Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts

Revisionist Shakespeare

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Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts

PAUL CEFALU

REVISIONIST SHAKESPEARE

© Paul Cefalu, 2004. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6484–X hardback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cefalu, Paul. Revisionist Shakespeare : transitional ideologies in texts and contexts / Paul Cefalu. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–6484–X (alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616–Political and social views. 2. Politics and literature—Great Britain—History—16th century. 3. Politics and literature—Great Britain—History—17th century. 4. Literature and society—England—History—16th century. 5. Literature and society—England—History—17th century. 6. Political plays, English—History and criticism. 7. Social problems in literature. 8. Politics in literature. I. Title. PR3017.C44 2004 822.3'3—dc22

2004044577

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November, 2004. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Anna

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: On Shakespearean Contradictions

1

1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

Rethinking Colonialism in Economic Terms: The Tempest, Captain John Smith’s Virginia Narratives, and the English Response to Vagrancy

25

The Ends of Absolutism: Coriolanus and Jacobean Political Irony

53

Shylock as Homo Sacer?: Mercantilist Fallacies and Subjective Demand in The Merchant of Venice

79

The Early Modern Veil of Ignorance: Natural Rights Theory in King Lear

111

“Damnéd Custom . . . Habits Devil”: Hamlet’s Part-Whole Fallacy and the Early Modern Philosophy of Mind

145

Notes

173

Selected Bibliography

199

Index

209

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Acknowledgments

An early version of chapter 1 appeared in Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 85–118, edited by Leeds Barroll and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Press of the Associated University Presses. An early version of chapter 2 appeared in Renaissance Forum 4 (2000); and an early version of chapter 5 appeared in English Literary History 60 (2000): 399–412, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. I thank the editors and publishers of these journals for permission to reprint these essays. Like all of my work, this study owes much to Richard Strier’s guidance. In the earliest stages of this project, which began as a Marxist study of early modern English masterlessness, Richard offered valuable encouragement. Over the years this study has developed away from that topic, but Richard has continued to offer his support and characteristic insight. Thanks also to Joshua Scodel and David Bevington for commenting on early versions of selected chapters. During the past six years, Lafayette College has proved to be a wonderful place to teach and research. For their ongoing support and collegiality, I thank Susan Blake, Owen McLeod, Lee Upton, Lynn Van Dyke, Bryan Washington, and James Woolley. A special thanks goes to David Schrag for our lively discussions on social theory, which greatly influenced the final direction of this study. Kandyce Fisher, Doug Moore, and the staff at Skillman Library deserve special thanks for expeditiously acquiring loan materials, particularly Early English Books microfilm reels at a time when Early English Books Online was still a fantasy. At Palgrave Macmillan Press, Farideh Koohi-Kamali has offered valuable advice throughout the stages of bringing this study to publication. She has also been exceptionally kind and patient, for which I thank her. I would also like to thank the reader for the press who provided me with such a detailed and helpful report on a very rough draft of the original manuscript. Many thanks also to Melissa Nosal for such reliable assistance. I thank Anna Siomopoulos for making this work possible.

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Introduction: On Shakespearean Contradictions Many of the influential recent interpretations of Shakespearean drama have read the plays in relation to social, economic, and political “transitions” that are held to have occurred during the early modern period in England. Transitional readings often lift from historical context neatly formulated values associated with feudalism and capitalism, and argue that these values are sources for the representation of social conflict in a given play. King Lear has been a transitional war-horse for Marxist critics, who contend that the play charts in microcosm the decline of a tottering feudal mode of production and the rise of social atomism and capitalist profiteering. Other transitional readings of Shakespearean drama have described Prospero as bourgeois; Macbeth as a liberal and refined individual, opposed to the blandness of normative convention and absolutism; Coriolanus as a possessive individualist; and of course, Hamlet as a precociously self-alienated modernist.1 While not all such transitional readings draw on the same theoretical and historical models of transition, I would argue that many rely on some version of a Whig-Marxist account of the rise of capitalism. According to the Whig-Marxist view of history, the rise of “bourgeois individualism” is seen as the progressive and, in the most teleological of such arguments, inevitable outcome of steadily increasing class antagonisms. Christopher Caudwell’s and John Danby’s early accounts have been provocatively refined in recent decades, but it will be helpful to establish these foundational arguments before assessing more recent transitional arguments. Describing Marx’s account of English primitive accumulation, Caudwell writes, In this period of primitive accumulation the conditions for the growth of the bourgeois class are created lawlessly. To every bourgeoisie it seems as if his instincts—his “freedoms” are intolerably restricted by laws, rights and restraints, and that beauty and life can only be obtained by the violent expansion of his desires. … The absolute-individual will overriding all other wills is therefore the principle of life for the Elizabethan age. Marlowe’s Faust and Tamburlaine express this principle in its naievest form.2

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Between the first two sentences, Caudwell extrapolates the “instincts” of “every” bourgeois individualist from the behavior of one historically situated “bourgeois class.” Such transhistorical instincts, herded under the unelaborated concept of “freedom,” seem to emerge naturally, and in ideological opposition to those forces that might constrain the autonomy of the bourgeois will. This sort of argument is reprised a few decades later in John Danby’s study of the “two natures” reflected in King Lear. Danby distinguishes a retrogressive feudal nature, in which the individual is organically tied to a benign and rational natural world, from an emergent capitalist nature, in which the individual is severed from communal ties, and exerts instrumental rather than right reason in order to flourish. These sociocultural changes are underpinned by disparate economic ideologies. Feudal values—embodied by Lear, Kent, and Cordelia—are noncapitalistic, and “assume a co-operative and reasonable decency in man.” Bourgeois values—embodied by Edmund, Goneril, and Regan—belong to the “new age of scientific inquiry and industrial development, of bureaucratic organization and social regimentation, the age of mining and merchant-venturing, of monopoly and Empire-making . . .”3 While Caudwell’s and Danby’s discussions of the rise of individualism draw on a range of mid-twentieth-century historical and cultural accounts of the transitional period, the most recent and consolidated Whig view of early modern history, one that underwrites much recent literary criticism on transitions, can be found in Lawrence Stone’s Decline of the Aristocracy and The Causes of the English Revolution. Stone argued that the sixteenthcentury price revolution and a rise in trade produced an urban bourgeoisie ready to exploit emergent market mechanisms. The landed aristocracy, by contrast, avoided the market and instead attempted to step up its paternalistic, military hold over the peasantry. But faced with rising prices, and a concomitant desire to maintain power and prestige through luxury expenditure, the aristocracy faced both a financial and legitimation crisis. In an effort to regain power, the aristocracy allied itself with the state; the state responded by issuing an increased number of sinecures, elite court appointments, and monopolies, and began unjustly taxing the commercial classes. Once the bourgeoisie organized resistance, civil war, if not an outright revolution, inevitably resulted.4 But as revisionists have argued, no historian has pointed to distinct aristocratic and bourgeois class or status groupings prior to 1640. By the Elizabethan era landlords had indeed recuperated their earlier losses by profiting from rising rents. Furthermore, the so-called consumption expenditures of the Elizabethan aristocracy were not financially ruinous, at least not under the James I, since the court spent extravagantly on its courtier class.

Introduction

3

The conclusion, in fact, seems to be that the decades between 1580 and 1640 show a rise rather than decline of the aristocracy: Indeed, if anything, this was an era of rise, not decline, for the aristocracy and for the landlord class as a whole. But this should not be surprising in view of the fact that the years between 1580 and 1640 were ones of rising rents and food prices, as well as of agricultural improvement. Both nobles and gentry should have done very well, so long as they had ceased to maintain themselves as military magnates and could assume the position of absolute owners and commercial landlords taking market-determined rents from their tenants.5

The implication from all this is that one finds a “broad transformation” of the landed class rather than the rise of an adversarial bourgeois class. Furthermore, a large segment of this landed class that comprised the peerage and political leadership of the country had assimilated to the capitalist economy. By 1641, a segment of this broadly homogeneous “capitalist” ruling aristocracy emerges as the principal opposition against Charles I. In relation to early modern political ideologies, some revisionists have gone so far as to offer a consensualist interpretation of seventeenth-century politics. According to the main lines of such an argument, both Parliament and the Crown recognized the sanctity of private property and the common law tradition, and believed that the King’s absolute prerogative was exercisable only as an emergency measure, and even then subject to strong Parliamentary discretion. Conrad Russell writes, “[an] ideological gulf between ‘government’ and ‘opposition’ is impossible to find in parliament before 1640. There were many disagreements on policy, often profound ones, but these were decisions which split the Council itself.”6 Glenn Burgess has recently made a similar argument regarding the absolutist nature of the Jacobean state. Burgess notes that the terms “absolutism” and “arbitrary” to describe monarchical power should be displaced by a nonabsolutist understanding of the relation between state and society. Burgess writes, “there is a prima facie case for supposing that ‘absolutism’ is an inadequate term of analysis for early Stuart thought. . . . Kings were limited, not just by divine and natural law, but in the sense that they had a duty to govern through the laws of the land.”7 Revisionists, thus critical of the Whiggish tendency to assess the causes of social conflict by extrapolating from consequences, have argued that the civil war was caused by, among other things, the difficulty England faced in maintaining multiple kingdoms, the force and unpredictability of personality—Buckingham and Laud are favorite targets of the revisionists— and a series of unforeseen triggers. The force of circumstance, rather than

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adversarial politics, uninevitably leads to social collapse. J.C.D. Clark offers a good summary of revisionist methodology: A proper study of the intricacy and uncertainty of human affairs is indeed apt to reveal values as subservient to situations, and political and ethical norms and conventions as defined retrospectively, in response to events whose outcome is often unforeseen or undesired; to show chance, ignorance, and error overriding purposeful endeavor; and to show the values and intentions of past men, seen at close quarters, as often quite different from anything which could be fitted into a teleological explanation of English liberties or a dialectic of social classes.8

This historical narrative is broad, and I fill out some details in relevant contexts throughout the following chapters. What this brief sketch suggests, however, is that early modern literary critics should rethink the tendency to align literary characters in two ideological camps, the old feudal guard and bourgeois individualists. We should also be wary of applying evolutionist models of economic and social transition to literary texts. Along these lines, albeit drawing on Althusserian structuralism rather than Anglo-American revisionist history, Richard Halpern has recently offered a sophisticated, historically detailed account of English textual production during the transitional period. Halpern argues that Marx’s primitive accumulation model of the rise of capitalism provides the best foundation for a materialist analysis of Renaissance cultural production. According to Halpern, Marx was working with a genealogical, rather than teleological model of transition. Marx’s prehistory narrates the class struggles of the early modern period to show how they produced the elements of capitalist production, but it does not give a coherent account of how these struggles were informed by the structures of the feudal mode of production within which they arose. . . . Marx thus writes a prehistory of capitalism in two different senses: it is a genealogy of that which is not yet capitalism and this genealogy is not yet a history.9

By appropriating Marx’s structural and non-teleological account of the transition, Halpern dispenses with idealizing, neo-Smithian narratives of progress. He also rejects traditional historical materialism, in which the economic substructure determines the nature of the superstructure. Emphasizing not only the non-evolutionist succession of modes of production, but also the “relative autonomy” of superstructural instances—including state formations, political ideologies, cultural output—Halpern concludes that Renaissance literary texts are capable of actually anticipating, rather than simply reflecting, economic change: “Certain political, legal, or

Introduction

5

cultural domains were able to anticipate those of a capitalist formation even in advance of capitalism as such.”10 The theoretical advances over the Caudwell and Danby schemas are significant, and Halpern brilliantly finds complex representations of economic transition in a range of Renaissance texts. But if Halpern draws on an Althusserian and non-evolutionist theory of history, at times he seems to employ a more orthodox, Whig-Marxist theory of ideological class conflict. Stone’s narrative of the decline of the aristocracy underpins much of Halpern’s reading of King Lear, in which characters are still aligned, albeit more counterintuitively than in Danby’s “two moralities” argument, with feudal and capitalist values. In Halpern’s rendering, Oswald is the “new man,” while Edmund ultimately embraces a chivalric ethos, thus reflecting a nostalgic return to feudal values rather than the rise of bourgeois rationality.11 The linear narrative of class conflict underlying historical change remains intact, even if the play refuses to endorse such a forward movement.

Contingency, Irony, and Early Modern History One of the aims of this study is to describe the ways in which Shakespearean drama allegorizes functional contradictions that are specific to a range of early modern institutions and belief systems, including the Elizabethan management of vagrancy, objective and subjective theories of economic value, the nature of Jacobean statecraft, Protestant ethical theory, and Augustinian notions of sinful habituation. The adjective “functional” is used to designate a material or ideational contradiction that is not immediately expressive of antagonistic class interests. At a material level, a functional contradiction will often present itself as a design flaw or systemic irrationality; at an ideational level, it will more often present itself as an internally contradictory ethos, or as an unsustainable theory that subverts itself once manifested in practice. Functional contradictions might be described less gracelessly as historically particular ironies. One of my arguments is that while Shakespeare’s plays, in their attempt to unravel such contradictions, might impose transitional schemas on their historical referents, the plays do not reflect, as is more customarily argued, early modern transitions that occur in historical reality. Consider, for example, the Elizabethan poor law regime and the management of vagrancy, the subject of which has been discussed in a number of recent, incisive accounts of literary depictions of masterless men.12 Historians and literary critics typically offer critiques of England’s handling of its vagrancy problem by asking the following questions: To what extent

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Revisionist Shakespeare

does the masterless man represent a user-friendly alien, the construction of which allows for the consolidation of Elizabethan and Jacobean power in various incarnations? What forms of oppression did vagrants and “sturdy” beggars undergo in the notorious Elizabethan workhouses, or in their emergent roles as indentured servants and colonialist wage-laborers? What sociological factors contributed to the stylized account of masterlessness that one finds, for example, in the Elizabethan cony-catching pamphlets, in which groups of beggars are depicted as criminally threatening countercultures or corporate fraternities? All of these questions address politically important and ideologically complex aspects of the Elizabethan handling of vagrancy. One might, however, ask a slightly different sort of basic, historically relevant question regarding the Elizabethan poor law regime: To what extent did the poor law apparatus efficiently achieve what it set out to achieve, namely, to advance the stalled economy by setting the able-bodied poor to work? This is a goal that most sectors of English society endorsed, even if various Elizabethan and Jacobean interest groups—humanist educators, economic theorists, Puritan vocationalists—offered competing schemes for achieving such a goal. It turns out, in fact, that the economic project behind the poor law apparatus was founded on an internal, systemic contradiction: the plan to motor the economy by putting the poor to work in workhouses or in the colonies actually forestalled economic advancement because it impeded the free circulation of labor. This is the sort of contradiction that escaped most, although not all, Elizabethans, and one that Enlightenment economic theory describes as parish serfdom. And this is the sort of functional contradiction that I take as my conceptual starting point in my interpretation of a given play. An assessment of class positions is inevitably a feature of many of the chapters, but I focus on classes primarily in their roles as unintentional causes rather than concrete manifestations of such functional contradictions. In relation to the Elizabethan fear and confinement of masterless men, for example, I argue in chapter 1 that The Tempest allegorizes some of the internal contradictions of the Elizabethan poor law apparatus. Rather than take as my interpretive starting point, as Paul Brown’s new historicist argument does, an ideological struggle between an amorphous “official culture” and a masterless underclass, I begin by exploring the nature of a contradiction internal to the fundamental mechanism by which the poor law system operated.13 I argue that, rather than allegorize the masterless man as a threatening alien, a new historicist presupposition, The Tempest denies the historical emergence and protraction of masterlessness and allegorizes instead a successive overlap between neo-feudal, master–servant relations and the commercialization of labor. In my reading, the play thus allegorically imagines a sense of linear history and transition that does not occur in historical reality.

Introduction

7

Shakespeare’s handling of early modern functional contradictions or ironies can more easily be understood if we distinguish between political and material ideologies. Theories of political ideology focus primarily on class conflict, and can be divided into negative and positive subtypes. The negative conception is formulated most clearly in Marx’s famous observation in The German Ideology: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force in society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”14 Ideology describes the ways in which dominant classes universalize ruling beliefs. The dominant class is required to “represent its interests as the common interests of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.”15 According to this restrictively political account of ideology, ideology works fundamentally to conceal and reproduce material and social contradictions. Specific material contradictions under capitalism include contradictions between use-value and exchange-value, relations and forces of production, or capital and labor. More generally, ideology serves to conceal contradictions between class interests, typically between “bourgeois freedom and its oppressive effects.”16 Such a theory of ideology is usually described as the “epiphenomenal conception,” to the extent that the ruling ideas are direct expressions of underlying economic conditions and relations of production. If the negative conception of political ideology focuses on the ideological distortions of the ruling class, a more inclusive, positive conception of ideology—described in the work of Lenin, Lukács, and Gramsci—conceives of ideology as the “totality of forms of consciousness or the political ideas of all classes.”17 In this epistemologically neutral sense of ideology, ideologies are the province of all classes, rather than the narrow preserve of dominative classes. Positive ideologies do not function principally to mask or conceal social contradictions; they rather serve as competing world views. The materialist theory of ideology, on the other hand, can be found in the work of Althusser, for whom ideology describes not a body of ideas, but rather the full range of material practices that socialize individuals as subjects. As is well known, Althusser suggests that material ideologies are not disseminated primarily by sectional class interests, but rather by institutions or “state apparatuses,” including schools, churches, and political systems.18 Such material ideologies work their way into subjects’ practical, everyday behavior, serving as the cement that provides social cohesion. Ideological state apparatuses tend to function the same way that, according to Pierre Bourdieu, linguistic and social habitus determine subjects’ pre-reflective consciousness or nondiscursive awareness.19

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The most recent ideology critiques of Shakespearean drama have tended to focus on the plays’ treatments of early modern political ideologies, particularly those connected to oppositional sectional and class interests. As Louis Montrose writes: “By representing ideology as a ceaseless contest among dominant and subordinate positions, a dynamic, agonistic, and temporal process—a ceaseless interplay of continuity and change, of identity and difference—this concept of culture opens poetics to politics and history.”20 Jonathan Dollimore similarly emphasizes the usefulness of ideology critique in demystifying a Tillyardian metaphysic of early modern order: “Materialist criticism is likely to consider the ideological dimension of consolidation—the way, for example, that this world picture reinforces particular class and gender interests by presenting the existing social order as natural. . . .”21 For Montrose, Dollimore, and many other materialist critics, a play’s “contradictions” are usually revealed when a play’s bid at political and social consolidation is ruptured by the disclosed interests of race, class, and gender. One can, of course, productively explore the ways in which a text’s contradictions disclose prevailing political ideologies. My alternative focus on the presence of functional contradictions or historical ironies in Shakespeare’s plays is not meant to imply that there are early modern modes of conduct that bear some transideological, scientific character. I am suggesting only that we can realign our perspective in order to appreciate the nature of selected historical ironies that are of intrinsic and analyzable interest. Perhaps a somewhat crude way of putting this distinction is to ask of the early modern period—if only as a conceptual starting point—“how things work,” rather than “why people (and Shakespearean characters) act the way they do.” Much of the best revisionist work in early modern historiography has attempted just this sort of perspectival shift, as it is concerned less with individual and social values than it is with the micro-mechanisms by which political and social systems function. Thus Conrad Russell has emphasized the extent to which the monarchy experiences a “functional breakdown” in the 1620s when the demands of war further eroded the bureaucratic and financial resources of the Crown; and G.R. Elton’s and Mark Kishlansky’s accounts of Caroline parliamentary proceedings underscore the procedural strengths and weaknesses of Parliament in the 1620s.22 Revisionist historians have been duly criticized for their narrow attention to the intricate functions and structures of politics rather than regnant political values and ideological perceptions. Thus Richard Cust and Ann Hughes would expand, for example, Russell’s account of Charles’s difficulty in negotiating multiple kingdoms to include a study of prevailing religious mentalities that disturb continuity across the three realms: “Accounts of the English Civil War which do not relate it to the overall ‘British’ dimension are unsatisfactory,

