequently not at all.

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Gordon McMullan abandons the constraints of classical category and moves beyond genre towards an indeterminate mode akin to reverie.12

For Nevo, chronology outweighs – supersedes, even – generic ascription: late style, is, for her, simply ‘beyond genre’. Yet even as she turns for a parallel to her principal critical influence, Freud – suggesting, in a broadening of the applicability of ‘late work’, that ‘[t]here is a strange affinity between these strangely anguished “comedies” and Freud’s late review of his own theories’ in Beyond the Pleasure Principle – she contradicts herself, offering a clear demonstration of the difficulty of negotiating between the temporal manifestations of the allegedly transtemporal mode that is late style and the historically bound concept of genre. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, she argues, is ‘a melancholy disquisition, Freud’s displaced mourning for his daughter, an oceanic deathwish fantasy’ – that is, for her, ‘a tragicomedy’ – and she adds that ‘Shakespeare’s tragicomedies are also essays beyond the pleasure principle and toward mourning’.13 The urge to substitute for genre a discourse of lateness that transcends form thus appears to fall in on itself: as chronology reappears, it is almost immediately elided with tragicomedy, even in the midst of an attempt to move beyond generic terminology. That said, Nevo is not alone in her desire to move beyond genre. A.D. Nuttall argued in 1966, in response to the debate over generic nomenclature, for the unique status of the last plays. ‘There is’, he claimed, ‘a sense in which the last plays of Shakespeare are sui generis, so that any word would do (the blanker the better).’14 This sentiment is echoed by Henke, who – despite arguing vigorously for the relationship of the late plays to tragicomedy in the pastoral tradition – concludes that, in the end, ‘[a]s a label, the neutral term “late plays” is probably best, for there is always danger in announcing that one has finally discovered the true generic identity of these odd creations’.15 Partisans for ‘romance’ seem equally inclined to adopt this ‘neutral term’. Barbara Mowat, for instance, appears to treat ‘late play’ as a kind of inflectionless default label for plays whose complex generic affiliations she wishes to address. For Mowat, despite her focus on dramatic romance, the various generic terms need to be treated with kid gloves and given very careful, historically aware definition. ‘Late’, on the other hand, as a description of the plays, has no more or less significance than it does in a phrase such as ‘the late 1600s’. Yet ‘late’ is, as critics tend to forget, a word loaded with a specific critical history which is both subjectivist – which, that is, treats texts as manifestations of authorial state of mind at the time of composition – and anti-theatrical – designed to

12 13 14 15

Nevo, p. 6. Nevo, p. 6. A.D. Nuttall, ‘William Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale’, Studies in English Literature 26 (London, 1966), 10. Henke, p. 31.

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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’ resist the material conditions of theatrical production – and which brings with it a series of presumptions and elisions that arguably do far more than either ‘romance’ or ‘tragicomedy’ to limit our understanding of the last plays in the Shakespeare canon. ‘Late play’, I want to claim, is no ‘neutral term’, and it is useful to remind ourselves why.

II The lives of artists, writers and composers are, like their works, typically thought of episodically and progressively, as having beginnings, middles and endings, and for a range of reasons the latter in particular have taken on particular significance as validation of the entire career. This has, in a sense, been true from classical times: the idea of the cursus, the rota Virgilii, the poetic career running from pastoral via eclogues to epic, is an obvious instance of an artistic teleology, a way of mapping the creative life as a development towards a generic consummation, with a powerful and sustained impact – creating lasting problems, for instance, for Milton scholarship in negotiating the work subsequent to Paradise Lost and leaving Pope, centuries later, with lifelong anxiety because, despite all his achievements, he had never completed his projected epic. This is a teleology which is willed, doubly willed, in a way, since an early modern writer following the Virgilian path is deliberately and self-consciously reworking an already deliberate and self-conscious career structure: the imitator, like Virgil himself, produces something knowing, something that makes a clear statement to the contemporary reader of the reach of his ambition. The last years of certain major artists, however, from Titian to Picasso, from Sophocles to Shakespeare, from Beethoven to Shostakovich, have been taken by critics in the course of the last two centuries as instances of something quite different from the genre-based poetic progress for which Virgil’s career is the guiding example. They are read as exemplars of a phenomenon both personal and impersonal, a shared, transhistorical phenomenon, that of ‘late writing’ or ‘late style’: terms which signify the qualities associated with a last brief period of renewed energy that comes after the major achievements of the life of a creative artist in any discipline, extending, completing and validating that life. This is, of course, a characterisation of the artistic life that depends upon a biographical imperative in the ordering of the creating subject, a linear narrative and a clear sense that the works of the last years of certain artists are qualitatively and stylistically distinct from those artists’ earlier work (though often reminiscent of the very earliest work) and are marked by a manner – an accomplished, sometimes serene, sometimes irascible, manner – felt in some way to reach ‘beyond the subjective’. Late-period work is typically depicted not, as in the Virgilian model, as a steady development towards an epic climax, but as a kind of coda, a supplementary phase of the creative life which 121

Gordon McMullan manifests itself at the same time as a renewal, a rediscovery, a renaissance, characterised in particular ways: by looseness of facture, a tendency towards intense colour or expression, perhaps a certain difficulty and abstraction of manner, and by a distinct style which is in a way childlike and yet at the same time – and this is frequently the key authenticator of true lateness – predictive of styles yet to be established by the artist’s successors, of future developments in the particular art form in question, as work, in other words, that is outside its own time. Late work is not generically bound; it is personal, essential, autobiographical; it is a supplement to the main body of the artist’s work which is also a fulfilment of that work; at the same time, it has ramifications beyond the personal, expressing a sense of epochal lateness or of a going beyond the possibilities of the current moment or, combining the two, of a certain paradoxical prolepsis in its finality. For the most sophisticated theorist of lateness, Theodor Adorno, for instance, late Beethoven, in its fragmented redeployment of, and resistance to, convention, predicts the as yet unthinkable musical revolution of Schoenberg and Webern.16 The attribution of a late phase has thus come to serve as a signal of the elect status of the poet or painter or composer in question – incontrovertible evidence of his (and it is, conspicuously, almost always his, not her, a lacuna which itself suggests the time- and culture-bound origins of the idea) status as an individual of genius. The irony of this, of course, is that the late phase as described is effectively identical from artist to artist, from period to period, from country to country – a transhistorical, transcultural phenomenon – thus seeming to undermine the very claim to individuality that is its apparent purpose. But go to any monographic art show, walk through to the last room, and read the wall text: what you will see, almost certainly, is a version of the standard description of a late phase, a period typically seven or eight years before the artist’s death (less than a decade, but long enough to be significant) in which there is a profound shift of style, a turn back to the early which is also a looking forward to future forms of art (so, for instance, late Turner is celebrated as proleptic Impressionism), a looseness of facture which seems simultaneously to echo an essential serenity or perhaps resignation on the part of the artist and at the same time to offer certain difficulties of categorisation (this is the earliest feature of late style ever delineated, by Vasari in his account of late Titian). There may be a certain primitivism, an engagement with the things of childhood reshaped from the perspective of maturity; there will often be a residual sense of darkness left over from the tragic phase that typically precedes the late period. But in one or other version the basic map remains constant. Art history and musicology formulated their versions of late style a little later than literary criticism (though the first late phases, not called such but

16

See Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Fragments and Texts, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, 1998; first published in German, 1993).

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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’ clearly doing the same work, were constructed for Mozart and Beethoven at the beginning of the nineteenth century).17 It was in the 1900s that German art historians began to theorise what they called Altersstil or Spätstil, ‘old-age style’ and ‘late style’, treating lateness and old age as synonymous and delineating many of the features I have described, particularly in relation to a certain abstraction, a late loosening of brushwork. As Michael Millgate’s excellent book Testamentary Acts demonstrates, literary lateness pre-dated this by a couple of decades. Certainly, a sense of late style as the hallmark of genius was already fully established by the time Henry James – in a classic deliberate late gesture – began work on the New York Edition, in which he carefully reshaped his early work to establish a clear dynamic for his life as an author culminating in a neatly delineated late style best known to us from The Golden Bowl (and not too difficult to parody). The agonising self-consciousness of Jamesian lateness is at its clearest in a lateish short story called ‘The Middle Years’, in which the dying writer, Dencombe, soaring again a little on the weak wings of convalescence [. . .] found another strain of eloquence to plead the cause of a certain splendid ‘last manner’, the very citadel, as it would prove, of his reputation, the stronghold into which his real treasure would be gathered.18

The acquisition of a ‘last manner’, then, by 1893 when this story was written, had become established as a marker of literary genius. James himself was painfully aware of the centrality of Shakespearean lateness to any subsequent ascription of late style, significantly choosing to break off from his work on the New York Edition just once, in order to write an introductory essay to The Tempest for Sidney Lee’s Complete Works in which he expresses his profound and deeply anxious inability to understand Shakespeare’s decision, in middle age, to draw his career to a close, and he reads the play, in Millgate’s words, as a flattering analogue for what he confidently expected to be his own culminating achievement. James celebrates the play as constituting the occasion when, after ‘too much compromise and too much sacrifice,’ Shakespeare at last ‘sinks’ profoundly, as an artist, into ‘the lucid stillness of his style’ –

an attitude to Shakespeare’s last writing which is intrinsically anti-theatrical, reading professional work for the theatre – no doubt in response to his own 17

18

See Alexander Dmitryevich Ulïbïshev, Nouvelle Biographie de Mozart (Moscow, 1843); Wilhelm Von Lenz, Beethoven et ses Trois Styles, new edn, ed. M.D. Calvocoressi (Paris, 1909; reprinted New York, 1980). For an immensely helpful account of the relationship between style and period-of-life in early nineteenth-century musicology, see Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ian Bent, vol. I: Fugue, Form and Style (Cambridge, 1994), esp. pp. 255–329. Henry James, ‘The Middle Years’ (1893), in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, ed. Frank Kermode (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 239–54 (252).

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Gordon McMullan less-than-triumphant experience as a dramatist – as ‘compromise’ and ‘sacrifice’.19 James treats such lateness as a given, but Shakespeare studies had taken its time in achieving a large enough view of the career to coalesce a distinct notion of lateness. There could, for one thing, be no late period before there was a chronology and, since Malone, at the end of the eighteenth century, was the first to attempt to fix an order of composition for the plays, it is with him that the history of Shakespearean lateness begins.20 That said, there is no evidence that Malone had any sense whatsoever of a Shakespearean ‘late style’: he uses ‘late’ very loosely to signify roughly the second half of the career and for a very long time he insisted that Twelfth Night was in fact the last play – a dating which demonstrates that Malone pre-dates the equation of Shakespeare with Prospero and thus the general belief in the quintessential lateness of The Tempest. His choice of Twelfth Night as the last play is doubly instructive because it underlines his basic anti-theatricalism: he was convinced that its ‘completeness’ as a comedy means that it must have been written on the peaceful riverbanks of Stratford-upon-Avon, not in the grubby professional atmosphere of London’s Bankside. ‘When Shakespeare quitted London and his profession, for the tranquillity of a rural retirement’, wrote Malone, it is improbable that such an excursive genius should have been immediately reconciled to a state of mental inactivity. It is more natural to conceive, that he should have occasionally bent his thoughts towards the theatre [. . .]. To the necessity, therefore, of literary amusement to every cultivated mind, or to the dictates of friendship, or to both these incentives, we are perhaps indebted for the comedy of Twelfth Night; which bears evident marks of having been composed at leisure, as most of the characters that it contains, are finished to a higher degree of dramatick perfection, than is discoverable in some of our author’s earlier comick performances.21

Even as Malone focuses his attention erroneously on Twelfth Night as the last play, though, there may, in the image of the poet ‘bending his thoughts’ from a distant location (though there is no suggestion of a desire to return from exile) and in the echo of the mage’s reassurance to Alonso at the end of Act 5 that he will explain all ‘at picked leisure’, be a hint of the identification – later, of course, to become standard – of Shakespeare with Prospero. This was already, in any case, beginning to be implied by others. For John Gilbert Cooper, for instance, writing in 1755, Shakespeare is a magician of obvious power: 19 20 21

Michael Millgate, Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy (Oxford, 1992). On Malone’s chronology and its impact, see Margreta De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford, 1991), pp. 132–76. Edmond Malone, ‘An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare were Written’, in The Plays of William Shakspeare, ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 10 vols (London, 1778), I, p. 344.

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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’ For my Part, I am of opinion, that there is now living a Poet of the most genuine Genius this Kingdom ever produced, SHAKESPEAR alone excepted. By poetical Genius, I don’t mean the meer talent of making Verses, but that glorious Enthusiasm of Soul, that fine Frenzy, as SHAKESPEAR calls it, rolling from Heaven to Earth, from Earth to Heaven, which, like an able Magician, can bring every Object of the Creation in any Shape whatever before the Reader’s Eyes.22

If it seems a little odd that a direct association of Prospero and Shakespeare was not in fact made (in print, at least) until as late as 1831 – in Thomas Campbell’s edition of the plays – then it is clear that critics and poets had already begun to imply this identification a lot earlier, long before a distinct understanding of the late plays had been established. It was in fact Coleridge who first described something along the lines of a late period for Shakespeare, presenting the playwright’s life in an 1819 lecture as a five-act drama and describing the last act as a period beyond the height of creativity he had achieved in the major tragedies, when ‘the energies of intellect’ had become ‘predominant over passion’.23 Coleridge, though, had either not read or chose to ignore Malone’s chronology, and he includes in his fifth period several plays – including Measure for Measure, Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida – which we would not now recognise as late Shakespeare. So that it was not, in the end, until as late as 1875 that a critic fully delineated a Shakespearean late phase. That critic was, as is well known, Edward Dowden, Professor of English in Dublin, who – drawing on F.J. Furnivall’s vehemently expressed wish in his prospectus for the New Shakspere Society for a book which deals in [a] worthy manner with Shakspere as a whole, which tracks the rise and growth of his genius from the boyish romanticism or the sharp youngmanishness of his early plays, to the magnificence, the splendour, the divine intuition, which mark his ablest works –

set out to establish an overview of Shakespeare’s career.24 He divided the life, drawing again on Furnivall and on the German scholar G.G. Gervinus, friend and correspondent of Goethe, into four periods – personal phases that correspond to generic categories. The first phase he calls ‘In the workshop’, the work of an ‘industrious apprentice’ displaying ‘a quick enjoyment of existence’; the second ‘In the world’, featuring work which is ‘strong and robust’ and which begins ‘to deal in an original and powerful way with the matter of history’; and the third ‘Out of the depths’, marking the grimmest period of the

22 23

24

John Gilbert Cooper, Letters Concerning Taste (London, 1755), p. 101. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 On Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes, 2 vols (comprising vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn, associate ed. Bart Winer) (London and Princeton, 1987), I, pp. 373–5. F.J. Furnivall, ‘Introduction’ to G.G. Gervinus, Shakespeare Commentaries, trans. F.E. Bunnett (London, 1875), pp. xix–l.

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Gordon McMullan playwright’s life, in which the grief caused by the deaths of his father and his son prompted him ‘to inquire into the darkest and saddest parts of human life; to study the great mystery of evil’.25 The ‘Fourth Period’, which he sees as wholly distinct from the preceding phases, he calls ‘On the heights’, reading it as a time in which the artist emerges with a ‘clear and solemn vision’ to produce plays in which ‘there is a resolution of the dissonance, a reconciliation’ expressed as a ‘pathetic yet august serenity’.26 ‘The impression left upon the reader by Shakspere’s last plays’, he claims confidently, ‘is that, whatever his trials and sorrows and errors may have been, he had come forth from them wise, large-hearted, calm-souled.’27 As a result, the dramatist created theatre quite different from anything that had gone before, plays characterised by a certain abandonment of the common joy of the world, a certain remoteness from the usual pleasures and sadnesses of life, and at the same time, all the more, [a] tender bending over those who are like children still absorbed in their individual joys and sorrows.28

The mood of the plays as a group is central to his analysis of each: The spirit of these last plays is that of serenity which results from fortitude, and the recognition of human frailty; all of them express a deep sense of the need of repentance and the duty of forgiveness. And they all show a delight in youth and the loveliness of youthful joy, such as one feels who looks on these things without possessing or any longer desiring to possess them.29

This godlike serenity had not come easily to Shakespeare but, emerging from the profound crisis which yielded King Lear and Timon of Athens, he found a new mood which ‘demanded not a tragic issue’ but rather ‘an issue into joy and peace’.30 The ‘dissonance’ that had characterised the tragedies would instead ‘be resolved into a harmony, clear and rapturous, or solemn and profound . . . a reconciliation’ (p. 406). In part, this was the result of Shakespeare’s detaching himself from the theatre: for Dowden, The Winter’s Tale, for instance, has a ‘breezy air’ which ‘is surely that which blew over Warwickshire fields upon Shakspere now returned to Stratford; its country lads and lasses . . . are those with which the poet had in a happy spirit renewed his acquaintance’.31 But, above all, the final reconciliation was the logical end point of the romantic understanding of the growth of genius, inflected with a 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Edward Dowden, Shakspere, Literature Primers (London, 1877), pp. 58–9. Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London, 1875), pp. 403, 406, 380. Dowden, ‘Primer’, p. 60. Dowden, Mind, p. 415. Dowden, ‘Primer’, p. 60. Dowden, Mind, p. 406. Dowden, ‘Primer’, p. 151.

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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’ Christian (or at least a post-Christian) urge for redemption. This was, then, both a period unique to Shakespeare, something that emerged from his particular experience of life – in other words, a very personal development – and at the same time a manifestation of a process that could have been expected from the very beginning, because it is in the nature of genius to develop in stages and because it would be unthinkable for the National Poet not to find salvation at the end. As Sir Walter Raleigh anxiously phrased it fifty years later, demonstrating a basic dependence upon Dowden’s narrative, [m]any a life has been wrecked on a tenth part of the accumulated suffering which finds a voice in the Tragedies. The Romances are our warrant that Shakespeare regained a perfect calm of mind. If Timon of Athens had been his last play, who could feel any assurance that he dies at peace with the world?32

The late plays serve as reassurance to the anxious critic that Shakespeare left this world in the knowledge of his own salvation. It was only with Lytton Strachey’s 1906 essay ‘Shakespeare’s Final Period’, in which he deliberately turns the lateness thesis on its head, arguing that ‘it is difficult to resist the conclusion that [Shakespeare] was getting bored . . . with people, bored with real life, bored with drama, bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams’, and with C.J. Sisson’s British Academy lecture of 1934 – in which he mocked the idea that ‘dramatists write tragedies when their mood is tragic and comedies when they are feeling pleased with life’ – that Dowden’s way of reading the last plays received critiques commensurate with its impact.33 Yet Sisson and other Shakespeare critics, performing historical critique, never achieved the ubiquity of Dowden’s (or, for that matter, Strachey’s) subjectivist views, and the idea of the Shakespearean late phase never really went away, persisting into the twentieth century and merging with the developing sense of lateness in art history and musicology, sustained in particular by Jungianism in its search for artistic archetypes. Amongst Shakespeareans, the persistence of transcendent lateness in the second half of the twentieth century is typified by Kenneth Muir and David Grene, who both wrote books (the latter apparently unaware of the former, despite writing six years later) thematically connecting the late works of Shakespeare with those of Sophocles, Racine and Ibsen.34 In each case, the connections drawn suggest both that late writing is a hallmark of individual genius and that it is a 32

33

34

Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, English Men of Letters series (London, 1926), p. 212. I am grateful to Kevin de Ornellas for directing me to Raleigh’s comments on Shakespearean lateness. [Giles] Lytton Strachey, ‘Shakespeare’s Final Period’, in Book and Characters, French and English (London, 1922), pp. 47–64 (60); C.J. Sisson, The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare, Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy (London, 1934). Kenneth Muir, Last Periods of Shakespeare, Racine, and Ibsen (Liverpool, 1961); David Grene, Reality and the Heroic Pattern: Last Plays of Ibsen, Shakespeare, and Sophocles (Chicago, 1967).

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Gordon McMullan phenomenon beyond time and context, manifesting itself similarly in ancient Greece, Jacobean England or nineteenth-century Norway. It should seem obvious to contemporary Shakespeareans, aware from a range of studies over the last thirty years of the conditions of production that made the Shakespearean late plays what they are – the habitually collaborative nature of playwriting, the contingency of style in the early modern understanding of rhetoric, the centrality of company repertory and competition to theatrical output – that this transhistoricity is wishful thinking, yet critics remain nonetheless largely complicit in sustaining the idea of Shakespearean lateness. After all, we all know that subjectivism is questionable just as we know that The Tempest wasn’t Shakespeare’s last play – that, even if we ignore Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen (which of course we cannot), we have no firm external evidence to guarantee that it came after The Winter’s Tale or Cymbeline – but this doesn’t stop us all, in our heart of hearts, from continuing (with Campbell) to see something of Shakespeare in Prospero as he drowns his book.35 And that equation continues to underpin the received idea of late Shakespearean serenity in even the most current work on late style – most recently, that of Edward Said, who sets up late Shakespeare as a bland, unified, resigned norm against which to promote his preferred manifestation of artistic lateness as fragmented, resistant, irascible.36 ‘Late play’, then, is far from being a ‘neutral’ alternative to ‘romance’ or ‘tragicomedy’. It bears at least as much baggage, if not more, as those terms and it depends upon a series of presumptions that run counter to the understanding that theatre historians have achieved of the conditions of production for the plays written by Shakespeare and his collaborators in the period 1607 to 1613. In fact, it is possible to argue that Shakespeare wrote no ‘late plays’ at all in the sense that the astonishing run of plays he wrote or co-wrote in the last seven years of his life, plays which share a range of characteristics in more or less complex and revealing ways, do not correlate with ‘lateness’ as criticism since Dowden has conceived it. These plays, in their negotiation with the forms of tragicomedy that were emerging at the time, offer a degree of contingency, of responsiveness to circumstance and theatrical fashion, of material engagement, that simply does not fit with the numinous lateness imagined by Dowden and his successors. More to the point – and this is not always recognised – Shakespearean lateness is irreparably tied to (subsumes, even) both romance and tragicomedy. Dowden, after all, having determined the existence of a distinct group of plays at the end of the career, called them not ‘the late plays’ but ‘the Romances’: Shakespearean romance and late Shakespeare are, 35 36

Anthony B. Dawson, ‘Tempest in a Teapot: Critics, Evaluation, Ideology’, in ‘Bad’ Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, ed. Maurice Charney (Rutherford, 1988), pp. 61–73. Edward Said, ‘Untimely Meditations’, review of Maynard Solomon, Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination, in The Nation 277 (September 2003), 38–42 (38); see also Said, On Late Style (London, 2006), pp. 6–7.

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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’ for him, one and the same. At the same time, Dowden’s account of Shakespeare’s life is a tragicomic biography, beginning with the youthful energy and enthusiasm embodied in the early comedies and channelled for a while into the patriotism of the histories before the tragedies signal a dark and threatening midlife crisis which plunges the playwright down to the condition of a Timon before he emerges at last, redeemed, onto the serene sunlit uplands of the late plays. This is an inescapably tragicomic narrative, reading the story of Shakespeare’s life as if it were itself a late play. As Valerie Forman has argued, tragicomedy is a redemptive genre, ‘explicitly modeled on Christian redemption . . . in which the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve result in the coming and sacrifice of Christ’.37 What is lost is found again. The child hath found its father. The early is reclaimed and redeemed in the wake of tragedy. This is both the pattern of Shakespearean tragicomedy and the structure of the life of Shakespeare à la Dowden. In other words, the supposedly ‘neutral term’ is implicated in the two ‘loaded’ terms right from the start.

III Still, as with both ‘romance’ and ‘tragicomedy’, the term ‘late play’ has certain heuristic resonances and I want, in conclusion, to tease out some further possibilities in the latter for thinking about the plays we know as ‘Shakespeare’s late plays’. Some of these further connotations are unhelpful. There is, for instance, a sense in which the plays are read implicitly as coming at the end not only of a career but at the same time of an epoch, as the end of the era marked by Shakespeare’s death but going beyond the confines of the canon of his works – in other words, of the ‘decadence of the drama’, the old-historicist sense of post-Shakespearean theatre as decline mapped partly through the excesses of Jacobean revenge tragedy but also through tragicomedy viewed as a bastard, disunified, emotionally unstable genre and as metonymic of the decline to Civil War. This in a sense draws Shakespeare’s late plays – and Jacobean drama in general – into the conjunction of late style and connoisseurship of which you can see glimpses in late Henry James – the sense of epochally late art exquisitely poised on the brink of destruction that draws its value from its position at the last moment of a civilisation before it is destroyed by imminent barbarism but which is, at the same time, undermined by its own implication in that barbarism. In this sense, Shakespeare’s late plays either stand apart from Jacobean decadence as the true conclusion to the age of Elizabeth (five or ten years after her death) or they participate in that decadence and thus mark a terminal decline in the art of which they are a final flowering – an argument 37

Valerie Forman, ‘The Economics of Redemption in Early Modern English Tragicomedy’, unpublished paper given at the ‘Tragicomedy: Renaissance to Restoration’ conference, Cambridge, 2005.

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Gordon McMullan confirmed for its champions by the ‘lapse’ into collaboration after the writing of The Tempest. In either case, the late plays mark more than the end of the life of a playwright. Neither of these options has much contextual validity. There is, though, one possible further way to rehabilitate the ‘late’ in ‘late play’ and at the same time to rethink Shakespearean tragicomedy as neither serene postscript nor decline into decadence but rather to reimagine its place in the overall scheme of early modern theatre. In order to do so, I wish to turn briefly and finally to Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson. The last plays of Jonson, while forming a distinct block at the end of his career, do not comfortably fit received ideas of the stylistic or generic features associated with lateness. As Martin Butler has argued, plays such as The New Inn and The Tale of a Tub are by no means the ‘dotages’ Dryden thought them.38 At the same time, to try to manipulate them to fit either Dowdenesque serene transcendence or Saidean late resistance to the oncoming of death is just as unhelpful: they are adequately explained neither by mapping them overtly onto the model of late Shakespeare, as Anne Barton implies in reading passages from A Tale of a Tub as, ‘like certain sections of Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, [. . .] an immensely sophisticated attempt to re-create the atmosphere of early Elizabethan drama’, nor by setting them up, with Larry Champion, as the opposite phenomenon, the last works of a stubborn personality who, ‘in character until the end, did not, like Shakespeare via Prospero, break his staff and drown his book’.39 For Julie Sanders and others in recent years, these readings ‘underestimate the [. . .] topicality’ of the Jonsonian late plays, ‘as well as the continuing exercises in dramatic experimentation’ they represent.40 Late Jonson, rather than embodying a tragicomic transcendence of matters political, appears instead to be the product of contexts social and political – of its composition, for instance, immediately prior to the recall of the last of Charles’s early Parliaments, in March 1629, [. . .] a moment in which rapprochement or accommodation, rather than confrontation, might at last have been achieved between the court and the court’s critics.41

38 39 40

41

Martin Butler, ‘Late Jonson’, in McMullan and Hope, pp. 168–88. Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984), p. 322; Larry S. Champion, Ben Jonson’s ‘Dotages’: A Reconsideration of the Late Plays (Lexington, 1967), p. 140. Julie Sanders, ‘Print, Popular Culture, Consumption and Commodification in The Staple of News’, in Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon, ed. Julie Sanders, with Kate Chedgzoy and Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 183–207 (183). See also Butler, ‘Late Jonson’; Helen Ostovich, ‘The Appropriation of Pleasure in The Magnetic Lady’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 34 (1994), 425–42; Sanders, ‘ “The Day’s Sports Devised in the Inn”: Jonson’s The New Inn and Theatrical Politics’, Modern Language Review 91 (1996), 545–60; and Part Three of Sanders’s Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics (Basingstoke, 1998). Butler, p. 172.

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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’ Thus, for Sanders, the emphasis on ideal communities in The New Inn, The Magnetic Lady and The Sad Shepherd is not the product of classic late otherworldliness but rather of tangible political imagining. Jonson, impatient and ambitious, had in any case, by the time he wrote his ‘late plays’, long used up a significant ‘late’ gesture by publishing his collected plays in midlife. The 1616 folio Works, though deliberately chronological and ostensibly encyclopaedic, is not late per se, pre-empting the latter end of Jonson’s life by two decades. To read the plays on the basis of Jonson’s personality in this way is to be complicit in foregrounding both Jonson’s own construction of his poetic selfhood and that of subsequent critics in thrall to Jonsonian authorialism over the actual conditions of production for early modern theatre. Still, the curious irrelevance of the volume’s frontispiece, analysed intriguingly in recent years by Joseph Loewenstein and, in slightly more detail, by Robert Henke, perhaps offers a way to understand the conjunction of tragicomedy and lateness despite the inadequacy of both terms for the plays that follow.42 This frontispiece, as both Loewenstein and Henke have shown, represents the ascent of drama from ritual origins to urban sophistication and is both a map of generic synthesis and a celebration of theatrical hybridity. The image is that of a triumphal arch, in the central space of which is the title of the volume, The Workes of Beniamin Jonson; across the frieze runs a phrase from Horace – singula quaeque locum teneant sortita decenter – which translates as ‘Let each individual kind hold its rightful place’. In the left-hand niche stands Tragedy, and beneath her, on the base of the arch, is an image of a wagon, a plaustrum, which is drawn by a horse and has a sacrificial goat tethered to the back; inside it stands an actor striking a pose, representing the primitive origins of tragedy as the earliest form of drama. In the right-hand niche stands Comedy, glancing across at her sister (perhaps acknowledging her generic primacy), who surmounts an image of an ancient open-air amphitheatre, a visorium, in which a group of men and women dance around a sacrificial fire: this, in turn, offers a vision of comedy as originary, less primitive than tragedy because inhabiting a later, fixed, purpose-built space, but nonetheless associated with pagan religious activity and thus underlining the pre-Christian origins of the genre. Above the arch are three figures. To the left is a satyr with panpipes, to the right a shepherd with crook and cornet, figures representative of pastoral (and perhaps, in the case of the satyr, as Henke suggests, noting the preferred, though incorrect, early modern etymology, also of satire); above them, front and centre, is the figure of Tragicomedy, dressed in a combination of the clothing of Comedy and Tragedy and 42

Joseph Lowenstein, ‘Guarini and the Presence of Genre’, in Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics, ed. Nancy Klein Maguire (New York, 1987), pp. 33–55; Henke, pp. 13–16; see also Sara van den Berg, ‘Ben Jonson and the Ideology of Authorship’, in Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio, ed. Jennifer Brady and W.H. Herendeen (Newark, 1991), pp. 111–37, esp. pp. 114–17.