Introduction

9

although we would emphasize the ideological, particularly the religious element, in the problems Charles had with his multiple kingdoms rather than seeing the issue merely in a ‘functional’, practical way.”23 It is no doubt true that the revisionists at times focus too narrowly on micropolitics, tending to ignore the broader social ambience of seventeenthcentury England. It is also true that, as Kevin Sharpe remarks, revisionists unjustifiably tend to treat state papers and bureaucratic, “factual” documentation as more authoritative historical sources than literary texts.24 But if revisionist historians are biased in their attention to systems rather than values, Shakespeare’s transitionalist critics might at times be faulted for a biased focus on the plays’ reflections of values rather than systems. One would be foolhardy, given that the center of gravity in Shakespeare’s plays is arguably character and human psychology rather than plot, to claim that Shakespeare is fundamentally concerned with the way that systems operate rather than the way people act—or that systems can be adequately evaluated once they have been conceptually sundered from human agency. But perhaps we have been so preoccupied with uncovering the ethos of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae that we have falsely elevated Shakespeare’s “invention of the human”—whether considered transhistorically or historically—over Shakespeare’s explorations in human invention. Notwithstanding the virtues of revisionist methodology over orthodox historical materialism, I should emphasize that this study is fundamentally sympathetic to the concern that revisionist historicism often understates the ideological character of early modern social formations. I believe, however, that we can extract the valuable kernel of revisionist theories of historical change from their undesirable shell, namely revisionism’s whisking away of principled early modern social and political conflict. In the process, we can uncover the seemingly unlikely overlap of revisionist theories of historical change with some of the most influential revisions of Marxist theory itself, extending from Althusser’s theory of structural causality to more recent Marxist accounts of the passage from feudalism to capitalism. I would like briefly, therefore, to evaluate early modern revisionist methodology against both Althusser’s theories of contradiction and overdetermination, as well as the most incisive intervention into the so-called transition debates, Robert Brenner’s class-based model of the decline of English feudal relations.25 The turn to Althusser might seem belated, but I would suggest that because so much attention has been paid to Althusser’s theory of ideology, early modern critics have overlooked the insights that his related theory of contradiction can offer to transitional interpretations of early modern texts. Althusser draws a distinction in his writings between the general Marxist class contradiction between capital and labor, on the one hand, and

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more specific contradictions tied to contradictory historical “accidents” or “circumstances,” on the other hand: If the general contradiction . . . is sufficient to define the situation when revolution is the “task of the day,” it cannot of its own simple, direct power induce a “revolutionary situation,” nor a fortiori a situation of revolutionary rupture and the triumph of the revolution. If this contradiction is to become “active” in the strongest sense, to become a ruptural principle, there must be an accumulation of “circumstances” and “currents” so that whatever their origin and sense (and many of them will necessarily be paradoxically foreign to the revolution in origin and sense, or even its “direct opponents”), they “fuse” into a ruptural unity. . . .26

Althusser’s point is that the collision of individual wills, as well as unforeseen circumstances, shape particular historical resultants outside of the rational control of individual and collective agency. Such contradictory circumstances, irreducible to the “pure phenomena of the general contradiction,” derive not only from relations of production, but also from “superstructures . . . which have their own consistency and effectivity . . .”.27Althusser employs the term “overdetermined” to describe the ways in which the ensemble of such unpredictable historical circumstances relate to the more general contradiction between labor and capital: The “contradiction” is inseparable from the total structure of the social body in which it is found, inseparable from its formal conditions of existence, and even from the instances it governs; it is radically affected by them, determining, but also determined in one and the same movement, and determined by the various levels and instances of the social formation it animates; it might be called overdetermined in its principle.28

Althusser’s claim is that the fundamental Marxist contradiction between capital and labor both determines and is determined by the range of more local contradictions that are not immediately linked to economic relations. The important caveat is that, in the last instance, the economy determines the whole structure or set of relations. The only way to fully understand the logic here is to read this passage alongside the comment Althusser quotes from Engels that appears in an appendix to “Contradiction and Overdetermination.” The Engels passage reads: History is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each again has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant—the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the

Introduction

11

product of a power which works as a whole, unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.29

Historical resultants—world pictures, political institutions, social policies— constitute more than the sum total of the individual wills or historical “accidents” from which they emerge. To the extent that each individual “desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort, economic circumstances . . . determination by the economy is no longer external to the accidents amid which it asserts itself, it is the internal essence of these accidents.”30 The social totality is overdetermined by contradictions in the sense that the economy determines individual wills; the clash of individual wills undergoes a kind of chemical rather than physical reaction to produce something that no particular individual or group willed; and this new resultant exerts its influence back on the individual wills and the economy that ultimately motors the whole process. This process does not unfold temporally, one level causally influencing the next as one billiard ball strikes another; it rather occurs ceaselessly and synchronically, each level or instance simultaneously influencing every other level, hence Althusser’s notion of structural, rather than expressive causality. Revisionists share with Althusser at least the notion that circumstances give rise to historical events or ideas in an unpredictable, often nonpurposive way. Revisionists do not inquire about the ideological causes of such resultants, because they believe that the randomness of events cannot be traced to particular world views. Althusser would agree that at least at the level of the local effects of the “parallelograms of forces” one cannot isolate discrete political ideologies, narrowly defined as particular class positions that are directly aligned with specifiable mentalities. Particular political ideologies give rise to the historical resultant, but the actual resultant is “in essence, unconscious (it does not correspond to the consciousness of each will—and at the same time, it is a force without a subject, an objective force, but, from the outset nobody’s force).”31 Here we should recall the distinction between political and material ideologies. Althusser would clearly depart from Anglo-American revisionism by noting that any “historical event” is a manifestation of material ideologies, even if one cannot extrapolate particular political or class based ideologies, or even any purposive rationality, from such an event. While all political ideologies have a materialist basis, not all materialist ideologies manifest themselves politically. Robert Brenner, a historian deeply committed to a class-based theory of historical change, might seem like an unlikely bedfellow of the revisionists or Althusserians. But a review of his view of the transition shows a kindred notion of unintentional historical change. Brenner argues that Marx outlined

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two irreconcilable theories of the transition, a teleological, neo-Smithian account in his early works, which is then superseded by a structural account (the revised primitive accumulation model that is presented in Capital ). To Marx’s mature view that class exploitation rather than bootstrapping advances the economy, Brenner adds an account of the micro-mechanisms responsible for transforming feudal relations, the how rather than merely why of feudal decline.32 When feudalism operated as a viable mode of production, neither the lords nor the peasants stood to benefit from direct participation in the emerging capitalist markets. Since peasants both possessed direct access to the means of production, and sought to maintain themselves and their families at subsistence levels, they were not required to labor for exchange. Since they were not motivated to participate in market relations, especially given that the market for goods and services was unpredictable, peasants thus gained more from diversifying their output than from buying and selling commodities (and commodifying themselves). The lords, in turn, who also enjoyed direct access to the means of production, and could therefore maintain subsistence levels, were not forced to cut costs, specialize, and invest in order to increase productive output. The structural relations were such that the lords’ only means to increase production was coercion, principally military force and other forms of extraeconomic coercion. The joint effects of subsistent peasant production and the absence of a developed labor market rendered it economically nonrational for either the peasants or the lords to transform the inertial quality of the feudal economy. Eventually, however, in the fourteenth century, Europe faced demographic collapse and steep economic decline. Lords could only maintain subsistence levels of production by exerting additional pressure on the peasantry to labor more efficiently. Brenner usefully compares the outcome of this stepped-up exploitation of the peasantry in Eastern countries, France and England. Because the Eastern European peasantry was relatively weak and fragmented, Eastern lords were able successfully to extract additional labor and thereby impose a second serfdom on the peasantry. On the other hand, since the French peasantry was a relatively strong and cohesive group, they were able to establish independent proprietorship over the land and labor, thus forestalling the emergence of wage-labor and agrarian capitalism. In England, however, structural class conflict did motor the development of agrarian capitalism because the peasantry was too strong to accept a second serfdom, but too weak to establish on a large-scale basis independent production for subsistence. Some were thus forced to hire out their own labor, facilitating what Marx described as the triadic system of agrarian capitalism.

Introduction

13

The most important lesson to be taken from Brenner’s account is that neither the intentional conduct of the lords nor the peasants fostered the development of capitalist relations. Rather, capitalist relations emerge in spite of both the lords’ and peasants’ embrace of subsistence living, behind the backs, as it were, of the intentional agency of social actors. The trigger in this case is demographic collapse, not an ethos of thrift or entrepreneurialism: “The methods applied by the ruling class . . . are thus incomprehensible simply as their own choice. These were given as it were by the class structure; by the system of surplus extraction relations with the direct producers in which the ruling class found itself.”33 Despite the obvious differences among these three models of contradiction and socioeconomic change—Anglo-American revisionism, Althusserian structuralism, and Brenner’s class-based model of transition—each posits the existence of contradictions or historical ironies that are not immediately tied to polarized class ideologies, even when class conflict is considered the engine of historical change. This, of course, does not mean that a functional contradiction will have no relationship to material ideologies. While a critic (e.g., Pierre Macherey) might undertake a comprehensive Althuserrian critique, attempting to uncover the precise ways in which a text shows that the economy in the last instance determines a text’s relative ideological complicity or subversiveness, we might train our critical explorations more locally on the ways that, for example, a text like The Tempest allegorizes the manner in which the early modern poor law regime functions against its designed purpose to advance the economy; or, as I describe below, we might explore the ways that a text like The Merchant of Venice allegorizes the self-subverting mechanisms by which the mercantilist fetishization of money actually devalued English coin in the very process of attempting to enhance the wealth of the nation.34 And we can assess these internal contradictions by employing revisionist methodology as a critical hermeneutic without also endorsing the revisionist assumption that early modern social and political formations were not ideologically overdetermined.

Revisionist Shakespeare Each of the five chapters of this study has a three-part structure: a critique of conventional transitional interpretations of a given play, an assessment of the allegorization of a historically specific functional contradiction in that play, and then an account of the ways in which formal constraints— character-functions and generic and modal ideologies—influence a text’s ultimate transitional or non-transitional character. A brief summary of each

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chapter will help provide points of reference for some additional introductory methodological considerations, particularly regarding the importance of genre considerations to transitionalist arguments. As I have begun to explain, in chapter 1 I argue that the romance conventions framing the plot of The Tempest influence the resolution of the play in the direction of an improved or idealized past (which imagines a historical conjuncture in which masterlessness seamlessly transmutes into post-feudal forms of wage-labor) in keeping with romance’s master trope, utopianism. That is, The Tempest allegorizes an improvement upon social policy, in which the play hearkens back to a past option foregone (allowing for the free circulation of labor following the decline of medieval serfdom) that might have advanced the economy. A play might instead allegorize an institutional contradiction or irony, for example, the uneasy yoking of paternalism and negative libertarianism by the Jacobean state, without offering any neat resolution, thereby functioning as admonitory rather than transitional. In relation to this particular political tension, I review in chapter 2 the nature of Jacobean statecraft as reflected in Coriolanus. While recent criticism of the play tends to focus on class antagonisms, I take as my starting point the self-contradictory nature of the early modern state. One fundamental problem with the Jacobean state is its tendency to integrate two conflicting state platforms, negative libertarianism and paternalism. Historical models or analogues for Jacobean negative libertarianism include the Ciceronian form of government, promoted by Guicciardini in his Dialogue on the Government of Florence, and Isaiah Berlin’s model of liberal government. According to each model, the state fundamentally exists to safeguard private property. Inasmuch as civic participation, on the order of the Aristotelian polis, is a secondary concern, there is negligible emphasis on training a participatory, ethical citizenry. But if the state promotes negative liberties, it simultaneously, and potentially contradictorily, promotes a policy of publicly maintaining the poor. It thus places burdens on parish authorities and the middle- and upper-class citizenry to contribute to poor relief. Clearly negative libertarianism and paternalism can be characterized as state ideologies. But it would be misleading to argue that during the Jacobean period these platforms existed in ideological tension, meaning that stratified classes allied themselves with either policy. These platforms only fissure into class positions during the middle decades of the seventeenth century, well after the Folio publication of Coriolanus in 1623. Coriolanus, I argue, momentarily upsets the delicate consensual ideal that is allegorized in the play, but he is ultimately sacrificed in order to maintain consensus. In this sense the play is admonitory rather than transitional, since it allegorizes the influence of charismatic

Introduction

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personality on the disintegration of political stability, a factor that will become crucially relevant to the demise of the Caroline government in the 1630s and 1640s. In chapter 3, on The Merchant of Venice, my focus is not on an institutional irrationality or contradiction as much as on a logical fallacy, often described as a fallacy of composition. A fallacy of composition occurs when one argues that what is true or probable in any individual case will necessarily be true or possible in all similar cases. As Marx noted, the early modern mercantilist fetishization of money-capital erroneously assumed that because any individual capitalist can gain by treating his money as interestbearing capital rather than as an item of production, every individual has the option of making the same choice. Marx writes, “The idea of converting all the capital into money-capital, without there being people to buy and put to use, means of production, which make up the total capital outside of a relatively small portion of it existing in money, is, of course, sheer nonsense.”35 Marx refers to the early modern mercantile belief that a tendency to hoard money, rather than invest in production (an idea promoted by Gerard de Malynes, among other English and European mercantilists), would lead to falling interest rates and a decrease in the value of money. In this case, an action that is rational for each individual is irrational for social collectivities. Money fetishism is closely linked to objective theories of value, according to which a commodity has a fixed value outside of the market of supply and demand. Both money fetishism and objective theories of value sit uneasily during the late Middle Ages with an entirely different, subjective theory of value, which holds that an item’s worth is established by the vicissitudes of subjective demand. I argue that both theories of value are reflected in The Merchant of Venice, and that Shylock is scapegoated by the Christians because he is able to appropriate some of the implications of the theory of subjective demand on his own behalf. Here, though, as in the earlier chapters, I argue that we would be wrong to assume that the play reflects a polarized ideological tension between, for example, an old economy or subsistence ethos and capitalist profiteering. Most of the characters in the play are in some sense allegorical mercantilists, but not all of these mercantilists share the same theory of value. One of the limitations of traditional transitional readings of Shakespearean drama is their neglect of theorizing a play’s treatment of transitions in intellectual history. In chapters 4 and 5 of this book I apply the methodology of revisionist history to King Lear and Hamlet, focusing, as in chapters 1–3, on early modern contradictions or ironies, but in these chapters such contradictions emerge in the realms of philosophy and theology, not socioeconomic theory or practice.

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Thus in chapter 4, I offer a critique of the materialist readings of King Lear, offering in their place a discussion of the play in relation to the history of ethical theory, in particular, the displacement of command morality and duteousness by a context-sensitive ethic of sentiment and rights-recognition. I argue that the abdication scene reflects the manner in which command morality becomes self-defeating when it is not coordinated with an awareness of natural rights. While most Lear criticism focuses on character defectiveness as root causes of the turmoil following the abdication scene—Lear’s hubris, Cordelia’s stubbornness, Goneril’s greed—I instead argue that the internal contradictions and inefficiencies of Protestant ethics rather than characterological vice determine the fateful course pursued in the play. Much of the focus following the abdication scene is on the necessary conditions that need to obtain in order for Lear, in particular, to cultivate an affective ethic that can mitigate the rigors of command morality. Rather than interpret the autonomous rationality of Goneril and Regan as allegorically capitalist, I argue that their instrumental reason impels a process through which Lear becomes dispossessed and hence develops an alternative ethic of care. The instrumental reason of Goneril and Regan thus mediates the play’s initial split between duties and rights, and so helps to resolve the inefficiencies that are immanent to Protestant moral theory. In the final chapter (Chapter 5) on Hamlet, I focus on Hamlet’s interpretation of the early modern preoccupation with the relationship between habits and sin. Unlike in the other chapters, however, I argue that the text does not inherit or reproduce an existing social irrationality or functional contradiction; rather, Hamlet contrives an irrationality in relation to a relatively uncontroversial early modern theory of sin. One finds, beginning with Augustine and extending throughout seventeenth-century theology (across denominational strains), the standard belief that the repetition of discrete sinful acts can lead to a sinful habit, one that may become so intractable as to be irreversible. In some more refined accounts of sinful habituation, the sinful habit is conceptualized as a sin unto itself, superadded to the discrete sins of which it is comprised. Hamlet becomes so preoccupied with the ontological nature of habit that he internalizes an extreme behaviorist notion that social agents are composed of nothing but latent and manifest habits. As such, and contrary to most transitional interpretations of the play— in which Hamlet is described as precociously Cartesian—Hamlet rejects any belief that people consist of disembodied minds, souls, or intentions that are not manifested in action. I argue that Hamlet is indeed the one Shakespearean character who seems most modern, not because he is inward-seeking or self-alienated, but because he is the only character discussed

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in this study who willfully manipulates, on the level of allegory, the topical belief system that is reproduced in the play. Hamlet commits a part-whole fallacy of composition by assuming that individuals are nothing more than the sum of their individual habits and dispositions. Unlike Prospero, Regan and Goneril, Coriolanus, and Shylock, Hamlet thus does not function allegorically to mediate a historically particular functional contradiction, irony or fallacy. Rather, Hamlet brings a fallacy to the text when he exaggerates the implications of the Protestant theory of sin.

Immanent Critique, Genre, and Transition We can see from this summary of chapters that selected plays attempt to expose the precise flaw, irrationality, or irony of a particular institution or beliefsystem, at times deriving alternative schemas that seem more or less internally sound. By “derive” I mean that what emerges from a text’s own critique is often carried within what is criticized, that the constituent parts of alternative schemas are immanent to the system or idea that bears a functional contradiction. There are many ways that a play might perform such an immanent critique: a play might employ a counterfactual thought experiment, imagining what might happen, for example, were an aging, dispossessed King to descend into a natural, pre-political environment; or a play might give expression to a historical path that had not been pursued— an exploration, for example, of the forms of labor that could have emerged had English culture left masterlessness largely to its own socioeconomic devices. Whatever the nature of the content that is subjected to immanent critique, the alternative theory, institution, or schema that is derived is in many cases something seemingly more natural, less constructed, than what it displaces. A play’s immanent critique thus is often tied to a strategy of defetishization—or at least a play’s putting into question whether defetishization is at all possible. So Lear imagines the existence of natural “rights” or basic entitlements logically prior to their “establishment” and legitimation by the nation-state; and Merchant finds in subjective valuation the defetishized version of the iustus pretium.36 The plays thus tend to “constellate” ideas, to borrow a term from Theodor Adorno, in which contradictions are refracted at multiple angles, gradually dismantled in search of frozen possibilities that are capable of being developed into alternative historical allegories.37 At the point, though, at which a text reconstitutes the fragments that it creates through such a process of constellating, it may indeed construct its own transitional schema out of its topical material. I suggest, however, that the ideological character of such a schema will be shaped fundamentally by

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ideologies of form, particularly ideologies of genre. One of the projects of this book is to reintroduce genre theory and character criticism into political and transitional discussions of Shakespearean drama.38 To this end, I assume that, although genres and their accompanying modes do not serve as hypostatized classificatory schemas, they do influence the extent to which a transitional schema emerges by the end of a given play. We might recall Hayden White’s belief that modes of emplotment (which correspond to Northrop Frye’s mythoi) align themselves with various modes of “ideological implication.”39 For example, the genres of romance, tragedy, comedy and satire correspond, respectively, to anarchist, radical, conservative, and liberal ideological modes. Modifying White’s and Frye’s categories slightly, I suggest that Shakespearean romance, in particular, tends more often than tragedy and comedy (as well as the tropological modes of irony and satire), to sublate functional contradictions in the interests of offering an idealized, at times utopian view of the future. Thus the one text that I argue does indeed impose a linear transition onto its historical material is The Tempest, which imagines a smooth, telic transition from feudal to capitalistic forms of labor that manifestly does not occur in reality. Tragedy is close to romance in sublating contradictions and serving as a problem-solving genre, but tragedy offers new or alternative historical possibilities without also reconstructing linear history. Comedy, on the other hand, and more “mongrel” genres like tragical irony (under which I situate Coriolanus) are more often limited to exposing rather than resolving contradictions, and hence are not easily accommodated to transitional schemas. One might say that generic forms and modes, rather than prevailing economic relations, function in the last instance as determinants of a text’s transitional character. My sense of the ways in which the plays “constellate” ideas in relation to ideologies of genre can be further explained in the context of Bryan Reynolds’s useful distinction between “investigative-expansive” and “dissective-cohesive” modes of analyses. While both critical procedures break “down the subject matter under investigation into variables” and then “partition them as a means by which to examine them discretely,” the dissective-cohesive mode, in particular, attempts to “reassemble the variables into a unified and accountable whole, such as a human subject, a social totality, or a deterministic history.40 “Like psychoanalysis, the dissective-cohesive mode is preoccupied with “discerning patterns and conforming them to a preexisting and inflexible model.”41 The investigative-expansive analysis, on the other hand, “transversal theory” in practice, “resists anything resembling predetermination or circumscription and requires continuous maneuverings and reparameterizations in response to unexpected, even sudden emergences of glitches, quagmires, and new information. . . .”42

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While these are helpful categories of analysis, I would suggest that they be slightly modified to allow for a more inclusive approach to interpreting Shakespeare’s plays. Such an approach would acknowledge that not every act of investigation leads to expansion, and not every bid at cohesion follows from dissection. One of my basic assumptions is that, depending on the nature of their framing genres and related treatment of character, some plays impose schemas and others do not. In relation to the argument of this study, at least, I would abandon the pejorative-sounding “dissection,” and then shuffle Reynolds’s categories slightly by redrawing a more flexible distinction between investigative-expansive and investigative-cohesive modes of analyses. Shakespeare’s plays, more specifically, their treatments of particular historical referents, might fall into either category, depending on any number of factors, not the least of which are a play’s formal presuppositions.

Shakespearean Character-Functions A focus on the interrelations of genre and historical allegory allows us to assess the functional roles of Shakespeare’s characters in the plays’ allegorizations of early modern social and political ironies, which a brief history of Shakespearean character criticism will help to contextualize. Beginning roughly in the 1930s A.C. Bradley’s neo-romantic form of character criticism, which tended to search for psychological realism in Shakespearean drama, became the subject of a sustained critical controversy. Because he thought that the center of Shakespeare’s tragedies lies in “action issuing from character, or in character issuing in action,” Bradley’s search for a character’s motives seemed to many critics to mistakenly treat fictive agents as real personages. Coleridge’s criticism of “motive-hunting for motiveless malignancy” seemed particularly relevant to Bradley’s chase after character. G.K. Hunter, for example, argued that the world of Shakespearean tragedy is “for A.C. Bradley a world of secular men whose lives yet embody and display the deepest mysteries of our existence.”43 E.E. Stoll, an early pioneer of the anti-Bradley school, insisted that Shakespeare’s heroes should be described as dramatic functions or types whose words and conduct serve the more fundamental needs of plot, structure, and genre.44 “The trouble with Shakespeare criticism” Stoll maintained, “is that it is has been prompted and guided by the spirit of literalism. The play has been thought to be a psychological document, not primarily a play, a structure, both interdependent and independent, the parts mutually, and sufficiently, supporting and explaining each other; and the characters have been taken for the separable copies of reality.”45

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Shakespearean characterization, according to Stoll, owed more to “artistic expedients” than either naturalistic psychology or historical allegory. Such artistic expedients might include, for example, “the atmosphere created by means of a characteristic language and imagery. . . . the ebb and flow in the intensity of the action, and . . . the metrical movement from speech to speech and scene to scene.”46 As Hugh Grady remarks, Stoll was attempting more than just a critique of Romantic psychologism; he was concerned to professionalize Shakespeare criticism, to take it out of the hands of the likes of the Victorian Clifton Shakespeare Society, which “based its discussions on the premiss that the analogues of Shakespeare’s characters could be found in the ordinary life of ordinary people.”47 A proper understanding of Shakespearean characterization required for Stoll a high level of expertise in the history of dramatic form, especially the differences between Elizabethan and modern stagecraft. Stoll’s form of criticism was later revived by a number of American and European critics. L.L. Schucking generated a list of veritable axioms in order to explain his sense of the abiding “character problems” in Shakespeare’s plays. Remarking that a number of Shakespeare’s principals seem to act inconsistently or contradictorily during the course of a given play, Schucking described Shakespeare’s method as a “single-scene method,” in which, in the interest of producing captivating stage effects, Shakespeare might cut up and modify descriptions of, for example, Plutarch’s Cleopatra, and then create dramatically intense but isolated scenes that fail to endow coherence to character.48 Because Shakespeare “as a rule, starts with the action and follows it closely as long as possible,” he tended to mold character to the exigencies of plot, particularly when relying on source texts, and thus failed to achieve characterological unity.49 Leo Kirschbaum made a similar argument regarding the functional rather than naturalistic quality of Shakespeare’s characters. Lear’s Edgar, for example, should be seen not as a naturalistic approximation but rather as a multifunctional plot device: “Edgar is not a mimetic unity; he is a dramatic device. Each of his roles contributes not to a rich psychological unity but to Shakespeare’s poetic purposes.”50 Edgar thus functions to assist Lear’s reeducation, to “enforce religious querying,” “to contrast with Oswald,” and “to provide spectacle.”51 Kirschbaum concludes that Shakespearean character development relies principally on theatrical convention, whereby characters are “precipitated into action by the dramatist” rather than “motivated into action by psychology.”52 Madeline Doran eventually shorthanded the phenomenon of the ex tempore quality of Shakespearean characterization as a “failure of repetitive form.”53 As has been remarked in recent studies of the modernist Shakespeare, these early to mid-twentieth-century “functionalist” accounts of Shakespearean

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character were eventually displaced by the new critical and symbolist readings offered by, for example, G. Wilson Knight and Cleanth Brooks.54 The new critical Shakespeare was eventually superseded by various strains of Tillyardian historiography, after which, as is well known, Tillyard’s providentialist Shakespeare was subjected to the ideology critiques of new historicism and cultural materialist criticism. In this study I suggest that many transitional readings of Shakespeare have, in the interest of revising Tillyard’s metaphysic of order, returned in some respects to a form of Bradleyan character criticism, the fundamental difference being that transitional readings historicize rather than universalize the psychological realism of selected characters. Transitional readings occupy a position somewhere between naturalistic psychology and morality play typology: characters are allegorical types of a specific historical and economic provenance; the generic embodiments of vice and virtue are often aligned with capitalist and feudal values, broadly construed.55 It would not be too much of a caricature to imagine that the worst versions of such arguments might bear the subtitle “Theophrastus meets Marx.” Throughout this study I attempt to achieve an integration of functional character criticism with historical analyses of Shakespearean drama: a seemingly unlikely rapprochement of early and late twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism. I assume the methodological starting point of the neo-Aristotelian work of Stoll, Schucking, and Kirschbaum—that character is largely subordinate to plot—but then assume, against Stoll and his followers, that exigencies of plot and action are themselves shaped by the topical and revisionist historical material treated in a given play. What shapes character, then, are the concerns of historical allegory (in conjunction with the plastic requirements of genre), rather than the “artistic expedients” isolated by Stoll, or the problematic treatment of sources described by Schucking. Thus, while it is undoubtedly true that some of Shakespeare’s heroes and antiheroes exhibit a degree of autonomous rationality, often means-end in nature, that sets them apart from their “peers,” I argue that such characters serve the larger interests that each play has of attempting to work through, and at times to resolve, the functional contradictions that it allegorizes. Such “autonomous” characters as Goneril, Prospero, Coriolanus, and Shylock are rationally free, but, from the perspective of their prescribed roles, functionally constrained. In order to theorize character-functions in relation to historical allegory, I draw on recent genre theory, as well as the foundational work of Frye and Fredric Jameson. I am particularly interested in applying Jameson’s notion of the “donor” to some of Shakespeare’s characters. Jameson borrows the concept from A.J. Greimas, for whom characters function in prescribed roles throughout

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a text, whether as villains, heroes, or donors. The donor usually functions as a mediator or reconciler of oppositions, assisting in many cases to impel a plot forward.56 In the case of Lear, for example, I argue that Goneril and Regan function as donors in the play in order to facilitate the displacement of an ethics of duty by an ethics of sentiment. In my reading, Lear functions as a tragic scapegoat, although he is scapegoated not in the interest of what Franco Moretti would describe as the disintegration of kingship in the tragedies, but in the interest of the play’s historically specific ethical allegory.57 Even in The Tempest, where I suggest that Prospero does indeed figure at key moments as a neo-feudal overlord—an argument that might seem consistent with more traditional transitional arguments—I argue that Prospero ultimately serves as a donor to facilitate the very dissolution of feudal relations of lordship and domination. The important point is that in those cases when a character momentarily expresses values associated with a particular mode of production, that character’s function in a given play may not at all be to uphold those particular values. The five chapters of this study have been organized thematically, and in terms of generic relations to one another, rather than chronologically according to dates of composition or publication. Since the passage from feudalism to capitalism frames the arguments of the book, I begin (rather than end, as is usual) with a discussion of The Tempest in relation to shifting early modern labor forms. I then move to a discussion of Coriolanus in chapter 2 in order to establish the prevailing revisionist positions on political ideologies and absolutism, which resurface in chapters 3–5. Chapter 3, on The Merchant of Venice rejoins the economic focus of chapter 1, but can also be productively compared to Coriolanus in terms of genre: the comedic conventions that influence the resolutions of Merchant differ in illuminating ways, I hope to show, from the satirical and ironic tropes that dictate the political stasis, rather than resolution of conflicts reached by the end of Coriolanus. Chapters 4 and 5 attempt to apply the spirit of revisionist methodology, if not actual revisionist history, to both King Lear and Hamlet. I end the book with Hamlet because, as I have already remarked, I argue that there are indeed “modern” elements in Hamlet, but these elements are not connected to Hamlet’s so-called radical inwardness. The non-chronological ordering of chapters might irritate some Shakespeareans, but I hope my decision to scramble chronology reveals unexpected thematic and generic linkages, and in the process exemplifies the larger revisionist methodological principles that underwrite the claims of the book. While not every chapter of this study directly draws on the content of revisionist history, and in chapters 4 and 5 I am interested in questions of transitions in relation to the history of ideas, the following tenets of revisionist

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methodology frame the arguments of each chapter: 1. Early modern socioeconomic and political transitions are not directly caused by the rational or purposive agency of institutions or social actors. 2. Such transitions are influenced by a range of unanticipated historical events or triggers, including the force of demographic changes, policy mistakes, or charismatic personalities. 3. Class antagonisms are more often conditioned by such unanticipated triggers than by the clash of discrete ideological biases. Given the diverging historical trajectories reflected in each chapter, as well as the varying textual strategies for mediating topical events, the reader should not expect a comprehensive theory of historical transition to emerge in the following pages. But I would add to the three revisionist presuppositions outlined above the following three interpretive guidelines: 1. Shakespeare’s plays do not allegorize existing historical transitions; they at times set out to evaluate and, in some cases, resolve functional contradictions, the resolutions of which may lead to a textual reconstruction of a transition. 2. While characters may embody values associated with feudalism and capitalism, the function of such characters is not primarily to reflect competing, early modern ideologies; rather, characters fundamentally serve the interests of plot, which itself is influenced by the demands of a text’s historical allegory. 3. A text’s handling of functional contradictions is mediated by the formal conventions of genre; such generic conventions often serve in the last instance as determinants of a text’s transitional character. A final introductory comment about new historicism in relation to the argument of this book: among the usual criticisms made of new historicism, I would emphasize the tendency of new historicists to endow early modern institutions and belief systems with too much rationality and too many selfgoverning laws of motion. During the last few decades, an entire subdiscipline of sociology, often called “historical sociology,” has questioned the capability of early modern institutions to coordinate dominant ideologies throughout the many sectors of society. Consistent with the general thesis of Abercrombie and Turner—that many regional interests within medieval and early modern culture remained ideologically incorrigible, and that dominant ideologies insufficiently explain the coherence of whole societies or common cultures58—historical sociologists have suggested that social integration

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becomes truly effective only with the advent of capitalism. Without sophisticated forms of surveillance and capitalist exploitation, medieval and early modern dominant cultures could at best enforce a level of system-integration using extra-economic military force.59 Controlling beliefs, traditions, and ideas—the mental climates that flourished within sectional cultures in early modern Europe—were shaped not by a wide-scale dissemination of ruling ideas but by a local extension of community ideals. As Michael Mann tells us in his Sources of Social Power, “pre-capitalist states faced limitations on infrastructural power and therefore the means to penetrate dispersed and wide-ranging interests and value-systems.”60 One fundamental assumption of new historicism—that dominant cultures produce and then contain subversion in order to affirm asymmetrical relations of power—begs the question of how such systematic dominant forces can appear prior to the advance of rationalization as a regular feature of Western culture. At times, new historicism seems as guilty as traditional Marxism in investing early modern culture, broadly construed, with too many self-regulating laws of motion, often simply finding in abstract power relations the logic of self-maintenance that historical materialism had discovered in the economy. I argue in this study that early modern texts, rather than political regimes, more often operate according to laws of motion and rational choices. Thus I generally reinstate a dichotomous relationship between texts and history, rather than endorse an expanded conception of textuality.61 My hope is that Revisionist Shakespeare can suggest a way in which to proceed with historical criticism that does not reinstate a reflective model of text–context interaction but that retains, if not a teleological conception of a play’s thematic unfolding, then at least the assumption that character-functions and the ideologies of genre influence the transitional character of particular texts.62

Chapter 1 Rethinking Colonialism in Economic Terms: The Tempest, Captain John Smith’s Virginia Narratives, and the English Response to Vagrancy Recent criticism of The Tempest and early modern travel narratives has discussed the ways in which these texts are implicated in a larger discourse of colonialism. Anticolonialist critics have sought to “demystify the national myths” of the Empire and to write an alternative history of the colonial encounter.1 Typically, in their desire to delegitimate colonialist selfrepresentation and restore agency to a native counter-voice, critics have drawn out moments of textual rupture and contradiction in early modern texts such as The Tempest and John Smith’s Virginia narratives.2 Undoubtedly, recent ideology critiques of The Tempest have gone a way toward unmasking Western incorporation of new world, peripheral cultures. But because so much attention has been paid to the politics of the early modern English–Native American encounter, we have generally overlooked the extent to which many central early modern colonialist texts, particularly John Smith’s writings, are primarily concerned with describing embattled economic relationships among the European colonists themselves. Much of Smith’s concerns in the Virginia narratives, for example, center on issues of English idleness, unproductive labor, and exploitation of the early Virginia labor force by merchant capitalists, economic topics that have been largely passed over in the more sociopolitical, colonialist readings of early modern travel writing.3 Because so much effort has been devoted to unmasking Western oppression of new world cultures, we have also neglected to consider the specific

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forms of class division prevalent among the early English settlers, particularly the ways in which the English response to vagrancy and “masterlessness” shaped the new world labor force in the short term and inadvertently halted the transition to distinctly capitalist forms of wage-labor in the long term. This neglect is itself the product of the mythologization and overallegorization of the figure of the masterless man by literary critics, who have connected masterlessness with misrule, “topsy-turveydom,” and any number of cultural anxieties, often abstracting masterlessness from its socioeconomic origins and deep connections with the dissolution of feudalism and the long and uninevitable path toward the proletarianization of labor.4 In this chapter, taking into account revisionist positions on early modern employment, I describe the ways in which paternalistic statutes like the Statue of Artificers (1563) and the Act of Settlement (1662) inadvertently hampered the development of capitalism by immobilizing the free circulation of labor. The effects of this form of parish serfdom last until the Elizabethan poor laws are repealed on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.5 In the second section of my argument, I show how the English anxieties over unauthorized migration of masterless men and vagabonds are reproduced in the new world, specifically how the Virginia Company attempts (but fails) to set England’s landless poor to productive labor in the Chesapeake. Not simply representations of the manner in which the European “metropole” encounters the native “periphery,” the Virginia texts show the extent to which England exports its own, domestic periphery to the colonies, superimposing a drawn-out confrontation between official power and vagabondage onto the European–Native encounter.6 We see in these texts principally three interacting cultures, an official metropolitan culture, a culture of European vagabondage and poverty, and the native culture, in which the fears of unauthorized migration that hamstring colonial economic advancement are counterposed to the native culture’s selfconfident appropriation of the power to travel freely. In the last section of the chapter, I argue that if English culture attempts to solve its masterless problem by exporting the poor to the new world, and the Virginia texts record the failure of that effort, The Tempest reveals the consequences of a repression of masterlessness. The Tempest intervenes in the unproductive historical contradiction that stems from the confinement of vagabondage and consequential arresting of capitalist development; it offers an alternative history, one that obsessively denies the emergence of masterlessness and imagines an overlapping succession of precapitalist master– servant relations to the commercialization of labor. Rather than reveal its own textual ruptures that agitate ideological illusions of continuity, The Tempest offers a continuous narrative to cover over where history reveals itself

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as contradictory. The play’s utopianism lies in its idealization of diachronic process, not in its Gonzalo-like imaginings of a timeless land of Cockaigne. The general aim of this opening chapter is to suggest that typical transitional arguments of early modern texts have been under thrall to a too linear and symptomatic conception of the decline of feudalism and rise of capitalism. After suggesting that the interaction of the poor law regime and English response to masterlessness (in England and in the colonies) helps us to understand why capitalist wage-labor did not advance in a straightforward way following the decline of medieval serfdom, I then argue that The Tempest, in its reconstruction of unilinear transformation—from feudal relations of coercion to early capitalist forms of labor—looks retrospectively at history and attempt to rejoin history at important moments prior to systematic encroachments by social actors. Such encroachments in this case include the implementation of the Elizabethan poor law regime and the confinement of England’s new, proletarian-ready labor force. To the extent that The Tempest imagines a sense of history foregone or as it might have happened, it in many ways figures as a philosophy of history.