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Gordon McMullan holding a sceptre. Beneath her is an image, a little larger than those of the wagon and the early amphitheatre, of a Roman theatrum, three storeys high, with a fixed stage and tiring-house, a predictive amalgamation of early modern indoor and outdoor theatres, of Globe and Blackfriars. It is clear from this that Tragicomedy is both later than and superior to the two foundational sisters of which she is an advanced synthesis, the contemporary summation of generic possibilities. Tragicomedy, in this representation, is in a certain way a late genre – late in the history of theatre, that is. It is not untheatrical or reactionary, but is rather a logical corollary of and development from, urbane in the broadest sense, the primitive forms of tragedy and comedy. It is a genre that engages with the early – the primitive theatrical spaces, plaustrum and visorium, associated with the generic simplicities of tragedy and comedy – but also embraces the contemporary and prospective, going on (though of course Jonson and the engraver, William Hole, were not to know this) to dominate the stage before and after the closing of the theatres. The visual hierarchy of the frontispiece celebrates tragicomedy for its synthetic, hybrid qualities, its simultaneous dependence upon and transcendence of tragedy and comedy and its association with the early modern theatrum, the fixed, sophisticated, urban locus of contemporary drama, ensuring that we recognise in tragicomedy, emerging belatedly from the classical forebears it (literally, in the frontispiece image) supersedes, the future of theatre. Prompted by this image – puzzling as it undoubtedly is as a representation of the dramatic art of Jonson – we might, then, reconceive early modern tragicomedy itself as a kind of ‘late work’, not late in the subjectivist sense à la Dowden but late in the way it is understood by Adorno, that is, as prolepsis, as work that reaches beyond what is currently possible, opening up possibilities not yet imaginable, appearing to contemporaries, and even to those trying to comprehend it at later times, difficult to define, as work whose divergent logic remains obscure. Thus, finally, despite all I have said to condemn it, we might in fact recuperate the term ‘late play’ and celebrate through it the simultaneous looking back and looking forward that provides the basic tension of late Shakespeare, not as a closing down, a gesture of finality, but as a beginning, an opening out, a glimpse of a theatrical future Shakespeare himself would not live to see.

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9 Shakespeare by the Numbers: On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays1 MICHAEL WITMORE and JONATHAN HOPE

If I could write the beauty of your eyes And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say ‘This poet lies: Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces’ . . .

Sonnet 17

Return, forgetful Muse, and straight redeem In gentle numbers time so idly spent . . .

Sonnet 50

S

INCE THE late nineteenth century, critics have tried to group some or all of the plays Shakespeare wrote late in his career – Coriolanus, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Pericles (co-authored with George Wilkins), Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen (both co-authored with John Fletcher) – into a single critical category, usually on the basis of thematic, dramaturgical, or linguistic similarities among members of the group. While there is no consensus on which category is most appropriate for such a grouping (designations such as ‘late plays’, ‘romances’, and ‘tragicomedies’ have been proposed), there is nevertheless a persistent feeling among Shakespeare’s readers that something distinguishes several of these plays from the others and that this ‘something’ ought to be the object of critical analysis.2 At

1 2

The authors would like to thank David Kaufer, Pantelis Vlachos, and particularly Suguru Ishizaki for their technical support and advice in the preparation of this paper. The first generic identification of some of these plays as ‘romances’ was made by Edward Dowden in 1877, drawing on the results of metrical analysis by Furnivall and his colleagues in the New Shakspere Society, established in 1874. Furnivall’s work was exclusively formal, attempting to establish a chronology of Shakespeare’s plays on the basis of metrical patterns. These analyses grouped four of the plays we now know as ‘Late Plays’ – Pericles, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline – for the first time in critical history, placing them together at the end of Shakespeare’s career on the basis of his increasing use of hypermetrical lines.

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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope times the perception of such a similarity has been so strong that it has led to categorical declarations of the sort made by Gerard Eades Bentley in the mid twentieth century, who asserted that ‘no competent critic who has read carefully through the Shakespeare canon has failed to notice that there is something different [about these plays]’.3 Philip Edwards (1958) went even further on this score, arguing that ‘the [late plays] seem more closely related than any other group of Shakespeare’s plays’.4 Given that Shakespeare’s first editors, Heminges and Condell, found no need for a fourth generic category when dividing the plays in Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) into histories, tragedies and comedies, Edwards’ claims about the definitive unity of some additional generic grouping seem particularly extravagant. While Shakespeare’s first editors were not entirely consistent in their use of early modern genre distinctions to group the thirty-six plays in their edition (the First Folio omits Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen), they were certainly no worse judges (‘no competent critic . . .’) than those who came after them. What, then, have critics been seeing in these plays for over a century that is so vivid, so pervasive, that it confounds the generic distinctions of some of Shakespeare’s most intimate seventeenth-century contemporaries? Genre distinctions are notoriously difficult to express in formulae or abstract terms, even if particular genre labels can be recognised and applied with little experience; genre critics since Aristotle have thus tended to use examples or tokens of a particular genus in order to express one or another feature of a type. Ever the biologist, Aristotle tended to think of genre in genus and species terms, and this particular habit of thought persists through most attempts to specify genre. A tragedy shows a character of high standing being laid low: the rule can be illustrated by any number of examples, of which Aristotle supplies two, Oedipus and Thyestes (Poetics 1453a.10–11).5 Renaissance

3 4 5

Dowden extended this chronological grouping with content-based criteria, stressing the presence of the sea, and lost children as contributors to the romantic element. In 1901, Thorndike added ‘tragicomedy’ to the mix, claiming the influence of Beaumont and Fletcher, and this recasting of the late plays was strengthened by other critics, such as Bentley, who associated the plays with masque, and the purchase of the Blackfriars theatre (see Bentley’s article in the first issue of Shakespeare Survey). What started as an association of the plays by chronology, arrived at by a purely formal metrical test, quickly became one of genre and theme, with hitherto unperceived overlaps in subject matter and concern being readily identified. For a full account of the critical history of this genre and relevant bibliography, see Barbara A. Mowat, ‘ “What’s in a name?” Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, 4 vols (Oxford, 2003), IV, 129–49. See too Russ McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge, 2006). Gerard Eades Bentley, ‘Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre’, Shakespeare Survey 1 (1948), 47–48. Philip Edwards, ‘Shakespeare’s Romances’, Shakespeare Survey 11 (1958), 1. Aristotle, The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, trans. Ingram Bywater (New York, 1984), pp. 238–39.

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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays literary criticism followed the model of genre as genus or formal type, with theorists such as Guarini outlining typical features of a specimen within a genre such as ‘tragicomedy’ and then going on to provide concrete examples.6 In some cases a particular ‘token’ might be taken to exemplify the genre in all of its attributes, as was perhaps the case with John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, which was designed to introduce English audiences to Guarini’s tragicomic ideal in all of its aspects. For Fletcher, this play and others of its kind possessed certain attributes and lacked others: ‘A tragi-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie.’ 7 Some of these features have been attributed to Shakespeare’s later plays, leading critics to identify them as ‘tragicomedies’ as well. We will return to this argument later, but it is enough at this point to notice that Fletcher’s definition of genre not only specifies what must be in a play to qualify it for membership in a genre, but also what it must lack. The notion that genre is a set of co-ordinated presences and absences of features is one we will take up in the conclusion of our paper, below. Of course, criticism after the Renaissance has developed further critical categories with which to approach the question of genre in Shakespeare’s plays, relying variously on biographical, formal, historical and dramaturgical criteria for membership in a generic group. The Victorian critic Edward Dowden, for example, felt that The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and Pericles were alike in their tendency to retreat to a serene, enchanted world, one that Shakespeare craved after having plumbed the depths of the tragedies earlier in his career.8 More recent critics have emphasised the seemingly mythical or folkloric atmosphere of these plays, suggesting that the improbabilities of plot found in the later works evidence a desire to enact a messianic quest ending in deliverance or to test the nature of reality by framing it in a deliberately artificial way.9 Arguments about tone and atmosphere have been accompanied by 6 7

8 9

Giambattista Guarini, Compendio della poesia tragicomica (Venice, 1601). John Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepheardesse (London, 1610). It is worth pointing out, however, that Fletcher’s introduction is an attempt to justify as literature a play that had failed as drama – and that the plays he went on to write with Beaumont and others, generally taken as exemplars of English tragicomedy, are very different in form and tone from Guarini’s model, and Fletcher’s own solo attempt at it (see Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, ‘Introduction’ in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, ed. Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (London, 1992), pp. 3–7). Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art, 3rd ed. (1899) (New York, 1967), p. 415. The interpretation of romance as messianic struggle is advanced in Northrop Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1997). The association of the late plays with folklore appears in Stanley Wells, ‘Shakespeare and Romance’, in Later Shakespeare, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 8 (New York, 1967), 49–80 (53). The association of romance with improbable tall tales told by women and gossips is explored in Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Engendering the Narrative Act: Old Wives’ Tales in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest’, Criticism 40, no. 4 (1998), 28–43,

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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope inquiries into sources and dramaturgical techniques. Barbara Mowat, for example, has argued that Shakespeare’s later plays get their distinctiveness from their source (the Greek novel), suggesting moreover that the ‘family resemblance’ among these plays defies generic labels – although the plays have a tendency to mix disjunctive presentational and representational modes (essentially, modes of telling and showing).10 In having recourse to an explicitly Wittgensteinian notion of ‘family resemblance’, Mowat is bearing out Fletcher’s insight that generic identity is not just a bundle of sine qua non features that are ‘present’ in every token member of a type, but that membership and type only become intelligible within the fullness of a highly variable group. Whatever it is that critics are reaching for when they see a generic or ‘familial’ resemblance among different late Shakespeare plays, perhaps that ‘something’ is not a roll-call of features (to use the analogy, dimples, dark complexion, curly hair), but a variously distributed set of features common only to the entire group, a set that can further be contrasted in their absence with those that appear in members of another group. The late plays are ‘romances’ because they bring families together; they are ‘tragicomedies’ because they bring happiness only after trial. These are real features that can be pulled out of many of the plays listed above, but they do not appear in exactly the same way in each play. Indeed, the basic difficulty Mowat identifies in past attempts to name a fourth genre of Shakespeare’s plays may be a difficulty common to all attempts to create stable genre definitions; and yet such distinctions are nevertheless intelligible in practice and can be debated in rich detail, as the critical history rehearsed above suggests. In what follows we would like to take a different approach to the problem of naming a fourth genre in the Shakespeare canon, one that attempts to re-describe the difference critics have sensed between ‘romances’ or ‘tragicomedies’ and the more traditional First Folio genres, not by qualitative analysis of tone, atmosphere or plot, but by quantitative analysis of linguistic features. Like Fletcher, we believe that this analysis shows genre to be a fully relative construct in the sense that it involves the strategic collocation of features common to other genres, features that are emphasised or missing in a coordinated way. But we also believe that such analysis calls attention to a heretofore invisible set of dramaturgical strategies at work in the late plays, strategies that mobilise language so consistently and on such a pervasive verbal level that their effects have gone unnoticed by more traditional literary genre criticism.

10

while the notion that these plays seek to question or establish a ‘reality principle’ can be found in Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton, 1972), p. 50. See Barbara Mowat, The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances (Athens, 1976), pp. 36, 69 and ‘ “What’s in a Name?”: Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy’, p. 134. Mowat credits the adaptation of Wittgensteinian ‘theory of resemblance’ to genre theory to Alastair Fowler’s Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, 1982).

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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays * In order to conduct such analysis, we have made use of a computer text analysis tool called Docuscope. Docuscope is a text analysis and comparison program developed by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. The program was designed for use in writing/rhetoric classes (as understood in the North American model), and aims to allow tutors to make fast, statistically reliable comparisons between texts written by students. To accomplish this function, the program consists of a first stage of textual analysis tools – essentially, smart dictionaries – that comb texts for strings of words which are then assigned to a predetermined set of rhetorical categories. (As we will see below, these dictionaries are ultimately an expression of the designers’ views on how language works; they are thus, in effect, a working rhetoric.) The frequency results from this combing are then displayed in various graphical formats by the program’s sophisticated and user-friendly visual interface. These results can also be exported into statistical analysis packages for more complex statistical analysis.11 The rhetorical categories used by Docuscope have been explored in practical and theoretical terms by the designers in a book entitled The Power of Words: Unveiling the Speaker and Writer’s Hidden Craft.12 Here the primary architect of the dictionaries, David Kaufer, and his colleagues support the choices made in creating Docuscope by advancing an essentially phenomenological view of how different types of language shape or recreate an experientially vivid world for an engaged reader or listener. Here we can provide a brief overview of the categories that the program assumes are working to accomplish this goal; further below we will describe how these categories relate to ‘tragicomedy’ or ‘romance’ and to our own sense of what ‘genre’ must be in the theatre. As it scans an electronically formatted text, Docuscope organises word strings into three high-level categories (termed ‘clusters’). These clusters correspond to a theoretical model of the effects texts seek to have on their readers developed from a Hallidayan theoretical base (pp. 51–5).13 The model groups rhetorical effects as follows: 1

11 12 13

Internal Perspectives: those sequences of words – ‘strings’ in the parlance of Docuscope’s creators – that are used to communicate the interior mind of the writer, or a character, to the reader (for example, grammatical first person features, expressive and subjective vocabulary, complex tense/aspect constructions that imply a relation between two different times entertained in a narratorial consciousness).

Those interested in examining the precise statistical procedures and data used in this paper are invited to contact the authors. David Kaufer, Suguru Ishizaki, Brian Butler, Jeff Collins, The Power of Words: Unveiling the Speaker and Writer’s Hidden Craft (London, 2004). This approach is set out in M.A.K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edn (London, 1994).

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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope 2

Relational Perspectives: strings used to connect readers to the representations within a text. For example, aspects of the language that recognise or engage shared processes of reasoning between reader and author or their implied social ties; also strings that orient readers to other locations in the text.

3

External Perspectives: strings that refer out of the text, but to the physical world (rather than the metatextual or social values of ‘Relational Perspectives’). These strings include types of description of physical objects, strings describing the spatial location of objects, and representations of movement through space and time.

A fundamental assumption of the creators of Docuscope is that texts will vary in the frequency with which they employ string types from each of these clusters depending on the writer’s purpose. Variation visible at the highest level is rather crude, but a broad expectation would be that fiction and autobiography ought to be high in cluster 1, while instructional writing (technical manuals for example), ought to be high in clusters 2 and 3. This is hardly an impressive or surprising finding. The real value of Docuscope comes, rather, in the finegrained analysis that becomes possible when comparisons are made at a far more detailed level of string category. Within Docuscope, the three high-level clusters are further divided into six ‘families’, and then further into ‘dimensions’ that contain multiple ‘language action types’ (LATs) which allow a high degree of interpretive distinction to be made in the analysis of texts. An example, adapted from the authors’ exposition of their categories (59–88), is given below: Cluster 1: Internal Perspectives Family 1: Interior Thinking (strings involved in exposing the audience to the activity of another mind) Dimension 1: First person LAT: Grammatical first person e.g. first person pronouns – ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’, ‘mine’ LAT: Self-disclosure: e.g. first person plus simple past – ‘I went’ LAT: Autobiographical reference: e.g. first person plus habitual past verb phrase – ‘I used to go’ Dimension 2: Inner thinking LAT: Private thinking e.g. private cognition or thinking verbs – ‘contemplate’, ‘decide’, ‘discover’ LAT: Disclosures e.g. verbs of speaking, some adverbs – ‘confessed’, ‘acknowledged’, ‘personally’, ‘frankly’, ‘tellingly’ LAT: Confidence e.g. ‘that’ – complement, situational ‘it’, existential ‘there’: ‘I know that the box is upstairs’; ‘It’s a boy!’; ‘There’s an apartment down the street that you can afford’ LAT: Uncertainty e.g. adverbials – ‘allegedly’, ‘to the best of my knowledge’, ‘nearly’, ‘almost’

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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays Dimension 3: Positive affect LAT: Think positive – e.g. ‘loving’, ‘succulent’; attitudinally marked prepositions: ‘up’ Dimension 4: Negative affect LAT: Think negative – e.g. ‘too many’, ‘too much’; attitudinally marked prepositions: ‘down’

Note how the shift from ‘family’ to LAT allows the analyst to make some relatively fine distinctions in the stylistic effects produced by texts, particularly when each of these distinctions can be counted and compared with one another across a large corpus of texts. Within the Dimension ‘First person’, for example, Docuscope distinguishes bare first person pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’, which produce a simple point of view within a text, from ‘pronoun + tensed verb’ strings (‘I went . . .’, ‘I’ll go . . .’), which produce a particularised consciousness, self-realised in terms of time. Look at the difference between these examples: I often use facts about Einstein’s laws in my work I often used facts about Einstein’s laws in my work

In the first example, ‘I’ appears with a simple present tense and establishes that the text is written by a specific individual, but not much else. The second example, however, complicates the point of view presented considerably: the self constructed in the sentence is one who looks back on a past state of selfhood, analyses itself, and discloses something about that analysis. As mentioned above, Docuscope assigns strings to the various dimensions identified by the development team using a set of dictionaries that seek out word clusters (so for example, ‘I’ on its own will be assigned to the LAT Grammatical first person, but ‘I’ followed by a past tense verb will instead be assigned to the LAT Self-disclosure). Words can only be counted as part of one string, and the program always counts the longest possible string. In practice, Docuscope is capable of parsing or categorising an enormous number of strings within the English language. When used to ‘read’ the Frown Corpus, a multi-genre corpus of contemporary American English of approximately one million words, the version of Docuscope used for this paper classed 76% of its contents; when used to ‘read’ the plays of the First Folio, Docuscope classified approximately 75% of all the words or phrases, which is approximately the average ‘find rate’ of the tool for most large collections of texts it is used to study.14 14

Many of the unclassifiable words were place or person names, non-standard English words, hyphenated words, or extremely common words such as ‘and’ or ‘that’. The set of dictionaries employed by Docuscope is under continuous revision, which is why we asked that a state of those dictionaries (14 May 2006) be ‘frozen’ so that our future analyses of texts (for example, the Middleton corpus) could be made under identical conditions and the results compared.

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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope * Our initial research with Docuscope involved the analysis of the First Folio of 1623, a promising starting point for our work, we felt, because the Folio presented us with a concrete editorial decision about generic divisions (the editors sorted the plays by comedy, history, and tragedy). Furnished with that initial qualitative decision, we could then attempt to re-describe it in statistical terms and see if we learned anything new. Our initial findings were reported in 2004, and we have since embarked on several research projects examining Shakespeare’s genres and the historical development of his style. In the course of this research, we have learned that Docuscope, a device created to teach writing four hundred years after Shakespeare wrote his plays – and by designers with no academic interest in Shakespeare or early modern drama – can nevertheless ‘see’ the First Folio genres, sometimes quite distinctly.15 It should be said here that if Docuscope were redesigned to count different things (different strings of words, based on a different interpretation of how texts work), we would still expect it to find statistically significant patterns of string usage that differentiate the various genres; this is because, assuming enough different types of items are being counted, such items ought still to show signs of coordination because (1) theatrical language is saturated, potentially at every level, with dramaturgical effect and (2) the particular type of story that critics recognise as ‘history’, ‘comedy’, ‘romance’, or ‘tragicomedy’ makes certain material demands on the speakers of a play and thus the language they must use to advance the story. Our conclusions about Shakespeare so far are based on a micro-analysis of LAT frequencies rather than assumptions about how such LATs may group into Families or Clusters. This is a crucial point, since it allows us to remain agnostic on the question of whether or not the architecture of categories used by Docuscope represents the ‘best’ or most ‘functional’ way to organise language. Ultimately, the statistical patterns we are interpreting are used as prompts or pointers to particular uses of words that remain invisible in the linear flow of reading, but may nevertheless have some more general rhetorical and dramaturgical function. The art here is not in crafting the ‘best’ categories, but in seeing how the coordinated presence and absence of various types of words (type being itself an interpretation) might function in a concrete, dramaturgical setting. We call this assumption of pervasively coordinated rhetorical patterning the ‘principle of dramaturgical saturation’. In adopting it, we are assuming that the material constraints of the theatre and the temporal entailments of certain narrative

15

The results of our earliest attempt to discriminate the Folio genres using Docuscope appear in Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, ‘The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading of Shakespeare’, Early Modern Literary Studies 9.3 / Special Issue 12 (January, 2004), 6.1–36. URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/09–3/hopewhit.htm.

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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays conventions create a situation in which even the smallest particles of language are regularly pressed into the service of telling a particular type of story.16 With these caveats in mind, we move to the questions that motivate this essay: What could a literary linguistic analysis using Docuscope provide in support of the claim that the late plays constitute a distinct group? We know from our previous work with Docuscope that the three Folio genres have distinct linguistic features: do the late plays, identified as such first of all by formal metrical tests, also share formal linguistic features that characterise them, aside from their shared content concerns with the sea, lost children, reunited parents, and so on? To what extent can a quantitative analysis of different classes of language yield clues about (1) the dramaturgical strategies that may have coloured the composition of these plays or (2) the interpretive criteria that have led critics to make such claims as those offered above? What, further, can such analysis reveal about the degree to which these plays are an amalgam of previous genres such as comedies and tragedies, as the term ‘tragicomedy’ suggests? To answer these questions, we are going to rely on two types of evidence. The first consists of findings based on a statistical procedure known as ‘factor analysis’, a procedure that is blind with respect to genre judgments and instead simply looks for correlations among frequently used types of words or phrases. To the non-statistician, this procedure might be understood through the following example: if you were to create thirty-six unique packs of playing cards at random from an infinite pile of cards, you would expect the resulting packs to differ from one another in certain ways. A factor analysis would compare the relative frequency with which different ‘types’ of card (twos, threes, queens, etc.) occur in every pack, working then to characterise any pattern that cuts across all of the packs. For example, it might turn out that packs containing lots of fours and fives have almost no sixes: this ‘factor’ (the metavariable that coordinates ‘having’ fours and fives with ‘lacking’ sixes) could then be used to ‘rate’ all of the packs in order, from those that are highest in this factor (they have lots of fours and fives but no sixes) to those that are 16

In one of our experiments, we asked Docuscope to count the number of words beginning with the letters ‘m’ ‘o’ ‘a’ and ‘i’ and then to use only these counts to produce a recipe for the various genres. Unsurprisingly, it did. A factor analysis indicated that comedies are distinguished by a relative lack of words beginning with ‘o’ combined with a relative abundance of words beginning with ‘m’ and ‘i’. The experiment showed us that with enough observations (counted items), a statistical portrait of a genre can be created out of almost anything; the trick is knowing what to make of what you count – being able to connect a quantity of something counted to an activity that is meaningful (e.g., a dramaturgical event such as dreaming, narrating, arguing, etc.). Given the principle of total dramaturgical saturation, we would hold that eventually even the lack of ‘o’ in comedy could be explained in terms of the dramaturgical features of the genre. It would take something like a virtuoso form of Vico’s ‘maker’s knowledge’ with respect to writing, performing and staging plays to get at what these ‘o’ words were not doing in comedies, however.

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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope lowest (they have almost no fours and fives but lots of sixes). If you think of each Shakespeare play in the Folio as a pack of cards in this example, and the individual cards (two of hearts, two of spades, two of clubs, two of diamonds) as being like the words (or strings of words) that Docuscope is organising into types and then aggregating as factors, you begin to understand the nature of the procedure. Sometimes a factor will arrange the plays in a way that make no sense to the observer – it is picking up on a pattern that has nothing to do with genre.17 But often a factor ends up ‘sorting’ the plays in such a way that almost all specimens of a particular Folio genre appear at one end of a particular spectrum, something we discovered was the case with Shakespeare’s histories; this is a particularly powerful statistical finding, precisely because the computer knows nothing about the target genre grouping that is being sought. The second type of evidence we will be introducing is that resulting from something called analysis of variance (ANOVA) among single variables, which looks at the relative frequency of particular types of words or phrases in groups that we have already sorted into generic types. Unlike factor analysis, which characterises those broad patterns that emerge from frequent and consistent use of certain types of words or strings of words, single variable analysis can hone in on those strings and words (LATs) that are (1) used less frequently but still occur in very different proportions across a predefined group of genres or (2) on LATs that appear in dense clusters rather than a consistent spread throughout the entire text. Taken together, the two techniques give us a detailed picture of how the words identified by Docuscope’s counting procedures are really working to separate out the genres.18 We began by dividing the Folio plays into four groups – the original comedies, histories and tragedies of the 1623 editors Heminges and Condell – and a fourth called ‘late plays’ that consists of Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Henry VIII.19 Because Docuscope looks for and correlates over

17

18

19

In our procedure, Docuscope generates factors without any knowledge of the Folio genre divisions and then, once these are obtained, automatically screens the results for those factors that separate out the genres we have identified; this latter procedure is mediated by a statistical algorithm, the Tukey Test for statistical significance, eliminating our role in the selection procedure. Since these algorithms are well known in statistics, our results could be independently reproduced. The packs are somewhat loaded in this second type of analysis since, in single variable ANOVA, Docuscope is only re-describing, as it were quantitatively, a set of generic distinctions that have already been assumed in the initial constitution of the four generic groups. The electronic text used in the analysis was that of the Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare. Speech prefixes, stage directions, and act/scene divisions were ‘stripped’ from the plays for the purpose of analysis, since some of these – particularly speech prefixes such as ‘King’ – were dead giveaways to Docuscope when it went to produce factors for genre. We plan to write about this decision to exclude non-spoken text and its implications for our theory of genre and dramaturgy in a future article.

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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays ninety LATs, we further subdivided the plays into smaller chunks – of 2500 and 7500 words – before dropping them into our four genre containers (C, T, H, L). This chunking procedure is normal statistical practice: ideally, the number of individuals in a population to be analysed (i.e. the number of plays, or chunks of plays) should exceed the number of categories being searched for. The thirty-six plays of our sample are thus too small a population to search for over ninety LATs with statistical rigour. By automatically chunking the plays into 1000-, 2500- and 7500-word sections, we make the procedure statistically respectable, and also ensure that items identified as statistically significant in their distribution are consistently used throughout the texts of the plays identified. This final point is important: ‘chunking’ means that we only identify as significant LATs which are consistently used across the whole text of a play (they appear in a high number of the chunks of a play). LATs that appear in only a few chunks of a play, even if they have a very high frequency there, are excluded. Using the results of Docuscope’s counting procedure, we employed multivariate statistical analysis to identify factors – again, metavariables that capture coordinated variations in smaller variables (high amounts of A appear in plays with low amounts of B and C) – that differentiated the genres from each other, particularly those that distinguished the late plays from all of the other genres contained in the original Folio genre divisions. We then examined the LATs that Docuscope relied upon in making such discriminations, returning to read the texts of the plays in order to see what these particular types of words or phrases were doing rhetorically, dramaturgically, thematically, and the like. In the process of rereading the plays with the significant LATs highlighted for easy recognition, we consulted the results of the single variable analysis (ANOVA) to see which individual LATs were reliably present or absent in the late plays in comparison with all the other genres. Finally, we returned to the factor analysis to see what aspects, if any, the late plays shared, heightened or excluded from the previous three genres – in effect, looking for the ‘family resemblance’ within and across the late plays in the larger context of the Folio genres. Our most significant finding was that multivariate analysis could indeed identify factors which separate the late plays as a distinct linguistic group from the other Folio genres. In our analysis, two factors emerged as statistically significant, producing a clear separation of the late plays from all of the other genres – that is, the ranges of variation for these factors showed no overlap between the late plays and those of the other genres. This is a striking finding: Docuscope, and multivariate analysis, have identified a familial linguistic resemblance between plays which were not generically associated until the late nineteenth century. Further, the single variable analysis (ANOVA) supported the initial findings by factor analysis (which is initially ‘blind’with respect to genre), suggesting that, on both the pervasive and local levels, certain types of language were being used in ways that created a statistical footprint for the late 143

Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope plays different from that of any of the earlier Folio genres. In the following discussion, we first describe the two comparative factors which distinguish the linguistic texture of the late plays from that of the rest of Shakespeare’s work. We follow this with a brief examination of those aspects of comedy, tragedy and history that are only partially present in the late plays, concluding with a discussion of how multivariate analysis of linguistic structures might compliment traditional understandings of genre in future studies of early modern texts.

CF7: Focalised Recollection The first comparative factor (CF7/2500 in our analysis) is closely involved with the communication of the past. Two LATs are highly significant in constituting this factor: Narrative Verb (Narrating) and Think Back (Retrospect). Narrative Verb strings consist of simple past tense verbs. Note the following example, which like others we will be discussing, contains the LATs under discussion underlined in the passage: I was by at the opening of the fardel, heard the old shepherd deliver the manner how he found it [. . .] only this methought I heard the shepherd say, he found the child (The Winter’s Tale 5.2.2–6/TLN3013–7)20

As it does in hundreds of instances across the late plays, Docuscope is tracking the past tense narration of events through simple past constructions like ‘heard’ and ‘found’. The linguistic effect of this type of past narration is to focus on the event itself, which is usually presented as a discrete, completed action. The narrator, though clearly present, is not made a vivid part of the events described or the context in which they take place: to a large extent, the past events are presented directly, without narratorial comment. The second LAT on CF7, Think Back, involves a more complex presentation of past events. Think Back is triggered by past forms of to be and some auxiliary constructions and, under single variable ANOVA analysis, proved to be a regular feature of the late plays, but relatively absent in the other three genres:21 but the changes I perceived in the king and Camillo were very notes of admiration: they seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes; there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they

20

21

Quotations are from the Moby Text Shakespeare, as analysed by Docuscope. As this is an electronic text, line numbers are unreliable, so we have also included Folio through-line numbering (TLN). For histories, the median and mean frequencies of Think Back for 2500-word chunks were 0.57 and 0.58; for comedies, 0.52, 0.54; tragedies: 0.52, 0.54; late plays 0.72, 0.74.