English Paternalism and the Threat of Masterless Migration Throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, contemporaries offered principally two arguments to explain the rise of vagabondage. The argument of the Puritan divines (and of the poor laws for the most part) employ what Richard Halpern usefully has called a “discourse of capacities,” which equates vagabondage with neglect of a productive calling and a predisposition among the poor toward idleness.7 In A Description of England, William Harrison offers the usual charge against vagrants: “[vagrants] are thieves, robbers, despisers of all laws, and enemies to the commonwealth and welfare of the land. What notable robberies, pilferies, murders, rapes, and stealings of young children . . . I need not to rehearse; but for their idle roguing about the country the law ordaineth this manner of correction.”8 The alternative argument, not voiced until the midseventeenth century in any sustained way (with the exception of Thomas More’s Utopia), was a humanitarian one, which attributed rising vagrancy to enclosures, unemployment, inflation, and population explosion.9 During the Commonwealth years, for instance, Samuel Hartlib and Peter Chamberlen went so far as to blame poverty and vagabondage on inefficient bureaucratic planning, envisaging labor exchanges similar to modern

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unemployment offices where “employers, labourers, servants, and apprentices might converge to supply each other’s needs.”10 The argument for unemployment rather than idleness to explain the rise of vagabondage makes more sense to modern ears, and until recently, historians have linked the rise of masterlessness to economic upheaval and unemployment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By most traditional accounts, dispossessed peasants, casualties of the disintegration of feudalism and the dissolution of the charitable monasteries, were forced into vagabondage because unemployment prevented their reabsorption into the economy as wage-laborers or petty-producers.11 One study claims, “chronic unemployment obliged many urban poor to roam from place to place in search of subsistence.”12 A.L. Beier, discussing the state of vagrancy during the civil war period, writes, “This period was the grand finale of a disastrous century marked by rising population, rents and food prices, and declining real wages. . . . The result for the poor was a deepening crisis; it is no coincidence that parish poor relief was first widely enforced, and that large-scale emigration overseas began then.”13 Recently, revisionist history has provided new arguments that question the extent of unemployment and economic recession in early modern England, forcing us to reconsider the so-called doom-and-gloom tradition of early modern economic history—a tradition headed by R.H. Tawney and W.G. Hoskins—which argued that England suffered a century-long economic decline attributed to a “little ice age,” continental religious wars, and civil wars appearing on the eve of absolutism. Steve Rappaport writes, “That the Elizabethan decades were to some degree years of economic hardship in London seems undeniable, but the case for economic decline should not be overstated. . . . It is likely . . . that during the reign of Elizabeth employment expanded considerably. . . .”14 Ian Archer remarks of the late sixteenth century, “We have no way of telling, for example, whether the number of productive niches expanded at the same rate as the city’s population, and therefore we have no measure of the extent of unemployment or underemployment. . . .15 With respect to the often noted sloth and criminality of the vagrant underclass, Archer has also shown that vagrant delinquency has been inflated by historians, who tend to collapse stylized literary representations of a criminal fraternity with historical reality: “There was a criminal underworld in the sense of people for whom criminal activity was regular, but it is arguable that its rapidly shifting allegiances made it somewhat easier for the authorities to penetrate it.”16 And against Beier’s claim that London faced “large scale juvenile delinquency,” Rappaport tells us that even five hundred vagrants appearing in Bridewell in 1600 represented a tiny portion of the population and should not have been as threatening as contemporaries had supposed.17

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In the same vein, although less concerned with vagrancy specifically, D.M. Palliser has argued that early modern England was not overpopulated, nor as subject to Malthusian positive checks, falling wages, and harvest failures as has been traditionally assumed;18 and Robert Brenner has claimed that England managed to escape the economic hardship of the general crisis of the seventeenth century: “agricultural demand made possible the emergence of a growing home market, not only for industrial goods and products for general consumption, but also for agricultural means for production . . . which provided the indispensable basis for the development of the English economy through the period of the general crisis of the seventeenth century, when elsewhere industry was contracting.”19 Undoubtedly, many vagrants were a wayward, threatening presence during the period, some of whom were delinquent, nonproductive, and “congenitally” idle (rogues by birth, Timon says in Timon of Athens); but when we can no longer assume that unemployment created vagrancy, that vagrants were part of an insidious criminal underworld, or that masses of landless peasants took to vagabondage because of refractory delinquency, we can no longer easily explain the establishment of the Elizabethan poor laws, or at least the many persecutory vagrancy acts that were an integral part of poor law legislation. We should be wary, I think, of accepting Marx’s famous analyses of vagrancy in Capital and elsewhere, where he suggests that the newly free labor force was forced into vagabondage and crime because it could not be reabsorbed into the economy as fast as it was created. Nor should we uncritically accept (at least as it relates to England), Foucault’s assertion in Madness and Civilization that the repressive confinement of vagrants and the impotent poor followed from an “economic crisis that affected the entire Western world: reduction of wages, unemployment, scarcity of coin.”20 If revisionist history suggests that the fugitive poor were not necessarily criminal, and if it were possible that a good number, given freedom to migrate, could have found employment, we should perhaps reconsider why the Elizabethans were preoccupied with restricting their poor from freedom to move outside parish boundaries, and the long—term consequences in doing so. Drawing on official documentation, humanist polemic, and Protestant theology, historians have traditionally argued that vagrancy threatened to subvert the entire fabric of society. Beier writes, “Vagrants were not ordinary criminals; they were actually menaces to society. They posed this threat because they were corrupt and social outcasts.”21 Derek Hirst notes, “The ‘masterless man’ . . . threatened society’s image of itself as an organic whole, an interdependent family, and was denounced as the source of all disorder, whether criminal or political.”22 David Underdown observes, “The vagrant was the extreme case of that much-feared menace, the ‘masterless’ man or

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woman . . . poverty, vagrancy, masterlessness, landlessness: all seemed to strike at the very foundations of order.”23 And C.B. Macpherson concludes, “The sturdy vagrant beggars were commonly thought to have put themselves outside society by their refusal to labour usefully . . . they were masterless men, and Puritan society had no place for them.”24 What can supplement and unite the above accounts of masterless demonization is the pervasive fear of unauthorized travel and migration English culture expresses when it describes the problem of masterlessness. Masterless men not only show up in Puritan sermons or the Elizabethan poor laws, but also in some unexpected places, in Hobbes’s Leviathan, for example, where Hobbes, after outlining his Democritean/atomistic theory of self-moving objects and bodies, determines that “corporations of beggars, Theeves and Gipsies,” constitute “Private Bodies, Regular, but Unlawful, who unite themselves into one Representative without any publique authority at all.”25 Hobbes directly references the masterless man as the embodiment of the state of war within civil society: “amongst masterlesse men, there is perpetual war, of every man against his neighbor . . . no propriety of goods, or Lands, no security; but a full absolute Libertie in every particular man.”26 According to Hobbesian materialism a “private body” enjoying absolute liberty is like an unconstrained, wayward atom, seeking at all costs to preserve itself. The related concepts of “absolute liberty” and masterlessness dovetail nicely, if implicitly, in Thomas Carew’s well-received mask, Coelum Britannicum. After Mercury purges the heavens of the vices that have been exiled there as a result of Jove’s penance for adultery, Momus worries, “in my judgment it is not safe that these infectious persons should wander here to the hazard of this island, they threatened less danger when they were nay’ld to the Firmament: I should . . . send them to New England, which hath purg’d more virulent humors from the politique body. . . .”27 Carew expresses the familiar fear of wandering from a fixed point of origin, connecting the loosening of cosmological fixity with aimlessness on Earth. While he does not attach the term masterless or vagrant to these unfixed spirits, he does suggest they should be sent to the new world. And we know of course (and will have occasion to discuss later) that the most common remedy for masterlessness throughout the seventeenth century and beyond was exile or voluntary immigration to the colonies. A brief look at the Elizabethan poor laws shows that the statutes themselves repeatedly express a fear of unauthorized wandering and migration. The most comprehensive vagrancy acts and proclamations, the 1598 and 1601 Poor Laws, the 1607 Stuart Proclamation, and the Act of Settlement (1660), comprise what Karl Polanyi calls a fateful “code of labor,” one that controlled economic expansion for over two centuries.28 The hallmark of these acts was

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not their specificity of crimes or punishment thereof, or their establishment of charitable doles and work-projects, although these features were integral. While placing the burden of relief squarely on decentralized parish authorities, these acts were above all concerned to restrict any unlicensed movement and migration outside parish boundaries or the individual’s birthplace. The Statute of Artificers (1563), not concerned with vagrants specifically, set the tone for the restrictive hysteria against unauthorized mobility that became the centerpiece of most of the later acts and proclamations. The Statute stipulated forced labor, seven-year apprenticeships and wage assessments by public overseers, and it placed burdens on masters and overseers to monitor any travel of their apprentices or laborers. In 1598 an Elizabethan statute declared that “any rogue, vagabond, or sturdy beggar who shall be taken begging, wandering, or misordering themselves . . . should be openly whipped and sent from parish to parish . . . the next straight way to the parish where he was born . . . and if the same not be known, then to the parish where he or she had last dwelt by the space of a whole year . . . or if it be not known where he or she was born or last dwelt, then to the parish through which he or she last passed without punishment.”29 One notes in this act an obsessive desire to locate a place of origin and to fix movement. Jacobean politics reinforced the Elizabethan constraint on unauthorized wandering: a 1606 Proclamation demanded that all “idle persons and masterless men depart and avoid themselves from the city of London . . . and from thence to repair to the Counties and places where they were borne, and there to tary and abide in some lawfull worke. . . .”30 This concern to hinder unsupervised migration is concisely expressed in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, when the first citizen complains that the patricians “repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor” (1.1.79–82). The preoccupation with restrictions on unlicensed travel reaches a high point during the Commonwealth years. In 1656 the master-general appointed a committee to revise existing laws on vagabondage. The committee recommended that all individuals found wandering outside a tenmile radius from their residences were to be classified as fugitives. One member of the committee objected to the overly general mandate, claiming, “if you leave it in the power of the justices to judge who shall be a wanderer, for aught I know I myself may be whipped, if I be found but ten miles from my house . . . In this statute . . . any man may be adjudged by the justice to be a vagrant.”31 A number of years later the Act of Settlement (1662) also expressed a fear of unauthorized travel: “by reason of some defects in the law, poor people are not restrained from going from one parish to another . . . and then to another parish, and at last become rogues and vagabonds.”32

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While we can speculate as to the particular causes of the early modern fear of unlicensed and unauthorized wandering—Deleuze and Guattari argue, for example, that “it is a vital concern of every state not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire ‘exterior,’ over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon,”33—I am more interested in the consequences rather than the origins of masterless confinement. In terms of the consequences, the historical conjuncture becomes more complicated, since the restrictions on vagrant mobility had profound, although unintended, long-term effects on the rise of capitalism. The Enlighteners inveighed against the entire English poor law apparatus on the grounds that it immobilized the free circulation of labor. Adam Smith remarked, “The very unequal price of labor which we frequently find in England in places at no great distance from one another, is probably owing to the obstruction which the law of settlements gives to a poor man who would carry his industry from parish to parish without a certificate.”34 Malthus recommended the “total abolition of all the present parish-laws,” in order that the poor “would be able to settle without interruption . . . [and] the market of labour would then be free. . . .”35 Not just the classical economists, but also modern historians railed against the English poor law system. Paul Mantoux wrote of the Act of Settlement: “The law safeguarded the interests of the parishes. But at what a cost! The whole working class found itself deprived of one its most valuable rights: the right to move about freely.”36 Karl Polanyi, impassioned defender of liberalism and the free market writes, “The two great Elizabethan statutes and The Act of Settlement together were a charter of liberty to the common people as well as a seal of their disabilities.”37 Another economist, not as stridently liberal as Polanyi, writes simply, “In short, the effect of the Law of Settlement was to keep people where they were and to restrict greatly the opportunities for employment available to the man who was out of a job.”38 There is some evidence that the Enlightenment critique of the restrictive nature of the settlement laws is anticipated in the mid-seventeenth century. In The Office of Addresses and Encounters (1650), Henry Robinson realizes that the conditions of poverty are not simply created by idleness and sturdy beggary, but that the idle poor remain unemployed because they have no access to hiring employers and thus cannot offer their labor where it is in demand: “poore people are not acquainted with other peoples wants, besides their own; they have hitherto had no meanes to come to the speedy knowledge of such persons as stand as much in need of poore man’s labours, as the poor people doe of rich mens moneyes . . . But when the rich, as well as the poore mens occasions, and necessities, are equally known to one another, the poor will be able to treat with more reputation, and get

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more indifferent and advantageous prices.”39 Robinson goes on not to recommend the free circulation of labor, but, in keeping with the stillpaternalist nature of early modern culture, the establishment of a Registry and centralized employment agency that would facilitate communication between the poor and prospective employers. But the implication is that compulsory poor rates and the confinement of the poor in workhouses are inefficient antipoverty measures, given the notion that an opening of communication between employer and laborer could provide gainful employment for the available labor force. We see a series of ungovernable events, then, neither sequentially unfolding, nor anticipated by individual agents or the conscious efforts of ascending or descending ruling power, in which vagabondage, the poor law system, and the rise of capitalism are all deeply and contradictorily interwoven. Clearly this provides evidence against orthodox historical materialism, since immanently expanding economic forces or relations are not catalysts in the rise, protraction, and dissolution of masterlessness. What I have been trying to bring out in the above argument is the unforeseen nature of the consequences that the limitations on vagabondage and establishment of poor laws had on capitalist development. The significance of the unintentional aspect of these developments is consistent with Robert Brenner’s argument on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. As I briefly remarked in the introductory chapter, Brenner argues that most of the theories of the transition—from Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory to Maurice Dobbs’s earlier productive forces model—resemble Adam Smith’s explanation of economic development, which emphasized a rise in trade, division of labor, and the underlying belief in the influence of homo economicus in guiding capitalism toward a naturally unfolding end. According to Brenner, the neo-Smithians assume the instrumental existence of primary capitalist movers, so many atomistic egos, each functioning as individual profit-maximizers. Brenner argues instead that unforeseen events—dearth and demographic collapse—determined the differential ways feudal lords were forced to continue surplus extraction following the decline of serfdom. A relatively mobile and free peasantry in England, coupled with scarcity of land available to the lower orders, led to accumulation, innovation in agriculture, and the establishment of what Marx described as the classic triadic structure of agrarian capitalism (landowner, tenant-farmer, and laborer).40 Brenner’s conclusion bears emphasizing: “The methods applied by the ruling class . . . are thus incomprehensible simply as their own choice. These were given as it were by the class structure; by the system of surplus extraction relations with the direct producers in which the ruling class found itself. . . . The ruling classes were not free to choose the manner in which they

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exploited the direct producers.”41 The consequences of this argument are that capitalism was an unintended effect of structural conflict, or as Ellen Meiksins Wood has recently observed, “Capitalism is no longer a presupposition, whose unexplained existence in embryo must be assumed in order to account for its being. Instead it emerged as an unintended consequence of relations between non-capitalist classes.”42 Brenner’s argument is mostly concerned with explaining the onset of capitalism following the decline of the feudal mode of production. The argument I have been making with respect to masterlessness and the poor laws shows how the same logic applies but in the opposite direction: just as we find little ruling-class choice in propelling capitalism forward, so we see little ruling-class agency in obstructing that movement once underway. The following pages show how the contradictions inherent in the Tudor and Stuart reaction toward masterlessness are reproduced (and the consequences of that contradiction realized) in colonial Virginia. Following this is a discussion of the repression of masterlessness in The Tempest, and the attempt in the play to undo the contradictions revealed in the poor law history (those that are made more manifest in the Virginia texts). Needless to say, in neither John Smith’s texts nor The Tempest, do official or dominant cultural forces (seigniorial or bourgeois) intentionally or unidirectional shape the representation of economic advancement in The Tempest or economic retrogression in Virginia.

New World Vagrants, Old World Anxieties Seventeenth-century reformers and propagandists frequently argued that the new world could absorb England’s post-feudal landless population. A 1603 Proclamation called for the banishment “beyond the seas” of any “incorrigible or dangerous Rogues. . . .”43 Hakluyt thought the colonies could provide a haven for “condemned English men and women, in whom there may be founde hope of amendment,”44 and the author of Nova Britannium recommended exportation to the colonies on the grounds that it would be “most profitable for the state to rid our multitudes of such as lie at home, pestering the land with pestilence and penury, and infecting one another with vice and villanie, worse than the plague itself. . . .”45 Similarly, the author of The Reformed Virginian Silk-Worm wrote that emigration to the colonies would “disburthen this nation of many indigent persons, who having formerly perhaps enjoyed a fulnesse of abused or forfeyted plenty . . . are prompted by their owne and other mens ruine by making the highways . . . an ambuscado to innocent Travellers. . . .”46 Captain John Smith argued that the establishment of a colony in Virginia

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would “so employ and encourage a great part of our idlers . . . that could they but once taste the sweet fruites of their owne labours, doubtlesse many thousands would be advised by good discipline, to take more pleasure in honest industrie, then in their humours of dissolute idlenesse.”47 One historian sums up the propaganda: “Practically everyone who had anything to say on the subject of colonial development recommended that beggars, delinquents, ‘all such as lie on the parishes,’ all ‘lewed and lazy felowes,’ be forthwith collected and sent off.”48 After repeated failure to establish a stable and productive colony throughout the first decades of the seventeenth century, and after withdrawal of support and investment in the colonial venture, the same propaganda that championed the immigration of delinquency to the new world took an about-face, and blamed the failures of the colony on the preponderance of an idle labor pool. William Strachey describes the early colonial laborers as unskilled and unhallowed “scum of men,” and importuned England to send over “men of rank and quality,” “carpenters and workmen, and skillful vignerons.”49 The author of a New Life in Virginia recommends emigration for those “of honest minds and better sort,” instead of those who “cannot live at home, nor lay their bones to labor.”50 The arguments against the immigration of delinquents run throughout all of John Smith’s writings. In the Proceedings Smith (and his collaborators) note that their men are “little better than atheist,”51 “whose mischiefs” daily spring from their ignorant (yet ambitious spirits)” (P. 207); they are variously described as “mutinous prisoners” (P. 271), or “untoward gallants” harboring “childish fears” (P. 226–278). At one point, threatening coercive measures and forced labor, Smith warns his men, “and thinke not that either my pains, or the adventurers purses, will ever maintaine you in idlenesse and sloth” (P. 259). Smith compares the planters of Virginia to those in England who “lie under windows and starve in Cheap-side, rot in Gaoles, doe in the street, high-waies, or any where, and use a thousand devices to maintaine themselves in those miseries, rather than take any paines, to live as they may by honest labour. . . .”52 And in answer to King James’s question as to how misery in Virginia can be mitigated, Smith responds “with sufficient workmen and meanes to maintain them, not such delinquents as here cannot be ruled by all the lawes in England . . . to rectify a Commonwealth with debauched people is impossible” (GH 330). We see in these passages more than the casual recognition of a failed endeavor to establish Virginia as an outpost for England’s idle or criminal fringes. Smith’s and the others’ recriminations against the Virginian laborers are excessive and borderline-paranoid. If we set a monological official culture against an alien native culture we fail to register the fissures within the European culture itself, and the extent to which the English attitudes

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toward their own are part of the bad faith endemic to the colonial experience generally. The about-face the official culture makes, and their narrow explanations for colonial hardship, should perhaps make us as wary of accepting colonial representations of idle (English) labor as we are of accepting the European representations of the inferiority of the native culture. In the following pages, resisting the colonists’ ascription of colonial failure to masterless unproductivity, I suggest that the new world English laborer is the most available scapegoat for economic ruin. I also argue that such ruin is itself caused by a number of economic and ideological contradictions stemming from the reproduction in Virginia of an unresolved poverty problem that had originated in England. Historians have traditionally described Virginia as a haven for economic individualism, free competition, and market-oriented values. One historian writes of the Virginia Company: “The self-interest of the company was to be assured by giving a free rein to the economic self-interest of individual colonists and groups of colonists.”53 Another historian remarks that the headright system “was supposed to involve the free play of economic opportunity within the context of an industrious society.”54 Recently, Jack Greene has supported these claims, and has argued for an atomized, entrepreneurial Virginia, in which unbridled individualism, far from being exceptional, was coextensive with the secularized market values prevalent in England. Greene describes seventeenth-century England, and by implication early Virginia, as “dynamic, loose, open, individualistic, competitive, conflicted, acquisitive, highly stratified, and market-based. . . .”55 How can we reconcile this bourgeois and opportunistic outlook of the early colonial leaders with the backlash against that free-market ethos running throughout John Smith’s writings? Such a backlash is evident in, for example, the company’s concern to reoccupy the private land; their pejorative comments regarding the self-interest of the planters; their claim that individualism sacrifices the “common benefit”; the retention of traditional economic relations and belief systems, particularly, classical republicanism, indentured servitude, and coerced labor among the governors; and the uneven persistence of feudal values within an assumed capitalist setting. It can perhaps be argued that these elements are consistent with the governors’ opportunism, that faced with the threat of declining profits and selfinterested investors, it was merely strategic and not retrogressive for the company to reinstate the old world value system that it did; or that the company merely paid lip-service to classical republican arguments and georgic ideals. But against these views one could argue that a commitment to a capitalist ethos might have compelled the adventurers to ignore the privateering, once-indentured producers, or to fit them into a market framework that saw utility in private endeavors.

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Rather than take sides in a debate that sets self-interest on the one hand against communitarian values on the other, I suggest an alternative argument. We may begin with the premise that the structure of the relationships between the governors and their (white) laborers bears a striking resemblance to that inhering between English culture and their destitute poor, in which a philanthropic temper is interwoven with a fear of dispersal and migration. In Smith’s writings the problematic of movement becomes more complex, since the power of movement that is denied to the Euro-American poor is acknowledged in the text to be a primary support of the power of the native culture. Simply put, power and authority in these texts resides in the ability either to migrate or to prevent the migration of another. When Smith and the governors adopt the more authoritarian tone we have noted above, it is usually directed at economic opportunism among the laborers, those who, after their indenture had been fulfilled, dispersed from the central plantation in search of a life outside the ambit of the common stock and company settlement. Wesley Craven writes of the governors’ reaction against the breakup of the company’s plantation into individual holdings, “The first step toward the decline of the company’s plantation, or “publique” as it was known, had come in 1614. The seven year term of service of the oldest inhabitants in that year, and there were present for the first time in that colony free laborers.”56 Sandys, the governor of the colony at the time, reacted to the dispersion, warning that “as the Private Plantation began thus to increase so contrary wise the estate of the Publique . . . grew into utter consumption.”57 Eventually, in his effort to force colonists to grow diverse food crops and to thwart the overreliance on tobacco as a single cash-crop, Sandys convinced the Virginia Company to reoccupy much of the “common” land, and strictly to control the issuance of patents to individual or semiindependent plantations. A need for more labor forced Sandys to promote immigration, doubling the population of the colony, but in the process only making conditions worse than prior to 1618, because the colony could not absorb the rapid influx of laborers. Sandys suggests that dispersion among the colonists threatens the wellbeing of the colony as a whole. This sits oddly with any notion of the “free play of economic opportunity,” but eventually another seemingly more plausible argument was made by the colonial leaders against colonial dispersion, namely that the colonists became susceptible to native attack when settlements were separated one from another. When Smith is asked by the Majesties Commission to explain the cause of the massacre in 1622, in which over three hundred colonists were killed, he remarks: “the cause of the Massacre was the want of marshall discipline, and because they would have all the English had by destroying those they found so carelessly secure,

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that they were not provided to defend themselves against any enemy, being so dispersed as they were” (GH 328). For our purposes, it is important to note that interspersed throughout the passages in which Smith narrates the events leading up to the massacre, he invokes masterlessness and vagrancy, as if it were somehow connected with the colonial susceptibility to attack in the first place. After Smith offers his explanation for the massacre, a Commission organized by James I asks Smith how the problems in the colony could be rectified, to which Smith, in an uncharacteristic moment, argues that part of the problem is that many of the adventurers exploit and abuse their laborers because “God forbid . . . that masters there [Virginia] should not have the same privilege over there servants as here” (GH 330). This is an important line in the Historie and shows how Smith occupies two positions throughout his writings, on the one hand as the mouthpiece for the Virginia Company, on the other hand as the champion of the laboring poor. Rather than suggest that vagrancy created the conditions that enabled the massacre, Smith pushes the argument back a step further, and locates the causes of vagrant dispersion and idleness in the harsh treatment the laborers received under the authoritarian adventurers, those who oscillate between solicitude and outright oppressiveness. Thus, if on the manifest level, dispersion ostensibly leaves the plantations open to Native attack, it is perhaps more latently dangerous, Smith implies, because it undermines master–servant bonds, and creates disunity and a threat to synoptic order at Jamestown. Not surprisingly, the one native tribe well respected among the colonists is the Pawtuxunt, “who inhabit together, and not so dispersed as the rest. These of al others were found the most civill to give intertainment.”58 And if one good thing came out of the massacre, Smith adds (reverting to his usual campaign against idleness), it forced the company to replace those vagabonds who contributed to the massacre with more responsible citizens: “since I came form thence, the honorable Company have bin humble suiters to his Majestie to get vagabonds and condemned men to go thither . . . yet for all the worst of . . . this lamentable massacre, there is more honest men now suiters to go, then ever hath been constrained knaves.”59 We can see in these developments the same double bind that we saw earlier in the response to masterlessness in England. If dispersion of the undesirable second-generation vagrants Smith describes (those who became free of seven-year indentures beginning around 1614) made them susceptible to native invasion, Sandys and others might have let self-interested migration run its course and burn itself out. If native invasion was not a threat to scattered private plantations, then Sandys still should have left dispersal and individual initiative to its own devices, in keeping with the colonists’ vaunted free-enterprise outlook. But because the company held fast to a

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paternalistic conception of its laboring force that was conditioned no doubt from stubborn fears of masterlessness originating in England, the company’s leaders attempted to force unity by prohibiting unauthorized planting outside the perimeter of the main settlement. Analogous to the unintended effects of the English poor laws, the very concern that masterlessness and migration obstructed order and productivity only ended up forestalling productivity; without uninhibited expansion and free enterprise, the company and colony could not support each new wave of immigration, a principal cause of its dissolution in 1624.60 One of the ironies in Smith’s texts is that the very power of a nomadic lifestyle that is denied to the planters in the Virginia Company is the defining feature of the power the Natives hold over the colonists. On a number of occasions Powhatan warns Smith that the natives can migrate to another culture without much readjustment, an act that would devastate the colonists. Powhatan warns that if the Europeans attempt to destroy the native culture, they “will have worse by our absence; for we can plant anywhere, though with more labour, and we know you cannot live if you want our harvest . . . if you proceed in revenge we will abandon the country” (GH 210). In another exchange, recorded in The Proceedings, Powhatan repeats the similar threat: “what can you get by war, when we hide our provision and flie to the woodes, whereby you must famish by wronging us your friends . . .” (P. 247). Smith advises his men not to unnecessarily antagonize the natives on the following grounds: “If we should each kill our man and so proceede with al in this house; the rest will all fly, then shall we get no more, then the bodies that are slaine, and then starve for victuall” (P. 251–252). And Smith recognizes the advantages the natives enjoy because of migration and a nomadic lifestyle: “by their continuall ranging, and travell, they know all the advantages and places most frequented with Deer, Beasts, Fish, Foule, Roots, and Berries” (GH 118). One symbolic encounter between the natives and Smith that brings out the importance of the power of migration occurs when Smith is captured by the natives and offers his compass as barter for his liberation: He [Smith] demanding for their Captaine, they shewed Opechancanough, King of Pamaunke, to whom he gave a round ivory double compass Dyall. Much they marvailed at the playing of the Fly and Needle, which they could see so plainely, and yet not touch it, because of the glasse that covered them. But when he demonstrated by that Globe-like Jewell, the roundness of the earth, and skies, the spheare of the Sunne, Moone, and Starres, and how the Sunne did chase the night round about the world continually; the greatnesse of the Land and Sea, the diversitie of Nations, varietie of complexions, and how we were to them Antipodes, and many other such like matters, they all stood amazed with admiration. (GH 147)

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While Smith describes the compass in much detail, the compass is for the most part separated from its most important function, its power to provide direction when traveling. Since the freedom of movement is severely constricted for the colonists, the compass as compass becomes alien to or no longer functional for Smith and the Europeans. It is as if the transference of the compass to the natives represents Smith’s acknowledgment that in the new world the natives hold the power associated with migration and travel, and therefore should rightfully possess the greatest symbol of that power. Opechankanough merely needs to hold up the compass, letting it represent itself, and by extension the natives’ natural claim over it; he does not need to reinvent the compass as a symbol for so many things over and above its use-value. If in England, and during the passage to the new world, the European adventurers could claim a symbolic attachment to the instrument, once in the new world the power of the compass belongs to the natives.

The Tempest and the Reconstructed Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism We have seen thus far that English culture exported anxieties over masterlessness to the new world, which provides a partial explanation for the failure to set up a prosperous colony in Virginia during the first half of the seventeenth century. If the rise of masterlessness explains why history only fitfully develops, and history itself cannot conceal the obstacle of masterlessness to diachronic process, then The Tempest takes pains to obscure and suppress that unsettling reality. Obsessively reimagining and reinforcing master–servant relations, the play does not tolerate any unsubordinated relationship. But The Tempest is not static, and if not within history, then within the play-world does a dialectic motor itself toward a higher unity. Straddling both feudalism and capitalism, The Tempest performs a bypass on diseased history, clearing from its path any masterless impediment that might halt seamless economic transformation. To the extent that I will be describing the partial expression of feudal and post-feudal values by Prospero and Caliban, respectively, I might seem to be pursuing a conventional transitional argument that is focused on the clash of rival or historically successive class ideologies. It should become clear, though, that in my interpretation of the play, Prospero’s function is precisely to undermine the relations of lordship and domination that he initially supports; this allows for an uncontained expression of masterlessness (Caliban’s momentary freedom) that quickly transmutes into a form of

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post-feudal relations that, historically speaking, is sidetracked by the English confinement of masterlessness. We can begin an interpretation of the play by reviewing the many forms of mastery and servitude one finds in the early scenes, particularly in the exchanges among Ferdinand, Prospero, and Miranda. Ferdinand, “released” from a prior condition of subordination to his father, invents himself as the newly installed King of Naples upon meeting Prospero: “single thing, as I am now, that wonders / To hear thee speak of Naples. . . . Myself am Naples. . . .”61 Prospero intervenes almost immediately, compelled to reimpose mastery over Ferdinand: “The Duke of Milan / And his more braver daughter could control thee . . .” (1.2.439–441), and later, “I’ll manacle thy neck and feet together . . .” (1.2.463). Prospero at this point has not imagined an alliance between Ferdinand and Miranda; he is motivated, it seems, by his own will to punish Ferdinand for the latter’s audacity in claiming any sense of “freedom.” Prospero then promises Ariel his freedom in exchange for the newly enslaved or enserfed Ferdinand: “Delicate Ariel, / I’ll set thee free for this” (1.2.443–444). Prospero’s means of compensation to Ariel for Ariel’s labor of enslaving Ferdinand is an avowal of Ariel’s liberty. Not only all isolated relations between individuals, but also the entire system of exchange is founded on a tightly supervised economy of lordship and domination. These relationships—indentured servitude, outright slavery, reciprocal gift-exchange and barter—seem to represent precapital relations with a vengeance. The value of Ariel’s service is measured more by canons of proper obedience and deference to a capricious master than it is by productivity. Ariel reminds Prospero, “I have done thee worthy service; / Told thee no lies, made no mistakings, serv’d / Without or grudge or grumblings . . .” (1.2.246–248). And we should note just what kind of power Prospero wields over Ariel and everyone else: the power to immobilize, to “stow” the Mariners under “hatches” (1.2.230), to “rend an oak and peg Ariel in his knotty entrails” (1.2.294–295), to “sty” Caliban in the “hard rock” (1.2.344–345), to maintain the spirits in “their confines” (4.1.121), and to tie Ferdinand’s arms in a “sad knot” (1.2.223). In his obsession with practices of ritual bondage and immobilization, Prospero is figured initially as a vigilant overlord, as if in a neo-feudal repetition-compulsion he unceasingly suppresses a flight from serfdom among his unfree dependents. Of the immobilizing tendencies of the feudal state, Michael Postan tells us that the “miscellaneous rights or ‘freedoms’ which a free man could claim as his own—the right to move away . . . could not be exercised by the lord’s dependent tenants except with his permission.”62 Erik Olin Wright notes that feudal culture described these flights as “moments in which the peasant was stealing part of the labour power owned by the lord.”63 In a seventeenthcentury extension of these practices of migratory constraint, Prospero’s

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magic stands in for the legislative power of the poor laws to hinder movement; the difference, of course, is that while the poor laws restrict freedom to labor, Prospero’s magic overcompensates, sending Ferdinand, for example, into potentially interminable hard labor. Once under Prospero’s mastership, Ferdinand, like Caliban, is forced to gather logs. Ferdinand labors in a rite of passage in order to gain the affection of Miranda and the support of Prospero, who finally informs him “All thy vexations were but my trials of thy love / And thou hast strangely stood the test” (4.1.7–10). We recall also that Caliban is forced to work under Prospero’s dominion in atonement for his earlier advances upon Miranda. It goes without saying that this is unproductive work, without a division of labor and any sense of a social order based on rationalization, efficiency, or productivity. When Prospero tells Miranda that Caliban “serves in offices that profit” (1.2.314–315), “profit” denotes subsistence, not accumulation. It is even unclear whether all this work is required for anyone’s livelihood (just how many thousands of logs does Prospero need to maintain himself and Miranda?). Prospero is an inversion of Weber’s precapitalist charismatic magus, whose nearly demonic power relies on unmitigated will, persuasion, and coercion operating in the absence of any legitimating values or institutions. Yet The Tempest does not honor Prospero’s magic, and one of the most striking aspects of the play is the way in which these relations of unmasked coercion and servitude seem silently to pass over into naturalized relations of capital and commodity worship. The moments of “slippage” or textual rupture occur when the play extends its own diffuse but unsourced magic over Prospero’s charismatic magic. We can see this occur in the various metamorphoses Miranda undergoes in her development from primitive barter object to commodity fetish. Initially, Prospero offers her as a “gift” to Ferdinand: “Then, as my gift, and thine own acquisition / Worthily purchased, take my daughter” (4.1.13). Miranda is doubly inscribed here, at once Prospero’s gift, as if she is an exchange-object in a primitive potlatch, in which the countergift offered to Prospero will be his restoration and liaison with Alonso. But on the other hand, she is an item “purchased” by Ferdinand, no longer a gift or reward freely tendered, but a compensatory object. Later in the play, the double investment of Miranda is displaced by coding of a new order: in response to Alonso’s question, “What is this maid with whom thou wast at play?” Ferdinand responds, “Sir, she is mortal; But by immortal providence she’s mine. / I chose her when I could not ask my father for his advice” (5.1.189–191). Miranda’s status has changed from a gift given by Prospero to Ferdinand, to a purchase of Ferdinand’s, to a providential windfall, to finally an object-choice of Ferdinand’s. Ferdinand recognizes early on that he labored for Miranda as her “patient log-man.” Yet Ferdinand’s laboring past is soon forgotten, rendered invisible, and he

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acknowledges only the mystified presence of Miranda, divorced from the labor undergone in her “acquisition,” and now granted to him by “immortal providence.” Ferdinand mistakes the result of hard labor for a natural endowment, and Prospero as overseer recedes in the background, displaced by a higher power. “Immortal Providence,” then, need not simply mean divine providence here; it suggests the power of a secularized providential materialism, in which Miranda comes to represent, among other things, the detached and congealed labor of Ferdinand. When Alonso mistakes Miranda for a goddess, he is bowing to a new material goddess, not merely a sacred one. The silent, unobstructed passage from feudal to post-feudal relations is brought out more clearly in the relationship between Caliban and the Europeans. Caliban learns not one, but two languages in the play (or he learns one prior to the beginning of the play and another as the play unfolds): the language taught to him by Miranda is the language of a natural economy; the language he internalizes by the end of the play (one that he teaches himself ) approximates the language of instrumental labor and capital. Early in the play he worries that Prospero could “make a vassal” of his God Setebos (1.2.375). Unlike the commodities Harriot and colonial propagandists held up to colonialist investors, Caliban is not initially described as a valuable commodity transferable to England. Instead he is merely a spectacle, one not to be bought and sold, but more of a display item, like an artifact or ornament. Stephano describes him as a potentially valuable “present for any Emperor that ever trod on neat’s leather” (2.2.69–72). And Caliban, of course, is no free laborer for much of the play; he works under coercion as Prospero’s “slave.” Yet the crucial moment in Caliban’s transformation comes when he supplants Prospero as master with, not simply Stephano, but the “celestial liquor.” He does so by promising that in return for the bottle, he will show the best springs to Stephano and Trinculo, and “dig pig-nuts,” and reveal to them a “jay’s nest, and “snare nimble marmosets” (2.2.168–169). After contracting himself to Stephano and Trinculo by swearing upon the bottle, Caliban announces he will be their “true subject; for the liquor is not earthly” (2.2.126–127). Self-fashioned as an altered, “true” subject, putting his labor-capacity to a self-interested end, Caliban has not merely substituted one master (Prospero) for another (Stephano). He has replaced both masters with the more amorphous master that is capital, effecting the substitution by exchanging his own alienable energies for the phantasmagoric, unearthly “bottle.” If under Prospero he was enslaved or enserfed, under Stephano and Trinculo he has attained at least a precarious and ironic degree of freedom. Of course, what I am describing as the scene of Caliban’s self-alienation, one might describe as the simple pursuit of base desires among low characters

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in a comic mode. But the scene is remarkable, I think, because, like Miranda’s shifting status and the reconfiguration of Ferdinand’s labor-form, Caliban’s relations with Stephano and Trinculo are so essentially different from his prior relations with Prospero. Caliban is not simply, as George Lamming suggests, “the excluded, that which is eternally below possibility . . . an occasion which can be appropriated and exploited to the purposes of another’s own development.”64 Under no compulsion by an overlord, freely discoursing in a new version of the language he had hitherto cursed, Caliban sets the terms of the bargain, instrumentalizing his labor-capacity in order to attain a desired end. When Ariel says “Caliban has found a new master,” the meaning is not entirely clear. If Stephano is Caliban’s new master (the most likely signification) then mastery does not imply re-feudalization, since Prospero-like compulsion is not readily apparent: in place of Prospero’s bodily persecution of Caliban, Trinculo’s method of persecution is verbal taunting and “mocking,” an affront, Stephano self-righteously declares, to Caliban’s “dignity” (3.2.28–35). “Master” could equally refer either to the bottle, suggesting reification, or Caliban himself, suggesting a newly conceived, if momentary, form of alienable self-mastery. Not only is Caliban a different servant to Stephano than he is to Prospero, but Stephano is also a different master to Caliban than is Prospero. Stephano boasts that he has made the bottle “with his own hands” (2.2.124) after escaping from the shipwreck “upon a butt of sack” (2.2.122), and he assures Caliban he has a household supply of the celestial liquor in a cellar “in a rock by the sea-side, where my wine is hid” (2.2.134–135). Whereas Prospero possesses an overflow of subsistence goods (surplus logs) but only one desirable and exchangeable commodity (Miranda), the surprisingly resourceful Stephano harbors a commodity surplus, potentially exchangeable, in this comically inverted world, for more worthwhile commodities proper, including not simply the knowledge of Prospero’s whereabouts and elusive books (which only Caliban’s specialized labor can provide) but the valuable rarities Caliban will furnish as recompense for the bottle. Caliban exclaims, “I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts; / . . . bring thee . . . clustering filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee / Young scamels from the rock” (2.2.168–172). Unlike the labor he ungainfully performs for Prospero’s subsistence—”fetch in firing” (2.2.181), “scrape trenchering” (2.2.183), and log-gathering—Caliban offers Stephano the sorts of commodities that would have stirred the imagination of colonialist merchants and investors: “clustering filberts,” “young scamels,” and “nimble marmosets.” In William Strachey’s True Repertory of the Wracke, as Frank Kermode notes, “scamels,” or “sea-mels,” are described as exotic commodities and delicacies.65 While Stephano and Trinculo enlist Caliban’s talents with a manifest view to conquest and consumption, the

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items Caliban lists are potentially convertible to further commodity and gain; indeed part of the irony in the scene lies in the fact that Stephano, the depraved and “poor drunkard,” would hardly have cultivated the refined palate and taste required to appreciate the nonpareils Caliban is offering, and the use or exchange to which Stephano would put these commodities if ever furnished is an open question. The important point is not that these relations are allegorically capitalist as such, but that inasmuch as Marxist critics like Walter Cohen principally focus on Prospero (who I have suggested acts like a customary, paternal overlord) as the exemplar in the play of post-feudal, “perhaps bourgeois,” individualism, they fail to consider the more materialist forms of flexible, uncoerced self-interest and labor distributed among these low characters in this allegorically rich comic mode.66 Critics have labored over Prospero’s disturbance when he realizes he has momentarily forgotten the subplot and Caliban’s conspiracy. Hulme and Barker have seen this disturbance as a “textual excess,” one that almost shakes Prospero’s power, but because Shakespeare relegates the subplot to the comic mode, “in the end his version of history remains authoritative, the larger play acceding as it were to the containment of the conspirators in the safely comic mode. . . .”67 Hulme and Barker fail to note that the moment when Prospero’s power is de-authorized marks the moment of Caliban’s self-alienation. This is the more remote or long-term consequence of Prospero’s neglecting to monitor closely events in the subplot. If The Tempest aims to represent the historical change from feudal to post-feudal forms of labor (and I am assuming it makes that attempt, given its extended discussion and transformation of different forms of labor and servitude), and the beginnings of that transformation occurred the way revisionist history has suggested (and I am assuming this is the most compelling argument available), then Prospero’s agency in realizing that transformation needs to be negated, and the onset of post-feudal labor-forms needs to be allegorized in the absence of any ruling power underwriting that transformation. Prospero’s history is not authoritative, as Hulme and Barker would have it, but rather subordinate to the play’s tendency to script a narrative that itself reconstructs history. We should consider, then, the ways in which Prospero’s ultimate function in the play might not be at all to uphold the neo-feudal values with which he is initially aligned. How can we reconcile the play’s very negation of Prospero’s power with the emphasis it places on the prodigiousness of his power to control all forms of labor, movement, mastery, and servitude? On the one hand, Prospero’s project (the play’s project) is to repress any notion of masterlessness if the play is to represent an undisturbed transformation from feudal to post-feudal relations; yet after having done so, Prospero needs to recede or relinquish his power at the very moment of