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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed: a notable passion of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing, could not say if the importance were joy or sorrow (The Winter’s Tale 5.2.8–18/TLN 3020–8)

Here continuous states rather than discrete events are communicated and, significantly, the past state is presented via an explicit narratorial present. That is, the past is filtered through the consciousness of the narrator who is, quite frequently, making some sort of implied or explicit emotional evaluation of the events described. The distance of one time from another (narrative present to historical past) becomes less important than the emotional effects created by that distance. Note the Think Back verbs tagged in the following: First Gentleman: The dignity of this act was worth the audience of kings and princes; for by such was it acted (The Winter’s Tale 5.2.72–74/TLN 3088–89)

and now note the effect of shifting them to Narrative Verb: The dignity of this act justified the audience of kings and princes; for such acted it

Here, a shift away from past forms of to be into simple past forms of main verbs strips away the focalising presence of the First Gentleman: the actual events (the justification, the acting) are arguably more vivid, but we lose the sense that we experience them through his consciousness and judgement.22 This comparative factor then, shows us that one of the most striking linguistic differences between the late plays and the other genres is that the late plays show an increase in the direct representation of the past (the LAT Narrative Verb is more frequent), but also, at the same time, an increase in the focalised representation of the past, where the representation is directed through the explicitly realised consciousness of the narrator (via the LAT Think Back). Past events could therefore be argued to be more important in the late plays than in the early work – but this increase in concern with the past is also accompanied by a shifting relation to the past: the past is important in as much as it is relevant to, and contextualised via, the present. The increased use of language designed to focalize past events in the late plays appears, in our view, to be connected with these plays’ thematic preoccupation with family reunions and plots of wandering, both of which place a dramaturgical premium on the emotionally charged narration of past events with an eye toward a redemptive, corrected present.

22

On focalisation, see Mieke Bal, Narratology, 2nd edition (Toronto, 1994), pp. 142–60.

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CF5: Subjective Particularisation The second comparative factor that distinguishes the late plays (CF5/2500 in our analysis) correlates the presence of the two LATs Asides and Verb State. The Language Action Type known as Asides identifies strings that introduce or end digressive comments: ‘by the way . . .’, ‘anyway’, ‘as an aside’, ‘let me digress’, ‘incidentally’, ‘to return’, ‘at any rate’. A significant marker of asides for the developers of Docuscope is ‘which’ as a non-restrictive relative pronoun – that is, a relative introducing information which is non-essential, hence an aside. Indeed, when Docuscope analyses Shakespeare, Asides strings are almost wholly made up of ‘which’ forms, and there is a significant increase in these strings over his career, and particularly in the late plays.23 We have already identified (on CF7) a trend in the language of the late plays that sees Shakespeare increase the frequency of two types of past narration, and in particular Think Back, which presents the past filtered through the explicit consciousness of a narrator. It is possible to identify a similar effect in this increase in Asides over the course of Shakespeare’s career. We will take as an example The Winter’s Tale, act 5, scene 2, where the discovery of Perdita is narrated by one ‘gentleman’ to two others, employing a linguistic style which relies heavily on which-relativisation. Note in the following how the relative clause always introduces some form of subjective judgment or evaluation on the part of the speaker: Then have you lost a sight, which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of (42–3/TLN 3052–3) now he thanks the old shepherd, which stands by, like a weather-bitten conduit of many kings’ reigns (54–6/TLN 3064–5) I never heard of such another encounter, which lames report to follow it, and undoes description to do it (56–8/TLN 3065–7) Like an old tale still, which will have matter to rehearse, though credit be asleep, and not an ear open (61–3/TLN 3070–2) this avouches the shepherd’s son; who has not only his innocence, which seems much (63–5/TLN 3072–3) One of the prettiest touches of all, and that which angled for mine eyes, caught the water, though not the fish, was when[. . .] (81–3/TLN 3090–91)

Compare these subjectively inflected descriptions with those associated with

23

Here, too, single variable ANOVA for 2500-word chunks showed a significant increase of Aside words in the late plays. For histories the median and mean frequencies of Aside were 0.17, 0.18; comedies, 0.14, 0.15; tragedies, 0.16, 0.18; late plays, 0.27, 0.29.

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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays ‘that’ relatives, which tend to introduce material more likely to be objectively true of the antecedent: this avouches the shepherd’s son; who has not only his innocence, which seems much, to justify him, but a handkerchief and rings of his that Paulina knows (63–6/TLN 3072–5) What, pray you, became of Antigonus, that carried hence the child? (59–60/TLN 3068–9)

Neither relative here gives us access to any speaker’s subjectivity. Rather, each supplies us with an objective fact about the head noun (Paulina recognises the handkerchief and rings; Antigonus took the child away). Remember: although we have concentrated on one scene, Docuscope has shown that this type of effect increases significantly right across the late plays. Asides play an important role, for example, in Prospero’s recounting of his prior life as Duke of Milan to Miranda in The Tempest (2.1); in Giacomo’s confession of his feigned seduction of Imogen at the conclusion of Cymbeline (5.6); and in Henry’s declaration that it was his conscience that prompted him to abandon his marriage to Katherine in Henry VIII (2.4). The very choice to have the identification of Perdita narrated at the end of The Winter’s Tale rather than enacted on stage seems characteristic of Shakespeare’s dramatic style at this point: by this stage in his career, Shakespeare is exploring, and exploiting, linguistic resources that allow him to track events through an individual’s consciousness rather than to depict them impersonally – a prefiguration of Henry James, perhaps. It is hard to imagine such a crucial scene being narrated in one of the early plays. We suspect that what Docuscope calls an Aside was, for Shakespeare and his actors, a concrete opportunity for communicating a subjective impression of things in the mind of the speaker (rather than rendering their supposed material reality more ‘immediately’ in the physical world of the play). The dramaturgical effect of this linguistic multiplication of ‘internal’ perspectives on the action would have been atmospheric, contributing – as it still does – a certain prismatic quality to the late plays that distances spectators from events rendered in the play in a way that a more naturalistic theatrical practice does not. Folded into the words and minds of the characters, events in the late plays can only, we might say, be accessed from a particular linguistic angle. We have the option to go further and make connections with other impressions that have been taken from these plays – the sense that they are dreamlike, convoluted, difficult, spatially impossible. These interpretations would be supported, but not dictated, by the results of linguistic analysis, whose translation into dramaturgical strategy and (thus) theatrical effects is never one way or automatic. We can broaden this analysis of Asides in CF5 by looking to the second LAT with which it is correlated, Verb State. This LAT consists mainly of present tense usages of the verb to be (is, are, be) often taking the form: ‘X is Y’: 147

Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope A fair one are you

(The Winter’s Tale 4.4.82/TLN 1885)

the fairest flowers of the season Are our carnations and streak’d gillyvors, Which some call nature’s bastards (The Winter’s Tale 4.4.86–8/TLN 1889–91) over that art Which you say adds to nature is an art That nature makes (The Winter’s Tale 4.4.96–8/TLN 1901–3)

This LAT is also triggered by ‘to be + Determiner’ combinations (as with ‘is an’ in the third example above), and have combining with forms such as being and bearing on. The –ed forms of verbs also play a major role here, in combinations with of (for example ‘composed of’), and when they occur clause-finally: As you are certainly a gentleman, thereto (The Winter’s Tale 1.02.391–2/TLN 499–500) Clerk-like experienced the need I have of thee thine own goodness hath made (The Winter’s Tale 4.02.11–2/TLN 1624–5)

Non-finite forms such as ‘being’ and ‘given’, when used in a clause initially (‘Being the mother of two sons . . .’; ‘Given the state of the roads . . .’) are also coded for this LAT. The common thread here is that all of these different Verb State strings are associated with the communication of information that is taken to be (or at least presented as being) universally true, or states of affairs which continue from the past into the present. Verb State strings present continuous states rather than discrete actions (‘He is kind’ vs ‘He acted kindly’). Interestingly, modern rhetorical analysts associate its use with non-fiction texts: texts that have a high information density, and texts that communicate information by telling rather than showing. The tell/show distinction is useful in this dramaturgical context because it helps us see that Verb State locutions are inevitably distanced from the thick of unfolding action: a judgment of some sort is being made in many of the examples above, the stative verb serving to provide a snapshot of a person or thing in time so that the judgment or predication can take place. Even if the thing discussed – streak’d gillyvors, for example – is a subject of heated debate, the ‘stilling’ or ‘fermata’ effect of the stative verb seems more attuned to the ether of consciousness than the swells of passion. A speaker who says ‘I love you’ is much more convincing than one who states, ‘you are my love’. The dramaturgical effects of this last feature is related, we believe, to the subjective effects we have already identified in uses of its factor correlate above, Asides. (Note the frequent co-location of both in the examples above). As we have said, Verb State is involved with the communication of states rather than actions, and we would argue that just as Asides involve a foregrounding of the 148

On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays subjectivity of the narrator, so Verb State tends to foreground the narrator, in as much as it is more likely to involve the assertion of an opinion rather than the description of an action. In terms of overall effect, this factor again suggests a shift in dramatugical technique from the enactment of actual events in the early genres (showing) to the depiction of the mind’s reaction to events in the late plays (telling), what might be called a technique of subjective particularisation. Note how in the following passage a simple statement of a past event is elaborated with increasing subjectivity involving both Asides and Verb State: the penitent king, my master, hath sent for me; to whose feeling sorrows I might be some allay, or I o’erween to think so, which is another spur to my departure (The Winter’s Tale 4.02.6–9/TLN 1619–22)

The simple past event (‘the penitent king . . . hath sent for me’) becomes a vehicle for reflection on the role of the speaker himself (‘to whose feeling sorrows I might be some allay’), an explicit acknowledgement of selfabsorption (‘or I o’erween to think so’) and an assertion using Verb State and Asides, which turns a subjective opinion into something resembling a generally accepted truism (‘which is another spur to my departure’). The end result: Asides and Verb State work hand in hand to render – not the truth of action declared on the stage – but the truth of reaction as it unfolds in the mind. Focalised retrospection and subjective particularisation are only shorthand ways of describing the larger pattern of linguistic features that make the late plays distinct. These descriptions were in some sense prompted by statistical analyses, but were certainly not dictated by them. Nor can we say that the factors above in any way exhaust the linguistic patterns that can be unearthed through close analysis of the plays.24 Docuscope’s identification of Asides, for example, as one of the key features of the style of late plays focused our attention on relativisation (and thus subordination) as a means of stamping the subjective impressions of the speaker on what is said. A fuller analysis of Shakespeare’s language in the late plays than we have space for here would show that the effects we have associated with Asides are produced by a much wider range of features than simply relatives introduced by ‘which’. Parallel adverbial clauses and other forms of clausal subordination are also used to specify or elaborate nouns with reference to prior events or actions, rather than the attributive, adjectival modification we find in the earlier plays. These 24

Single variable ANOVA, for example, showed the late plays to be high in a LAT called Comparison, which includes words like ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’, ‘more’, ‘equal’, and ‘best’. This LAT was not attached to any factor – it was not distributed evenly throughout the plays bur rather was clustered in limited areas. It may be related to the tendency to stamp narratorial judgment on the description of events, but then again, it may not. Linguistic features or patterns do not all have to serve or respond to a single dramaturgical demand.

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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope subordinating strategies cannot be ‘counted’ by Docuscope, but must be turned up through careful parsing and comparisons of possible alternative ‘routes’ of expression. Where there is smoke, however, there is often fire, and so the tokens of subordination counted by Docuscope may be more prominent precisely because all of the strategies being used in the late plays to produce internal perspective are related. Our interpretive leap is to assert this relatedness. The ‘which’ becomes worth counting, then, because it is a linguistic footprint indexing complementary linguistic and dramaturgical strategies; these, in turn, register or express a vision of the world and its order that gets ascribed to tragicomedy by critics and is perhaps experienced by audiences in the theatre. The factor analysis also suggests the ways in which the late plays are partially like and unlike the other three genres, in effect mapping out the features of family resemblance across a very large array of possible members. Although we can only gesture toward these results here – no factor can really be understood without an investigation and discussion of examples – it is clear that, given what Docuscope can count, the late plays exhibit linguistic features that are present in certain other genres but absent in others (or conversely, they lack certain features that some cognate genre also lacks in relation to others). For example, the late plays share features that distinguish both tragedies and comedies, but not histories. At the level of 1000-word chunks, factor analysis showed that the late plays were like both comedies and tragedies (and unlike histories) in their comparatively high frequencies of the LATs named Denial/ Disclaim and Resistance (CF2/1000) and Person Pronouns (CF10/1000).25 The late plays also lack something that both comedies and tragedies lack in relation to histories – a LAT called Time Duration, which is made up of words and phrases that indicate time spans, such as ‘in his eleventh year’, ‘summer’, ‘hour’, ‘when’, ‘while’, ‘day’, and ‘night’. While the resemblance with comedies and tragedies is attested in one way or another by at least six factors at this level, late plays do share some similarity with the history plays in that both possess a comparatively high frequency of a LAT called Generalization, which includes words and phrases such as ‘every’, ‘all’, ‘of all’, ‘for all’, ‘with all’, and ‘every thing’. An analysis of criss-crossing similarities and differences on this scale is far beyond the means of this paper, but even a cursory glance at the results points out the degree to which Docuscope’s understanding of ‘pattern’ and ‘significance’ implies multiple forms of relation, often predicated on the simultaneous presence and absence of key features in groups of texts in some apparent pattern of coordination. 25

Denial/Disclaim LATs include words and phrases such as ‘cannot’, ‘not’, ‘is not’, ‘nothing’, ‘no’, and ‘never’. Its partner in CF2/1000, Resistance, includes words and phrases such as ‘yet’, ‘but’, ‘against him’, ‘against her’, ‘even so’, ‘rather’, and ‘would not’. The LAT Person Pronoun, which constitutes CF10/1000, includes the following: ‘he’, ‘his’, ‘him’, ‘himself’, ‘she’, ‘her’, ‘hers’, ‘herself’, ‘whose’.

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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays We must remain content here to conclude that, on a truly pervasive linguistic level, the late plays seem to do what many auditors and readers have experienced them doing on stage and page: they make way for inner life and revelation through memory and recognition; they pivot theatrical and readerly attention on the movements of a mind engaged in thought; they accommodate complexity of plot and long stretches of wandering by allowing the contingencies of romance wandering to be glossed with ruminating digressions; and they subordinate the declaration of actions present and past to the stillness of judgment. These dramaturgical possibilities are not dictated by the ‘types’ of language being used, just as the ‘types’ of language that are spoken on stage are not an expression of some universal set of theatrical scenarios or archetypal ‘scenes’. Rather, theatrical utterance and the action we associate with a particular genre must be part of a single structure – drama – which in the end is a story told by speaking beings on a stage in a limited amount of time. If approaching Shakespeare ‘by the numbers’ opens up another window onto the playwright’s late plays and genre, it should also tell us something new about the ways we might choose to read Shakespeare and other early modern writers in the coming years. Initiatives such as the Text Creation Partnership of Early English Books Online, for example, are creating a corpus of 25,000 digitised early modern texts that could be adapted to far-reaching forms of quantitative analysis.26 As this corpus of Early English Books becomes available for statistical analysis, critics will have an unprecedented set of resources to employ in thinking about traditional ‘literary’ questions such as genre, style, influence, and perhaps authorship. Having worked through a limited number of critical questions with one particularly rich corpus (Shakespeare’s plays) and the institution of its criticism, we believe our work with Docuscope may prove instructive to future scholars who want to understand the usefulness of ‘counting things’ in humanistic inquiry – quantity being perhaps one of the last concepts in the humanities which has not come in for rigorous theorisation.27 How is it, for example, that something like a ‘factor’ from multivariate statistical analysis might capture something as intimate as genre – ‘lateness’ in Shakespeare’s style being, admittedly, a difficult concept to defend on even the most subjective grounds?28 How can classifying vast numbers or ‘strings’ of words into their ‘functions’ and then looking for patterns in their underlying

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According to Early English Books Online, the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) is in the process of creating SGML coding for the full text of 25,000 EEBO works, allowing users to search the full ASCII text of the documents. Because Docuscope can analyse vast numbers of texts once they have been rendered into ASCII form, we find the potential for future quantitative work with such a corpus tremendously exciting. For a recent attempt to think about the value of quantity in literary studies, see Franco Moretti’s polemically charged Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory (New York, 2005). See the essay by Gordon McMullan in this collection.

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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope use/absence provide a sense of the singular experiential richness of a literary text? The answer, we believe, depends upon what one decides to count and how one decides to understand the significance of what has been counted. Both of these decisions are interpretive and contextual, even if the things counted are either objectively ‘there’ or ‘not there’ to be counted in an editorially stabilized text. Genre, it seems to us, is just as much a coordinated pattern of various types of dramaturgical and linguistic effects as it is some kind of ‘defining set of properties’: if it was not, genre would be completely inaccessible to multivariate analysis. Indeed, the difficulty of saying exactly what makes a genre a genre, a difficulty that leads Mowat to invoke Wittgenstein’s family resemblance analogy, may be precisely what makes genre amenable to quantitative statistical analysis: only multivariate analysis can produce a ‘thing’ as abstract as a ‘factor’ that coordinates relative frequencies across large numbers of groups. Only a factor, that is, can call the critic’s attention, in some organised way, to the pervasive things that happen and don’t happen at the same time in a set of literary texts. The fact that readers may actually register such quantitative factors as qualities within a particular work suggests that the proverbial quantitative/qualitative divide – or Dilthey’s contrast between the geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) and the naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) – hides certain areas of overlap that ought to be explored more carefully.29 As Henri Bergson would say, every change in quantity is ultimately a change in quality, although he probably would never have dreamed of counting non-restrictive clauses in the late Shakespeare.30 Just as important, the use of language in the theatre, because it is constrained by material factors such as the number of actors, the size of the stage, the various ‘technologies’ for simulating experience (music, noise, machines, etc.), is deeply marked by these constraints; when one is ‘counting’ the various types of language that get used in the theatre, then, one must not underestimate the degree to which the texts of plays are saturated with dramaturgical exigencies – the need to do something with language in a particular way in a particular set of circumstances. If you want to tell a story about wandering siblings and long-lost children and do it without the cinema technology of flashback, expect to do a lot of verbalised retrospection. So too, you may have to rely more on the emotional charge of subjective immersions, where a speaker narrates his or her way around a memory to encounter joy or despair, than on the narrated misfires of action in comic mishap (with its props and 29 30

The distinction is central to Introduction to the Human Sciences, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, 1988). Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York, 2001), ch. 1. Bergson’s notion of ‘duration’, it should be noted, is specifically designed to foreclose attempts at ‘converting’ quantitative differences into qualitative ones. We have, in our own analyses, tried to avoid such facile conversions.

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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays circumstantial judgments), tragic plotting and counterplotting (with its scenographically inclined onstage contrivers), or the concrete detail of historical conflict and battle. To understand what a particular kind of play does with its verbal resources, which is really what we mean by the word dramaturgy here, it makes sense to ask a blindfolded critic like Docuscope to feel its way around the corpus. You could, similarly, learn a great deal about how your house or apartment works by asking someone else to live in it for a month and then tell you how it works. Certain things are connected that you may have never noticed – the tap water pressure, say, seems to fluctuate whenever the neighbours turn on their sprinkler. So too, rather prosaically, we have discovered that Shakespeare’s penchant for certain types of subordination and verb forms in the late plays seems to complement a relative abundance of focalised retrospection: these things seem appropriate given the kind of story he and his company are trying to tell. One can try to grasp such interrelations through trial and error, but the odds of doing so are probably only slightly better than that of a monkey writing The Tempest. As literary critics attempting to read Shakespeare by the numbers, we are much more lucky than the proverbial monkey in the statistical parable. The deck is loaded in our favour – there are patterns, no end of patterns, for us to pore over while reading Shakespeare by the numbers. It is only because he was trying to do something in the theatre, however, that even one of those patterns makes sense to us today.

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10 Turn and Counterturn: Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in Massinger’s The Renegado MICHAEL NEILL

W

HEN The Renegado was first published in 1630, it was advertised on its title page as ‘A Tragicomædie’. Since the play was evidently printed under Massinger’s close supervision, and since the dramatist’s formative professional years had been spent as the collaborator and protegé of the pioneer of English tragicomedy, John Fletcher, the descriptor must have been carefully chosen. Taking his cue from the theory and practice of the genre’s Italian progenitor, Giambattista Guarini, Fletcher had done more than anyone in the English theatre to establish the status of tragicomedy as a legitimate ‘third kind’, distinguished from the ‘mongrel’ gallimaufries denounced by neoclassicists like Sir Philip Sidney. In his well-known epistle ‘To the Reader’ of The Faithful Shepherdess, Fletcher had briefly paraphrased Guarini’s defence of the new genre in The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, giving the Italian’s elaborate neo-Aristotelian arguments a markedly pragmatic twist. Where Guarini had devoted a good deal of his treatise to the ‘architectonic end’ of tragicomedy, adapting Aristotle’s idea of tragic catharsis to fit a genre that aimed, like comedy, ‘to purge the mind from the evil affection of melancholy’,1 Fletcher concentrated almost exclusively on what Guarini called its ‘instrumental end’, underlining the way in which tragicomedy absorbed elements of tragic plotting and characterisation to produce an authentically mixed form: insisting that ‘a God is as lawful in this as in a tragedie, and mean people as in a comedie’. Fletcher gives special prominence to his reworking of Guarini’s famous formulation, il pericolo, non la morte (the danger not the death): ‘A tragi-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it

1

Cited from Allan H. Gilbert (ed.), Literary Criticism Plato to Dryden (Detroit, 1962), pp. 520–1.

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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, but brings some near it, which is inough to make it no comedie.’2 In hindsight, this epistle, with its emphasis on the comic peripety by which an apparently tragic sequence of events is miraculously turned to benevolent comic ends, has come to read like a manifesto, announcing the tastes and practice of a new generation for whom the greatest source of dramatic pleasure would lie in the intricacies of plot and the cunning manipulation of audience expectation.3 Thus William Cartwright’s verses for the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio single out the wit of Fletcher’s designs for special praise: None can prevent the Fancy, and see through At the first opening: all stand wond’ring how The thing will be, untill it is; which thence, With fresh delight, still cheats, still takes the sence.4

As a drama that was ‘tragic in possibility, but not in fact’,5 tragicomedy was especially suited to such pleasurable deceit; and the key to its ‘delight’, Fletcher’s apostles insisted, was to be found in the ‘wonder’ or ‘admiration’ excited by what Davenant called ‘the Plots swift change, and counterturn’6 – by the dramatist’s ability (as Henry Harington put it in his verses on Fletcher’s Wild Goose Chase) ‘T’excell our guess at ever turn and shift’.7 ‘Turn’ and ‘counterturn’ referred to those sudden upsets and reversals of expectation otherwise known as peripeteia – the ‘counterturn’ being identified by Dryden with the penultimate element in classical plotting, the castastasis, ‘which destroys that expectation [hitherto created], imbroyles the action in new difficulties, and leaves you far distant from that hope in which it found you’.8 ‘Turn’ did, however, have another common application that had been given prominence in the action of a number of plays dealing with the vexed 2

3

4

5 6 7 8

‘To the Reader’, in John Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepheardesse (London, 1610); cf. Compendium, p. 511: ‘tragicomedy takes from tragedy great persons but not its great action, its verisimilar plot but not its true one . . . its danger but not its death . . . [while] from comedy it takes . . . feigned difficulty, happy reversal, and above all the comic order’. See the classic accounts of English tragicomic practice by Philip Edwards, ‘The Danger not the Death’, in John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (eds), Jacobean Theatre, Stratford-uponAvon Studies 1 (1960), pp. 159–77, and Eugene Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven, 1952). Cited from The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. A. Glover and A.R. Waller, 10 vols (Cambridge, 1905–1912). For a more detailed account of this trend in taste, see Michael Neill, ‘ “Wits most accomplished Senate”: The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters’, SEL 18 (1978), 341–60. Compendium, p. 522 Epilogue to The First Day’s Entertainment at Rutland House (London, 1656) Cited from The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols (Cambridge, 1966–96), V, p. 247 Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in H.T. Swedenborg et al., The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols (Berkeley, 1951–89), XVII, p. 23.

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Michael Neill religious politics of the Mediterranean and Eastern worlds – not least in a work to which The Renegado arguably served as a kind of theatrical riposte, Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (1610).9 In this context, of course, ‘turn’ meant to change one’s religious allegiance – to apostasise and become a renegade, but also to undergo conversion or to repent (OED). As its title promises, Massinger’s tragicomedy places this kind of ‘turning’ at the centre of its action; but not only that – in it there turns out to be a striking consonance between religious ‘turning’ and the successive peripeties on which the excitements of its plot depend. By such means, this essay will suggest, the dramatist contrived to give a new and deepened significance to the sensational turns and counterturns of tragicomic design, showing how the transformation of tragic materials by the imposition of Guarini’s ‘comic order’ might be used to express a providentialist vision running counter to the Calvinistic pessimism of late Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy. It will be part of my argument that this approach to tragicomic design is related to two conspicuous oddities of the play: the installation of a Jesuit priest at the moral centre of its action and the adumbration of theological positions that seem strikingly sympathetic to Catholic doctrine. In this context it becomes possible to see tragicomedy’s increasingly dominant place in the theatrical repertory of the late 1620s and 1630s not simply as a matter of aesthetic fashion, but as an epiphenomenon of larger tendencies in the religious politics of the time. A fully historicised reading of Massinger’s play must also take account of a second major alteration to his sources: The Renegado is based, in large part, on a group of captivity narratives by Cervantes, of which the most important are ‘The Captive’s Tale’ from Don Quixote (Part 1, Chaps 39–40) and a drama built on the same set of events entitled Los Baños de Argel (The Prisons of Algiers). From them Massinger borrowed the two main elements of his plot: the story of a Christian maiden’s abduction by a renegade and the efforts of her grief-stricken brother to rescue her from the Turks; and the story of an infatuated Turkish woman’s pursuit of a handsome Christian lover. At times Massinger makes quite detailed use of these originals: for example, the coup de théâtre in 1.3, where Donusa unveils her dazzling beauty to make Vitelli fall in love with her, exactly repeats an episode from Act 2 of Los Baños. In Cervantes, too, the heroine, Zahara, spurns her high-ranking Moorish suitor, and is eager to join her lover when the Christians engineer their escape from Algiers. Zahara, however, has been a secret Christian from the start, so that the Spanish play offers no equivalent to the sensational counterturn produced by Donusa’s renunciation of Mahomet in Act 4. Massinger’s Tunis, moreover, is a very different city from the Algiers that Cervantes remembered from his own experience as a prisoner of the Moors: its symbolic centre has shifted from the prison to the marketplace – a point that the dramatist underlines by 9

See below, p. 159.

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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado converting Cervantes’ Spanish Christians into citizens of Venice, a republic famous for the wealth it garnered from trade with the Orient, and by introducing his hero as a merchant, come to do business in the bazaar. For a play originally subtitled ‘The Gentleman of Venice’, The Renegado begins in a surprising way: ‘You have hired a shop, then?’ (1.1.1).10 This blunt demand seems better fitted to the commercial world of city comedy than to the aristocratic and romantic ambience conventionally associated with tragicomic drama; and the ensuing dialogue only compounds this sense of generic confusion. The speaker and his interlocutor are identified as a Venetian shopkeeper (Vitelli) and his apprentice (Gazet) who have travelled to the Ottomancontrolled city of Tunis, where, capitalising on the ‘free-trading’ allowed to foreigners in the ‘mart-time’ (1.1.45–6), they are preparing to vend a selection of rather suspect consumer goods in the marketplace. In addition to their stock of ‘choice China dishes . . . [and] pure Venetian crystal’ (1.3.1–2), they plan to entice their customers with a display of alluring portraits. Ostensibly ‘curious pictures of the rarest beauties of Europa’, executed by the likes of ‘Michaelangelo, / Our great Italian workman’ (1.3.1–4; 129–30), these are almost immediately revealed as no more than the ‘figures / Of bawds and common courtesans in Venice’ (1.1.12–13) – cheap paintings of the kind apparently used for advertisement in the Venetian flesh trade, objects of the crudest commercial and sexual exchange.11 Together with the third scene, where the apprentice is discovered in the shop itself, whipping up custom for their ‘toys and trifles’ (1.3.103) with the familiar pedlar’s cry of ‘What do you lack?’ (1.3.1, 4, 33, 91, 97) – this opening places Vitelli and Gazet in a milieu of fleshly appetite, commercial appetancy, and petty fraud familiar to audiences of Jonson and Middleton. Named as he is after a small Venetian coin, Gazet, in particular, with his mixture of cynical opportunism, greed, and naivety, is a character who would not be out of place in the appetitive world of Bartholomew Fair or A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Since this rather dubious commercial setting has no precedent in Massinger’s sources, its upset to audience expectations was clearly a deliberate effect; and one of the striking things about the design of The Renegado is the way in which it yokes together elements from a whole range of genres and subgenres: in addition to Jonsonian city comedy and voyage drama, it recalls Marlovian heroic tragedy in the blustering rant of the renegade Grimaldi, and revisits citizen romance in its story of ‘A poor mechanic pedlar’ (3.4.80) who wins the love (and dowry) of an oriental princess. It is as though Massinger, remembering Sidney’s strictures on ‘mongrel tragicomedy’, had set out to show how a judiciously mixed drama could successfully integrate the most 10 11

All citations from The Renegado are to the text in Daniel J. Vitkus, Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York, 2000). See, for example, Angelica Bianca’s use of a portrait to advertise her charms in Aphra Behn’s The Rover.

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Michael Neill diverse materials, exploiting them to help produce precisely those unexpected switches of tone and direction that were so important to tragicomic delight. Part of this strategy involves the referencing of individual works from a variety of kinds – not least through the subtitle under which the play seems originally to have been presented:12 inevitably ‘The Gentleman of Venice’ invites comparison with two of Shakespeare’s best-known dramas;13 and Massinger’s handling of both plot and setting seems calculated to reinforce these connections. On the one hand, the story of Grimaldi – a Venetian Christian turned Turk, who has become a captain in the service of Moorish Tunis, but who repents and reverts to his former allegiance – resembles a reverse image of Shakespeare’s tragic story of a renegade mercenary from the other side of the Mediterranean divide – a play that first appeared in the Revels account books under its alternative title, ‘The Moor of Venice’;14 on the other, Massinger’s plot has obvious parallels with the comic design of The Merchant of Venice: in each play a young Venetian wins himself an exotic bride endowed with fabulous wealth, and in each a Christian lover successfully elopes with a convertite bride whose dowry consists of rich jewels and a casket crammed with treasure. Yet even as the play’s subtitle highlights this relation with The Merchant, it teasingly distances the play from the bourgeois world of commerce by suggesting that its real concern is with the fortunes of a ‘gentleman’. It is as if, steering a middle path between the mercantile venality of Shakespeare’s Venetian adventurers and the passion-driven extravagance of his Moor, Massinger were offering to show how a gentleman of Venice should behave, tempering his dangerous appetites with reason and faith. Arguably, though, The Renegado’s most important debt to The Merchant is

12

13

14

The play was licensed by Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, on 17 April 1624, under the title of ‘The Renegado, or the Gentleman of Venice’: the subtitle did not, for some reason, survive in the published text; but Herbert must have found it on the manuscript submitted to him, and the first performances were presumably advertised under this title. Given Massinger’s close supervision of the published text, the decision to abbreviate it must have been his: perhaps it resulted from the way in which by 1630, as Benedict Robinson has argued, emergent Laudian polemics had retrospectively transformed Massinger’s meanings, making questions of religious allegiance (and the role of Francisco) seem much more central than the social and generic issues attendant on the protagonist’s rank – see Benedict S. Robinson, ‘The Turks, Caroline Politics, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado’, in Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer (eds), Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642 (Basingstoke, 2007); I am grateful to Dr Robinson for supplying me with typescripts of this essay, and also of ‘Strange Commodities’, a chapter from his forthcoming book, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (New York, 2007). Massinger’s subtitle may have influenced James Shirley’s choice of title for his tragicomedy The Gentleman of Venice (1639), though there are no other apparent links between the two plays, and Shirley’s play may perform its own meta-commentary on Shakespeare’s tragedy. The reference is in the account book of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, which records a court performance in November, 1604 of ‘The Moor of Venis’.

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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado of a larger structural kind; for, though nominally a comedy, Shakespeare’s play, with the spectacular bouleversement of its trial scene, provided an excellent home-grown prototype for the aspect of tragicomic design epitomised in Guarini’s famous formula, il pericolo non la morte. With a stroke of engaging wit, the ‘counterturn’ of The Merchant of Venice begins precisely as Antonio’s fate appears to hang in the balance of a pair of scales – instruments that are said to ‘turn’ when one side weighs heavier than the other; and, with a second ingenious flourish, it is completed at the moment when the villain Jew is forced (against his nature) to submit to the demands of ‘kind’ (in the literary as well as the moral sense of that word), to yield (against his faith) a ‘gent[i]le answer’, and to ‘turn’ Christian – a transformation echoed in the light-hearted metamorphoses of the comic catastrophe in which women-turned-men turn women again. In The Renegado, too, the counterturn involves a narrowly averted execution and once again pivots on a spectacular episode of conversion, in which an infidel turns Christian. Such parallels are a reminder of how often, in the increasingly self-conscious late-Jacobean and Caroline theatre, plays have to be recognised as being in conversation with one another – something to which tragicomedy, with its inherently dialectical form, was especially well suited. In the case of The Renegado this engagement with other plays extends well beyond Shakespeare. Daniel Vitkus has already drawn attention to ways in which The Renegado can be read as ‘responding to’ a play by his former colleague in the Henslowe stable – Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (c.1610) – ‘rewriting it with a happier ending’.15 The conversion scene that makes possible that happy turn of events may have been inspired by The Merchant, but its immediate model lay closer to hand, in a tragicomedy by Massinger’s sometime mentor and collaborator, John Fletcher: The Island Princess had been staged by the King’s Men little more than a year before The Renegado was performed by their rivals at the Cockpit. It is even possible that the Lady Elizabeth’s Men suggested to Massinger the idea of a play that might emulate the success of Fletcher’s oriental fantasy. Both plays exploit the glamour of exotic settings; in both the gentleman protagonist achieves his ends by assuming the guise of a merchant; and in both the choice of disguise can be seen as a device for validating English commercial ambitions – even as the play ostensibly disavows them with the pretence that merchant enterprise is no more than a convenient instrument for an old-fashioned chivalric heroism.16 Above all (as Marvin T. 15

16

Vitkus, Three Turk Plays, pp. 41–2. Cf. also Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 158–9; and Patricia Parker, ‘Preposterous Conversions: Turning Turk and its “Pauline” Rerighting’, JEMCS 2 (2002), 1–34. See Michael Neill, ‘ “Materiall Flames”: Romance, Empire and Mercantile Fantasy in John Fletcher’s The Island Princess’, in Putting History to the Question (New York, 2000), pp. 311–38.

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Michael Neill Herrick long ago noted),17 The Renegado seems to model its climax on Fletcher’s last triumphant peripety, when a foreign princess is so moved by her Christian lover’s fortitude in the face of death that she announces her conversion to his inspirational faith. Considered as a theatrical metacommentary on Fletcher’s play, The Renegado exhibits some important differences, however – not least in its attitude towards cultural contact. The precipitate escape of Massinger’s Venetians from Tunis contrasts with the amity and ‘universal gladness’ celebrated by the triumphant Portuguese and their East Indian allies at the end of The Island Princess, where the King of Tidore is sufficiently impressed by Armusia’s steadfast courage and his sister’s conversion to contemplate turning Christian himself. While they may admire Vitelli’s unwavering resistance to conversion, Massinger’s Muslim potentates feel no such admiration for Donusa’s apostasy, and never deviate from their resolve to execute the offenders. The Renegado, moreover, deliberately frustrates the conventional expectations of tragicomic ending, replacing The Island Princess’s circle of cross-cultural reconciliation, with a scene of frustrated bafflement: instead of focusing on the happiness of the reunited lovers as they sail away from Tunis with the other Christians, Massinger’s final scene is given over to the ‘grief and rage’ of Asambeg and Mustapha, who are left to mutual recrimination and the prospect of torture at the hands of their ‘incensed master’, the Sultan (5.8.31–9).18 This however only makes the issue of religious conversion more important: where Quisara’s change of allegiance is accomplished in four lines (‘Your faith, and your religion must be like ye . . . I do embrace your faith sir, and your fortune’, 5.2.118–21), Massinger extends Donusa’s conversion across two scenes, climaxing it with a carefully improvised baptism that turns the hero from a merely passive example of Christian virtue into a kind of surrogate priest. In The Island Princess, as in Othello, it is colour that most conspicuously divides European and ‘Moors’: Fletcher’s East Indians are distinguished from his Portuguese adventurers primarily by their ‘tawny’ skins – and by the

17 18

Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy (Chicago, 1955), p. 291. In ‘Strange Commodities’, Benedict Robinson, likening the Venetians’ flight with the abandonment of Prospero’s island at the end of The Tempest, argues that Massinger repudiates ‘the possibility of any legitimate contact with “Turks” ’, because such intercourse can only be ‘contaminating’. However, given that the hero departs with a sizeable fortune in Ottoman jewels – the portion of a princess who has herself been figured as the choicest commodity of all – the conclusion we are to draw about his adventuring is not, perhaps, quite so clear-cut: in fact, it might well seem that Massinger’s fugitives are allowed to have it both ways, returning from their enterprise laden with wealth, even as they celebrate their departure from Tunis by launching a defiant ‘broadside’ at their infidel pursuers. Such equivocation is in accord with the divided attitude towards Ottoman Turkey described in Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark, 2005): Burton shows how ‘a discourse of captivity and degeneracy’ competed with more positive reactions designed to encourage trade – sometimes within the same text (p. 24).

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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado lamentable want of ‘temperance’ of which their colour appears to be the outward sign.19 In The Renegado, Donusa may scorn her Moorish suitor Mustapha for his ‘wainscot face’ and ‘tadpole-like complexion’ (3.1.48–50); but for Massinger (as his title indicates) the crucial divisions between Venice and Tunis are cultural, political, and, above all, religious. Although the principalities of Tidore and Ternate, in common with most of their region, had by the early seventeenth century given their allegiance to Islam, Fletcher seems uninterested in ethnographic niceties, representing his East Indians simply as generic heathens. As such they are creatures of unstable belief who – though they fall easy prey to the villainous Governor’s seductions when he appears in the guise of hate-mongering pagan priest – prove immediately susceptible to conversion when faced with evidence of Christian spiritual and material superiority. Massinger, by contrast, imagines the conflict between European and Turk as a war of opposed civilizations,20 making use of what were already becoming two of the most enduring tropes of orientalism – on the one hand stressing the distinction between Christian ‘liberty’ and Mahometan ‘license’,21 and on the other contrasting the ‘bondage’ imposed by arbitrary, passion-driven whims of Turkish autocracy with the social and political ‘freedom’ enjoyed by rational Europeans. So the humiliations of Ottoman slavery are set against the good ‘service’ that governs relations among the citizens of Venice; the ‘unbounded’ power of the Sultan (2.4.89) and his tyrannous subordinates is opposed to the voluntary submission and self-restraint exemplified by the Venetian hero; and the ‘free’ conduct allowed to European women is contrasted with the repressive ‘restraint of freedom’ to which their Turkish sisters are subjected by a religion that, while ostensibly ‘allow[ing] all pleasure’ to its adherents, actually confines the ‘free enjoyment’ of desire to men (1.2.16–50; 4.2.126–9). It is this structure of oppositions, together with the attendant problematics of trading between the two – above all by ‘turning Turk’ or turning Christian – that helps to account for the key role given to two figures who have no obvious equivalent in Massinger’s sources: Grimaldi, the blaspheming apostate who gives the play its title, and Francisco, the Jesuit priest who manages its sequence of redemptive conversions.22 Just as Donusa’s inward metamorphosis is without any counterpart in Cervantes, so too are Grimaldi’s defiant 19

20 21

22

See Michael Neill, ‘ “Materiall Flames”: Romance, Empire, and Mercantile Fantasy in John Fletcher’s Island Princess’, in Putting History to the Question (New York, 2000), pp. 311–338 (330–4). For an approach stressing this aspect of the play, see Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa, 1991), pp. 120–32. On the endlessly recycled myths of Mahometan licence and lust, see Vitkus, Turning Turk, pp. 115–19), and ‘Turning Turk: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor’, Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1997), 145–77 (155–9). Jonathan Burton has suggested that Francisco’s role may have been partially inspired by the story of Sir Francis Verney – an English corsair who was active in Algiers from 1608 and

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Michael Neill blasphemies and the sudden repentance that announces his reversion to Christianity. The corsair who is responsible for Costanza’s abduction in Los Baños is killed early in the play by a second renegade, who (like Grimaldi in Act 3) is a penitent – he, however, is quickly discovered and given no opportunity to return to Christendom. Thus, where conversion and repentance are merely part of the background against which Cervantes’ action unfolds, in The Renegado, as the prominence given to Francisco’s spiritual counselling indicates, they are central to Massinger’s tragicomic purpose. The addition of such a choric moraliser is the kind of adjustment we might expect from a dramatist of Massinger’s didactic bent, but the choice of a Catholic priest is much more surprising – especially since Francisco is no ordinary priest but a a member of an order notoriously anathematised by all God-fearing Protestants, and disliked even by loyalist fellow Catholics.23 Denounced as masters of equivocation and disguise, Jesuit priests were unique in being required to swear an oath of allegiance to the Pope, and the suspicion which this invited had seemed amply confirmed by their implication in the Gunpowder Plot. The order had even been singled out for several pages of execration in one of the travel narratives on which Massinger drew most extensively for his picture of the Ottoman world;24 yet Francisco, unlike nearly every papist cleric in the drama of the time, is presented as an entirely admirable character, no Machiavellian politician, but a steadfast friend and counsellor: saluted by Vitelli, as the ‘Stay of my steps in this life, / And guide to all my blessed hopes hereafter’ (1.1.164–5), he turns out to be responsible not only for the Christian hero’s salvation and the Turkish heroine’s conversion, but for the redemption of Grimaldi, the renegade pirate, and hence for the rescue of all the play’s Christian captives from their Turkish persecutors. The priest, moreover, is made the agent of an exacting Christian stoicism, a code whose moral and theological rigour produces a species of ethical counterturn by paradoxically enabling a spiritual ‘liberty’ inaccessible to Turkish license. To idealise a member of the Society of Jesus in this way would have been problematic at any time; and in the atmosphere of controversy provoked by the Prince of Wales’s negotiations for a Spanish match, it looks like a particularly provocative choice – even if (or perhaps especially if) Massinger were the closet Catholic suspected by Gifford, rather than the Whiggish Protestant imagined by Coleridge.25 Yet (in contrast to Middleton’s militantly

23 24 25

converted to Islam in 1610; five years later, falling ‘desperately sick’ Verney was reconverted by an English Jesuit (Traffic and Turning, pp. 149–50). See Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 113–18. See William Biddulph, The Travels of certaine Englishmen into Africa, Asia, Troy, Bithynia, Thracia, and to the Blacke Sea (London, 1609), pp. 108–12, 120–1. See William Gifford (ed.), The Plays of Philip Massinger (London, 1813), vol. 1, p. xliv, and vol. 2, p. 122 and T.A. Dunn, Philip Massinger (London, 1957), pp. 49–51, 184–91: Dunn offers a

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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado anti-Spanish A Game at Chess, performed later the same year) The Renegado seems to have attracted neither censorship nor any conspicuous public outcry. Compounding the puzzle, the 1630 quarto appeared with a dedication to George Harding, Baron Berkeley – a great-nephew and sometime ward, it is true, of a prominent Catholic nobleman, the late Earl of Northampton – but the same man to whom John Webster, using strikingly similar language, had dedicated his thoroughly Calvinist tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, seven years earlier.26 Given that The Renegado’s source material came from Catholic Spain, it might easily be assumed that the priest was simply part of Massinger’s inherited baggage – but in fact he is entirely a creature of the dramatist’s invention, and any serious attempt to understand the play in its historical context must come to terms with his role. Benedict Robinson has sought to circumvent the problem by proposing that The Renegado is actually a veiled commentary on the events of 1622–23 in which the categories Catholic and Turk need to be understood as standing for something other than themselves: the arrival of Gazet and Vitelli in Tunis, disguised, recalls Charles and Buckingham’s disguised escapes to and from Spain, and the danger of Vitelli’s being seduced into conversion surely evokes the danger of a Catholic marriage.

This requires, however, a rather strained ‘allegorical displacement’ whereby the audience would ‘[read] Islam as a stand-in for Catholicism, and . . . forget the actual Catholicism of the main characters’.27 Such oblivion seems unlikely, not just because of the public mood in 1624, but because the dramatist actually

26

27

detailed account of the case for regarding Massinger as a crypto-Catholic or Catholic sympathiser. Claire Jowitt’s Voyage Drama and Gender Politics 1589–1642 (Manchester, 2003), acknowledging that ‘Massinger’s use of Francisco . . . as a heroic figure at a time when there was such strong anti-Catholic and anti-Jesuit feeling is unusual’, argues (unconvincingly, in my view) that attention to the details of the plot exposes him as ‘an unstrustworthy machiavel’ (p. 182). Nothing is known of Harding’s religious allegiance, but he had affiliations with Puritan as well as Catholic families: he was related by marriage to the Earl of Huntingdon, the leader of a strongly Puritan, anti-Buckingham faction, to whose sister Massinger had dedicated The Duke of Milan in 1623. Massinger’s other dedicatees included the Catholic Earl of Caernarvon, to whom he offered A New Way to Pay Old Debts in 1633, but the dedication invokes the dramatist’s ties to Caernarvon’s guardian and father-in-law, the Puritan Earl of Pembroke, whom his father had served as steward. See Robinson, ‘The Turks’, 224. A similar approach is taken by Claire Jowitt, who reads the play as ‘a geographically displaced account of recent anxieties about Charles’s vulnerability to conversion to Catholicism whilst negotiating a marriage with the Infanta’, in Voyage Drama, p. 178. Jowitt’s and Robinson’s arguments were partially anticipated by Doris Adler in Philip Massinger (Boston, 1987), who also interprets the play as a partial allegory of English politics, ‘hold[ing] out the hope that Prince Charles will make a good wife of Henrietta Maria [i.e. by converting her like Donusa], but little hope that he will truly “husband” England [Paulina]’ (p. 59).

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Michael Neill seems to go out of his way to highlight the characters’ religious allegiance by introducing a number of controversial points of doctrine, including justification by works (1.1.24; 4.1.96,129), the role of confession and penance (3.2.1–11), the significance of the Mass and of ritual vestments (4.1.31–2, 81–2), the magical power of relics (1.1.146–53; 2.5.161–3), and the continuing possibility of miracles (2.5.150). Most conspicuously of all, Massinger makes the crucial ‘counterturn’ of his tragicomic plot depend upon the efficacy of lay baptism (5.1.29–41; 5.3.110–16) – a ritual espoused only by those committed to the Catholic belief in the magical efficacy of the sacraments. As if conscious of the intractability of the conundrum, Robinson suggests that it was ultimately ‘in the Caroline period that The Renegado discover[ed] its [full] political relevance’ (‘The Turks’, 214). Thus his essay chooses to concentrate on what he believes were the changed resonances of the play by 1630, when the full swing of the Laudian revolution would have made some play-goers more ready to acknowledge the commonalities between Roman Catholic and Anglican doctrine, less suspicious of ritual and sacramental mysteries, and more sympathetic to a view of Mediterranean politics that stressed the essential unity of Christendom in the face of an aggressive Islam. Ex post facto reinterpretations like Robinson’s can hardly provide the explanation that he claims for The Renegado’s ‘apparent endorsement’ of Francisco. A more fruitful approach is suggested by the work of historians such as Nicholas Tyacke and Thomas Cogswell which demonstrates the exceptional fluidity and complexity of English religious politics at the time of the play’s composition and first performances.28 Already by the second decade of the seventeenth century, the broadly ‘Arminian’ reaction against official Calvinism, which would reach its apogee under the archbishopric of William Laud, had begun to gather head, attracting powerful supporters both inside and outside the Church. The direction in which the official wind was beginning to blow was marked by the publication of Richard Montagu’s anti-Calvinist A New Gagg for an Old Goose early in 1624, shortly before the appearance of Massinger’s play.29 Montagu (who was to become one of Laud’s bishops) was especially anxious to dissociate the Anglican Church from the rigid predestinarianism associated with the Thirty-Nine Articles; and his book was accordingly denounced in a petition to parliament as ‘full fraught’ with the ‘dangerous opinions of Arminius’; however, Montagu’s claim that his book was printed ‘by King James’s speciall warrant’ suggests that his views enjoyed powerful support, and that the king himself had begun to shift towards a more

28 29

Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists (Oxford, 1987); Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the coming of war, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989). Since Massinger’s earlier play, The Bondman, was not licensed for performance until 3 December 1623, it seems reasonable to assume that the writing of The Renegado must belong substantially to the first three months of 1624.

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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado Arminian position.30 Calvinists were not Montagu’s only target, of course: indeed A New Gagg was ostensibly published in order to refute what he claimed were Catholic misrepresentations of Anglican belief. Nevertheless, Montagu insisted that Rome was, despite everything, ‘a true church and the Pope not demonstrably an Antichrist’;31 and this concession reflected the increasingly tolerant official attitude towards Catholicism at the beginning of the 1620s, when James’s anxiety to conclude a Spanish match for his son had led to a considerable relaxation of the penal laws against Catholics and their religion: the king having sought to demonstrate his good faith by ordering an end to harrassment by the pursuivants and by releasing all imprisoned Catholic priests.32 Polemicists on both sides of the divide had begun to use the prospect of a Spanish queen as an occasion to appeal for the greater ecumenical understanding to which the pacific James himself was attracted.33 As a result of these developments, 1623, the year in which Charles and Buckingham departed on their ill-starred expedition to Madrid, became the year when (in the words of one contemporary) ‘the Romish foxes came out of their holes’: with prosecutions for recusancy now abandoned, Catholic priests – especially Jesuits – had begun to appear openly in both London and the provinces, and were proselytising with considerable success in the court and beyond.34 All of this may have emboldened Massinger and the Cockpit company – or those in whose interest they were working – to risk a play whose doctrinal attitudes are not merely compatible with Arminianism, but extend to open sympathy with Catholicism, and seeming admiration for the Jesuits. Such a move, however, was still a potentially dangerous one, and those associated with the play can hardly have been unaware of the gathering reaction against such attitudes, stoked by rumours of an impending French marriage for the prince, and given voice in the fiercely anti-Catholic Petition of Religion drawn up by Parliament on 3 April.35 The initial staging of the play must have coincided with the angry debate over the king’s reply which dominated Parliament

30 31 32 33 34

35

Tyacke, pp. 104, 103, 147–51. Tyacke, p. 149. See W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997), p. 317. See Shell, p. 144, Patterson, pp. 343–4. Cogswell, pp. 37–8 (the quotation is from stanza 40 of John Vicar’s Englands Hallelu-jah, 1631). In a private communication, Michael Questier has reminded me that ‘although Charles’s and Buckingham’s return from Spain was, politically, the end of the Spanish match project, the king was still thinking in terms of an Anglo-Spanish treaty, and did so more or less to the end of his life. All during 1624 there were rumours that Gondomar was about to return to England, and that Buckingham would be displaced. James was deeply distrustful of the U-turn performed by Charles and Buckingham, and thought that the war policy was a serious mistake.’ See Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 (New York, 1981), p. 199.

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Michael Neill from 17–24 April, culminating in James’s reluctant acceptance of the petition, and the subsequent proclamation banning the Jesuits – those ‘Janissaries of his Holynesse’ as John Castle called them – on 6 May.36 From this perspective The Renegado looks as though it may have been intended as one shot in a campaign, supported by James, for tolerance and Christian unity. For this reason it will also have formed part of the skirmishing between the king and the Prince of Wales, who (along with Buckingham) had temporarily thrown his support behind the Calvinists.37 This embroilment in religious politics may well have been what attracted the attention of the hostile claque apparently referred to in James Shirley’s commendatory verses for the published text, where he writes of ‘A tribe who in their wisdoms dare accuse / This offspring of thy Muse’. But any difficulties experienced either by the dramatist or the company will presumably have dissolved quite quickly in the wake of Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria and his subsequent commitment to the Arminian cause, giving the published text (as Robinson argues) a much less controversial currency. Of course we may never understand precisely how The Renegado functioned in its immediate political and religious milieu; but in its theological emphases it is certainly far from being the ‘undenominationally Christian’ work described by T.A. Dunn.38 The direction of events in 1623–24 at least provides a plausible context for the play’s seemingly pro-Catholic tendency, and helps to explain the prominence Massinger gives to matters of doctrine – above all to the hugely contentious issue of lay baptism, which becomes the enabling instrument of the conversion on which the main plot turns. Because baptism played such an important part in its rituals, conversion itself must have seemed a somewhat problematic enterprise under a Calvinist dispensation, which denied any mysterious efficacy to the sacramental rites by which unbelievers were customarily inducted into the Church.39 For predestinarians, baptism could claim no part in securing salvation; for Catholics or Arminians, by contrast, it was an essential instrument of grace, so that in ‘cases of necessity’ – where an unbaptised person might be about to die and no priest was available – baptism by a layperson was considered an essential recourse. In The Renegado, Francisco licenses Vitelli to ‘do that office’ for Donusa as she 36 37

38 39

Cogswell, pp. 246–53; Castle’s words are from a letter dated 14 May 1624 (cited p. 253). However it would be dangerous to assume that the prince’s circle were necessarily hostile to the Jesuits per se: Michael Questier further notes not only that ‘the Society, while seen by many as the prime representative of popery, described itself at this stage as primarily non-political and also broadly supportive of the regime’, but also that there were prominent Catholics in Buckingham’s own circle who favoured Jesuit priests as chaplains – including the countess herself, whose conversion was engineered by John Percy SJ. Dunn, Philip Massinger, p. 177. It was perhaps partly for this reason that, as Dunn notes (taking the conversion motif as further possible evidence for Massinger’s Catholicism), the Roman Church was so much ‘more rigorous in proselytizing’ than its Protestant rivals (p. 187).

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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado faces execution, assuring him that not only ‘do midwives, upon necessity, perform it’, but also that ‘knights that in the Holy Land fought for / The freedom of Jerusalem . . . have made their helmets / The fount out of which their holy hands . . . drew heavenly liquor’ (5.1.29–39). By locating its counterturn in a layman’s baptism of a Turkish convertite, Massinger’s play makes its opposition to Calvinist orthodoxy as defiantly apparent as possible. It is The Renegado’s deep allegiance to the magical power of the sacraments that underlies its repeated reference to the various kinds of false or misapprehended magic that produce the deceptive false ‘turns’ of a plot that is ushered to its happy conclusion by the transformatory ‘counterturn’ of conversion and baptism. The Turks’ religion is stigmatised as the work of an ‘imposter’ (5.3.133), a ‘juggling prophet’ whose impotent ‘sorceries’ are contrasted with the ‘pious miracle[s]’ associated with Francisco (4.3.115, 125; 5.7.16).40 Not for nothing is the chamber where Donusa seduces Vitelli compared to the Prophet’s tomb in Mecca by the infatuated Mustapha (1.2.60–2);41 for the fraudulent pretences of his religion are associated with the base transformations wrought by unlicensed desire, just as love for those who turn Christian is shown to become an instrument of miraculous grace. Thus Asambeg feels himself ‘transformed’ by the ‘charm’ of Paulina and the ‘angelical sounds’ of ‘her enchanting tongue’ which seem to ‘invade and take possession of my soul’, convincing him that there is ‘something in her that can work miracles’ (2.5.104, 114, 132–4, 150). In much the same way, Donusa, overcome on her first encounter with Vitelli by the ‘sudden change’ that makes her ‘turn roarer’ and vandalise the Venetian’s shop (1.3.145), attributes this unaccountable passion to a ‘magic [that] hath ‘transformed me from myself?’ (2.1.5, 23). In each case, erotic fascination shadows the possibility of the more profound transformation that grace might effect: Asambeg’s desire for the saintly Paulina, the play intimates, arises partly as an unrecognised response to the greater magic represented by the holy talisman given her by Francisco, ‘a relic . . . which has power . . . To keep the owner free from violence’ (1.1.147–9); Donusa’s desire, on the other hand, ultimately gives way to the ‘holy motion’ that begins the process of her conversion at the end of Act 4.42

40 41 42

For the propagandist association of Mahomet with magic and sorcery, see Parker, ‘Preposterous Conversions’. The Prophet’s tomb, where his casket was reputedly suspended in mid-air by some dubious spell, was strongly associated with sinister magic. For a reading that explores the sexual relationships in the play as a response to intense gender anxieties aroused by encounters with the Turkish world, see Burton, Traffic and Turning, Chapters 2–3: ‘Asambeg experiences at Paulina’s hands the effeminization that Christian men feared suffering in their encounters with Muslims’ (p. 114); ‘the virtuous Christian man overcomes temptation by converting lechery into propriety and the Muslim temptress into a Christian wife. At the same time lechery is displaced from the former temptress onto the

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Michael Neill Faced with the prospect of execution for her dalliance with an infidel, Donusa seeks to evade her fate by relying on what Asambeg calls ‘the magic of her tongue’ in order to ‘turn this Christian Turk and marry him’ (4.2.159, 182). Instead she finds herself so overwhelmed by Vitelli’s ‘unanswerable’ arguments against her faith (l. 138) that the hero, sensing victory, draws on the power of his own transformatory magic and marks her with the sign of the cross (‘The sacred badge [God] arms his servants with’, l. 142), ensuring that it is she rather than he who, to Asambeg’s horror, now stands ready to ‘turn apostata’ (l. 159). Surrendering herself to the shackled Venetian as his moral ‘prisoner’ (l. 149), the princess yields to the ‘heavenly prompter’ within her (l. 141), defies the Viceroy’s threats, and ‘spit[s] at Mahomet’ (l. 158). Then, in the last act, as the lovers prepare to take leave of life in a martyr’s ‘wedding’, Vitelli completes Donusa’s conversion with his improvised baptism: assured of its sacramental efficacy by his Jesuit mentor, he throws water on her face, producing the miraculous effect that transforms the Mahometan princess into ‘another woman’: till this minute I never lived, nor durst think how to die. How long have been blind! Yet on the sudden By this blest means I feel the films of error Ta’en from my soul’s eyes. O divine physician . . . . . . Let me kiss the hand That did this miracle.

5.3.121–29

The violent contempt with which Donusa repudiates her faith, spitting at Mahomet, is evidently designed as the reverse counterpart of the act of sacrilege that announced Grimaldi’s apostasy – that act of ‘wanton, irreligious madness’ in St Mark’s, when he snatched the Host from Francisco’s priestly hands and ‘Dashed it upon the pavement’ (4.1.29–33); and when baptism confirms Donusa’s release from ‘the cruelest of prisons, / Blind ignorance and misbelief’ (5.3.131–32), it is as if Grimaldi’s violation of one sacrament has been symbolically cancelled out by Vitelli’s performance of another. But Grimaldi too is subject to a process of conversion: cashiered for his insolence to the Viceroy, he descends from atheistic Tamburlainean rant to Faustian despair, calling on fire, earth, air, and sea for the blessing of annihilation – only to be rescued by Francisco. Moving through the proper stages of contrition, confession and penance, the renegade’s transformation comes to its own histrionic climax in a scene that deliberately challenges the Calvinist dismissal of ritual as empty and impious histrionics. By interrupting Grimaldi’s desperate meditations dressed in the same ‘sacred vestments’ Muslim man whose foolhardy obsession with an unattainable Christian woman enables the escape of all his Christian captives’ (p. 153).

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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado worn during the Mass at which the apostate performed his original blasphemous assault, the Jesuit stuns him into a recognition of the redemptive power of grace. Grimaldi ponders the sense of mysterious transformation that results, and then goes on to meditate the efficacy of good works as an instrument of salvation:43 What celestial balm I feel now poured into my wounded conscience . . . . . . Can good deeds redeem me? I will rise up a wonder to the world When I have given strong proofs how I am altered.