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that transformation, to vanish as a ruling influence if the play is to be consistent with the logic of actual history (history as told by Brenner, Wood, et al.) that was momentarily submerged with the advent of masterlessnesss. In other words, the play relies on Prospero’s ruling agency to undo a historical contradiction (masterlessness) but then negates that agency in order to recapture the history that masterlessness had subsequently precluded, to represent the continuation of capitalism divested of any ruling coordination. But this in itself seems to beg the question of how, if at all, the play, deals with the question of masterlessness; that is, Prospero’s obsession with mastery doesn’t entail an obsession against masterlessness or the repression thereof. We can understand the curious nonrepresentation of masterlessness in the play through an assessment of Prospero’s compulsion to repeat the events that led up to his exile. Of the series of repetitions in Prospero’s play—the restaging of the storm, the planned conspiracies, Prospero’s comments to Alonso on the loss of his daughter—Hulme remarks, “Prospero stages a fantasized version of the original conspiracy with the difference that, this time, he will defeat it. . . . His pastoral romance is a dream of wish-fulfillment, a fantasy of dreams come true. . . .”68 Hulme refers to Erik Erikson’s account of repetition, in which an individual “constructs a model of his past experiences which will allow him to play at doing something that was in reality done to him.”69 While it is commonsensical enough to assume that Prospero’s compulsion to repeat is tied to wish-fulfillment and a desire for revenge, Hulme elides the importance of repression in the repetition-compulsion. For Freud the compulsion to repeat is a symptom of repression. Repetition expresses a partial return of the repressed, in which the subject repeats distortions of events rather than directly reencountering them. If we believe that repetition stems from repression, how we can we reconcile Prospero’s repetition of the events of his exile with his tendency to so thoroughly explain those very events at opportune moments throughout the play? If the aim of repetition is to prevent the emergence of past unpleasure that would accompany the return of the repressed, why would Prospero restage such patently unrepressed events? Narrative repetition (Prospero’s narration of past events to Miranda, Ariel, and Alonso) would perhaps obviate the functional importance of repetitive action. The reasons motivating Prospero’s compulsion to repeat should therefore be latent in the text, and we can only understand the root causes of his neurotic symptoms if we look beyond the manifest level of the events in the subplot or the play itself. Given the disjuncture between, on the one hand, the pervading threat of masterlessness in early modern England, and, on the other hand, the play’s shift in focus from servitude built upon personal relations to an allegory of servitude structured around the phenomenology of the commodity, we can

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suggest that what Prospero mostly represses is masterlessness itself and its contradictory influence on historical development. The Tempest rewrites undisturbed history by imagining history without masterlessness, or it allows masterlessness to emerge only momentarily, only insofar as masterlessness can effectively transmute into post-feudal labor-forms. Most important, the play achieves this end by offering discrete moments of transformation without offering an extended space of transition, and in the process it omits the entire historical record of “subversive” masterlessness and the constraining poor law countermeasures. In order to fuse the two ends of the transitional period, the play offers history with an excluded middle. Although I have partly aligned Prospero and Caliban with feudal and post-feudal values, I would reiterate that in my interpretation the play does not allegorize a clash between class interests: Prospero functions in the play to undermine an approximation of feudal relations through his loss of jurisdictional power over Caliban; his actions allow for the uncontained expression of masterlessness, but only insofar as masterlessness can, of its own devices, transform into post-feudal labor-forms. Class positions thus serve as little more than place-holders in the play, functional categories that enable a reconstruction of a linear transition that has no concrete manifestation. The argument I have been making above runs counter to Paul Brown’s claim that the play relies on masterlessness as an archetype for subversion. Brown argues, in a paradigmatic new historicist essay, that the official culture represented in the play relies on the subversive power of masterlessness to bolster its own sense of mastery over disrupting forces: The Tempest aims to produce masterless subversion in order to (re)confirm courtly authority, but this “orientalist” project partially fails because it inadvertently reveals internal contradictions and “produces the possibility of resistance.”70 One problem here is that Brown never really offers a precise definition of the masterlessness he claims to have found in the play. He makes reference to Stephano and Trinculo’s “masterless aping of the aristocrats,” where they steal clothes off a line, an action that “draws attention to their bestiality.”71 Later he notes that Ireland and the island are “peopled with a strange admixture of the savage and masterless other, those who are fully controlling and malcontendedly lapsed civil subjects.”72 For Brown, masterlessness includes within its wide horizon the Irish, malcontentedness, and bestiality; in other words anything that hegemony or orthodoxy deems alien, subversive, criminal, and so on. This sort of definition divorces masterlessness from the specificity of the connections among vagrancy, poverty, and labor. As a term describing subversion generally, Brown’s use of masterlessness is reasonable, but if we define the masterless man as the landless vagabond who for various reasons does not labor and is subject to restrictions on migration and severe poor law penalties, we will not find that figure allegorized in The Tempest (although we

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will in Timon, Lear, and The Winter’s Tale). On the contrary, we will find an intensification of nonmasterlessness as a counterpoint to historical reality. I should perhaps note the larger strategy underlying Brown’s argument, and the point at which my argument differs not only from his, but from new historicist arguments generally. Brown suggests that a kind of abortive contract exists among history, colonialism, and The Tempest, in which the text sets out to rescue history from its internal contradictions with the goal of legitimating ruling class power. He describes the ways in which the text fails to deliver on that promise and instead points up “problems which it works to efface or overcome.”73 Accordingly, since The Tempest ultimately cannot “harmonise disjunction and “transcend irreconcilable differences,” it thus exposes a moment of “historical crisis.” But we have seen in the earlier discussion of masterlessness and the poor laws that historical events and reigning ideologies point up their own arbitrariness and noncausal sequencing of events. The history of masterlessness shows its own contradictions with or without The Tempest revealing those contradictions. The Tempest is history after the fact (to modify a coinage of Myra Jehlen’s74), or history against the fact, history as an alternative or corrective to the discordant poor law history with which it is engaged. The important point is that Prospero’s magic is not enlisted in the service of any ruling power passing itself off as eternal; nor is his power even antagonistic to vagabondage and the threat of “courtly disorder.” Rather, Prospero and the entire play is antagonistic to the effect the intersection of masterlessness and poor law legislation has had on the course of historical development. That effect is simply the slowing down of the development of capitalism. History has already revealed the danger of direct confrontation or containment of masterlessness. As I have already suggested, Prospero’s task is to repress the consequences of that confrontation, to reimagine a history of which masterlessness was never a part. I have been suggesting that The Tempest represses the unintended consequences of ruling class confinement of masterlessness in order to allegorically facilitate the development of capitalism without in itself acting on the behalf of any particular political dominant. This makes sense if we recall that the rise of capitalism itself was not the product of any rational human propensity toward progress, but rather that it forced itself upon England (producers and owners alike) following the decline of medieval serfdom. In this sense, The Tempest works for capitalism and for no class in particular, or it works against masterlessness (and the ruling class interference thereof ) for history in general.75 Masterlessness becomes a mutation and a threat to the development of English society only after it is contained by those who mistook it for a threat in the first place. I have not fully explained why The Tempest sets out to reconstruct potential historical immanence (to use a structural modification of Lucien

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Goldmann’s belief in the stirring of “potential class consciousness” by the artistic work76), or why an early modern text would elevate a depersonalized historical consciousness above (on the level of intention but not effect) the motive force of rational human agency. A provisional answer would be that, while we do not need to fully endorse Roger Nisbet’s or J.B. Bury’s one-sided view that the early modern period could not sustain a belief in uncyclical, nondegenerative progress, the period could not easily reconcile an unqualified enthusiasm for social development with some of its more antidevelopmental ideological commitments, including classical exemplarity, common law immemorialism, golden age sentimentalization, the stillprevalent fetishization of Fortuna, and versions of irrationalism in its partial retention of magical and supernatural ritual forms. Certain early modern texts like The Tempest perhaps function to omit or self-consciously negate these constraining ideological commitments; as such, the developmental logic they imagine follows from a more primary imagining: that once stripped away of widely held belief systems as schematized above, history would assume a steady, unimpeded march forward. This is the sense in which The Tempest’s overall project progressive vision seems to be more of a discovery than a prescription, the unintended consequence of the text’s negation of its own historical horizons. If struggles between power and subversion have at all factored into my argument, they do not describe relations between dominant interests and potentially subversive others, as new historicism would have it. Literary texts like The Tempest can record or allegorically undermine the effects of prior class struggles, the in-betweeness of determinative conflicts, without having to record those actual struggles.

The Fortunes of Romance Due to the processional and wish-fulfilling nature of quest-narratives, romance has often been linked to historical materialism and Marxist historiography. Northrop Frye, for example, writes, “in every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance, where the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains the threats to their ascendancy.”77 Hayden White more explicitly links romance to Hegel’s and Marx’s narratives of progress: Hegel’s comic conception of history was based ultimately on his belief in the right of life over death; “life” guaranteed to Hegel the possibility of an ever more adequate form of social life throughout the historical future.

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Assuming this link between myths of progress and romantic emplotment, we can finally link Prospero’s formal function in the play to the play’s depiction of shifting labor-forms. This can be achieved by employing Fredric Jameson’s method of “actantial reduction.” According to Propp’s and Greimas’s formal classification of stories and folktales, characters are ascribed a finite number of functions in a given tale. These “characterfunctions,” in Propp’s usage, or “actants,” in Greimas’s usage, are linked to a finite number of roles—hero, donor, or villain—across a range of texts, mostly fairy tales. The donor, in particular, functions as a mediator or catalyst in a given plot, serving to reconcile opposition and impel the plot forward.79 Jameson attempts to complicate such a purely typological or classificatory rendering of characters by exploring the extent to which actants deviate from their prescribed roles; this, in turn, raises the more “dialectical and historical issue of this determinate formal difference.”80 Jameson performs actantial reduction on the character of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, whose very functional ambiguity—“romantic hero or tyrannical villain?”81—calls for a more complex analysis. Actantial reduction, a process of exhaustively testing the actions and functions of Heathcliff in as many functional roles as possible, shows that Heathcliff ’s most subtle role in the story is to “restore the fortunes and to rejuvenate the anemic temperament of the two families.”82 As such, Heathcliff functions as a donor, rather than as the hero, protagonist, or villain of the novel: Heathcliff is “a donor who must wear the functional appearance of the protagonist in order to perform his quite different actantial function.”83 While Jameson’s analysis of Heathcliff ’s character-type is too detailed for our purposes here, the important idea is that actantial reduction should open out to historical inquiry, the results of which show, in the case of Wuthering Heights, that the “aging Heathcliff then constitutes the narrative mechanism whereby the alien dynamism of capitalism is reconciled with the immemorial (and cyclical) time of the agricultural life of a country squiredom.”84 If we attempt to isolate Prospero’s formal functional role in The Tempest, we would describe him as the “eiron” or heroic protagonist, who, in the typical dialectical unfolding of the romance plot as described by Frye, stages a protracted agon with the “alazon” or villain—principally Antonio—the resolution of which leads to a collective anagnorisis and restoration of monarchical stability. Interpreted, however, in terms of his historically

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allegorical functional role, Prospero, like Jameson’s Heathcliff, serves as a donor rather than protagonist, mediating two chronologically linked “semes” or historical conjunctures, feudal and post-feudal labor-forms. Thus, while Prospero works on his own behalf within the play to reacquire his monarchy—in the process gently chastising the usurping blocking agents—he also works to effect an untroubled transition between laborforms that has particular historical resonance. Prospero’s function to rewrite rather than simply reflect economic transition is consistent with that aspect of the quest motif that centers on wish-fulfillment. Frye notes, “translated into dream terms, the quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for the fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality.”85 Whether or not we apply Frye’s psychoanalytic categories to Prospero’s questing, the important point is that the romance mode transforms rather than transcends the juncture at which the play meets history. Prospero’s historically idealizing but restorative function thus highlights the utopian elements of romance. But what of the relationship between romance and the other Shakespearean genres? Howard Felperin has argued convincingly that the romances share more with the tragedies than comedies. While the movement toward festivity and mirth is impeded in the comedies by the strictures of an irrational law or edict, as well as a blocking or “killjoy” agent—Malvolio or Shylock, for example—such blocking mechanisms are mostly inept and easily surmountable in the comedies. In the romances, however, reconciliation is halted by more insidious forces, by a “recalcitrance to human desire built into the universe itself ”;86order is thus achieved in the romances by “nothing less than a ‘miracle.’ ”87 The romances share with the tragedies seemingly impossible obstacles to redemption; however, romantic protagonists, unlike tragic protagonists, are more readily idealized and redeemed in their golden, “second worlds.” What Felperin does not explore is the link between romantic emplotment and historical allegory, the bearing the romance conventions have on, for example, the history of early modern labor transformations. The Tempest, true to the problem-solving thrust of the romance genre, “solves” its relevant historical problem by undoing the effects of masterless confinement, recreating an alternative past and present. It thus offers a redemptive scenario not only in terms of character—the restoration of the play’s principals—but also in terms of its historical allegory: a reconstruction of the history of labor-forms in which masterlessness does not emerge as an impediment to economic development. Slavoj Zˇizˇek has recently described the transformation of the precapitalist master–servant relationship (in which the determination “being-a-king” is naturalized, and relations between a king and subject are founded upon

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fetishistic misrecognition) to the capitalist commodity fetish that is built upon relations between things: “It is as if the retreat of the Master in capitalism was only a displacement: as if the de-fetishization in the ‘relations between men’ was paid for by the emergence of fetishism in the relations between things—by the commodity fetish.”88 For Zˇizˇek, one fetish seems to immediately succeed another, the interpersonal relations of feudal fetishism are repressed, and the persistence of domination and servitude emerges under capitalism as a “symptom which subverts the ideological appearance of equality, freedom and so on.”89 Zˇizˇek fails to consider the long, unevenly developing historical period between the two forms of fetishism, and the wrenching apart by masterlessness of the otherwise continuous but displaced fetishistic relations of mastery and servitude. The commodity fetish is not the displacement or repressed symptom of the fetishization of feudal relations between men: it is the historical displacement of the masterless man, himself the symbol of the de-fetishization of those relations. What Zˇizˇek describes is not early modern reality but history as imagined by The Tempest: a continuum of two forms of relations of mastery without a de-fetishized masterless intermission. We will see that The Tempest differs in this respect from the other plays in its idealized avoidance of a direct confrontation with de-fetishized relations between people as well as things. While most plays perform counterfactual critiques of functional contradictions in the interests of uncovering the natural and unreified versions of relevant historical belief systems—the bare fact or givenness of natural “rights” in Lear, for example—The Tempest, consistent with the ideological implications of the romance mode, works to make the very idea of “masterlessness” a conceptual impossibility. It achieves this allegorical bracketing of masterlessness by relentlessly fetishizing, on the one hand, neo-feudal relations among people, and, on the other hand, post-feudal relations between people and things.

Chapter 2 The Ends of Absolutism: Coriolanus and Jacobean Political Irony Some years ago, in the Machiavellian Moment, J.G.A. Pocock described Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as a historically precocious text, one that dramatizes humanist republicanism in advance of the emergence of a civic humanist polity in England.1 When viewed in the context of more recent transitional appropriations of the play, Pocock’s notion of the exceptional and untimely nature of the play seems quaint. Recent discussions have described Coriolanus as transitional not because it is symptomatically republican at a time when England was residually absolutist, but (more radically and anachronistically) because the play dramatizes embryonic capitalism or early modern pragmatism, despite its republican context and seventeenth-century provenance.2 In the following chapter I evaluate what I argue are transitional misreadings of Coriolanus and then attempt to reinterpret the play in the light of recent historical work on the nature of the Tudor-Stuart state, particularly Glenn Burgess’s revisionist account of seventeenth-century absolutism and Markku Peltonen’s assessment sixteenth-century English republicanism. I argue that most transitional readings of the play are based on an unwarranted assumption that the early modern state was an absolutist or arbitrary structure against which Puritan or bourgeois energies were waged throughout the Jacobean era. In an attempt to reverse our impressed beliefs that Jacobean politics was absolutist in nature, revisionists have held that governmental “opposition” was typically expressed within the parameters of a consensual understanding between King and commons with respect to the scope of proper state powers. I argue that the representation of conflict in the play allegorizes the consensual but potentially incommensurate nature of Jacobean statehood,

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which on the one hand is founded on a Ciceronian form of republicanism (a qualifiedly ethical conception of the state, predominantly concerned with safeguarding private property), but on the other hand is founded on a paternalistic conception of government, which mandates a redistribution of wealth on behalf of the dispossessed. Coriolanus and the Tribunate clash due to the fundamental ambiguity internal to the state itself: an unresolved tension between negative libertarianism and paternalism that reflects the self-fissuring of Jacobean government. This suggests that critically reifying arguments that have described Coriolanus as either absolutist or bourgeoisindividualist, or the Tribunate as the embodiment of medieval organicism, do not accurately reflect the politics of the play or the nature of early modern government.

Coriolanus in Transition In a recent transitional reading of Coriolanus, Arthur Riss draws an analogy between the individualism and acquisitiveness of early modern enclosers (the “gentry, nascent capitalists”) and Coriolanus’s urge to enclose his own body: “In essence, just as the Midlands Revolt foregrounded the conflict between communal and private notions of the body, Shakespeare in Coriolanus dramatizes the conflict between communal and private notions of the body. The movement to enclose land is metaphorically linked to the constitution of the individualistic, enclosed self. . . . The play . . . establishes a correspondence between the impulse to enclose public land and Coriolanus’s urge to enclose his body, a body that the dominant ideology demands be available for public use.”3 For Riss, the representation in the play of individual sovereignty and self-ownership, examples of the emergence of “philosophical liberalism,” “prompts the assertion of individual rights against the state when the state threatens an individual’s autonomy.”4 This is a provocative argument, but one that does not precisely explain the circumstances under which liberalism is able to “constitute” itself during the early modern period, or how the king’s absolutism figures in the play, given the play’s Republican dispensation. According to Hobbes, Locke, Macpherson and traditional Marxist accounts of absolutism, emergent liberalism is not “self-constituting,” or founded on an opposition between the state and various bourgeois elements (enclosers, tenant-farmers, merchants) but rather based on an alliance between the state and entrepreneurial forces. The early modern social system shows a non-correspondence between the political formation and the economic base: the state is patriarchal and interventionist, serving to protect individual property rights and

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to function as a bulwark against aristocratic encroachments on the one hand and upswelling communal leveling reforms on the other. Nicos Poulantzas writes: “The function of the absolutist (transitional) state is precisely not to operate within the limits fixed by an already given mode of production, but to produce not-yet-given relations of production (i.e. capitalist relations) and to put an end to feudal relations of production.”5 Negative libertarianism, which Riss would suggest is prefigured historically by Coriolanus’s tendency toward self-absolutizing, is in fact made possible by the interventions of a sovereign state.6 And enclosure practices themselves were fostered by the sale of land to entrepreneurs throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the so-called absolutist state.7 Riss’s essay is exemplary of the kind of transitional reading that suggests Coriolanus looks away from absolutism and forward to a bourgeois ideal. An essay by Thomas Sorge is exemplary of another kind of transitional reading, the nostalgic one, which finds as an alternative to absolutism the idylls of medieval organicism and communitarianism. Describing the social body of the citizens, Sorge writes, “Though it is frequently denounced as a monstrosity by its opponents, this newly emerging body has few if any grotesque features. It rather moves within the province of time-worn communal, organic thought, and posits the body analogy in opposition to the Tudor and Jacobean ideology of civil obedience and order.”8 If one invokes an official ideology of Tudor-Stuart culture, which in Sorge’s reading is “civil obedience,” such an ideology should be compared to the corresponding official ideology of medieval society, namely feudalism, which had been in many ways far more exploitative than was Tudor-Stuart “official” culture.9 But rather than compare two analogous political and economic ideologies, Sorge compares Tudor-Stuart political and economic ideologies with a medieval social form, and so tends to elide discussion of the exploitative nature of feudalism. Nothing in Coriolanus suggests that the Tribunate looks backward to medieval folk culture and organicism; the Tribunate is concerned with the acquisition and availability of food, and as such any analogy the play draws between the Tribunate and an earlier common culture should logically line up the Tribunate with laboring serfs, constrained by exploitative overlords and subject to arbitrary levies on their products. The classical, slave-bearing past, the feudal, serf-bearing past, and the modern, wage-laboring future are all equally oppressive for the common culture.10 Both of the exemplary transitional interpretations noted above, the possessive-individualist reading and the agrarian-communist reading, arise because critics often posit unexceptionable absolutism as a political ideology that is resisted by radical utopian or entrepreneurial ideologies. Revisionist history on the subject of absolutism complicates transitional readings of this sort, for without such a univocal form of absolutism as a