(4.1.306)

Francisco’s appearance in the splendid cope that renders him ‘like a bishop’ is a transparently theatrical device that nevertheless becomes indistinguishable from sacramental magic. Earlier in the play, however, the plot appears to associate ‘personation’ and disguise with less admirable forms of transformation – above all, through the protagonist’s merchant disguise, with the deceits and doubtful exchanges of the marketplace. In the dialogue that opens the play, Gazet declares his allegiance to a commercial regime in which religion seems as subject to ‘free-trading’ as any other commodity: ‘Live I in England, Spain, France, Rome, Geneva’, he declares, ‘I am of that country’s faith’ (1.1.36–7). It is only his fear of being ‘caponed’ that dissuades him from immediately ‘turn[ing] Turk’ in Tunis (ll. 36–40); and before long that is the path both he and his master will take. First Vitelli establishes himself as ‘a royal merchant’ – in both senses of that quibbling oxymoron – when he trades his virtue for the favours of a Turkish princess (2.4.94). After Donusa has capriciously destroyed the glassware in his shop, Vitelli is summoned to meet her in the palace, where she tempts his sight with an array of treasure laid out on her table: looking for all the world like a more sumptuous version of the ‘commodities’ displayed on his own shop-counter (2.4.0), these bags of ‘imperial coin’ and Indian gems are ostensibly offered as recompense for ‘The trespass I did to thee’ (2.4.82–6), but are soon identified as ‘seeds’ of a more bountiful ‘harvest’, the ‘tender’ (as she puts it) of her own person (ll. 97–8, 101).44 If Donusa has felt herself inwardly metamorphosed by her sudden infatuation with this Christian (‘What magic hath transformed me from myself’, 2.1.23), Vitelli is now subject to a conspicuous outward transformation: when he next appears in 2.6, he is costumed in a ‘rich suit’ and accompanied by the train of attendant Turks who mark his new-found status as a ‘citizen turn[ed] courtier’ (l. 2). In a world of sartorially defined identity where (as Donusa contemptuously suggests to Mustapha) any French tailor can ‘new-create’ a man (3.1.57–8), Vitelli himself appears so 43

44

In a neat gloss on the play’s mercantile setting, Robinson suggests that ‘Francisco’s theology, according to which grace can be “purchased” by works, also preserves at its heart a kind of commerce, suggesting that commerce and conversion are versions of each other’ (‘The Turks’, 230). A similar point is made by Robinson, ‘The Turks’, 221.

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Michael Neill ‘strangely metamorphosed’ that Gazet can barely recognise him as ‘mine own natural master’, thinking him perhaps ‘some French ambassador’ (ll. 9, 19–20). It is as if ‘the gentleman of Venice’ were himself becoming the renegado of the title: clad in what he later calls ‘the proud livery / Of wicked pleasure’ (ll. 50–3), he is visibly in thrall to a religion that the play defines by the fact that it ‘allows all pleasure’ (1.2.50); and from the perspective of Francisco, at least, his protegé appears ‘lost’ (2.6.1), as though to turn courtier in this extravagant oriental fashion were, in effect, to turn Turk. The effect of this metamorphosis on the impressionable Gazet is immediate: having been released from his apprenticeship and made master of Vitelli’s shop (2.6.25–7), he sets about transforming himself into ‘A city gallant’ (3.2.50) by dressing himself in his master’s clothes and insisting that there is now no difference between them: They fit me to a hair, too. Let but any Indifferent gamesters measure us inch by inch Or weigh us by the standard, I may pass. I have been proved and proved again true metal.

3.4.11–14

To imagine the scales of social judgement thus ‘turning’ in his favour is not enough, though: for Gazet next resolves to ‘change [his] copy’ (l. 32) and to follow his master into the Turkish court. The parallel between the two is reinforced by the way that preferment in both cases is not only imagined in the language of trade, but made contingent on a form of sexual exchange. Gazet, who earlier confessed his fear of losing ‘A collop of that part my Doll enjoined me / To bring home as she left it’ (1.1.38–40), now evinces himself willing to ‘sell my shop . . . And all my wares’ to secure the supposedly lofty office of eunuch. In his ignorance he fails to recognise – even when the English castrato Carazie assures him that the real ‘price’ is ‘but parting with a precious stone or two’ (3.4.50–2) – that he is about to barter the one ‘commodity’ he has hitherto reserved from the market. Undertaking, if necessary, to ‘part with all my stones’, he innocently declares himself a ‘made’ man, even as Carazie prepares to unman him (ll. 53–5).45 The initial transformations of both Vitelli and Gazet, beginning as they do in the promiscuous transactions of the bazaar, perfectly reflect those anxieties about the dangerous fungibility of the self in a market-dominated world of 45

In a reading of the play that fascinatingly explores the relationship between gender anxieties and trade, Gil Harris notes that ‘castration is . . . associated throughout the play with economic loss’, moreover, since castration implicitly threatens all the play’s Christian males, ‘[i]t may seem that the only way in which a male Christian visitor to Tunis can fully avert the risk of castration is to receive the largesse of a powerful Turkish princess who, by filling his testicular purse with precious stones, also restores his manly vigor’ – Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia, 2004), pp. 157–8.

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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado ‘limitless profit, a[nd] radically unbalanced exchange’ such as Benedict Robinson describes.46 But equally important is the way in which the standard satirical motif of tradesman turning courtier is so rapidly linked to the idea of turning Turk – and hence to the apostasy and reconversion of Grimaldi. Gazet’s behaviour not only mimics his master’s folly, but serves to parody the twists and turns of Grimaldi’s renegadism: dismissing even the deep inward promptings of conscience as though they too were a form of degrading costume, mere ‘scrupulous rags . . . Invented only to keep churchmen warm’ (1.3.46–8), Grimaldi is a man so free of any loyalty that, when he is slighted by his Turkish masters, he can contemplate ‘turn[ing] honest and foreswear[ing his] trade’ (2.5.5–6), as readily as he once turned Turk and forswore his natal faith. But just as true repentance and counter-apostasy are only made possible for Grimaldi by Francisco’s ministrations, so the Jesuit’s spiritual counselling produces a redemptive turnabout in the hero’s progress. In Act 3, just as his apprentice is about to follow his example and turn courtier, Vitelli stages a second sartorial metamorphosis: responding to Francisco’s spiritual counselling, he returns to Donusa’s chamber to ‘deliver back the price / And salary of [her] lust’ (3.5.48–9): first returning her casket of jewels, he then tears off his cloak and doublet, as if they were ‘Alcides’ fatal shirt’, and announces himself free ‘Of sin’s gay trappings’ (l. 50). To Donusa, this volte-face represents a kind of treason or apostasy: ‘you turn rebel to / The laws of nature . . . and deny allegiance / Where you stand bound to pay it’ (ll. 17–20); and she responds by vowing to Asambeg that she will ‘turn this Christian Turk’ (4.2.158).47 The hero’s new-found resolve proves unshakeable, however, issuing in the final stage of his transformation, when he is hauled from the palace dungeon in the chains and soiled garments of a prisoner – a costume that Francisco hails as the splendid robe of a martyr: I never saw you Till now, look lovely . . . All Roman caesars, that led kings in chains Fast bound to their triumphant chariots, if Compared with that true glory and full luster

46

47

See Robinson, ‘The Turks’, 221: Robinson further notes that the ‘metaphorical and literal sexiness’ of Vitelli’s ware suggests ‘that there is something promiscuous about buying and selling’ and that ‘the play continually sexualizes trade drawing out the simultaneously mercantile and erotic associations of words like “commerce” and “commodity” ’ (219). In ‘ “Best Play with Mardian”: Eunuch and Blackmoor as Imperial Culturegram’ (Shakespeare Studies 34, 2006, pp. 123–57), Anston Bosman interprets Vitelli’s rejection of Donusa’s seductions (and the jewels she heaps on him) as a kind of ‘voluntary eunuchism, albeit of the spiritual variety’, in which the hero learns, in his own words, ‘To put off the condition of a man’ (3.2.9) – rather as Gazet does when he offers to surrender his own ‘jewels’. I am grateful to Dr Bosman for supplying me with a draft of his essay.

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Michael Neill You now appear in, all their boasted honors Purchased with blood and wrong would lose their names And be no more remembered. 4.3.9–20

Underlying these visible transformations, of course, is another even more important one, since Vitelli has been from the beginning a man in disguise. The audience is given a clue to the merchant-protagonist’s real identity as early as the second half of Scene 1: enraged by news of his sister, ‘the virtuous Paulina’, who has been abducted by the renegade, Grimaldi, and sold to the Viceroy’s seraglio (ll. 109–117), Vitelli swears to discard his ‘borrowed shape’ and prove his ‘noble’ condition by exacting revenge on his enemy (ll. 119–20, 140–158). Francisco, however, dissuades him, ensuring that Vitelli remains cloaked in his merchant role until the climactic moment of discovery in Act 5, when (to Princess Donusa’s evident relief) Paulina at last reveals her brother to be no merchant at all, but ‘a gentleman of the best rank in Venice’ (5.5.13).48 A disguised hero is, of course, a conventional device of romance – so much so that Vitelli’s Turkish rival, Mustapha, feels bound to discredit the possibility that Donusa’s lover is a ‘prince disguised’, repeatedly insisting that he is ‘no man of mark, nor honor . . . [But] A poor mechanic peddler’, ‘a delinquent of . . . mean condition’ (3.3.77–80; 5.3.4). But while in romance ‘disguised greatness’ (5.3.5) frequently masks in humility, it rarely adopts such a realistically bourgeois guise – a ‘sordid shape’ as Asambeg thinks it (5.3.5–6): even in The Island Princess Armusia’s merchant disguise is a only a fleeting camouflage to enable his heroic rescue of the King of Tidore, and one that compromises neither the hero’s identity nor the play’s chivalric fantasy. By contrast, Vitelli’s extended pretence not only installs the market at the centre of The Renegado, but makes his successive transformations – from shopkeeper to courtier, from sexual minion to penitent moralist and helpless prisoner, from prospective apostate to intending martyr, and from merchant to ‘Gentleman of Venice’ – significant turning points in the action. The importance of Paulina’s disclosure of the hero’s true identity lies in its implicit appeal to an essential self that remains unchanged beneath the casual transformations effected by disguise and theatrical imposture or driven by the powerful currents of desire and fear. Responding to Francisco’s applause, Vitelli at first envisages his prospective martyrdom as a histrionic performance of heroism, at the sight of which ‘a thousand full-crammed theaters / Should clap their eager hands to witness that / The scene I act did please’ (4.3.22–4), but then insists that it is proof of something much less ephemeral: ‘’Tis not in man / To change or alter me’ (ll. 53–4). Even his torturer and intended

48

It is possible that Massinger’s emphasis on Vitelli’s status was influenced by Cervantes’ story ‘The Liberall Lover’, Book 3 of Exemplarie Novells (trans. 1640), where the lady Halima is impressed by a rumour that her new slave, ‘Mario’, is actually ‘a Gentleman’ (p. 147).

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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado executioner, Asambeg, is made to marvel that this Christian ‘will not be altered in his soul for any torments / We can afflict his body with!’ (5.3.35–6). Donusa’s progress through the play follows a similar trajectory. Vitelli’s theatrical metaphors call to mind his earlier dismissal of the princess’s amorous overtures as ‘a personated passion’ (2.4.67), as well as her vain insistence on the veracity of the performance as ‘A part, in which I truly act myself’ (l. 74); and this echo is a reminder that the turns of fortune involve the heroine in a parallel set of transformations, which (like Vitelli’s) culminate in another of the play’s spectacular changes of costume, when in Act 4, scene 2, Asambeg orders her to be stripped of her court finery and to be brought in ‘In black, as to her funeral’ (4.2.65). Donusa’s mourning dress is symbolically linked both to the deadly vehicle of ‘the Grand Signior’s pleasure’ – the sinister ‘black box’ which contains her sentence (4.2.57 sd., 59) – and to the Black Tower from which the condemned Vitelli makes his escape in the penultimate scene; but the princess’s ‘sad livery of death’ (4.2.75) proves (like her lover’s discarded ‘livery / Of . . . pleasure’) to stand for a more inward metamorphosis: for as Vitelli persuades the Princess to ‘turn apostata’ (4.3.160), her black gown becomes the penitential robe that announces her death to the world of sin, before being identified in 5.3 as the wedding garment which – together with her ‘choicest jewel’ (5.1.25), the baptismal cross with which Vitelli marks her forehead – signifies her union not merely with her chosen husband, but with the Church whose agent he now is. It is just at this point, as bride and groom prepare to welcome martyrdom, that Massinger adds one last extravagant counterturn to his plot. For scarcely has Donusa’s sacramental transformation been effected, than the virtuous Paulina denounces it, in language that once again recalls Calvinist indictments of Church ritual, as empty theatre: Who can hold her spleen When such ridiculous follies are presented, The scene, too, made religion.

5.3.140–42

Having up to now resisted Asambeg’s tyrannic efforts to make her ‘turn apostata to the faith / That she was bred in’ (1.1.138–9), Paulina suddenly announces herself ready to ‘turn Turk’ (l.152), demanding that the renegade sultana change places with her, becoming her slave, while she adorns herself in Donusa’s ‘choice and richest jewels’ (l. 166). Only one short scene elapses, however, before Paulina is made to reveal that this seeming transformation was merely a last theatrical imposture: no way was left me To free you from a present execution But by my personating that which never My nature was acquainted with.

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5.5.4–7

Michael Neill Like her revelation of Vitelli’s true identity a few lines later, Paulina’s invocation of her ‘nature’ appeals to an idea of essential, unchanging selfhood that seems amply warranted by her resolute defiance of all Asambeg’s efforts to make her yield to his importunities and ‘turn Turk’. But then we remember that it was only the mysterious power of Francisco’s relic that guaranteed such constancy, just as it was the sacramental influence of which he is the conduit that enabled the conversion of Donusa, the recovery of Vitelli’s and Grimaldi’s true selves, and their escape from the world of ceaseless transformation and exchange epitomised by the seductions of the Turkish marketplace. The way in which Massinger’s plot comes to ‘turn’ on episodes of conversion or religious ‘turning’, demonstrates a crucial symmetry between the play’s doctrinal stance and its dramatic form. It is not, I think, coincidental that the conventional ‘turn and counterturn’ of tragicomic design should have become the vehicle for a drama of apostasy and conversion just as English Arminianism was beginning to test its strength against Calvinist orthodoxy – nor is it surprising that tragicomedy should have gone on to become such a favoured genre during the Arminian ascendancy. For if the impossibility of effective repentance in works like Dr Faustus and The Duchess of Malfi points to a natural affinity between Calvinism and tragedy, then the sudden reversals and metamorphoses of The Renegado suggest tragicomedy may have its own doctrinal affiliations. Once we are alert to them, some interesting formal patterns begin to emerge. I have tried to show how the structural bond that ties turning-as-conversion to turning-as-peripety is linked to a pervasive preoccupation with various forms of metamorphosis, disguise, and theatrical pretence, in which the superficial alterations produced by the ‘juggling sorceries’ and enchantment of infidel Turks are contrasted with the deeper transformations wrought by sacramental Christian magic. This patterning becomes especially conspicuous in the light of Massinger’s changes to his source material: not just the unlikely invention of a Jesuit priest as the moral anchor of his fable, but the prominence which the title gives to the role of the renegado himself, and the relocation of the play’s symbolic centre from the prison of Algiers where Cervantes’ Spanish captives languish to the Tunis bazaar where Massinger’s Venetians drive their ambiguous trade.

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11 Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages LUCY MUNRO

Every Writer must gouerne his Penne according to the Capacitie of the Stage he writes too, both in the Actor and the Auditor.1 I wish you had kept better form. I like form as much as matter.2

J

AMES SHIRLEY’S narrative poem, Narcissus, or the Self-Lover, was accompanied on its publication in 1646 by a selection of ‘PROLOGVES AND EPILOGVES; Written to severall Playes Presented in this Kingdom, and else-where’. These include a series of prologues written in Dublin between late 1636 and spring 1640: ‘A Prologue to Mr. Fletcher’s Play in IRELAND’; ‘A Prologue to the ALCHIMIST Acted there’; ‘A Prologue there to the Irish Gent.’; ‘A Prologue to a Play there; Call’d, No wit to a Womans’; ‘A Prologue to another of Master Fletcher’s Playes there’; ‘A Prologue to a play there; Call’d, THE TOY’; ‘To another Play there’; ‘To a Play there, called the Generall’; ‘To his own Comedy there, called Rosania, or Loves Victory’.3 The playhouse for which Shirley wrote these prologues was built around 1635 on Werburgh Street, Dublin, by John Ogilby, a member of the household of Sir Thomas Wentworth, Lord Deputy in Ireland from July 1633 to March 1640.4 As Alan J. Fletcher suggests, Wentworth saw theatre as an important part of his ‘general program for Dublin’s social upgrading’.5 The playhouse was located 1 2 3

4 5

‘The Printer to the Reader’, in A Pleasant Comedie, Called The Two Merry Milke-Maids (London, 1620), f. A2r. James I to his English Parliament, National Archives, S.P. 14/8, 93, quoted in J.P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge, 1966), p. 41. Narcissus, or the Self-Lover (London, 1646), C3r–D2r. On the length of Shirley’s stay in Ireland see Allan H. Stevenson, ‘Shirley’s Years in Ireland’, Review of English Studies 20 (1944), 19–28; ‘Shirley’s Dedications and the Date of his Return to England’, Modern Language Notes 61 (1946), 79–83. See Alan J. Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Cork, 2000), pp. 261–5. Drama, Performance and Polity, p. 261.

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Lucy Munro in a fashionable area of the city, and the building of an indoor playhouse rather than an outdoor amphitheatre also hints at the relatively sophisticated tone that Wentworth and Ogilby hoped to establish. Ogilby recruited among the London companies, taking advantage of a prolonged outbreak of plague to hire Shirley, at that time resident dramatist for Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, and a clutch of English actors.6 The project may have gained some notoriety in London. A jest-book entered in the Stationers’ Register in April 1636, a few months before Shirley arrived in Dublin, includes this joke: ‘A hireling Player demanded an augmentation of his meanes from the Company, and received a deniall; whereat being much offended he said, I protest if you mend not my wages you shal see me in Ireland within these two dayes.’7 Something of the ambiguous cultural position of Ogilby’s Men and the Werburgh Street playhouse can be seen in a prologue and epilogue ‘at the New house’, written for a play previously produced in England by John Clavell, another playwright associated with the London theatre.8 Clavell is acutely aware of the Irish context within which Ogilby’s Men were operating, writing in his epilogue, Wee as Industrious planters have fenc’d in This litle plott vpon your Land, (twere sin To be ingratefull) as our profeits spring To you, our Lords, w’ele thankfull tribute bring,9

The theatre, with its English patron, manager, dramatist and actors, is like a colonial plantation; however, in a twist on the usual power dynamic, the ‘planters’ vow to bring tribute to the native inhabitants. At its inception, the Werburgh Street project mirrors something of the complexity of ‘English’ and ‘Irish’ identity in early seventeenth-century Dublin; its position was to become still more complex with the later involvement of playwright Henry Burnell, a member of a Catholic Old English family.10 6

7 8

9 10

See Stevenson, ‘James Shirley and the Actors at the First Irish Theatre’, Modern Philology 40 (1942–3), 147–60; Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, pp. 267–71, updates and corrects Stevenson’s findings. A.S., The Booke of Bulls (London, 1636), f. C1r. Clavell lived in Ireland 1631–33 and 1634–37; his only extant play is The Soddered Citizen, performed in London by the King’s Men c.1630. See Alan J. Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 440–1, Drama, Performance and Polity, 262–3; see also Alastair Bellany, ‘Clavell, John (1601–1643)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.ulrls. lon.ac.uk:80/view/article/5551, accessed 8 May 2006]. Another London playwright resident in Ireland c.1635 was Robert Davenport. See G.E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols (Oxford, 1941–68), III, 228–9. Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts, 441, quoting Wiltshire Record Office 865/502, p. 86. On Burnell see Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, pp. 276–7; Deana Rankin, ‘Burnell, Henry (fl. 1640–1654)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [http://0-www.oxforddnb. com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk:80/view/article/4054, accessed 8 May 2006].

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Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages Shirley’s prologues provide a snapshot of the Dublin repertory: revivals of plays by Fletcher, Jonson and Middleton; his own new productions; a variety of lost plays. In many ways – such as its preponderance of comedies and tragicomedies over tragedies, its inclusion of revived plays and, in particular, the revival of plays by Jonson and Fletcher – this repertory is typically Caroline. It is, however, a collection of plays that would have been impossible to stage in London. The revived plays belonged to different London companies: Jonson’s The Alchemist was owned by the King’s Men (and was regularly performed by them in the 1630s), while the Dublin play titled ‘No wit to a Womans’ is probably Middleton’s No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, originally performed by Prince Henry’s Men at the Fortune playhouse.11 It was apparently revised specifically for its performance at Werburgh Street in 1638.12 The two Fletcher plays have been associated with The Night-Walker and Wit Without Money, plays that were revised by Shirley in the 1630s for Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men.13 The Werburgh Street managers seem to have taken advantage of their theatre’s remoteness from London to put together something of a fantasy repertory, picking plays owned by a number of different London companies. Given the importance of tragicomedy in 1630s theatrical culture, it is not surprising to find that plays of this kind were regularly performed by Ogilby’s Men. Three extant plays securely associated with the company – Shirley’s Rosania, or Love’s Victory (known on the London stage and in print as The Doubtful Heir) and St Patrick for Ireland, and Burnell’s Landgartha – are tragicomic in form. Another of Shirley’s Irish plays, The Royal Master, has marked affinities with that genre, and a further tragicomedy, The Gentleman of Venice, may also have been first performed in Dublin.14 Like tragicomedies performed in London, the Dublin plays are self-aware and highly politicised, deploying sexual material to spectacular and troubling effect. However, like the repertory in general, they combine material in a fashion uncommon on the contemporaneous London stage. They are highly indebted to Fletcherian tragicomedy, probably the genre’s dominant Caroline form and one employed by all of the

11

12 13

14

See John Jowett, ‘Middleton’s No Wit at the Fortune’, Renaissance Drama 22 (1991), 191–208. On revivals of The Alchemist see N.W. Bawcutt, ed., The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–73 (Oxford, 1996), 174; John Munro, ed., The Shakspere Allusion Book, 2 vols (London, 1909), I, 443; G.E. Bentley, ‘The Diary of a Caroline Theatergoer’, Modern Philology 35 (1937), 61–72 (69). See Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, V, 1134. The Night Walker was re-licensed for Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men on 11 May 1633 as ‘a play of Fletchers corrected by Sherley’; it was performed at court on 30 January 1634 (Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, p. 179, p. 187). Wit Without Money was performed at court by Beeston’s Boys (who took over Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men’s Cockpit playhouse and much of their repertory) on 14 February 1637 (Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 200). On Shirley’s revision of Fletcher see Cyrus Hoy, ‘The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (IV)’, Studies in Bibliography 12 (1959), 91–116. See Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, V, 1113.

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Lucy Munro London companies to some degree, but they are also infused with other influences. Rosania engages with tragicomedies written by the courtier-dramatists John Suckling and Thomas Killigrew for the King’s Men and Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, plays which might be termed ‘she-tragicomedy’, focusing as they do on the trials faced by their exemplary heroines. These plays were performed at the Blackfriars and Cockpit, small indoor theatres similar to the Werburgh Street playhouse, and it is unsurprising to find Shirley and Ogilby gesturing towards the most fashionable of contemporary experiments with tragicomedy. In contrast, St Patrick and Landgartha combine direct Fletcherian influence with another variant: the insistently tragicomic saints’ lives performed in London amphitheatres such as the Red Bull. These two forms of tragicomedy, associated with different theatres and different social groups in London, are brought together in the Dublin plays. In part, this development seems to have been propelled by Ogilby’s Men’s inability to find a dramatic mode appealing to their audiences. The company’s engagement with various tragicomic modes was also, however, made possible by the playhouse’s novelty, its detachment from London and its effective monopoly on theatre-going in Dublin.

Fashionably Observing the English Scene: Rosania The Dublin prologue to Shirley’s Rosania, or Love’s Victory, first performed around 1639, muses on its own title, saying, ‘Rosania? Mee thinks I hear one say, / What’s that? ’Tis a strange title to a Play’.15 It first suggests that an audience member might think that it comes from the name of a ‘pretty town in France / Or Italy [. . .] call’d Rosania for the store of Roses’, before stating that others that have seen, And fashionably observ’d the English Scene, Say, (but with lesse hope to be understood) Such titles unto Playes are now the mood, Aglaura, Claricilla, names that may (Being Ladies) grace, and bring guests to the Play. (D1v)

Although Shirley assumes the superiority of London audiences, he nonetheless links the two theatrical cultures together, associating Rosania with two English tragicomedies named after their heroines: Suckling’s Aglaura, licensed on 26 January 1638, and Killigrew’s Claracilla, licensed in 1639.16 The narratives of both of these plays focus squarely on the simultaneous chastity and desirability 15 16

Narcissus, D1r. Bawcutt’s discovery that Claracilla was licensed in 1639 suggests that Shirley’s prologue dates from that year (Control and Censorship, p. 204). See Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, V, 1206–7; Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 204. Aglaura was performed at court in tragic and tragicomic versions; both endings were included in the notorious folio edition published in April 1638.

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Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages of their titular heroines. Aglaura opens with the secret marriage of Aglaura and her lover, Thersames, and the question, ‘And will they lye together, think’st thou?’;17 it raises a voyeuristic desire in its audience to see the relationship consummated, only to repeatedly thwart it by means of Thersames’ father’s incestuous desire for Aglaura. Similarly, almost every male character in Claracilla is in love with its heroine; the villainous Seleucus tries to rape her and, when he finally commits suicide at the end of the fifth act, declares, ‘witnesse my heaven which is Claracilla / I fall to love and scorne a Martyr’.18 Although the Rosania prologue suggests that Ogilby’s Men were trying to establish a fashionable English mode in Ireland, the play itself is ambivalent about the ‘she-tragicomedy’ of Suckling and Killigrew. Indeed, much of its plot seems to ironise the gendered assumptions of Aglaura and Claracilla; while Sucking and Killigrew centre their narratives on the bodies of their heroines, Rosania focuses its anxiety on the body of the hero. This was not a new tactic for Shirley: in his first play for Ogilby’s Men, The Royal Master, he refuses to make his recently widowed king remarry, having him declare that he has ‘not paide yet the full tribute / To my Cesarias dust’.19 In a dedicatory verse, W. Smith alleges that women in the audience, ‘Whose nicer thoughts their female minds perplex’ (A4v), were discontented with this development: Say they, what makes the King in his dispose So Icy-temperd, as he frankly throwes Freedome on all except himselfe? Contrives The way for other men to purchase wives? Takes joy to forward propagation, By Nuptiall knot, yet to himselfe ties none? (B1r)20

In generic terms, the king’s refusal to remarry casts a tragicomic shadow over the play’s otherwise comic conclusion. Rosania carries this tactic further still; reworking his own play The Coronation (Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, 1635), Shirley embodies the play’s tragic potential in its hero’s questionable chastity. Rosania focuses on four characters: Ferdinand, the ‘doubtful heir’ of the London title; Rosania, his childhood sweetheart; Ferdinand’s cousin Olivia, Queen of Murcia; and Olivia’s fiancé Leonario, Prince of Aragon. Having been

17 18 19 20

Aglaura (London, 1638), f. B1r. The Prisoners and Claracilla. Two Tragæ-Comedies (London, 1641), f. F12r. The Royall Master (Dublin and London, 1638), f. L2r. ‘W. Smith’ may be the William Smith who wrote two poems preserved in the Ormonde manuscripts, and the ‘William Smyth’ who wrote dedicatory verses for Henry Burkehead’s A Tragedy of Cola’s Furie, or, Lirenda’s Miserie (Kilkenny, 1645). See John T. Gilbert, ed., The Manuscripts of the Marquis of Ormonde Preserved at the Castle, Kilkenny, HMC 14th report, appendix, part VII, 2 vols (London, 1895), I, 106, 107, 109; Sandra A. Burner, James Shirley: A Study of Literary Coteries and Patronage in Seventeenth Century England (Lanham, MD, 1988), p. 125.

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Lucy Munro smuggled out of Murcia as a baby in order to protect him from Olivia’s tyrannous father, Ferdinand returns to pursue his claim to the throne, is defeated by Leonario on Olivia’s behalf, and is imprisoned. Accompanying him, disguised as a page called Tiberio, is Rosania. When he is brought to trial, Ferdinand’s eloquence and defiance impress Olivia so much that she not only reprieves but also marries him, spurning Leonario. Ferdinand cannot forget Rosania and refuses to consummate the marriage, to Olivia’s fury. The tragicomic conclusion of the play in the marriage of Ferdinand and Rosania is therefore dependent on Ferdinand’s chastity and his ability to withstand Olivia. This resistance is not itself dramatised, but in an extraordinary scene Shirley proxies Ferdinand’s body with that of the disguised Rosania. Olivia calls ‘Tiberio’ to her chamber, hoping to seduce her husband’s servant in revenge for his indifference. In a highly allusive sequence, she playfully swaps gender roles with the supposed page, declaring that she is the man and ‘Tiberio’ the woman. ‘Think’, she tells Rosania, I am the man, and learn a little better, What beauty dwells upon this hand. What softness, How like the Snow, or Innocence it shews, Yet fires my heart with every gentle touch. Rosa[nia]. Dear Madam; would the King would come. Que[en]. This is a happiness that Kings should sue for, And yet there are poor comforts in these Kisses; Let hands preserve Societie with hands, And with their change of whiteness, and of Balm, Make wealthy one another: But let what Was mean’t for kisses meet, and finde out pleasure By warm exchange of souls from our soft lips. Kisses. Madam, how like you this? Rosa[nia]. Madam. Que[en]. I suppose you a Lady all this while, And I the man, our lips must meet again, Will this instruct thee nothing? Ros[ania]. Gracious Madam. Que[en]. And yet this recreation comes short, Dear Lady, of what love might well allow us. Admit you are a Queen, you are not bound To thin your Royal Blood with frost, but as Your power, your pleasure should exceed; nay gra[n]t You have a man (a man said I) that can Keep love alive, and warm a yielding bosom, Yet where from the invitement of your eie, And amorous choice, I am become your servant, You may be a little kinder.21 21

The Doubtful Heir. A Tragi-Comedie (London, 1652), ff. E1r–v.