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starting point, it becomes more difficult to interpret resistance in Coriolanus as the release of anti-absolutizing forces, and therefore less valid to impose prophetic or nostalgic myth-narratives onto the play. Glenn Burgess has recently shaken the traditional assumption that early seventeenth-century monarchy was either absolutist or arbitrary in nature. Critical of the “parliamentary hermeneutic,” which held that forcible resistance was the only effective means of resistance in seventeenth-century politics, Burgess tells us, “there is a prima facie case for supposing that ‘absolutism’ is an inadequate term of analysis for early Stuart political thought. It too readily elides differences between things that were kept distinct: between irresistible kings and unlimited kings; even between particular ‘absolute’ powers and a general theory of arbitrary government . . . the early Stuart ‘free’ . . . ‘imperial’ or absolute monarch was not what we would call an absolute king. . . . We need to look for expressions of the belief that the king was not bound by law, was legally unlimited.”11 According to Burgess, early modern political culture was beset by conflict, but such conflict was not ideologically grounded: “Conflict there undoubtedly was, but . . . it did not rise from ideological polarization. Early Stuart Englishmen did possess a variety of theoretical perspectives on monarchy, but they also possessed an intellectual framework that united those perspectives into a broadly consensual ‘world view.’ The occasional disagreement between divine right monarchy and contractual kingship was not the clash of irreconcilable opponents but a tension within a single intellectual system.”12 Markku Peltonen has recently argued that because the Tudor monarchy was not founded on a common theory of government, in which a theory of order and rule of law were presiding features, a number of political vocabularies coexisted, one of which was a vibrant civic republicanion, structured around a “prince with a full set of virtues.”13 Peltonen spends considerable time outlining the use by English culture of Ciceronian republicanism, suggesting that the classical humanist theory of citizenship flourished alongside a number of political forms, including royalist and common law. According to Peltonen, Ciceronian republicanism, endorsed by writers such as John Baston and Roger Baynes, held that “liberty could be realized only if everyone led the civic way of life,” and “was willing to disregard his own private good and to promote wholeheartedly the good of the whole community, without which it was impossible to avoid servitude.”14 While Peltonen’s work is useful as a critique of theories of the absolutist nature of early modern statehood, his discussion of the Ciceronian features of Tudor-Stuart politics departs significantly from recent discussions of Cicero’s views on politics. As Gordon Wood and others have argued, what sets the Ciceronian commonwealth apart from its Greek predecessors is that it is a non-ethical and non-teleological state form, one predominantly concerned

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with safeguarding private property rather than producing virtuous citizens.15 In De Republica Cicero describes the ideal commonwealth as a mixed government (in which the aristocratic element preponderates) whose principle of justice is conceived as proportional rather than absolutist: “In a government dominated by the people, even though they be just and selfdisciplined, yet their very equality is inequitable in that it does not recognize degrees of merit.”16 In De Officiis Cicero remarks that “it is the proper function of citizenship and a city to ensure for everyone a free and unworried guardianship of his possessions. . . . Now no property is private by nature, but rather by long occupation . . . by victory (when they acquired it in war), or by law, by settlement, by agreement, or by lot.”17 Consistent with his defense of private property and meritocracy, Cicero encourages cultivation of one’s unique endowments: “Everyone, therefore, should acquire knowledge of his own talents, and show himself a sharp judge of his own good qualities and faults.”18 Cicero’s tentativeness regarding fair distribution follows logically from his individualistic and meritocratic conception of justice—distribution should only occur when the outcome is instrumental for the maintenance of the commonwealth: “the law of nature itself, which preserves and maintains that which is beneficial to men, will undoubtedly decree that the necessities of life should be transmitted from an inactive and useless person to someone who is wise, good and brave, who, if he were to die, would greatly detract from the common benefit.”19 Far from imagining a modern-day kingdom of ends, Cicero’s distributive ethic is both hierarchical and utilitarian. A.A. Long notes that “Cicero construes society normatively as the aggregate of individual interests. . . . Much of his treatment of justice . . . is suited to his brief as a hard-headed Roman lawyer and conservative opponent of what we would call left-wing politics.”20 G.E.M. de St. Croix likewise observes that “no surviving Greek writer is quite as explicit about the overriding importance of property rights as Cicero, the earliest known to me in a long line of thinkers, extending into modern times, who have seen the protection of private property rights as the prime function of the state.”21 And Gordon Wood tells us that “Cicero . . . is the first important social and political thinker to affirm unequivocally that the basic purpose of the state is the protection of private property. . . . Unlike Plato and Aristotle, he does not conceive the state fundamentally in moral terms, that is, as a means of shaping human souls, of creating men of virtue.”22 It is important to distinguish whether, as Peltonen argues, English Ciceronianism demands sacrifice on behalf of the state, or whether English Ciceronianism holds that civic virtue is a means to a private end unto itself. Peltonen notes that historians have argued that Ciceronianism had been supplanted by Tacitean pessimism, “ethical skepticism,” and selfpreservationism by the beginning of the Jacobean period. Peltonen ultimately

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offers a compromise, arguing that both Ciceronian civic humanism and Tacitean contemplation coexisted during the period: “It is clear . . . that neither the growth of royal absolutism, nor the legal accounts of the freedoms of the Englishmen . . . nor even Tacitean pessimism and its related insistence on the merits of the contemplative and private life, could completely outweigh traditional Ciceronian humanism and its urging of the merits of the active life.”23 But one of the limitations in Peltonen’s account is that the opposition between Ciceronian humanism and Tacitean contemplation does not seem accurately to describe the structure of early Jacobean politics, which is consistent with Ciceronian negative libertarianism, the only model of government and society Cicero ever recommended, according to the classical historians cited earlier. While Peltonen’s treatment of Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment attempts to read back Pocock’s account of Machiavellian democracy into the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, a more adequate revision of Pocock might read his account of Guicciardinian aristocratic republicanism forward into the Jacobean era, an affiliation that Pocock does not explore in any detail in his classic account of early modern republicanism. Guicciardini writes, consistent with Ciceronianism (and Jacobeanism), that “one of the principal fruits to be derived from good government is security for one’s persons and one’s possessions, and the ability to dispose of them as one wants . . . nor can any one feels fully secure who has to rely on the goodwill of others, for true security consists in enjoying a state of affairs where one citizen cannot be injured or hurt by another.”24 For Guicciardini, to a larger extent than for Cicero, this form of negative libertarianism is still conjoined with an ethical and honorific political framework, since it enables the most virtuous citizens to flourish and assist in the preservation of commonwealth: “for if one examines carefully the course of all history, ancient and modern, one finds it is always the virtue of a few people that counts, for only a few are capable of such elevated deeds, and they are the ones gifted by nature with more intelligence and judgment than the others . . . to encourage and facilitate these men to use their abilities to the good is surely a public benefit.”25 Cicero’s and Guicciardini’s aristocratic forms of republicanism, which uphold the sanctity of private property and the worth of a few worthy citizens against the claims of a sovereign or the common culture, share much with Jacobean politics and the English forms of republicanism that arise during the civil war years. Nicholas Fuller tersely captures Jacobean negative libertarianism when he tells the House of Commons in 1610 that the individual held “an absolute property in goods by the rule of law.”26 George Saltern, as J.P. Somerville notes, “denied that nature had first established communism: ‘I cannot agree . . . that all thinges by the Lawe of nature were

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common: but as I take it the distinction of propertied was enacted by almighty God in the beginning, and by him imprinted with other Lawes, in nature.’ ”27 Regarding the crown’s policy on individual holdings, Parliament held throughout Bates’s case that extra-parliamentary levies and the king’s royal prerogative were constrained by the common law protection of individual property. James Whitelocke, for instance, argued that if the “king’s right of imposition were established, the ancient frame of the commonwealth would be much altered and Parliament—the storehouse of our liberties—would be endangered.”28 Importantly, King James himself claimed in a speech to Parliament that “if the fundamental Lawes of any Kingdome should be altered, who should discerne what is meum and tuum, or how should a King governe. . . . I shall ever be willing to make the reason appeare of all my doings, and rule my actions according to my Lawes.”29 And in his famous rebuttal of John Cowell’s defense of arbitrary government, The Interpreter, James argued that “he is a Kinge by the common lawe of the land,” and “he had noe power to make lawes of himself, or to exact any subsidies de jure without the consent of his 3.Estates.”30 One can turn to the historical work of Margaret Judson, Conrad Russell and Burgess for more documentation on the negative libertarian nature of Jacobean politics. What we see is an extension of the Ciceronian and Guicciardinian ideal that government should not trespass on individual liberties. When theorizing the nature of early modern statehood, however, one should also account for the other face of the Tudor and Stuart politics, the face that expresses itself in England’s elaborate poor law apparatus, workhouses, encouragement for private philanthropy, and taxation on the wealthy to provide for the impotent poor, in short, the state’s paternalism. Beginning with Thomas Cromwell’s poor law legislation in the mid1530s, poor law legislation mandated that labor should be compulsory and financed by public taxation. In one Elizabethan statute (18, cap. 3), Parliament designated “ ‘collectors and governors of the poor,’ whose duties were to collect contributions, provide materials, and direct and superintend the employment of the poor in cities and towns.”31 In another statute (39, cap. 3) churchwardens and four householders in each parish were appointed to be overseers of the poor, to “levy the contributions ordered by the justices, and to relieve the impotent poor, and raise stocks of materials for setting the able-bodied poor to work. . . .”32 A preamble to a 1609–10 (7 James) Parliamentary act declared that “great sums of money have already been given, and that more is likely to be given in future, to be continually employed in binding out the poorest children”; it further encouraged well-disposed people “to bestow money to the same good and godly purposes.”33 A 1623 statute maintained that the people of Wales had attained to a sufficient manner of living that they must “pay all duties,

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mizes, charges, subsidies, and taxations imposed upon or rated upon them for the relief of the poor.”34 The sum of these acts shows the seventeenthcentury supercession of the burdensome compulsory poor rate over private philanthropy, which had been steadily declining throughout the sixteenth century due to inflation and changing conceptions of poverty. By the 1620’s, public taxation had supplanted charity as the most effective means of poor relief.35 The statutes that document the burden on England’s employed classes to finance Tudor and Stuart paternalism—including the poor rates, the maintenance of the work-house and hospitals, the remuneration to salaried overseers and churchwardens—are all integral features of the protectionist and welfarist nature of the early modern state. It is important to note that while there is some evidence of the consensual nature of English politics— that James and Parliament agreed on the inviolability of property, that the king-in-parliament was subject to common law strictures, that divine right was operative in theory but not in a settled state—that neither early seventeenth-century lawyers nor the crown advanced a public doctrine of general welfare that would become a propagandistic tool used by both King and Parliament throughout the civil war. It is as if paternalistic poor law reform exists as a thing apart from common law politics, as if the two potentially conflictual public policies carry out their mandates in separate spheres, but under one governmental form. As Margaret Judson noted some years ago: “Lawyers and judges uttered many remarks concerning general welfare but failed to see that in the integrated state evolving in the Tudor period they must clearly define the relation of the general welfare to the traditional rights of king and subject.” 36 I argue here that Coriolanus represents the early modern state in its fullness and contradictoriness: the coexistence of negative libertarianism and a paternalist ideal, an historically accurate representation of early seventeenth-century state policy.

Coriolanus and Poor Relief Coriolanus’s moral outlook is difficult to interpret because at times his conduct seems to be governed by negative libertarianism, but at other times seems to be directed by a selfless devotion to Rome and an organic or telic theory of the state. When he suggests that the citizenry should only receive as much corn as they deserve, he seems to be upholding a meritocratic ideal and an unswerving commitment to the Roman state. He tells the First Senator, “In soothing them we nourish ‘gainst our Senate / The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition, / Which we ourselves have ploughed for,

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sowed, and scattered . . .” (3.1.71–73). He then tells Brutus: “They know the corn / Was not our recompense, resting well assured / They ne’er did service for’t. Being pressed to th’ war, / Even when the navel of the state was touched, / They would not thread the gates. This kind of service / Did not deserve corn gratis” (3.1.122–127). These statements suggest that for Coriolanus each individual’s right to goods and bounty is determined by that individual’s show of military valor on Rome’s behalf. The Tribunate, of course, interprets Coriolanus’s remarks and conduct as intensely individualistic, instrumentalized, and unethical. Contemplating whether or not to prosecute charges against Coriolanus, the First Citizen says that Coriolanus “pays himself with being proud” (1.1.30–31),37 and then explains Coriolanus’s heroism as such: “though soft-conscienced men can be content to say it was for his country, he / did it to please his mother and to be partly proud . . . “(1.1.33–36). Later in the scene, Brutus says that Coriolanus “is grown / Too proud to be so valiant” (1.1.256–257); and in the second act, Brutus remarks that “He’s poor in no one fault, but stored with all,” to which Sicinius responds, “Especially in pride” (2.1.17–18). Rather than interpret Coriolanus’s conduct as oriented toward the fulfillment of the Roman state, the Tribunes view each of Coriolanus’s acts as adding to his previous “store” of pride. Coriolanus is a good example of the kind of paradoxical negative libertarian figure Quentin Skinner describes in his important essay on early modern republicanism and negative freedom. Typically, negative liberty implies—for Hobbes in the seventeenth century and Isaiah Berlin in the twentieth century—that social freedom is a right guaranteed by the state, a right that does not require citizens to be bearers and performers of civic virtues in the Aristotelian polis tradition. In his dismantling of the traditional opposition between, on the one hand, eudaemonia and human flourishing and, on the other hand, unobstructed liberty, Skinner suggests that the early modern period often held that the pursuit of individual interests was compatible with and even presupposed an ethical and organic conception of polity. Skinner invokes Machiavelli’s conception of a virtuous polity in order to suggest that, counterintuitively, all classical republican theories of citizenship served to maintain each individual’s unobstructed freedom to pursue “whatever ends they may choose to set themselves. . . . The continued enjoyment of our personal liberty is only a possibility, according to Machiavelli, for members of self-governing communities in which the will of the body politic determines its own actions, the actions of the community as a whole.”38 For Skinner, classical republican theories of citizenship assume that a body politic acting according to a general will is the necessary condition for private, undetermined freedom, since an ethical community

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protects the citizenry from ambitious grandi or conquest by neighboring communities: “A readiness to volunteer for active service, to join the armed services, to perform one’s military services, constitutes a necessary condition of maintaining one’s own individual freedom from servitude.”39 Skinner’s argument that classical republicanism actually merged negative freedom and positive virtue, or put positive virtue in the service of negative freedom, helps to explain Coriolanus’s wavering between an ethos of selfsacrifice for Rome and a personal pursuit of glory. Typically negative “freedoms” include unencroachable property rights, civil liberties, as well as protection from violent crime. Coriolanus’s seeming selfless devotion to Rome provides personal freedoms as well, although his personal freedoms are not so much physical goods as psychological estates, including reinforcement from Volumnia, a boyish pleasure in sparring with Aufidius, and of course, his overweening pride that so offends the Tribunate. The citizens, not always obtuse, understand Coriolanus’s prompts. The First Citizen declares, in a comment already cited, “Though soft-conscienced men can be content to say it was for his country, he did it to please his mother and to be partly proud—which he is, even to the altitude of his virtue” (1.1.34–37). Sicinius later notes that Coriolanus’s nature is “tickled with good success” (1.1.258), and Brutus makes reference to Coriolanus’s “fame, at the which he aims . . .”(1.1.262). Skinner’s account of early modern citizenship provides a framework in which to describe Coriolanus’s conduct without describing such conduct as either possessive-individualist or absolutist in nature.40 Coriolanus is, by classical republican and early modern standards, a typical negative libertarian who secures personal freedoms by engaging and exploiting a republican system. And Skinner’s argument not only helps to explain Coriolanus’s ideals, but also to explain Peltonen’s difficulty in conjoining an honorific late sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury ideal of citizenship with Ciceronian negative libertarianism. The aspect of Coriolanus’s nature that Skinner’s framework does not explain, however, is Coriolanus’s militant antipaternalism, evident not only in his frank refusal, noted above, to give corn “gratis,” but also in his punning and ironic references to beggary and almsgiving. Mocking the citizens’ demand for a show of humility, Coriolanus responds, “There’s in all two worthy / voices begged. I have your alms. Adieu” (2.3.76–77). Later he complains that the Senate has yielded power to “beggars” (3.1.77), and that if he were to prostrate himself to the Tribunes he would be forced to “bend like his / that hath received an alms!” (3.2.121–122). Comments like these suggest that historical parallels between Coriolanus and sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century monarchical power are reductive. As we saw in the preceding chapter, the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century poor law apparatus was a state-supported, if not always effective, means of relief.

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Coriolanus’s stand against charity puts him outside the boundaries of the politics of the play and the period. But if Coriolanus at times reflects this paradoxical, negative libertarian ideal—a necessary but not sufficient feature of Jacobean consensualism— the Tribunate reflects a state ideal as well, the paternalist. The Tribunes often argue for a fair distribution of goods over and above a system of distribution governed by meritocratic desert. The First Citizen articulates the paternalist ideal when he complains, “If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely, but they think we are too dear” (1.1.16–18). R.B. Parker rightly notes the “echo of Lear” in the reference to “humane” reallocation. The paternalist dispensation is, of course, unmeritocratic in conception: “humane” redistribution is justifiable as an affective and moral view of polity, which may have political benefits as unintended consequences of its guiding humanitarianism. Menenius invokes patrician humanitarianism when he reminds the citizens of the guiding influence of the “helms o’th’ state, who care for you like fathers” (1.1.73–74), to which the First Citizen responds by listing the antihumanitarian practices of those who repeal measures taken against the rich and pass statutes to “chain up and restrain the poor” (1.1.80–81). The citizens’ embrace of paternalism is reflected in Menenius’s version of the belly fable. While the belly fable was something of an overused metaphor during the period, frequently manipulated according to context, it was typically employed to legitimate a vertical, rigidly hierarchical polity. The hierarchical usage can be found in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, Elyot’s Book of the Governor, and North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives (1605). Salisbury’s account is exemplary: “The position of the head in the republic is occupied, however, by a prince subject only to God and to those who act in His place on earth. . . . The place of the heart is occupied by the Senate. . . . The duties of the ears, eyes and mouth are claimed by the judges and governors of provinces. . . .”41 As he traverses the map of the body, Salisbury coordinates lesser offices of the polis with more specialized body parts (the hands coincide with soldiers, the stomach is identified with the treasurers), until he reaches the feet, which he identifies with the peasantry. In Menenius’s labored telling of the fable, the stomach, rather than head, is identified as the nourishing Senate, while the Tribunes and commoners are depicted as the mutinous appendages. The rebellious body parts accuse the belly of “cupboarding the viand” (1.1.97) and refusing to labor on the body’s behalf, to which the belly responds, “I receive the general food at first / Which you do live upon, and fit it is, / Because I am the storehouse and the shop of the whole body . . .” (1.1.128–131). Rather than attempt to recast the role of the commoners within the basic structure of Menenius’s body politic, the First Citizen mechanically invokes, as

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if reciting a propagandistic sermon, the vertical model of polity: “The kingly, crowned head, the vigilant eye, / The counsellor heart, the arm our soldier, / Our steed the leg, the tongue our trumpeter . . .” (1.1.112–114). Menenius’s emphasis on the passivity and humility of the proletarians is intensely paternalistic: “No public benefit which you receive / But it proceeds or comes from them to you, / And no way from yourselves” (1.1.149–151). When the poor receive food and alms, such succor comes in the form of a “public benefit,” as if the commoners can expect to receive discretionary charity, rather than just deserts according to any inalienable rights or claims on the goods. This argument is consistent not only with Menenius’s seeming non-hierarchical model of the body politic but also with the First Citizen’s invocation of the vertical model of the body politic: neither model recommends maintenance of the poor because the poor have either a natural right or legal claim to relief. When the metaphor does seem to justify the deserving quality of the lower orders, such rhetoric serves simply to screen out prudential considerations. Salisbury, for example, reminds his readers that the peasantry, or feet of the body, should be rewarded for the countless perils they risk on the body’s behalf: “the feet coincide with peasants perpetually bound to the soil, for whom it is all the more necessary that the head take precautions, in that they more often meet with accidents while they walk on the earth in bodily subservience. . . .”42 It is interesting to consider the extent to which the paternalism of the body politic metaphor strains against the early modern Christian exhortations to charity, those that recommend relief in more overtly moralistic terms. While most Christian sermons are blandly hortatory—“To do good, and to distribute unto the needy forget not, for with such sacrifice God is pleased”43—others employ a more specialized rhetoric of rights in relation to equity. In A Treatise of Equitie (1604), for example, William Perkins notes that in order to maintain public peace, which may involve administering to the needs of the impoverished, one must obey the duty and degree of private equity by relinquishing personal rights. Men must learn by Christ’s example, Perkins says, “not to stand always upon their right, if they will continue peace in the Church of God. It is not sufficient in Christianitie, nay it is a very wicked speach, which we often heare men speake. It is my right and therefore I will not loose it.”44 The Christian sermons recast the discretionary allocation of “public benefits” in Menenius’s fable as humanitarian duties that should trump rights when the peace and balance of the nation is at stake. The Tribunes, of course, do not articulate a Christian apology for relief, but they seem to disagree with Menenius’s position precisely on the issue of whether the Senate is morally or prudentially instructed to provide food.