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Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages Olivia parodies the language of male seduction, complimenting ‘Tiberio’ in exaggeratedly Petrarchan style and insisting on her usurped male identity (‘a man said I’); ‘Tiberio’, meanwhile, confesses her wish that Ferdinand should surprise them, and insists that they should retain their ‘true’ gender roles. Shirley’s debt to Fletcherian tragicomedy is evident here, as he reworks the erotic triangle of Beaumont and Fletcher’s perennially popular Philaster. However, because the audience know that Rosania is female, Shirley is able to capitalise on an ironic layering of gender identities which is only available in retrospect in Philaster. In Rosania, the characters are simultaneously presented as two women (as the play’s narrative dictates), as a man and a woman (as their costume would have been ‘read’ by a playgoer unable to hear the dialogue), as a man in woman’s clothes and a woman in man’s clothes (as they are in Olivia’s erotic narrative), and as two boys (as the actors are beneath their costumes). In his handling of the resonantly named Olivia’s attempted seduction of ‘Tiberio’, Shirley echoes the ambiguous, homoerotic exchanges of Twelfth Night, itself a notoriously uneasy comedy. His treatment of female eroticism can also be compared with the treatment of Kate Low-Water’s male disguise in No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, another play in which a marriage goes unconsummated (in this case because the husband is really a woman), and one seemingly revived at Werburgh Street shortly before the first performances of Rosania. Underlining the scene’s role play, Olivia later tries to persuade ‘Tiberio’ to swap clothes with her and Rosania cloaks her refusal in comic-erotic allusions to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. As the allusions to Venus and Adonis might suggest, the comic sequence quickly gathers tragic potential when Ferdinand enters with the Murcian courtiers and accuses Olivia of adultery, a crime punishable by death under her own laws. The plot replicates the narrative trick of the impossible infidelity employed in Philaster, but the fact that Rosania’s gender is known to the audience produces different effects. Shirley piles irony on irony by having Violetta, Olivia’s waiting woman, hatch a plan to clear Olivia by disguising ‘Tiberio’ as a woman. Then, when Rosania’s true sex is revealed, Olivia tells Ferdinand that she suspected the deception and that she therefore wooed ‘Tiberio’ ‘to trie how long the sex would be / Conceal’d’ (E4r). Like the heroine of Philaster, Olivia is accused of sexual intercourse with a ‘boy’ who turns out to be a woman; unlike Arethusa, Olivia is able to turn the accusation to her own advantage. Shirley’s ironic reworking of Aglaura and Claracilla thus produces a renegotiation with Fletcherian tragicomedy, in which the body of the heroine also frequently carries the weight of the narrative. In Philaster, the chastity of Arethusa, and the impossibility of her supposed seduction by Bellario, is key to the reversals of the final scenes, in which the happy and politically settled ending is contrived. Rosania, in contrast, focuses on the body of the hero, his dubious political legitimacy mirrored by his uncertain sexual loyalty. This process is emphasised in the twists and turns of the final act, which focus on 181

Lucy Munro the doubtful heir’s progress to political legitimation, and, finally, a marriage to Rosania which is deferred until after the play’s close.

This Story Shall Not Fall So: St Patrick for Ireland A rather different strategy is employed in St Patrick for Ireland. Where Shirley’s other prologues grumble about the limitations of the Dublin spectators, the prologue to St Patrick has a slightly desperate tone: We know not what will take, your pallats are Various, and many of them sick I feare: We can but serve up what our Poets dresse, And not considering cost, or paines to please; We should be very happy, if at last, We could find out the humour of your taste, That we might fit, and feast it, so that you Were constant to your selves, and kept that true.22

It has generally been assumed that St Patrick, with its self-consciously Irish theme and setting, was calculated to appeal to these spectators. Ogilby’s Men certainly attempted to engage with their audience through ‘local’ material elsewhere: the Werburgh Street repertory included plays called The Irish Gentleman and (possibly) The Merchant of Dublin, and Landgartha capitalises on its audience’s knowledge of Irish affairs.23 The sub-plot of Rosania, in which the Captain induces a pair of citizens to whom he owes money to convert themselves first into soldiers and then into courtiers, may represent tensions between tradesmen and army officers in Dublin.24 The repertory of Ogilby’s Men thus presents a complex negotiation between a desire to import English forms and to mould an audience’s taste, and a perceived need to cater to local issues and tastes. Oddly enough, the subject matter of St Patrick for Ireland can also be directly associated with the concerns of Shirley’s erstwhile patron in London, Queen Henrietta Maria. In autumn 1638 Henrietta Maria wrote to Wentworth 22 23 24

St. Patrick for Ireland. The First Part (London, 1640), f. A2r. Ogilby’s lost play The Merchant of Dublin may date from between 1636 and 1640 or from the 1660s (Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, V, 950–1). See La Tourette Stockwell, Dublin Theaters and Theater Customs (1637–1820) (1938; repr. New York and London, 1968), p. 11; Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, pp. 273–4; Deana Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 100–2. A similar ‘application’ may have been made of Wit Without Money’s treatment of landownership and absentee landlords; for discussion of this play in an English context see Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (Amherst, 1994), pp. 80–3. I am very grateful to Dr McMullan for this suggestion, and for his careful reading of a draft of this essay.

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Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages in her own hand, asking that he restore the shrine at St Patrick’s Purgatory in Donegal (which his predecessor as Lord Deputy, Henry Cary, Viscount Falkland, had ordered to be destroyed), telling him that the local people would use it ‘sy modestement, que vous n’aures point de Raison de vous en repentir; & vous me seres un grand Plaisir’ [‘so unassumingly, that you will have no reason to repent of it; and you would do me a great service’].25 He replied on 10 October 1638, advising her to wait for a better opportunity: Being now absolutely taken away, there will be greater Difficulty to restore it, than would be barely to continue and tolerate such a Devotion, prohibited by a smaller Power, or discontinued for a shorter time, than this hath been. Besides the Place is in the midst of the great Scotish Plantations, and I feare at this Time, where some Men’s Zeal hath run them already not only beyond their Wits, but almost forth of their Allegiance too, it might furnish them with something to say in Prejudice and Scandal to his Majesty’s Government; which for the present indeed is by all Means to be avoided.26

The restoration of St Patrick’s Purgatory was therefore a political issue, not merely a matter of private devotion. Henrietta Maria seems to have accepted Wentworth’s arguments; the Lord Deputy wrote to Sir John Wintour on 10 December, ‘I am much bound to her Majesty that is pleased so graciously to interpret me in what I humbly offered concerning St Patrick’s Purgatory; and cannot chuse but extremely much congratulate her Majesty’s Wisdom and Moderation therein’.27 As Christopher Morash suggests, in this context St Patrick may well be a piece of ‘special pleading’ on behalf of the queen.28 If so, the play is highly divided in its religio-political stance: it asserts the positive impact of Patrick’s mission but nonetheless incorporates anti-Catholic polemic in the Spenserian name and characterisation of the villainous Archimagus, the highest authority of Ireland’s pagan religion. As John D. Cox points out, the play may seem to have a ‘tolerating impulse’ – Patrick is accompanied on his first appearance by priests singing in Latin – but in its treatment of Irish Catholicism it is ‘as eager an advocate of English colonization in Ireland as Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland’.29 Shirley distinguishes between (Catholic) Irish on one hand and (Catholic) Old and (Protestant) New English on the other, and accommodates the concerns of his two patrons, the Protestant Wentworth and the Catholic queen. The same divided attention infuses the form of the play; in Deana Rankin’s 25 26 27 28 29

William Knowler, ed., The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Dispatches (London, 1739), II, p. 221. I am very grateful to Karen Britland for her help with the translation. Ibid. Ibid., II, 257. A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 8. The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 200.

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Lucy Munro terms, it ‘bears the marks of generic and geographical strain’.30 While Rosania incorporates allusions to fashionable Caroline tragicomedy, St Patrick has often been perceived as a dramatic throwback. G.E. Bentley remarks that compared with Shirley’s ‘generally sophisticated plays’, St Patrick is ‘conspicuous for its crudeness; it is more like a Red Bull play than like Shirley’s characteristic pieces for the Cockpit and Blackfriars’.31 I would like to take seriously the idea that St Patrick is ‘like a Red Bull play’, and to argue that it combines Fletcherian influence with that of a remarkable cluster of tragicomic saints’ plays first performed at the Red Bull between 1618 and 1622. These include William Rowley’s A Shoemaker a Gentleman (Prince Charles’s Men, c.1618,32 focusing on the early lives of St Crispin and St Crispianus and dramatising the martyrdoms of Saints Alban, Amphiabel, Winifred and Hugh); The Two Noble Ladies (Company of the Revels, c.1619–22, focusing on the conversion of St Cyprian by St Justina); Henry Shirley’s The Martyred Soldier (Revels, c.1619, focusing on the conversion and martyrdom of the Vandal general Bellizarius and his wife Victoria); and Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr (Revels, 1620, focusing on the martyrdom of St Dorothea and the conversion of her persecutor, Theophilus). The Virgin Martyr has been suggested as a source for St Patrick – Cox calls St Patrick ‘a spin-off, of sorts’ from the earlier play – and this assertion gains greater force if we acknowledge Shirley’s use of another Red Bull play, J.C.’s tragicomedy The Two Merry Milkmaids (1619).33 Although St Patrick is perceived as an oddity in Shirley’s dramatic corpus, he also seems to have written the lost Tragedy of St Albans, entered in the Stationers’ Register in February 1640.34 What looks like a one-off experiment may have been part of a longer engagement with popular tragicomedies of the kind performed at the Red Bull. All of these plays fuse comic and tragic elements. A Shoemaker a Gentleman juxtaposes the martyrdoms of its saints – some taking place off-stage, others gorily dramatised for the audience – with the tragicomic careers of the disguised princes Crispin and Crispianus. Although tragicomic in form, The Two Noble Ladies looks towards the eventual fate of Cyprian and Justina, the Angel who appears at the moment of Cyprian’s conversion telling them to travel to Antioch, where ‘shall you both (ere long) in Martyrdome / Mayntayne 30 31 32 33

34

Between Spenser and Swift, p. 99. Jacobean and Caroline Stage, V, 1143. See David Nicol, ‘A Shoemaker a Gentleman: Dates, Sources and Influence’, Notes & Queries, n.s. 50 (2003), 441–3. The Devil and the Sacred, 199; Hugh MacMullan, ‘The Sources of Shirley’s St Patrick for Ireland’, PMLA, 48 (1933), 806–14, pp. 812–14; John P. Turner, A Critical Edition of James Shirley’s St Patrick for Ireland (New York, 1979), pp. 53–4; 57–60. See Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, V, 1142. R.S. Forsythe (The Relations of Shirley’s Plays to the Elizabethan Drama [New York, 1914], pp. 150–2) suggests that this may have been Shirley’s first tragedy, referred to in the dedication to The Maid’s Revenge (licensed 1626; printed 1639); Stockwell, Dublin Theaters, p. 4, associates it with Werburgh Street.

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Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages your faith, and meet the ioys to come’.35 A similar moment can be found at the end of St Patrick, when Patrick declares, ‘’Twere happy for our holy faith to bleed, / The Blood of Martyrs is the Churches seed’ (I4r), and the two plays suggest, as Rankin states of St Patrick, that ‘true narrative redemption is only to be found in death’.36 In an analogous fashion, The Martyred Soldier and The Virgin Martyr are tragic in form, but tragicomic in their determination to look beyond death to the martyr’s heavenly apotheosis. Shirley’s use of spectacle – and in particular his staging of the guardian angel, Victor – also owes much to the techniques of the Red Bull dramatists. At the climax of St Patrick, a stage direction calls for ‘Soft Musick’ (I2r) before the appearance of ‘Victor, and other Angels’ (I2v), who sing triumphantly as they protect Patrick from the snakes summoned by the Archimagus. In A Shoemaker a Gentleman an angel ascends from Winifred’s holy well, accompanied by music, to explain its health-giving properties.37 In The Two Noble Ladies, the first appearance of the angel is accompanied by recorders; a stage direction describes him as ‘an Angell shaped like a patriarch vpon his breast a [red] blew table full of silver letters, in his right hand a red crossierstaff, on his shoulders large wings’ (ll. 1101–3). In The Virgin Martyr, Angelo is revealed in his heavenly glory at the moment of Dorothea’s martyrdom, which is accompanied by what a stage direction calls ‘Loud Musicke’ and Sapritius calls ‘heauenly Musicke’.38 Similarly, appearances of the angels in The Martyred Soldier are accompanied by music and song; at the climax of Act Five an angel ascends singing from Victoria’s prison, heralding Victoria’s appearance as she ‘rises out of the cave white’, and later in the scene two angels descend from the heavens, also singing.39 It is not surprising that Abraham Wright remarked in his commonplace book that The Martyred Soldier was ‘very good for ye presentments and songs by angel; by wch ye people were much taken’.40 Like the Red Bull saints’ plays, St Patrick bears the strains of post-Reformation engagement with saints’ lives and martyrology, a strain which is embodied in the connection of theatrical spectacle and miracle. Nova Myhill notes in The Virgin Martyr a ‘contest between narrative and spectacle as the guarantor of truth’, which is played out in the tension between Protestant and Catholic conventions of martyrology and in ‘the assumptions of an audience that understands the theatre in

35 36 37 38 39 40

Rebecca G. Rhoads, ed., The Two Noble Ladies (Oxford, 1930), ll. 1879–80. The play is preserved in British Library MS Egerton 1994. Between Spenser and Swift, p. 104. A Merrie and Pleasant Comedy: Never Before Printed, Called A Shoo-Maker a Gentleman (London, 1638), ff. C3v–C4r. The Virgin Martir, A Tragedie (London, 1622), f. K3r. The Martyr’d Souldier (London, 1638), f. I1r. Arthur C. Kirsch, ‘A Caroline Commentary on the Drama’, Modern Philology 66 (1969), 256–61, p. 259, quoting British Library Add. MS 22608.

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Lucy Munro primarily visual or verbal terms’.41 The same is true of the other Red Bull saints’ plays and of St Patrick, which perhaps plays for higher stakes in its representation of a saint who converts not only individuals but an entire nation. Interconnected with these plays’ concern with religious spectacle is their disquieting exploration of rape. The Two Noble Ladies juxtaposes the threat of sexual violence and sexual manipulation in each of its plots. Miranda is forced to escape from her father, the Souldan of Egypt, when he proposes marriage to her, and Justina’s conversion of Cyprian takes place when he about to rape her, urged on by the demonic spirit Cantharides. In a comic sub-plot, Cantharides – who shares his name with a common aphrodisiac – makes another woman, Caro, declare love to three different men. The Virgin Martyr and The Martyred Soldier both feature attempted rapes on Christian converts, and an association between conversion and sexual violence is also clear in Maximinus’ casual threat to the convert queen in A Shoemaker a Gentleman, ‘Ile prostetute thy body to some Slave, / And if the issue prosper, make him a Hang-man’ (B3v). In The Virgin Martyr, Sapritius tries to force first his son and then a British slave to rape Dorothea; Dorothea’s imperviousness foreshadows her divine protection later in the play, when her torturers are exhausted before their actions have any effect on her. In The Martyred Soldier the king of the Vandals threatens rape against Victoria, only to find that the camel-drivers he sets on her are either sent mad or are blinded and deafened before they can touch her; stage directions instruct two of them to ‘dance antiquely, and Exeunt’ (H2r). The threat of sexual violence in the Red Bull saints’ plays is thus part of a movement towards either conversion or martyrdom. St Patrick similarly connects religious faith with sexual violence, and with a disturbing kind of theatrical spectacle. While the main plot follows the progress of Patrick’s mission in Ireland, the sub-plot focuses on a love triangle between two princes, Conallus and Corybreus, and a noblewoman, Emeria. Corybreus fails to seduce Emeria, who is in love with Conallus, and, following the Archimagus’s advice, disguises himself as the god Ceancrochi, gaining access to her by wearing a magical bracelet which makes the wearer invisible. He tells Emeria that it is her religious duty to submit to him, and when she resists, saying, ‘I thought the powers above had beene all honest’ (E4r), he replies, ’Tis in them chastitie, nor is it sin In those we love to meet wit[h] active flames, And be glad mothers to immortall issues: How oft hath Jove, who justly is ador’d, Left heaven, to practise love with such a faire one? 41

‘Making Death a Miracle: Audience and the Genres of Martyrdom in Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr’, Early Theatre 7.2 (2004), 9–31 (24).

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Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages The Sun, for one embrace of Daphne, would Have pawn’d his beames: not one, but hath sometimes Descended, to make fruitfull weake Mortalitie. Oh, if thou could’st but reach, Emeria, With thy imagination, what delight, What flowing extasies of joy we bring Your sex, made nice and cold by winter lawes Of man, that freeze the bloud, thou wood’st be fond To my embraces, and petition me To blesse thee with a rape, yet I woe thy Consent. (E4r)

Despite his claim that he is ‘wooing’ her consent, Corybreus signals through his references to classical precedent a willingness to use force that is made explicit in his grotesque desire that Emeria might, in future ‘petition me / To blesse thee with a rape’. When she continues to resist, he tells her, Nay then, what should have beene with thy consent A blessing, shall now only serve my pleasure, And I will take the forfeit of thy coldnesse. Em[eria]. Oh help, some man, I dare not call upon The gods, for they are wicked growne, oh help. Cor[ybreus]. I shall need none, thou thing of disobedience, Thou art now within my power of love, or furie: Yeeld, or I’ll force thee into postures shall Make pleasure weep, and hurle thee into wantonnesse. He carries her in. The Devills rejoycing in a dance conclude the Act. (E4r–v)42

Like the Red Bull dramatists, Shirley associates pre-Christian faith – in this case a mixture of classical and Celtic deities – with sexual exploitation and violence. What is threatened against Christian converts in the Red Bull plays is realised against the pagan Emeria. Shirley also follows these plays in his use of spectacle: a Fletcherian moment, with its queasy combination of seduction and rape, is transformed into theatrical spectacle as the devils celebrate Corybreus’s violation of Emeria’s chastity. The appearance of the Devils serves to link the two plots, reminding the audience that Corybreus’s sacrilegious masquerade as a god has been achieved with the connivance of the Archimagus. While rape victims in other plays lament the devilish behaviour of their attackers, Emeria’s rape is hellish in a far more concrete sense. It is perhaps for this reason that Emeria’s story does not follow either of the standard early modern rape narratives. Her rape does not become the focus of the tragic narrative typified by Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (Sussex’s Men, c.1594?), Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece (Queen Anne’s Men, c.1607–08), 42

These speeches are printed as prose in the 1640 quarto.

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Lucy Munro Fletcher’s Valentinian (King’s Men, c.1610–11) and Davenant’s The Cruel Brother (King’s Men, 1627), in which the victim dies either through suicide or at the hands of her male relatives, her dishonour (and, in most cases, that of her family) being avenged by the very male relatives who in some versions demand her death. Another storyline open to Shirley was the tragicomic narrative in which a victim of rape eventually marries her rapist, as do Meriope in Fletcher and Massinger’s The Queen of Corinth (King’s Men, c.1618) and Clara in Dekker, Ford, Middleton and Rowley’s The Spanish Gypsy (Lady Elizabeth’s Men, 1623). Suzanne Gossett suggests that these plays represent the ‘fulfilment of a fantasy of rape’, the guilt attached to both the act and the fantasy removed by the eventual marriage: ‘rather than being a tragic crime rape becomes a comic error cured by being brought into the social order’.43 Although this pattern can be found in Caroline tragicomedies such as Dick of Devonshire (unknown company, c.1626?) and Arthur Wilson’s The Swisser (King’s Men, 1631), Shirley rejects it. Instead, he adopts an alternative storyline that is also found in William Heminges’ tragedy The Fatal Contract (Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, c.1638). In The Fatal Contract Chrotilda, raped by Clotair years before the opening of the play, pursues her own revenge in the guise of a Moorish eunuch. Like Chrotilda, Emeria attacks her rapist, stabbing Corybreus when he returns to her later in the play. Although he reveals his identity as he dies, Emeria is unrepentant, declaring that she has ‘done a justice to the gods in this / And my own honour [. . .] I am proude / To be the gods revenger’ (F4r). Both plays set up a ‘rape-revenge’ narrative in which the victim not only refuses to die after she is raped, but also pursues her revenge more effectively than her male relatives.44 Emeria is, in fact, more effective than Chrotilda, who is ultimately unable to kill Clotair and is fatally wounded by him; she self-consciously refuses to die, saying, ‘I will live now, this story shall not fall so’ (F4r). Instead, Emeria’s betrayal at the hands of the Archimagus and Corybreus and, it is suggested, the pagan gods, is balanced by her final Christian redemption; Patrick having ‘quieted the tempest in [her] soule’, her fate is seemingly to become a nun and to be ‘Spouse to an eternall Bridegroome’ (I1v). Emeria’s ‘story’ thus combines the tragic and tragicomic rape narratives prevalent in the Caroline theatre; she does not die, but Shirley also rejects the problematic marriage of the rape victim to her attacker. The rape itself remains a tragic act, one which cannot be assimilated into the social order or neutralised as a comic error – it is telling that Corybreus’ death is permanent: he is not brought back to life and his death is not revealed to be false. It is, however, 43

44

‘ “Best Men are Moulded out of Faults”: Marrying the Rapist in Jacobean Drama’, in Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, ed. Arthur F. Kinney and Don S. Collins (Amherst, 1987), 168–90, p. 187. I borrow the term ‘rape-revenge’ from Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London, 1992).

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Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages followed by Emeria’s announcement of her religious vocation; the tragedy of the rape is seemingly followed by the tragicomedy not only of Emeria’s conversion – strikingly figured in terms of the standard comic conclusion of marriage – but also of the nation itself. Similarly, the sinister connotations that theatrical spectacle has gathered in the wake of Emeria’s rape are countered by the appearance of the guardian angel Victor, and Patrick’s defeat of the Archimagus’s venomous snakes. But the play as a whole resists this neat conjunction of genre, narrative and theatrical spectacle, since King Leogarius, who conspired with the Archimagus against Patrick, still remains to be converted at the end of Act Five.

Kind Night-Imbraces: Landgartha Similar generic concerns animate Landgartha, first performed on St Patrick’s Day 1640, which seems designed, as Rankin suggests, ‘as a riposte to Shirley’s vision of Ireland, past and present’.45 Basing its narrative on material taken from Saxo Grammaticus,46 Landgartha reworks both the earlier Werburgh Street tragicomedies and Shirley’s own influences. What Bentley describes as the play’s ‘effeminate tone’ mirrors that of Caroline tragicomedies written for indoor playhouses.47 Like Rosania, Aglaura and Claracilla, Landgartha is named after its heroine, but Burnell’s description of her as a ‘patterne’ for his female readers to imitate, combining ‘Chastity and other virtues joyn’d to beauty, virtue single and manly fortitude in the female sexe’, suggests a role similar to that of Victoria or Dorothea.48 Its use of spectacle is akin to that of St Patrick and the Red Bull saints’ plays: for example, an angel appears to Harrold and Eric in Act Five, accompanied by ‘a sweet solemne Musicke of Recorders’ (I1r), prophesying their political success and Landgartha’s eventual conversion to Christianity. Similarly, while the play’s depiction of Amazons might be compared with that of William Cartwright’s privately acted The Lady Errant (c.1633–35), it is also like that of the Red Bull tragicomedy The Two Noble Ladies, in which the Amazonian Miranda fights bravely and successfully in battle. Like St Patrick, Landgartha mixes questions of sexual propriety with those of national destiny. In the first scene, the extravagantly depraved king of Norway, Frollo – who ‘minds nothing / But whom to kill, or foulely ravish’ (B1r) – appears leading a ‘weeping Lady’ (B1v) who he has evidently just raped. Frollo is quickly and symbolically despatched by Landgartha, but the play’s 45 46 47 48

Between Spenser and Swift, p. 105. See also Catherine M. Shaw, ‘Landgartha and the Irish Dilemma’, Éire-Ireland 13 (1978), 26–39; Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, pp. 275–7. See Shaw, pp. 29–32; Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, III, 97–8. Jacobean and Caroline Stage, III, 97. Landgartha. A Tragie-Comedy (Dublin, 1641), f. A2r.

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Lucy Munro concern with sexual propriety remains as she marries Reyner, the king of Denmark, only to be abandoned when Reyner takes up with Frollo’s daughter Vraca. The extent to which Landgartha’s generic structures are infused with sexual concerns is clear in Burnell’s postscript to the printed text: Some (but not of best judgements) were offended at the Conclusion of this Play, in regard Landgartha took not then, what she was perswaded to by so many, the Kings kind night-imbraces. To which kind of people (that know not what they say) I answer (omitting all other reasons:) that a Tragie-Comedy sho’d neither end Comically or Tragically, but betwixt both: which Decorum I did my best to observe, not to goe against Art, to please the ever-amorous. (K1v)

Burnell echoes not only Smith’s account of the Dublin audience’s disgruntled reaction to the conclusion of The Royal Master, but also Fletcher’s address ‘To the Reader’, which prefaced the first printed edition of The Faithful Shepherdess. Fletcher and Burnell differ in important respects, however, in their approaches to tragicomedy. Fletcher famously writes, ‘A tragie-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie’.49 Tragicomedy in The Faithful Shepherdess functions through a kind of abjection, in which characters and audience experience something of the trauma associated with death but eventually escape its sting. Burnell instead identifies his tragicomic effect in a combination of narrative and tone, focusing not on death but on erotic harmony. In refusing to accept the ‘kind night-imbraces’ of her bigamous husband, Landgartha ensures that the play will end ‘neither [. . .] Comically or Tragically, but betwixt both’, and the dramatist claims that he will not yield to pressure from an ‘ever-amorous’ audience who would prefer to see romantic reconciliation. Landgartha’s refusal to be reconciled fully with Reyner means that Burnell’s play ends in sexual and political stasis. She leaves the stage swearing, ‘I’ll end my life, / An honest widdow, or forsaken wife’ (I4r), but her sister Scania tells Reyner, You know the way to Norway, Sir, and if I might advise so wise a King to follow Us thither, and not slowly: that honourable Obligation would so bind your Queene (Being seconded by us your friends, and reason) That I beleeve what now she does denie, She wo’d then grant. (I4r)

Reyner himself vows that if he cannot regain Landgartha he will commit suicide: ‘(Strucke with my dyre misfortune) my owne hand / Shall send my

49

The Faithfull Shepheardesse (London, [1609?]), f. ¶2v.

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Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages spirit to the Stygian strand’, while a seemingly repentant Vraca tells the audience, ‘seeing I’ve walk’d astray, I will from hence: / By future good to expiate my offence’ (I4v). Her repentance is, however, notably sudden, given that only eighty or so lines earlier she was exuberantly exchanging insults with Landgartha. The last lines of Landgartha thus maintain the uncertain, tragicomic tone of the exchanges that precede them, and the play’s form mirrors its political conclusions. If, as Catherine M. Shaw suggests, the steadfast Landgartha represents Ireland and her wavering husband represents England – the ‘union’ between Ireland and England allegorised as sexual union – then no real solution to their dilemma can plausibly be reached. The play may ‘allegorically incline toward hope for a reassessment of the terms of union’,50 but any such ‘hope’ must be based on optimism rather than experience.

Conclusion As I have suggested, the intertextual experiments of the Werburgh Street dramatists were enabled by the theatre’s monopolistic position in Dublin, where there were no other commercial playhouses. The theatre did not, however, have a monopoly on popular entertainment. In ‘A Prologue to another of Master Fletcher’s Playes there’, Shirley complains about competition from other pastimes: Were there a Pageant now on foot, or some Strange Monster from Peru, or Affrick come, Men would throng to it; any Drum will bring (That beats a bloudlesse prize, or Cudgelling) Spectators hither; nay, the Beares invite Audience, and Bag-pipes can doe more than wit.51

The reference to ‘wit’ is telling, since Caroline prologues and epilogues, particularly those written for indoor theatres, tend to emphasise it as the essential quality of a discerning audience. Just as the sight of the bears attracts a larger crowd than the sight of the actors, so the loud, unrestrainedly vulgar sound of the bagpipes is prized over that of polished dramatic dialogue. Although the company seem not to have had rivals in conventional theatre, they were nonetheless forced to position themselves in relation to opposing forms of entertainment. Rosania, St Patrick and Landgartha testify to the generic fluidity produced by this uncertain environment, as dramatists turn to alternative models for

50 51

‘Landgartha and the Irish Dilemma’, p. 35. Narcissus, f. C7r. On popular entertainment in Dublin see Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, p. 274.

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Lucy Munro tragicomic drama. Like Fletcherian tragicomedy, these plays have a strong narrative investment in female sexuality; however, each reworks this material to different ends and through a filter of later experiments. As I have explored, these plays reconfigure the contours of the genre in ways that were uncommon on the contemporaneous London stage, bringing together influences associated with different playhouses, companies and audiences. Rosania refashions in ironic fashion the narrative structures of Aglaura and Claracilla, while St Patrick turns instead to the innovations of plays such as The Virgin Martyr and The Two Noble Ladies; Landgartha, meanwhile, looks back to the plays of the courtier dramatists even as it responds to and reworks St Patrick. The Dublin tragicomedies thus provide us with a means of rethinking the relationships between London stages such as the Blackfriars, Cockpit and Red Bull. Moreover, the Werburgh Street experiment suggests that we patronise or underestimate the influence of popular modes on this so-called elite genre at our peril, be they the Red Bull plays or Dublin’s pageants, monsters and bears.

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12 ‘Betwixt Both’: Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy DEANA RANKIN

It’s because the Irish have a special gift for tragicomedy, and lord knows you can never have too much tragicomedy. It’s a truism that only an Irishman could make you laugh at three guys being held hostage in Beirut.1

W

HETHER or not you concur with the ‘truism’ outlined above, it certainly seems to have become commonplace to claim that tragicomedy and Ireland are thoroughly enmeshed. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as the full title announces, is A Tragicomedy in Two Acts; many of Brian Friel’s plays, not to mention recent international theatre hits such as Marie Jones’s Stones in his Pockets or Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, have been described, in both critical study and newspaper review, as tragicomic; Verna Foster’s recent study of the genre includes discussion of eight examples of modern tragicomedy, three of which – Playboy of the Western World, The Plough and the Stars, Waiting for Godot – are by Irish writers.2 In what follows, I want to try to resist a very strong temptation: that of making a historical necessity of a modern critical commonplace, offering a national history of this particular genre, and tracing the links between Ireland and tragicomedy back to a seventeenth-century point of origin. Such a point could be plotted as being located somewhere at the intersection of the two small, productive, though very differently constituted, literary circles which 1 2

Review of Frank McGuinness, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, www.ffwdweekly.com/Issues/ 1998/1126/the2.html (consulted 5 March 2006). See, for example, review of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, Time Magazine, 6 January 1992; L. Christy, ‘Stones in his Pockets: How a Tragicomedy became a Legal Farce’, Entertainment Law Review 15 (2004), 228–30; Nicholas Grene, ‘Ireland in Two Minds: Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson’, The Yearbook of English Studies 35 (2005), 298–311; Verna A. Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 135–48, 166–75.

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Deana Rankin formed around John Ogilby and his Dublin theatres: first the Werburgh Street Theatre, established with the approval of the Viceroy, Wentworth, in the 1630s; and second, the later Smock Alley Theatre, established at the Restoration when Charles II appointed Ogilby his official Master of the Irish Revels.3 The very structure of this collection seems actively to encourage such a national historical perspective: a collection in which Spanish, French and Italian strands of enquiry weave themselves around a central tragicomic preoccupation, never quite articulated as ‘English’. But the temptation is worth resisting, in so far as such refusal opens up the possibility of asking an alternative set of questions, and exploring a further set of intersections. By way of a selection of dramatic moments in seventeenth-century Ireland, I want here to ask what territory has to do with tragicomedy, and thus to address the question of geography and its influence on genre. For what is most intriguing about the review of Frank McGuinness’s play, cited in the epigraph above, is not the ‘Irishness’ claimed for tragicomedy; it is rather the fact that tragicomedy emerges between nations, inter-nationally.4 Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (London, 1992), a drama suspended between Ireland and Beirut, tells of unwilling exiles, of hostages abroad. Indeed this particular production by the Liffey Players – a company which takes its name from Dublin’s river, performs only ‘plays by and about the Irish’, but is located in Calgary, Canada – gives even sharper focus to a compelling snapshot of international displacement, and so throws into relief a series of interlinked questions about hybridity, at once cultural and generic. Geographical displacement was, of course, one of Sir Philip Sidney’s chief causes for complaint against ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’; that hybrid, cross-bred genre which continually demands the impossible of its audience: Now you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers: and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear news of shipwreck in the same place: and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke: and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave. While in the meantime two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers: and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field?5

Sidney’s particular criticism of such constantly shifting locations is not simply 3

4

5

See W.S. Clark, The Early Irish Stage (Oxford, 1955), pp. 26–42; A. Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Cork, 2000); C. Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2001 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 4–66 and my Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenth-century Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 96–108, 159–90. Cf. Richard Dutton’s apologetic inclusion of Beckett in his Modern Tragicomedy and the British Tradition (Norman and London, 1986): ‘as an Irishman living in France, [he] is only marginally defined by this context’, p. 6, see also pp. 55–89. Sir Philip Sidney, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, eds, Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973), pp. 59–122 (112).

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Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy that they stretch belief; it is also that they produce an attendant loquaciousness. His complaint is of theatre ‘where you shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other and so many under-kingdoms, that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived’ (113). Prolixity of place, then, produces prolixity of words; this in turn both complicates and transgresses the desired unity of action. Faced with the relentless geographical displacement of the early Renaissance stage, Sidney longs with heavy nostalgia for the classical simplicity of the messenger speech: I may speak (though I am here) of Peru, and in speech digress from that to the description of Calicut; but in action I cannot represent it without Pacolet’s horse; and so was the manner the ancients took, by some Nuntius to recount things done in a former time or other place. (114)

If Sidney is disoriented by the wordy wastage of late sixteenth-century ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’, Shakespeare has little time for such high-minded anxieties regarding Aristotle’s unities. Instead he delights in a profusion of words, instigating his own mesmeric geography as he raids the store of French, Italian and Greek romance to send Perdita to Bohemia, Pericles around the Mediterranean, Prospero to his magical island.6 The long periods of wandering and exile so characteristic – indeed so formative – of Shakespeare’s late romances take on the redemptive function of pilgrimage. Characters journey through foreign adversity to return, albeit bereft, at least safely, home: they turn, with the help of narrative time, tragedy into tragicomedy. As he explored the formation of dramatic character in ‘writers of tragi-comedy (and Shakespeare is always a writer of tragi-comedy)’, W.B. Yeats recognised and categorised this particular genius in a parenthetical remark.7 The positioning of his sweeping judgement, slipped in between clauses, seems almost to prefigure the topographical metaphor of precarious generic between-ness which follows later in the same essay: Yeats’s realisation ‘that tragedy must always be a drowning and a breaking down of dykes that separate man from man, and that it is upon these dykes that comedy keeps house’ (241). Tragicomedy seems, then, to demand not only that playmakers conjure borders into imaginative being, but also that they write, think and imagine beyond these borders, at once geographic and generic. Returning for the rest of this chapter to seventeenth-century Ireland, I want in the first section to consider two rare mid-seventeenth-century definitions of genre – one of tragicomedy, one of romance – composed by two very different Irish writers. The first, Henry Burnell, was an Old Englishman, which is to say a Catholic descendant of Henry II’s twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquest

6 7

See Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford, 1997). W.B. Yeats, ‘The Tragic Theatre’ in Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), pp. 238–45 (240).

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Deana Rankin of Ireland. The second, Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, was a beneficiary of the Elizabethan Protestant plantations, part-heir to a fortune built up by his entrepreneurial father (also father-in-law to Edmund Spenser) Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork. In the second section, I shall examine two variant prologues for a single tragicomedy, as it makes it way between Dublin and London. Composed by James Shirley, and first performed during his residency at the Werburgh Street Theatre, Dublin under the title Rosania or Love’s Victory (c.1638), the play was presented shortly afterwards in London as The Doubtful Heir.8 In conclusion, I will briefly consider a second play to make the journey from Ireland to England, this time post Restoration: Orrery’s Altemira, first produced in Dublin in 1662 and then two years later in London as The Generall. In tracing this journey across three sections, I shall be exploring the ways in which tragicomedy is inflected in both theory and practice ‘betwixt’ Ireland and England across the period. For what follows begins with the desire of both Burnell and Orrery to define and delineate the nature of genre as it arises between nations; then, by way of the anxiety experienced by Shirley, a playwright returning from the cultural dislocation of exile to a home city made strange by absence, the exploration concludes with the triumphant London debut of Orrery, transporting his new Restoration heroic tragicomedy from the cultural margins to the metropolitan, courtly centre. The argument that tragicomedy’s situation lies ‘betwixt both’ is not, finally, specific to the intersection of England and Ireland; this critical journey might also encourage a more global exploration not only of the interplay of geography and the tragicomic genre, but also of the relationship of this mixed form to historical event and historiography.9

I Landgartha: A Tragie-Comedy, as it was presented in the new Theater in Dublin, with good applause, being an Ancient story (Dublin, 1641) was performed in the Werburgh Street Theatre on St Patrick’s Day, 1639. Henry Burnell’s afterword to the published version is both defensive and brief. It also offers, as Ristine has pointed out, an English language definition of tragicomedy unique for the period: Some (but not of best judgements) were offended at the Conclusion of this Play, in regard Landgartha tooke not then, what she was perswaded to by so many, the

8

9

Published as James Shirley, The doubtful heir. A tragic-comedie as it was acted at the private house in Black-friers (London, 1652) and the following year as one of James Shirley, Six New Playes (London, 1653). See Paul Hernadi, Interpreting Events: Tragicomedies of History on the Modern Stage (Ithaca and London, 1985).

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Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy Kings kind night-embraces. To which kind of people (that know not what they say) I answer (omitting all other reasons:) that a Tragie-Comedy sho’d neither end Comically or Tragically, but betwixt both: which Decorum I did my best to observe, not to goe against Art, to please the over-amorous. To the rest of bablers, I despise any answer.10

A brief outline of Burnell’s complicated plot suggests the difficulties that (some of) his Dublin audience faced in making sense of his ‘Tragie-Comedy’. When the play opens, Frollo, the warrior king of Sweden, has succumbed to the dangers of settlement and his army has lost their military discipline. By the end of the first act, he has been defeated and slain by the king of Denmark and his allies, Landgartha and her Amazons. In the second act, against all Amazon and military rules, Landgartha agrees to marry the lovesick Denmark and to settle in Sweden. The third act protracts the view of court life between battles, presenting a classical masque within the play and some more boisterous local Irish colour for the play’s Dublin audience. One Captain Hubha and the one Irish Amazon, Marfisa, dressed in ‘an Irish Gowne tuck’d up to mid-legge, with a broad basket-hilt Sword on, hanging in a great Belt, Broags on her feet, her hayre dishevell’d, and a payre of long neck’d big rowll’d Spurs on her heels’, round off the act as they ‘Dance the whip of Donboyne merrily’ (ff. E3r, F2v).11 The fourth act returns to Landgartha, at a point where her husband has fallen out of love with her and returned from Sweden to Denmark. Two Christian Englishmen, Harold and Eric, bring Landgartha news of her husband’s adultery and try to capitalise on the situation by offering to assist her in battle against him. The fifth act sees Landgartha refuse the Englishmen’s offer. Although pregnant, abandoned, and grieving at the news of her husband’s new love, she sends her Amazons to his aid. Her loyalty causes Denmark, now fallen into the trap of military lethargy which Frollo occupied at the start of the play, to repent. The Amazons win his battle for him and, as the play rushes headlong towards its close, the drive to happy resolution appears to take over. Yet, as Burnell’s sometimes prickly, yet always clear and generically determined afterword acknowledges, the final resolution which some – ‘(but not of best judgements)’ – might expect of tragicomedy is withheld. For the key relationship, that of the emblematic husband and wife – of the King and his mistreated ally – remains ultimately, deliberately, unresolved. Landgartha herself leaves the stage with an ambiguous statement of intent: ‘And as for me (though yours:) I’ll end my life, / An honest widdow, or forsaken wife’ (f. I4r). Her sister suggests the king should seek a reconciliation scene; but not yet, and

10

11

Burnell, Landgartha, f. Kv; F.H. Ristine, English Tragi-comedy, Its Origin and Development (New York, 1910), p. 137. Guarini’s Compendio della Poesia Tragicomica (1601) was published in a similarly defensive mode to respond to criticisms of Il Pastor Fido. The specifically named dance links the scene to Ben Jonson’s ‘Irish Masque’, C.H. Herford, P. and E. Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925–52), IX, p. 401.

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Deana Rankin certainly not on stage: resolution comes later. Burnell’s ending – as he terms it, ‘betwixt both’ – leaves the adulterous king, recently saved from disgrace by his estranged wife, repentant yet facing an uncertain future; on stage, but in all important respects both alone and divided from himself. To coin the rhythm of Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King, the audience are left with a husband and no husband, a wife and no wife, a tragicomedy and yet no tragicomedy. Landgartha, as its full title cited above suggests, is a play caught between genres. The ‘Tragie-Comedy’ sits in tense relationship with the ‘Ancient story’ it represents. Rather than beguile the audience with one dramatic event – the complex interwoven plotting which tells the tale of one battle lost, one love won – Burnell follows the linear chronological structure of history. Abandoning the multi-stranded teleology of drama, Burnell recounts, act by act, a sequential historical narrative, withholding the resolution, and so leaving his audience with unfinished business. As the afterword makes clear, this left some in the audience unfulfilled: the suspense on which successful theatre relies, and tragicomedy more so than any other genre, some might say – the final revelation of birth, the arrival of the army, the finding of the father, the fulfillment of prophecy – is nowhere to be found. Burnell’s afterword to the reader of his play claims that this conclusion is no mistake; it is, rather, the point: ‘a Tragie-Comedy sho’d neither end Comically or Tragically [. . .]’. The hybrid term which names the genre does not describe a move from one form to the next, from the first of its constituent parts to the second: it is not tragedy-then-comedy one after the other. It is, rather, a properly hybrid form which remains deliberately undecided even – perhaps especially – in conclusion: ‘neither . . . or . . . but betwixt both’. The argument is strongly articulated here as counter-argument; the reception of Burnell’s play seems to have fallen between stools. On the one hand, there are the ‘overamorous’ and ‘the bablers’, whose taste for easy resolutions exemplified by the concluding marriages of comedy he affects to despise. On the other there are those ‘(not of best judgements)’, but who ought to know better. They ought to exercise their ‘judgements’, to understand the rules of ‘Decorum’, and the precepts of ‘Art’. They ought, in other words, to bring their classical training to bear on Landgartha, but as they do not, they have misunderstood his play. Within its local Irish context, Burnell’s claim concerning the constitutive inconclusiveness of his chosen genre has a further specific and political force. For Landgartha attempts to give courtly shape to Old English aspirations of playing a fuller part in the government of Ireland.12 It declares that, despite their doubly marginal position as Catholic subjects in a sister-kingdom, the

12

See A. Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625–42 (London, 1966); N. Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001); and my Between Spenser and Swift, pp. 75–116.

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Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy Old English, like Landgartha, remain loyal servants of the (English) king. For all its ancient Scandinavian setting, then, Landgartha has a documentary immediacy in its theme and composition; the movement between ancient Norway and Sweden does not so much mirror as triangulate the contemporary relationship of England and Ireland. The question at the heart of the play is that of international relations: how to manage the still incomplete transition between war and settlement. There is also a further intriguing international resonance to Burnell’s brief but unique moment of tragicomic self-reflection. It is impossible to ascertain if he himself had read any of the various texts generated by La Querelle du Cid. It is, however, highly likely that news of that spectacular argument about Corneille’s violation of the rules of generic ‘decorum’ had spread to Dublin. Corneille’s decision, at the close of Le Cid, to invoke, but defer still further, beyond the end of the play, the marriage between the Princess Chimène and her father’s murderer, Don Rodrigue, was already a cause célèbre. Le Cid was tremendously popular among the London courtly theatre set: Joseph Rutler translated and published it in English very soon after its first performance in Paris and his version was performed in 1637 at James Shirley’s former home, the Cockpit Theatre. But English tastes could not, it seems, leave the play alone: Rutler went on to produce an English sequel which brought to fruition the happy ending which Corneille had deliberately declined to stage.13 Conversations about Le Cid might well have taken place among the literary coterie which had coalesced around James Shirley during his residency at the Werburgh Street Theatre. If they did, as with so many seventeenth-century Irish events, no records survive. All of the key texts of the Querelle, however, were owned by James Butler, a leading young aristocratic figure of the day. Proud both of his Anglo-Norman origins and of a lineage which could be clearly traced to Henry II’s twelfth-century conquest of Ireland, Butler had nonetheless found it expedient to jettison another important aspect of his family inheritance: his Catholicism. His conversion to Protestantism did much to ensure that he was adopted as a protégé of Wentworth’s. The Querelle texts are listed, along with many unidentified volumes of French drama, in a library catalogue compiled after the Restoration, when Butler was Duke of 13

See A. Gaste, La Querelle du Cid (Rouen, 1894) and, for a succinct discussion of French classical arguments and their relevance to English tragicomedy, together with the central texts and David L. Hirst, Tragicomedy: The Critical Idiom (London and New York, 1984), pp. 48–61. The British Library copy of Rutler’s translation, The Cid a Tragicomedy is dated 26 January 1637; in France Le Cid was entered for publication on 21 January 1637. Rutler’s 1640 MS sequel was described as ‘A Tragi-comedy’. In it, Chimène’s father, presumed dead, returns, thus licensing the marriage. For a discussion of French translations of Corneille on the Dublin stage after the Restoration, see my ‘ “If Egypt now enslav’d or free, A Kingdom or a Province be”: Translating Corneille in Restoration Dublin’ in Sarah Alyn Stacey and Véronique Desnain (eds), Culture and Conflict in Seventeenth-century France and Ireland (Dublin, 2004), pp. 194–209.

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Deana Rankin Ormond and served as Viceroy himself.14 Burnell’s attempt to invoke the ‘Decorum’ of tragicomedy in defence of his play is tantalisingly contemporaneous with the French Querelle. That this young member of an emerging group of Catholic intellectuals and writers in Ireland seems to be just as aware of the literary as of the political battles being waged in the rest of Europe is intriguing. That he finds it useful to draw on the key terms of such debates to formulate a critical defence of his ‘tragicomedy’ against the ‘bablers’ of his home city reminds us that this particular genre has always thrived, grown, and been shaped between cultures. Some fifteen years later, Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery published the first volume of Parthenissa, the first romance to be published in English after the French model of Madame de Scudéry. Here, then, is another work written, in geographical terms, between Ireland and England, triangulated by France. If Orrery’s hagiographic biographer is to be believed, the inter-national dimension to the romance is quite specifically literal: he broke off work on Parthenissa in England when Cromwell forced him out of quiet retirement to join the 1649 campaigns in Ireland. The first volume was long believed to have been published practically on the Irish battlefield, in Waterford, 1651.15 In generic terms, Orrery was working between French and English models; and if Burnell invoked the ‘betwixt both’ quality of his chosen form, Orrery’s venture into French romance seems similarly to produce a defence of this allied genre: in a form not quite ‘betwixt’ but ‘mixt’. Beginning with a very personal tale of literary influence, Orrery shapes his own engagement with romance as an education in readerly discernment: In the Perusall of those Bookes, I mett with the names, & some of the Actions, of those Hero’s, whome I had heard off, in the Scoole; This gave me a passionate desire to separate the Truth from the Fixion, in the effecting whereof, I became as much a Freind to readeing, as I had bin an Enemy to it.16

He then proceeds to defend romance in generic terms. Moving beyond Burnell’s essentially dramatic terms, he invokes the parallel example of ‘history’: Historyes are for the most Part but mixt Romances, and yet the Pure Romance Part, may be as Instructive as, if not more than, the Historicall; since ’tis not the Truth of a wise Councell or Ingenious Designe which invites Men to an immitation thereof, but the Rationallity and Probability of it, whither it be reall or Imaginary; had the Histories of Caesar or Hanniball bin as meere a fable as

14 15 16

Calendar of the manuscripts of the marquis of Ormonde, 8 vols (London, 1902–1920), VII, p. 515. See Dave Edwards, The Ormond Lordship in County Kilkenny, 1515–1642 (Dublin, 2004). T. Morrice, A Collection of the State Letters of the Right honourable Roger Boyle (London, 1742), p. 17. See also my Between Spenser and Swift, pp. 151–54, 180–81. Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, Parthenissa, A Romance (London, 1655), fols I, Av, A2v–Br.

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Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy they are the Contrary, we might yet have Deriv’d from thence as much instruction as wee now can, or doe. (I, f. Br)

Echoing Sidney’s hierarchy of writerly endeavour, Orrery’s defence invokes rationality and probability over documentary truth; he asserts the value of the means of the dramatist and the romance writer over the ends of the historian. Romance offers, Orrery argues, greater educational, which is to say exemplary, potential: Besides Romances tell us what may be, whereas true Historyes tell us what is, or has bin, – now what may be, is more uncircumscrib’d than what is, or has bin, and consequently affoards a Larger Feild for instruction, and invention. (ibid.)

But Orrery’s preface protests too much. For if Landgartha’s dramatic form is dangerously close to being stretched out of shape by Burnell’s desire to represent an ‘Ancient story’, in Parthenissa the tension between romance and unfolding history is evident throughout and threatens at times to hijack the reader’s attention. The narrative focuses on the border kingdoms of Parthia and Armenia and the encroaching threat of the Roman Empire; it is a tale of colonial wars further complicated by domestic incident, as the opposing princes of the two kingdoms become the best of friends, but are duty-bound to obey self-interested kings. In other words, Parthenissa does far more than simply carry echoes of Orrery’s Irish campaigns; contemporary history appears at times to be inscribed all too clearly on its pages, the diversion of Middle Eastern romance not so much allegorical of, as subject to, highly fraught contemporary Irish event. In Artavades’ account of the fierce war between neighbouring kingdoms, for instance, the king of Armenia takes the Parthian city of Offala, giving the inhabitants twenty-four hours to leave. The consequences are Cromwellian in their brutality: For Artabazus Souldiers, whether to revenge their Companions deaths at the precedent Battell, or out of some dispute which happen’d betwixt those of the Army and the Garrison [. . .] put all that were in Offala as well Citizens and Souldiers most barbarously to the Sword. (I, 89)17

The specifics of dispute between the ‘Army and the Garrison’ could be drawn from the Cromwellian campaigns in Drogheda, or Waterford, or Limerick – ‘Offala’ and Offaly are not so far apart. Like Burnell, Orrery brings his foreign historical romance wanderings home to roost; like Landgartha, Parthenissa is thoroughly embedded in contemporary Irish history. A tragicomedy of ancient Scandinavia and a romance of Middle Eastern 17

See T. Birch (ed.), The Works of Robert Boyle, 5 vols (London, 1744), VI, p. 50. Further examples are discussed in John Kerrigan, ‘Orrery’s Ireland and the British Problem, 1641–1679’, in D.J. Baker and W. Maly (eds), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 197–225.

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Deana Rankin empires, both penned by writers who inhabit the fraught space between sister-kingdoms, who draw their literary inspiration from international sources, and who filter their generic sensibility through Parisian courtly culture. This sense of geographical dislocation, this awareness that they are not quite of the London world, might be said to encourage in turn a sense of generic self-consciousness. There is an awareness in the author that it might be useful to explain not just the generic rules, but also the nature of his particular innovations to those fellow authors, educated readers and audiences whom he suspects are more at home in the metropolitan cultural mainstream than he. From such assertions produced at a geographical distance, we turn now to ask what happens when just such a metropolitan writer returns from temporary ‘exile’ in Ireland; what happens when that most prolific of mid-seventeenthcentury writers of what we now recognise as English tragicomedy, James Shirley, brings his experience of the Dublin stage back home to London?

II Shirley’s Rosania or Love’s Victory was probably produced in Dublin in 1638. At some time, possibly in the same year, certainly before the outbreak of Civil War and the closure of the theatres in 1641, it was also presented in London. The play text, so far as we can judge, remained the same. It retained the same complex convolutions of plot: the would-be usurper Ferdinand, who raises a rebellion against a newly crowned queen, eventually turns out to be the rightful, bloodline inheritor of the throne; along the way, Ferdinand’s new ‘wife’, the queen, fed up with their unconsummated marriage, tries to seduce his ‘page’, Ferdinand’s cross-dressed lover, Rosania. The main plot is almost hijacked by a complex ‘soldier sub-plot’ in which a captain teaches the city merchants who are relentlessly chasing his debts a lesson in how to treat soldiers. Finally, in perhaps Shirley’s most contrived tragic-comic ending, two revolutions take place within two scenes: Ferdinand and Rosania are first defeated, but then the apparently hostile enemy leader is revealed, by the dramatic removal of a false beard, to be Rosania’s father in disguise: the lovers are reunited again and all is redeemed. Ferdinand’s attempt to sum up the action in the final lines is suitably breathless: Our story hath been full of changes, but love Hath met a glorious victory, and tied Our souls together with most firm embraces.18

18

A. Dyce and W. Gifford (eds), The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, 6 vols (New York, 1966), IV, pp. 275–362 (360). Marvin T. Herrick comments on the complexities of the plot in Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France and England, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, vol. 39 (Urbana, 1955), pp. 301–2.

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Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy When this fast-paced plot is transported to London, the title changes to The Doubtful Heir, a tragicomedy. It is with this generically specific subtitle that the play is entered into the Stationers’ Register in 1640 and eventually published in 1652 under the rule of that – to Shirley, doubtless – irredeemably ‘doubtful heir’, Oliver Cromwell. Along with this shift of location and change of title goes a change of prologue (IV, pp. 276–77).19 The two prologues are both, albeit in very different ways, self-consciously concerned with the intersection of genre and geography. The Dublin prologue plays upon the Dublin title: Rosania or Love’s Victory. It begins with an extended imagined conjecture among well-travelled but ultimately ill-informed ‘wits’ about the meaning of the title: ROSANIA? Methinks I hear one say, What’s that? ’Tis a strange title to a play. One asks his friend who late from travel came, What ’tis? Supposing it some country’s name: Perhaps says, ’tis some pretty town in France Or Italy, and wittily discloses, ’Twas called Rosania, for the store of roses. A witty comment: – others that have seen, And fashionably observ’d the English scene, Say, (but with less hope to be understood) Such titles unto plays are now the mood, Aglaura, Claricilla, – names that may (Being ladies) grace, and bring guests to the play.

The coordinates of this wondering and wandering are those of Romance: small towns in France and Italy. But they are also those of the metropolitan socialite, who has recently attended Sir John Suckling’s Aglaura (London, 1638) at Blackfriars, or Thomas Killigrew’s Claricilla (London, 1641) at Drury Lane. To counter such conjectures, perhaps especially those made by the ill-qualified men of mode who ‘fashionably observe’ and claim to understand the ‘English scene’, Shirley turns to what he terms ‘honest English’. Forget the romantic mysteries of ‘Rosania’, he tells his audience, focus on the subtitle ‘LOVE’S VICTORY’. For that is what ensures the comic ending: ‘Fear not the war, the victory is your’s / The battle will be ended in two hours.’ Ireland is nowhere referred to by name in this prologue, but the ghosts of Spenser, Sidney and other Elizabethan commentators on Ireland and Irishness haunt Shirley’s explications. Protective of his audience, he writes: ‘Not the least rude uncivil language shall / Approach your ear, or make one cheek look pale.’ By implication and association the ‘rude uncivil language’ which Shirley’s ‘honest English’ seeks to drive from the stage is Irish. Shirley’s language of generic explanation and clarity is championed against the slippery, 19

Both prologues were published in James Shirley, Poems (London, 1646), pp. 148, 154.

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Deana Rankin insecure forms and definitions not just of romance, but also of Irishness.20 And yet even as he invokes this apparent danger, Shirley also offers assurance. The Dublin audience Shirley addresses is a civilized and sophisticated one; they recognise both the hazards and the delights of romance, and of generic play. When Shirley opens his London ‘Prologue, spoken at the Globe’ with the apology that ‘Our author did not calculate this play/ For this meridian’, we might expect him to elaborate further on the transfer of The Doubtful Heir – now firmly generically defined as ‘a tragicomedy’ – from Dublin to London. In the event, however, he is referring to a much more traumatic transfer: the move from the north to the south of the river, when a play suited to the seated silent audience of Blackfriars finds itself relocated to the boisterous Globe. The feminised romance-style meanderings of the Dublin prologue are obliterated as Shirley, for all that he is in London once more, finds himself not quite at home in Shakespeare’s theatre, south of the river, home of a very different kind of tragicomedy: he did not mean For the elevation of your poles, this scene. No shews, no dance, and what you most delight in, Grave understanders, here’s no target-fighting Upon the stage, all work for cutlers barr’d; No bawdry, nor no ballads; this goes hard; But language clean; and what affects you not, Without impossibilities the plot: No clown, no squibs, no devil in’t.

Those elevating ‘poles’, the ‘grave understanders’, the ‘target-fighting’ and ‘cutlers’, the ‘bawdry’, the ‘going hard’ all invoke, even if under the sign of negativity, a thoroughly hostile theatre audience, steeped in masculine ideas of the theatre of action which Sidney so despised. In contrast to the Dublin prologue, which seeks to clarify and console, the Globe prologue offers a strangely negative definition of genre, one which attempts to strike a contract with the audience by explaining what it is not doing, what is not included, what Shirley did not mean to do.21 In his subsequent plea to the more discerning of his riotous audience – ‘But you that can contract yourselves and sit / As were you now in the Black-friars pit’ – Shirley also, by implication, defines his own well-crafted courtly tragicomedy in

20 21

See Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge, 2001). This recalls the negatives used by Sidney in his description of tragicomedy: ‘observing rules neither of honest civility nor skilful poetry’; ‘neither right tragedies, nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns . . . neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportfulness, is by their mongrel tragi-comedy obtained’, Sidney, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, pp. 112, 114.

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Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy contrast to the more extravagant dramatic inheritance of Shakespeare’s Globe. Even in London, Shirley finds himself both generically and geographically a little at sea. His only hope is to appeal once more, as he did in Dublin, but this time a little less knowingly and a little more desperately, to the civilised among his audience: to ‘you that can contract yourselves’, to those who ‘will not disgrace / This play, meant for your persons, not the place’. ‘Persons, not . . . place’: Shirley’s discomfort with this not-quite-return to his old London haunts is palpable. His reflections on the theory and practice of tragicomedy explore how geography and genre feature as thematic concerns for the dislocated dramatist. Echoing the generic concerns of Burnell and Orrery, the prologues revisit and reorient the question of generic selfconsciousness from the position of an English writer working between England and Ireland. Shirley too is left ‘betwixt both’: not simply between England and Ireland, but also between Blackfriars and the Globe. Having heard rumours of the civilised theatre successes of Aglaura and Clarcilla in Dublin, the playwright now finds himself back in London, but on the wrong side of the tracks; still under the curse of geographical displacement and unruly audiences. From the perspective of Dublin, London audiences had seemed undifferentiated, and ideal: they had all looked familiar, like home. But on his return, his Irish experience has left him a rather ‘doubtful heir’ to the still thriving but, to Shirley’s tastes, uncivil English dramatic tradition of Shakespeare.

III In conclusion, I want to consider very briefly one last play, this time by Orrery, which makes the journey from Dublin to London in the aftermath of the Restoration. On 18 October 1662, John Ogilby’s second Dublin theatre, Smock Alley, opened for its first public performance a production of Fletcher’s Wit without Money. That same day, Orrery hosted a private theatrical event. Entertaining the new Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Ormond, at Thomas Court, his Dublin residence, he presented ‘a play of his own making’: Altemira.22 In late February 1663, the same play was publicly presented on the Smock Alley stage, named this time not for the love interest, the heroine, but for the professional hero of the play: The Generall: A Tragi-comedy. In summer 1664, The Generall was produced at the Theatre Royal, London, where it had a successful first run and remained in sporadic repertory for about five years.23 22 23

Mercurius Publicus, 43, 1662, Thursday October 23–30, p. 710. W. Smith Clark II (ed.), The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, 2 vols (Cambridge Mass., 1937), I, pp. 101–64. According to Clark, Thomas Killigrew had had the play in his possession since 1661. Clark also claims The Generall to be the first English heroic play (ibid., I, 30) though this is contested in G.E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols (Oxford, 1941–68), III, pp. 34–35.

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Deana Rankin It was a tale which had instant resonance – painful and pleasurable – with those who assembled to watch it in both its Dublin and London incarnations. For in The Generall, an unnamed king, who has usurped the throne of Sicily, imprisoned its rightful tenant and banished Clorimun – the general of the title – is eventually overthrown when the army joins with the rebels to demand a Restoration. In the first part of the play, the anxiety and confusion caused by rebellion are palpable. Clorimun, at first reluctant to accept the invitation to lead the military coup, finally grasps the nettle and dethrones the usurper. Peopled by generals and officers who are not all they seem, bristling with a vocabulary of rebels and confederacies, riddled with compromises and with reminders that military might can overthrow both good and bad rulers, The Generall offered to public view a tentative, but unmistakable, re-enactment of those bitter wars and disputes which had, until very recently, preoccupied its audiences both in Ireland and in England.24 By way of brief coda to this Restoration performance history, in c.1700, Charles Boyle, grandson of the author, rediscovered his grandfather’s incomplete manuscript and, apparently unaware of its performance history in Dublin and London, severely cut and reshaped The Generall for performance at Thomas Betterton’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre in 1701. The revised text was published as Altemira: A Tragedy (London, 1702): the original Dublin title was unwittingly restored, but the generic classification, along with the text of the play, had been remodelled. This complex late seventeenth-century journey, from private to public stage, from Ireland to England, from family archive back to the stage returns us, perhaps, to the claim I made in the introduction: that I was not going look for a national account of tragicomedy, that I was not going to seek out the originary seventeenth-century moment for Irish tragicomedy, the better to ask what territory has to do with the tragicomic. It is certainly possible to describe the first play by Orrery to appear on the English stage as a tragicomedy rehearsed and rewritten in Dublin, tried and tested on the Irish stage before it was brought to London to launch his career as one of the most prolific writers of heroic plays of the Restoration period. However, when this narrative is relocated within the context of earlier Irish attempts to define tragicomedy as a genre, when it is placed alongside Shirley’s attempts to find his desired attentive audience in an unfamiliar London theatre, what seems instead to emerge is something like a poetics of between-ness, a genre which is intrinsically never quite at home. The rejuvenation of Restoration tragicomedy in the English language does not so much move from the Irish margins to the metropolitan centre, as emerge from a creative space between England and Ireland, Ireland 24

See Nancy Klein Maguire, ‘The “Whole Truth” of Restoration Tragicomedy’ in Nancy Klein Maguire (ed.), Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics (New York, 1987), pp. 218–39; Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge, 1992); Kerrigan, ‘Orrery’s Ireland and the British Problem, 1641–1679’.

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Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy and indeed France, from a silent suspension between the wars, the historiographical lacuna sanctioned by the 1660 Act of Oblivion. Tragicomedy might, then, be defined generically not merely as a form of reconciliation between tragedy and comedy, but also as a means to finding a very particular middle ground: someway between res gestae on the one hand (the acts, facts, commemorations and silences of historical writing), and on the other, fictio (the inventions, coincidences, recognitions and happy endings of romance). Rather than confining this hybrid ‘mongrel’ genre within national borders, and intermeshing its development within the politics of nationhood, it seems useful to allow the poetics of tragicomedy its own and proper place, at once geographical and generic: ‘betwixt both’.

207

INDEX Adams, Robert M. 116n. Adler, Doris 163n. Adorno, Theodor 122, 132 Aeschylus, Eumenides 20 Alemannus, 20 Alexander, Bill 92 Alleyn, Edward 44 Andrews, Richard 30n., 51, 58 Apuleius, 10 Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso 28, 39, 40, 47, 79 Aristophanes Frogs 20 Thesmophoriazusae 20 Aristotle 15–27, 62 Poetics 2, 15–27, 28, 29, 34–6, 38, 39–40, 42, 46, 81, 94–5, 96, 134, 154 Armani, Vincenza 47, 48, 52 Ashcroft, Peggy 92 Averroes 19–20 Baby, Hélène 78 Bacelli, Giralomo, L’Odissa d’Homero tradotta in volgare Fiorentino 26 Bacon, Roger 19, 20 Bakhtin, Mikhail 56 Bal, Mieke 145n. Baranski, Zygmunt G. 29n. Barker, Francis 119n. Barnes, Barnabe, The Devil’s Charter 103 Barton, Anne 130 Bawcutt, N.W. 177n., 178n. Beaumont, Francis 5, 25, 45, 101–14, 118, 119, 134n., 135, 155. For plays in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, see under ‘Fletcher, John’ Beccari, Agostino, Il sacrificio 47 Beckerman, Bernard 67 Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot 193 Beethoven, Ludwig van 121, 122, 123, 128n.

Behn, Aphra, The Rover 157n. Bellany, Alastair 176n. Beni, Paolo 35 Bentley, Gerald Eades 134, 176n., 177n., 178n., 184n., 189 Berg, Sara van den 131n. Bergeron, David 119 Bergson, Henri 152 Bevington, David 95 Biddulph, William 162n. Bieito, Calixto 64n. Billington, Michael 66n., 92 Blayney, Glenn 104–5 Bliss, Lee 107, 110 Boccaccio, Giovanni 49 Bosman, Anston 171n. Boswell, Laurence 66 Boyle, Charles 206 Boyle, Richard, First Earl of Cork 196 Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery (or Orrerey), see under ‘Orrery’ Brandon, Samuel, Tragicomedie of the Virtuous Octavia 103n. Brook, Peter 92 Brown, Paul 119n. Burkehead, Henry, A Tragedy of Cola’s Furie, or, Lirenda’s Miserie 179n. Burnell, Henry 176, 190, 195–6, 205 Landgartha 7, 8, 9, 177, 178, 182, 189–93, 196–9, 201–2 Burner, Sandra A. 179n. Burrow, Colin 16 Burton, Jonathan 161n., 167n. Butler, Brian 137n. Butler, James, Duke of Ormond 199–200 Butler, Martin 108, 130 Caldéron de la Barca, Pedro 59, 63 El alcalde de Zalamea (The Mayor of Zalamea) 69–70

209

Index Caldéron de la Barca, Pedro (cont.) El mágico prodigioso (The Prodigious Magician) 71 El medico de su honra (The Surgeon of His Honour / The Physician of his Honour) 67–8 La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) 63 Calverley, Walter 103–4 Campbell, Thomas 125, 128 Candamo, Francisco Bances 74 Canning, Elaine 71n. Canny, N. 198n. Carey, Henry, Viscount of Falkland 183 Cartwright, William 155 Cartwright, William, The Errant Ladies, 189 Castelvetro, Lodovico 15 Castle, John 166 Castle of Perseverance, The 96 Cave, Terence 25n. Cawley, A.C. 104n. Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quijote 63, 64, 156–7, 174 Los Baños de Argel (The Prisons of Algiers) 156–7, 162, 174 Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels) 172n. Chabrol, L’Orizelle 82 Champion, Larry 130 Chapman, George 23, 23n., 25, 26 Charles I, King (and formerly Prince of Wales) 93, 130, 162, 163n., 165–6 Charles II, King 194 Childress, Diana 116 Christy, L. 193n. Cinzio, Giambattista Giraldi 22–5 Altile 16 Antivalomeni 16 Discorsi 23 Egle 24, 30, 47 Epitia 23 Hecatommithi 23 On the Composition of Comedies and Tragedies 16 Selene 16 Civardi, J.M. 77 Clark, W.S. 194n. Clarke, A. 198n. Clavell, John 176

Clover, Carol 188n. Clubb, Louise George 46n. Coello, Antonio 63n. Cogswell, Thomas 164, 165n., 166n. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 125, 162 Colie, Rosalie 17 Collins, Jeff 137n. Condell, Henry 103, 134, 142 Cooper, Helen 116n. Cooper, John Gilbert 124–5 Corneille, Pierre 3, 11, 76, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 199 Le Cid 76, 77, 79–80, 199 Clitandre 81 Don Sanche d’Aragon 81 L’Illusion Comique 82 Pulchérie 82 Tite et Bérénice 82 Cox, John D. 183, 184 Cromwell, Oliver 203 Croy, Dorothée de, Cinnatus et Camma 82 D’Amico, Jack 161n. D’Aubignac, abbé 9, 79, 83 La Pratique du Théâtre 78–80, 83 Daborne, Robert, A Christian Turned Turk 156 Daniel, Samuel 45, 118 The Queen’s Arcadia 44 Dante (degli Alighieri) 7 The Divine Comedy 28–9, 39, 40 Davenant, Sir William 155 The Cruel Brother 188 Davenport, Robert 176n. Dawson, Anthony B. 128n. Dekker, Thomas The Spanish Gypsy (with John Ford, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley) 188 The Virgin Martyr (with Philip Massinger) 184–6, 192 Denores, Jason 34, 35–6, 38–42, 46, 117n. Desmartes de Saint-Sorlin, Jean, Les Visionnaires 77, 79, 82 Dewar-Watson, Sarah 2, 9, 10, 12 Dick of Devonshire 188 Dilthey, Wilhelm 152 Dixon, Victor 62n. Dolce, Lodovico 47

210

Index L’Ulisee, tratto dell’Odissea d’Homero 26 Donatus 19, 22 Donne, John 7 Dormer, Robert, Earl of Caernarvon 163n. Dowden, Edward 125–7, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133–4n., 135 Drayson, Elizabeth 74 Dryden, John 12, 70, 130, 155 Essay of Dramatick Poesie 10–14 Dunn, T.A. 162n., 166 Durval, J.G., Agarite 81 Dutton, Richard 90n., 194n., 115, 119 Dymock, Sir Edward 102 Edelman, Gerald M. 100n. Edwards, Philip 134, 155n. Damon and Pythias 5, 84, 86–91, 100 Palamon and Arcyte 88 Edwards, Richard 99 Elizabeth I, Queen 44, 129 Estienne, Charles, Dictionarium Historicum, Geographicum, Poeticum 26 Euripides 15, 20, 22 Bacchae 20, 22 Cyclops 15, 22–5, 78 Helen 20 Ion 20 Iphigenia in Tauris 20 Evans, Geraint 3, 8, 12, 13 Evanthius 18n., 19, 22 Fainlight, Ruth 69n. Fanshawe, Simon 85 Felperin, Howard 115, 136n. Field, Nathan 102 Figueroa, Cristóbal Suárez de, El pastor fido (translation of Guarini) 63 Finkelpearl, Philip 102, 111 ‘Flaminia’ 47 Fletcher, Alan 175, 176n., 182n., 189, 194n. Fletcher, John 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 25, 45, 101–14, 118, 134n., 136, 154, 175, 176n., 177, 184, 190 Cupid’s Revenge 101, 109–10, 111 The Coxcomb 101 The Custom of the Country 25 The Faithful Shepherdess 1, 8, 12, 44–5, 84, 101, 102–3, 109–10, 111–12, 119, 135, 154–5, 190 The Island Princess 25, 159–61, 172

A King and No King 107, 111, 114, 198 The Knight of the Burning Pestle 101, 102 The Maid’s Tragedy 107 The Night-Walker 177 (see also under ‘Shirley, James’) Philaster 12, 45, 102, 107–8, 109, 110–11, 113–14, 181 The Queen of Corinth (with Philip Massinger) 188 The Scornful Lady 101 The Sea Voyage 25 Valentinian 188 A Wife for a Month 109 The Wild Goose Chase 155 Wit without Money (see also under ‘Shirley, James’) 177, 182n., 205 The Woman Hater 101 The Woman’s Prize 108–9 Florio, John 44, 58 Forman, Valerie 129 Foster, Verna 4, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 75, 193 Fowler, Alastair 45n., 101n., 102, 103n., 136n. Freud, Sigmund 120 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 120 Friel, Brian 193 Dancing at Lughnasa 193n. Frye, Northrop 115, 135n. Furnivall, F.J. 125, 133n. Gager, William, Ulysses Redux 24–5 Gaines, Barry 104n. Garnier, Robert, Bradamante 79 Gaste, A. 199n. Gervinus, G.G. 125 Gifford, William 162 Gilbert, Allan H. 16 Gilson, Simon 28n. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 125 Gondomar, Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, conde de 165n. Gorgias (of Leontini) 96 Gossett, Suzanne 5, 12, 116–17, 188 Gosson, Henry 106 Gowrie (lost play) 103 Grazia, Margreta de 124n. Grene, David 127–8 Grene, Nicholas 193n. Grewar, Andrew 44n. Grimald, Nicholas, Christus Redivivus 7

211

Index Guarini, Giambattista 12, 28–42, 43, 45–6, 61, 63, 65n., 66, 70, 72, 117, 118, 154, 156, 159, 197n. Il pastor fido 2, 5, 7, 13, 28–42, 45, 46, 47, 84, 102, 117n., 119 Gurr, Andrew 101n., 107 Hall, Peter 5, 92 Halliday, M.A.K. 137n. Halliwell, Stephen 22n. Hammond, Nicholas 3, 8, 12 Harding, George, Baron Berkeley 163 Harington, Henry 155 Harris, Jonathan Gil 170n. Harris, Joseph 81 Hartwig, Joan 117 Hastings, Henry, Earl of Huntingdon 163n. Heminges, John 134, 142 Hemminges, William, The Fatal Contract 188 Henke, Robert 2, 25n., 45n., 84n., 117, 118, 119, 120, 131–2 Henrietta Maria, Queen 163n., 166, 182–3 Henry, Prince of Wales 108n. Henslowe, Philip 95, 159 Herbert, Philip, Earl of Pembroke 163n. Herbert, Sir Henry 158n. Hermannus 19 Hernadi, Paul 196n. Herrick, Marvin T. 4, 19, 117, 159–60, 202n. Thomas Heywood Apology for Actors 18n. The Rape of Lucrece 187 Hirst, David L. 99n. Holdsworth, Roger 104n. Hole, William 17, 132 Holinshed, Raphael, The Historie of England 93 Homer 22–4, 26 Iliad 20, 23n. Odyssey 2, 15, 21, 23–6 Honigmann, Ernst 104 Hope, Jonathan, 4, 5, 6, 84, 103n., 119n., 135n., 140n. Horace 131 Ars Poetica (Defence of Poetry) 84 Howard, Jean 90n., 105, 115, 119 Howerd, Frankie 92 Hoy, Cyrus 177n. Hulme, Peter 119n.

Hunt, Maurice 116n. Hunter, G.K. 45n., 103n. Ibsen, Henrik 127–8 Ishizaki, Suguru 133n., 137n. J.C., The Two Merry Milkmaids 184 Jack Juggler (by Richard Edwards? Nicolas Udall?) 89–91 James I, King 93, 103, 108n., 164, 165–6 James, Geraldine 92 James, Henry 123–4, 129 The Golden Bowl 123 ‘The Middle Years’ 123 Javitch, Daniel 46n. Johnson, Samuel 70 ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ 13–14 Johnston, David 66 Jones, Marie, Stones in his Pockets 193 Jonson, Ben 10, 17, 44, 130, 130–2, 157, 177 Bartholomew Fair 157 ‘Irish Masque’ 197n. The Magnetic Lady 131 The New Inn 130, 131 The Sad Shepherd 17, 131 Sejanus 103 The Tale of a Tub 130 Volpone 103 Works (1616) 9, 131–2 The Alchemist 175, 177 Jowett, John 177n. Jowitt, Claire 163n. Jung, Carl Gustav 127 Kamen, Henry 74n. Kaufer, David 133n., 137n. Kelly, Henry Ansgar 18n. Kemp, Will 44 Kennedy, William J. 32 Kermode, Frank 46, 51 Kerrigan, John 201n. Killigrew, Thomas Claracilla (see also under Shirley, James) 178–9, 181, 189, 192, 203, 205 King, Ros 4, 5, 13, 108n. Kirsch, Arthur 185n. Kirschner, Teresa J. 69n. Knutson, Roslyn 103 Kyd, Thomas, Spanish Tragedy 44 La Mesnardière, Hippolyte-Jules de 79 La Selve, Léandre et Héron 82

212

Index Lamb, Mary Ellen 135n. Laud, William 164 Lea, Kathleen 50, 51, 52n., 53n., 56n., 58n. Lee, Sidney 123 Lenzoni, Carlo 15–16 Lesser, Zachary 5 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 70 Lieblein, Leonore 106 Locatelli, Basilio 50, 51, 52, 53n., 56n. Lockyer, Roger 165n. Loewenstein, Joseph 131 Lorca, Federico García 69 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 97 MacMullan, Hugh 184n. Maguire, Laurie 90n. Maguire, Nancy Klein 4, 5, 6, 84n., 206n. Mairet, Jean, La Silvanire 79 Malacreta, Giovanni Pietro 34, 37–8 Malone, Edmond 124–5 Mareschal, Antoine 78, 80 La Cour 81 Marlowe, Christopher 157 Dido, Queen of Carthage 98 Doctor Faustus 5, 85, 94–100, 168, 174 Tamburlaine the Great 98, 168 Marston, John 45, 118 The Malcontent 45, 102–3, 109 Martinelli, Drusiano 44 Massinger 45, 119n., 154–74 The Bondman 164n. A New Way to Pay Old Debts 163n. The Queen of Corinth (with John Fletcher) 188 The Duke of Milan 163n. The Renegado 6, 7, 8, 154–74 The Virgin Martyr (with Thomas Dekker) 184, 192 McDonagh, Martin, The Beauty Queen of Leenane 193 McDonald, Russ 134n. McGuinness, Frank, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me 193, 194 McKendrick, Melveena 59, 60n., 63, 65n., 68n., 74 McMullan, Gordon 4–6, 10, 26, 84, 103n., 119n., 135n., 151n., 182n. Middleton, Thomas 45, 157, 177 A Chaste Maid in Cheapside 157

A Game at Chess 162–3 The Mayor of Queenborough 112 No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (see also under ‘Shirley, James’) 177, 181 A Yorkshire Tragedy 103–4 Mikalachki, Jodi 119n. Millgate, Michael 123 Milton, John 121 Paradise Lost 121 Mincoff, Marco 116n. Moir, Duncan 66 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 3, 83 Amphitryon 82 Tartuffe 80n. Molina, Tirso de (Gabriel Telléz) 59 Montagu, Richard 164–5 Morash, Christopher 183 Morby, Edwin S. 59n. More, Sir John 93 Moretti, Franco 151n. Mowatt, Barbara A. 115, 120, 134n., 136, 152 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 123 Mucedorus 115 Muir, Kenneth 127–8 Munro, Lucy 7, 12 Myhill, Nova 185–6 Nashe, Thomas 44, 58 Neill, Michael 6, 7, 8, 12, 155n., 159n., 161n. Neri, Ferdinando 50, 51, 54n., 55n., 57n. Nevo, Ruth 119–20 Newels, Margarete 59n. Nicol, David 184n. Nicole, Pierre 82 Norbrook, David 118 Norton, Thomas 44 Nuttall, A.D. 22n., 120 O’Casey, Seán, The Plough and the Stars 193 Ogier, Jean 78, 80, Ogilby, John 175, 176, 178, 194, 205 The Irish Gentleman 182 The Merchant of Dublin 182 Ornellas, Kevin de 127n. Orrery, Earl of (Roger Boyle) 196, 205–7 Altemira 196 The Generall: A Tragi-comedy (London title of Altemira) 196, 205–6 Parthenissa, A Romance 200–2 Ostovich, Helen 130n.

213

Index Ovid 48, 54 Metamorphoses 26 Palfrey, Simon 195n. Palmer, Patricia 204n. Parker, A.A. 68n. Parker, Deborah 28n. Parker, Geoffrey 70n. Parker, Patricia 159n., 167n. Pasqualigo, Luigi, Gl’intricati 48, 50 Patterson, W.B. 165n. Pavel, Thomas 113 Pescetti, Orlando 35 Petrarch 31 Pett, Phineas 108n. Pettet, E.C. 115 Picasso, Pablo 119, 121 Pigna, Giovanni Battista 15–16 Pitcher, John 26n. Plato, Symposium 20 Plautus 60, 64, 78, 84, 94 Amphitryo (or Amphitryon, or Amphitruo) 8, 9, 10, 17, 78–9, 81, 89–90 Pope, Alexander 121 Popkin, Richard H. 96n. Questier, Michael 165n., 166n. Racine, Jean 3, 11, 82, 83, 127–8 Bérénice 80n. Raleigh, Sir Walter 127 Ralph Roister Doister (Nicolas Udall?) 89n. Rankin, Deana 7, 176n., 182n., 183–4, 185, 189 Rasmussen, Eric 95 Rennert, Hugo 67n. Ristine, Frank H. 4, 117, 118, 196–7 Robinson, Benedict S. 158n., 160n., 163, 164, 166, 171 Rogna, Luigi 47, 48 Rojas, Fernando de, La Celestina (or Calisto y Melibea) 64 Rossi, Bartolomeo, La Fiamella 49, 50 Rotrou, Jean Cléagénor et Doristée 80–1 Laure Persécutée 80 Rowley, William, A Shoemaker a Gentleman 184, 186 Rutler, Joseph, The Cid A Tragicomedy 199 Sage, J.W. 66n. Said, Edward 128, 130

Sallebray, L’Amante enemie 81 Sampson, Lisa 34n. Sanders, Julie 130, 131 Sannazaro, Jacopo, Arcadia 30, 32 Saxo Grammaticus 189 Scala, Francisco, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative 49–50, 52, 53n., 54n. Schelandre, Jean, Tyr et Sidon 78 Scherer, J. 77 Schlegel, Johann Elias 70 Schoenberg, Arnold 122 Scipwith, Sir William 102 Scudéry, Georges 79 Seneca 20, 60 Sextus Empiricus 96 Adversus Mathematicos 96 Shaheen, Naseeb 90n. Shakespeare, William 2–6, 10, 14, 25, 43, 45, 47, 51, 57, 58, 99, 103–14, 115–32, 133–53, 158, 159, 205 Antony and Cleopatra 103 As You Like It 43, 52 Coriolanus 103, 133 Cymbeline 3, 5, 13, 45, 49, 57, 84, 91–4, 95, 107–8, 119, 128, 130, 133, 135, 142, 147 Henry VIII 117, 119, 128, 133, 142, 147 Othello 23, 68, 103, 158, 160 Pericles 6, 8, 103–14, 115, 116–17, 119, 130, 133, 134, 135, 195 The Comedy of Errors 84, 90, 94 Hamlet 48, 119 Julius Caesar 125 King Lear 103, 126 Macbeth 103 Measure for Measure 1, 8, 23, 106n., 118, 125 The Merchant of Venice 158–9 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 50, 51, 52, 53–4, 58 The Taming of the Shrew 108–9 The Tempest 2, 5, 6, 25, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51 52, 54–7, 58, 107, 116, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 125, 128, 130, 133, 142, 147, 153, 195 Timon of Athens 103, 126, 127, 129 Twelfth Night 119, 124 The Two Noble Kinsmen 115, 117, 119, 128, 133, 134

214

Index The Winter’s Tale 1, 5, 14, 45, 49, 50, 51, 52, 57, 105, 107, 119, 126, 128, 130, 133, 135, 142, 144–9, 195 Titus Andronicus 92, 187 Troilus and Cressida 1, 125 Shaw, Catherine M. 189, 191 Shell, Alison 162n., 165n. Shirley, Henry, The Martyred Soldier 184–6 Shirley, James 166, 176n., 177–8, 184, 187, 188, 189, 196, 199, 202–3 Aglaura (see also under ‘Suckling, John’) 178–9, 181, 189, 192, 203, 205, 206 Claracilla (see also under ‘Killigrew, Thomas’) 181, 189, 192, 205 The Doubtful Heir. A Tragi-Comedie (London title of Rosania) 180, 196, 203–5 The Gentleman of Venice 158n., 177 The Maid’s Revenge 184 Narcissus, or the Self-Lover 175, 191 The Night-Walker (see also under ‘Fletcher, John’) 177 No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (see also under ‘Middleton, Thomas’) 177, 181 Rosania, or Love’s Victory 12, 175, 177–82, 184, 189, 191, 196, 202–3 The Royal Master 177, 178, 190 St. Patrick for Ireland 177, 178, 182–9, 191–2 The Tragedy of St. Albans 184 Twelfth Night 181 Venus and Adonis 181 Wit without Money (see also under ‘Fletcher, John’) 177, 182n. Shostakovich, Dmitri 121 Sidney, Philip 12, 61, 71, 115, 154, 157, 201 Arcadia 107 Defence of Poesy 10, 11, 17, 194–5, 204n. Sillitoe, Alan 69n. Simonini, R.C. 44n. Sisson, C.J. 127 Snyder, Susan 95 Socrates 20 Solís, Antonio 63n. Solomon, Maynard 128n. Sophocles 45, 46, 121, 127–8 Oedipus Tyrannus 24 Philoctetes 24

Southampton, Earl of (Henry Wriothesley) 44n. Spenser, Edmund, A View of the Present State of Ireland 183 Spondanus, Homeri Quae Extant Omnia 26 Stern, Tiffany 112 Stockwell, La Tourette 182n., 184 Strachey, Lytton 127 Suckling, John, Aglaura (see also under ‘Shirley, James’) 178–9, 181, 189, 192, 203, 205, 206 Sullivan, Henry W. 70n. Summo, Faustino 34, 36–7, 38 Synge, J.M., Playboy of the Western World 193 Tasso, Torquato 43 Aminta 13, 30, 31–2, 45, 46, 47 Gerusalemme Liberata 28, 33 Taylor, Gary 108n. Terence 60, 84 Theocritus, Idylls 84 Theophrastus 19 Thorndike, Ashley 107, 117, 134n. Thorne, Alison 115 Tilney, Sir Edmund 158n. Titian 121, 122 Tononi, Giulio 100n. Treherne, Matthew 2, 12, 13 Trissino, Gian Giorgio 36n. Truchet, J. 77 Turia, Ricardo de (Pedro de Rejaule y Toledo) 8, 13, 61–3, 65–6, 72 Apologético de las comedias españolas (Apology for Spanish Comedies) 61–3, 65–6 Turner, J.M.W. 122 Turner, John P. 184n. Two Noble Ladies, The 184–6, 189, 192 Tyacke, Nicholas 164, 165n. Tynan, Kenneth 92 Ulïbïshev, Alexander Dmitryevich 123n. Uphaus, Robert 115 Uys, Pieter-Dirk 4, 85 Valbuena Briones, A.J. 63n., 65n. Valerini, Adriano 48 Valla, Giorgio 18 Vasari, Giorgio 122 Vega, Lope de 3, 13, 59–65, 71, 80 Adonis y Venus 59n.

215

Index Vega, Lope de (cont.) Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (The New Art of Writing Plays) 59–61, 64–5 El duque de Viseo 59n. Lo fingido verdadero (Acting is Believing) 71–2 Fuenteovejuna 59, 65, 68–9 El laberinto de Creta 59n. El perro de hortelano (The Dog in the Manger) 66–7, 69 El ultimo godo de España (or El postrer godo; The Last Goth in Spain) 72–5 Verney, Sir Francis 161n. Vicar, John 165n. Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham 163n., 165–6 Virgil 32, 121 Aeneid 26 Vitkus, Daniel 159, 161n. Vlachos, Pantelis 133n. Waith, Eugene 155n. Waith, Eugene 45 Walkley, Thomas 114

Walter, Harriett, 92 Wardropper, Bruce 71 Wayne, Valerie 119n. Webern, Anton 122 Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi 163, 174 Weinberg, Bernard 28n. Wentworth, Sir Thomas 175, 176, 182–3 Wilkins, George 5, 103–14 The Miseries of Enforced Marriage 103–6, 112–13 The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre 106 (for Pericles, co-written by Wilkins, see under ‘Shakespeare’) Wilson, Arthur, The Swisser 188 Wilson, E.M. 66 Wilson, Harold 107n. Wintour, Sir John 183 Witmore, Michael 6, 140n. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 136, 152 Wright, Abraham 185 Wright, Louis B. 44n. Yeats, W.B. 14, 119, 195

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Studies in Renaissance Literature Volume 1: The Theology of John Donne Jeffrey Johnson Volume 2: Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan R. V. Young Volume 3: The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature Kisses of their Mouths Noam Flinker Volume 4: King James I and the Religious Culture of England James Doelman Volume 5: Neo-historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics edited by Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess and Rowland Wymer Volume 6: The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes John T. Shawcross Volume 7: Milton and the Terms of Liberty edited by Graham Parry and Joad Raymond Volume 8: George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century James Ellison Volume 9: Shakespeare and Machiavelli John Roe Volume 10: John Donne’s Professional Lives Edited by David Colclough Volume 11: Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Alex Davis Volume 12: Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance: Rethinking Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear Michael L. Hays Volume 13: John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit Jeanne Shami

Volume 14: A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England Adam Smyth Volume 15: John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction Beth Lynch Volume 16: The Making of Restoration Poetry Paul Hammond Volume 17: Allegory, Space and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser Christopher Burlinson Volume 18: Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene Paul Suttie Volume 19: Devil Theatre: Demonic Possession and Exorcism in English Drama, 1558–1642 Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen Volume 20: The Heroines of English Pastoral Romance Sue P. Starke Volume 21: Staging Islam in England: Drama and Culture, 1640–1685 Matthew Birchwood

Studies in Renaissance Literature

Staging Islam in England: Drama and Culture, 1640-1685 MATTHEW BIRCHWOOD ‘This stimulating book will be welcomed by historians, literary scholars, and anyone interested in the history of the English fascination with Islam and the cultural exoticism associated with the East.’ PROFESSOR GERALD MACLEAN England’s close engagement with Islam in political and dramatic life from the inauguration of the Long Parliament until the death of Charles II emerges clearly in this study. It explores the reception and representation of Islam in a wide range of English writings of the period, employing close textual and historical research to trace the development of the ‘Turk’ from the archetype of cruelty and treachery to the complex and often contradictory figure of mid-century discourse. Throughout, it argues that Islam provided a repository of meanings ripe for transposition to revolutionary and Restoration England, a process that transfigured the ‘East’ through the lens of English politics and vice versa. 9781843841272

The Heroines of English Pastoral Romance SUE P. STARKE A key aspect of pastoral romance in Renaissance England between 1590 and 1650 is the shift to the daughter (rather than the son) of the gentle family increasingly becoming the subject of the romance’s attempt to define and illustrate heroism, representing honour and virtue in a changing society where traditional chivalric definitions of honour hold decreasing purchase. Sue Starke examines the typical challenges faced by the pastoral romance heroine: the foundling dilemma; the loop-shaped quest; the rhetorical battle; the chastity threat; the reconciliation of beauty to virtue; and familial reunification. She shows how the characterizations of pastoral heroines in the works of Sidney, Spenser, Wroth, Fletcher, Milton, and Marvell prefigure developments in the representation of female subjectivities more usually associated with the novel. 9781843841241 www.boydell.co.uk www.boydellandbrewer.com

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