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The complicated question is whether the Tribunes hold a consistent view of what they assume is or should be the Senate’s official policy on poor relief. At times the Tribunate seems to embrace a rights-based, implicitly negative libertarian model of relief. The rhetoric employed here carries a legalistic undertone, as if antipoverty measures operate in the realm of positive law. Brutus complains that the Senate mistreated the citizens when it “dispropertied their freedoms” (2.1.244); he later notes that the consul would take from the citizens their “liberties” (2.3.211), and that Coriolanus’s failure to properly “distribute” the spoils of Antiates is such a breach of policy that it serves as an unacceptable example of “tyrannical power” (3.3.150–153). The Senate’s breach of conduct, according to these charges, is held to be a policy compromise, not simply an ethical compromise. Now the citizens, of course, fail to see any fundamental discrepancy in their embrace of both a paternalistic and libertarian argument for relief. Indeed, such duality theoretically bolsters their stand, since they imply that the Senate has failed them on both legal and moral grounds. The Senate and Coriolanus, for their part, also seem to put such policy ambiguities to their advantage. In theory, during times of dearth, the paternalistic argument could more easily serve to justify an extreme form of Coriolanus’s position: the poor have no inalienable rights, so during times of crisis, the permissible and prudential option would be to withhold corn. In a bid to offset the arbitrariness of this default position, the senators, or at least Coriolanus, promote an alternative justificatory morality, namely meritocracy, which has the attraction of seeming ethically sound in nature (classically speaking) even while it would tolerate starvation. The meritocratic argument is thus wheeled in as an emergency device, much as James’s royal prerogative might be exercised during times of national crisis. But such a measure is dangerously adhoc in nature, and clearly does not facilitate peace in Rome. The important point is that the tension between the two schemes is precisely what exacerbates the problem of distributing scarce goods in the first place. During times of economic crisis, all of the implicit tensions between paternalism and libertarianism come to the fore: What are the rights, if any, of each individual citizen, and is the Senate bound, under all circumstances, to hold such rights in equal regard? If the rights of goods and property extend only to members of the amorphous but exclusionary franchise approximated in the play—the Senate, the military, the Tribunes (but not necessarily all citizens)—should these rights be maintained at the expense of the multitude? Is the Senate duty-bound, according to humanitarian principles, to override the rights of the better endowed on behalf of the needy? These are all questions that the very nature of Jacobean political thought raises, and to which it does not give satisfactory answers.

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Many of these questions are also raised by contemporary and modern interpretations of the Midlands Rising, a series of food riots waged by the commoners against enclosing landlordism in 1607. The most reductive revisionist accounts of the uprising hold that the riots should be interpreted as benign, ritualistic events that were not grounded in organized antagonism to aristocratic and governmental authority. Derek Hirst, for example, emphasizing the ease with which the revolts were resolved—rioters were pardoned, landlords were fined—offers the following explanation: Whether in agrarian or food riot, the pattern of popular unrest manifests general acceptance of a patriarchal scheme of authority. Protesters invariably first approached the neighboring magistrate to complain about what they saw as anti-social activity, whether by landlords or food traders. Only if rebuffed did the poor act for themselves, and even then never challenged the social order, nor attacked the rich as rich.45

Given what I have been describing as the bifurcated nature of the early modern state, Hirst’s assessment of the uprising seems question begging. Because it is difficult to isolate a coherent “patriarchal scheme of authority” during the period, one would be hard-pressed to determine whether or not the amorphous commoners accepted or rejected the foundations of such authority. Citing contemporary records of the Midlands Rising, Annabel Patterson has responded to the revisionist challenge by noting that authorities did indeed view the uprising as an organized rebellion. As Patterson notes, some authorities identified the insurgents as levellers and diggers, and James expressed fear that the riots might suggest a “stage of panic.”46 Against Hirst’s position, Patterson concludes that the “country had experienced not a ritual protest but a major test of the government’s ability to maintain order, which in turn was structurally connected to its ability to feed its citizens.”47 Patterson draws much of the force of her argument from Robert Wilkinson’s contemporary sermon on the causes and effects of the uprising. In arguing that the commoners did indeed challenge the social order, and were capable of modeling their stance on rational motives, Patterson cites the following passage from Wilkinson’s account of the rioters: “First they professe nothing, but to throw downe enclosures, though that were indeed no part of common powre, but afterward they will reckon for other matters . . . and counsell is given to kill up Gentlemen, and they will levell all state as they levelled bankes and ditches. . . .”48 Patterson notes that Wilkinson not only depicts the rioters as organized and forward-looking, but that he also extends sympathy toward the destitute, and cautions the

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magistrates that they would be acting unethically, not to say imprudently, were they to neglect the demands of the able-bodied poor. Patterson argues compellingly, against revisionists like Hirst, that the tract represents the poor as mobilized, politically self-aware, and militarily capable in both the short and long terms. Patterson has greatly improved upon Hirst’s interpretation, yet she does not elaborate precisely the nature and rhetoric of the “official” position on poor relief. Indeed, Wilkinson’s sermon is particularly interesting, I would argue, for its unwitting depiction of the self-contradictory nature of the state’s policy on poor relief. At times, Wilkinson recommends a paternalistic stance toward the poor, advising the magistrates to indulge the poor by responding to their petitions gently, cheerfully, and with dignity: “It giveth to great personages, Judges and Magistrates in their places, an honorable patterne of pitey, cheerfully to accept, and gently to answer, the cries, petitions and just complaints of the poore, which stand in need of them, as they stand in need of God, and come kneeling to them as they kneele to God. . . .”49 Wilkinson constructs a standard microcosm-macrocosm analogy, within which is embedded a causal argument: the poor ought to humble themselves to the magistrates as the magistrates humble themselves to God; as a result, the poor can expect from the magistrates what the magistrates expect from God. Proper decorum seems to be a necessary, if not always a sufficient condition for the administration of relief. Although such prescriptive humanitarianism does serve to justify the rhetoric of forbearance we find later in the tract—the poor often have to passively wait out their suffering, as do all Christians, magistrates included—the thrust of the passage emphasizes that “great personages” are, if not strictly duty-bound to the poor (that would, by analogy, limit God’s power), then at least responsible for maintenance of the flock. In the same tract, though, Wilkinson seems to maintain a position that comes as close to negative libertarianism as seems possible in a Christian sermon. In this mode he argues that God’s original and ongoing distribution of food and sustenance is inherently unfair; the needy are unjustified in their complaints because the rules of sacred and secular law dictate respect for the rights of those who have fortunately received a divinely sanctioned bestowal of goods. Relentlessly pursuing his argument that man does not live by bread alone, but by the word and blessing of God, Wilkinson remarks, The very same thing blessed and not blessed doth shew forth powre accordingly, as Exod. 16. when against the commandement of God they reserved of the Mannah till morning, it putrified and stanke, yet the very same Manna being kept by the commandement of God, was sweet and good many

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God’s unequal and unpredictable “blessing” is accorded normative force over the self-preservative demands of hunger; those who petition for bread without Godly warrant sinfully attempt to manipulate the laws of providential distribution. Adducing the example of the grasping poor cited in Daniel 1, Wilkinson warns, “Had we not tied our life to bread, and thought God could not have blessed us, but by filling our bellyes, wee should never have forsaken the blessing of God, to have faln into the curse of those conspiring brethren.”51 Wilkinson cites the rule of law, itself based on a view of mind–body dualism, to bolster his exhortation to respect the Godly scheme of unequal distribution: Wee therefore should rather care to feed and instruct the soule, then to pamper the body, especially to instruct the soule thus farre against the body, that we may learn to do no unlawfull thing for nature’s necessity, nor to hazard an immortall soul, for a mortall and dying body; And had many of us beene as well instructed in the word of God, and in their duty to God, the King and Country, as they have beene in the word of the divill, and in unlawfull meanes of recovering bread; I think want of bread could never have raised such wicked tumults as it hath.52

Wilkinson can only offer bitter consolation to the poor: God may never decide to redistribute goods to the dispossessed, but piety and good citizenship will at least enable the upright soul to withstand the degradations of the body. In passages like these the paternalistic shading found elsewhere in the sermon—the poor should receive from the rich what the rich receive from God—is colored by an emphasis on the rigor of the laws governing distributive justice. The double stance we find in Wilkinson’s sermon, which is consistent with the internally contradictory nature of Jacobean statecraft, suggests that we gain only a limited understanding of the complexities of the Midlands Rising if we focus simply on whether the poor acquiesced to patriarchal order, or whether they coalesced into a politically viable opposition. Both arguments tend to beg the question of the nature of “official power,” and so both provide a reductive framework for interpreting the Uprising and its handling in Coriolanus. Given the paternalist face of Jacobean consensualism, the Tribunate’s articulation of such a redistributive ideal should not be interpreted as a discrete ideological stance set in opposition to a countervailing early modern

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ideology such as absolutism or (anticipatory) liberalism. Menenius’s and the Tribunate’s failure to agree on the most efficient delegation of paternalistic policy itself reflects the unsettled nature of early modern state policy. As described in the preceding chapter, Elizabethan and Jacobean culture at large believed it was not unduly oppressive in “restraining” the free movement of the underclass and the nonlaboring poor, and argued that confinement to workhouses was the most rational antipoverty measure available, given high employment and the dangers of “masterlessness.”53 The Tribunate’s critique of the settlement laws resembles the Enlightenment description of the settlement laws as parish serfdom more than it is does any seventeenth-century, rank-and-file critique of an official ideology. It follows that the Tribunate is not a dramatic instance of any early modern common culture or class, but a reflection of an aspect of the very state that one can too easily mistake for an oppositional body that might have been counterposed to the state. When one argues that the Tribunate allegorizes an exemplary early modern class formation, one inevitably contrives unhistorical parallels between text and context. Consider R.B. Parker’s belief that an exploration of “ ‘legal antiquarianism . . . lies behind the play’s pervasive legal terminology and the Tribunes’ constant appeals to custom and traditional right—neither of which can be found in Plutarch.”54 But ancient constitutionalism and legal antiquarianism are sources for the kind of negative libertarianism that is concerned primarily with respecting the boundaries of property and goods, the ideal of which Coriolanus and the Senate are the main proponents, not the Tribunate, which at certain moments holds out for communal redistribution, without consideration of merit. During the Interregnum the Levellers, for instance, rejected immemorialism and common law theory and argued that the people were bounded by the laws that had been imposed upon them by the Norman Conquest, a clear expression of their disdain for legal antiquarianism and artificial reason.55 It is worth noting that the preoccupation with custom reflects not so much an opposition between rival classes but an ambiguity concerning the very nature of custom and its relationship to law during the Jacobean era. Deciding whether or not to beg for the voices of the Tribunate, Coriolanus says, “Custom call me to’t. / What custom wills, in all things should we do’t” (2.3.113–114). The implication here is that custom demands that Coriolanus simply ask politely for the Tribunes’ voices. But after Coriolanus has achieved the voices, the Second Citizen decides that Coriolanus “should have showed us / His marks of merit, wounds received for his country” (2.3.158–159). Sicinius then later says not simply that Coriolanus had breached custom, but that “He hath resisted law, / And therefore law shall scorn him further trial / Than the severity of the public

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power” (3.1.269–270). Between the second and third acts, “custom” miraculously transmutes into “law.” Throughout the play it is never entirely clear what the proper custom and decorum is which would be required to gain the Tribunes’ voices, and the precision with which everyone describes Coriolanus’s wounds is apposite to the ambiguity respecting just what he should do with those wounds (conceal them or display them) in order to honor custom and appease the Tribunate. Perhaps a contemporary context for the play’s preoccupation with the unclear nature of custom can be found in King James’s 1610 speech to Parliament, delivered around the time Shakespeare wrote the play. In the 1610 speech James tells Parliament that “our Common Law hath not a settled Text in all Cases, being chiefly grounded either upon old Customes, or else upon the Reports and Cases of Judges. . . . Yet I wish that some more certaintie were set downe in this case by Parliament . . . so the people should not depend upon the bare opinions of Judges, and uncertaine Reports.”56 The historical coincidence becomes more intriguing when one considers that the unspecified nature of law and custom is probably not a reflection of customary practices specific to the Roman Republic, for the Twelve Tables, written between 445 and 448 B.C., were meticulously detailed instructions for proper governmental operations and a fair distribution of powers. In any case, if there is a parallel between James’s request that customs be codified and the nature of custom in the play, the parallel suggests not rival class tensions as much as an ambiguity with respect to the nature of early modern customary law.

Coriolanus’s Sacrifice I have been suggesting that the play represents the dualistic nature of the early modern state rather than any reified class antagonisms. This suggests that the tensions in the play are not characterologically caused, that, for instance, Coriolanus’s absolutist personality or unresolved Oedipal pathology does not foster disunity but that disunity is always potentially present given the bifurcated nature of seventeenth-century government. But since this involves reading Coriolanus as a “normal” Roman soldier, we should address the psychoanalytic readings of the play, those which trace Coriolanus’s pathological aggression to his relationship with what has been described as a nonnurturing mother. In her influential essay on the play, Janet Adelman argues that Coriolanus’s life is a kind of “phallic exhibitionism, devoted to disproving the possibility that he is vulnerable. In the transformation from oral neediness to phallic aggression, anger becomes his meat as well as his

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mother’s.”57 For Adelman, Coriolanus’s exhibitionism is conditioned by maternal deprivation: “Thrust prematurely from dependence on his mother, forced to feed himself on his own anger, Coriolanus refuses to acknowledge any neediness or dependency.”58 Adelman’s provocative reading might be reconsidered in the context of classical theories and practices of child-rearing, which show not the exceptional and pathological nature of the Volumnia–Coriolanus relationship, but the normalcy of this sort of relationship throughout the Republic and early Empire. Recent work on Roman mothering has described the ubiquity of Volumnia-type mothers. In her discussion of late Republican accounts of mothering, Susan Dixon writes that “there is little stress on the softer side of such women as Volumnia, Cornelia or Aurelia. Rather, mothers were praised for diverting their sons from unsuitable courses. . . .”59 Dixon adds that an identification of a “Coriolanus complex” in Roman men is suspect, that there is “no evidence that the Roman aristocracy produced a great proportion of sociopaths,”60 for “ancient authors saw it as appropriate for a mother not only to inspire and foster legitimate ambition but to curb mature excesses in her son much as she might check a youthful zeal for philosophy.”61 A “mother who had been separated from her child after its birth . . . was still expected to behave dutifully towards the child. . . . This seems to me to differ radically from the prevailing modern view that which puts the emphasis on the relationship between mother and infant as the foundation of all subsequent interaction.”62 Another feature of Roman culture that helps us to contextualize the nature of mothering in Coriolanus is the widespread reliance by Roman mothers on wet-nursing in order to raise children. Dixon points out a suggestive epitaph which reads: “To Graxia Alexandria, an outstanding example of womanly virtue, who actually reared her children with her own breasts.” In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero remarked that young children too often “have drunk in error with the nurse’s milk;”63 and Quintilian assumed that the nurse is the person with whom the small child will have greatest contact.64 The Roman mother’s relationship to her young child,” Dixon concludes, “was not similar to the modern one. She was not the exclusive formative influence which Sociology and Psychology, developed within a few highly urbanised, wealthy modern countries, assume her to be.”65 Interpreted in historical context, then, Volumnia’s manner of raising Coriolanus seems fairly typical: “When yet he was but tender-bodied and the only son of my womb . . . when for a day of kings’ entreaties a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding, I, considering how honour would become such a person . . . was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame” (1.3.5–13). Far from neglecting her son’s emotional needs, she indulges what she deems to be his natural inclinations: to

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“let” him seek danger. In this respect, Coriolanus’s character should be read in the light of the description given of his son, young Martius. Valeria notes that “I looked upon him o’ Wednesday half an hour together: ‘has such a confirmed countenance! I saw him run after a gilded butterfly, and when he caught it he let it go again, and after it again, and over and over he comes, and up again, catched it again” (1.3.61–66). The case of young Martius, who is not evidently deprived of maternal care yet is described at such a young age as an exact likeness to his father, should perhaps make us question whether the play suggests that maternal deprivation conditions social pathology. That is, how can we explain the similarity between father and son if Volumnia’s non-nurturance of Coriolanus is the cause of his “pathology?” One might respond that young Martius is as bereft of maternal care as Coriolanus, and that he will grow into the pathologies befitting his upbringing. Yet that would assume, given the normalcy of the mother–child relationships in the play, that all Roman men should develop like Coriolanus, which is at best reductionistic and at worst detracts from the uniqueness of Coriolanus’s nature. Rather than describe Volumnia’s role in the play as the source of Coriolanus sociopathology, it might be helpful to consider her bearing on the incommensurability thesis I have been advancing. With respect to the two axes of early modern statehood—the paternalist axis, which marks subjects as dependent and the libertarian axis, which marks subjects as autonomous and unconstrained—Volumnia reproduces in her relationship with Coriolanus an intertwining of both axes, since Coriolanus is both dependent upon and independent of her overarching influence. Volumnia is to Coriolanus as the early modern state is to all its subjects, and as such Volumnia as much as the Tribunate or Coriolanus incarnates the dual nature of early modern politics. Aufidius describes the consequences of Coriolanus’s eventual capitulation to Volumnia as follows: “As with a man by his own alms impoisoned, / And with his charity slain” (5.6.10–11). Volumnia has allowed one state ideal, the paternalist, (refigured as the maternalist) to impose itself on another, the meritocratic and libertarian, by means of the sacrifice of her effective agent, Coriolanus, for the purpose of maintaining both ideals in precarious balance. At the moment Coriolanus extends his paternalistic “charity” to his mother and Rome, he has assured the libertarian freedoms of the city at large, even though his charitable gestures will ultimately prove suicidal. Interposing on the state’s behalf, Volumnia helps to resolve through the sacrifice of Coriolanus the tension implicit in the play between an expansionist and maintenance goal for the culture. Typically, Republican polities were conceived either as imperialist and expansionist or stable and preservationist, bounded by population constraints and geographical restrictions. The

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Venetian government, for example, was considered a model for a preservationist ideology, and the Roman government for an expansionist ideology. The suggestion in the play is that ordinary, daily functioning and preservation of the polity can be upset by military conquest, particularly Coriolanus’s disruption of the ordinary workings of the city. In a passage already cited, Sicinius notes, perhaps too optimistically, that once Coriolanus is exiled from the city one sees “tradesmen singing in their shops and going / About their functions friendly” (4.6.7–9). Sicinius adds that “Rome / Sits safe and still without him” (4.6.38–39). Sicinius does not mention whether or not Coriolanus’s victories have allowed Rome to attain a level of prosperity without which the tradesmen would not be able to prosper in the first place—that is, whether the regular functioning of the city requires the kind of turmoil Coriolanus introduces following conquest on Rome’s behalf. The implication is that the city both gains and suffers at the hands of Coriolanus, and that Coriolanus needs to be contained when the costs of his influence outweigh the benefits. Even here meritocracy and paternalism compress, for the meritocratic ideal allows Coriolanus free play to exercise military virtue but the paternalist ideal seizes upon that virtue when it is no longer helpful to the working citizenry. What seems to make Coriolanus a cautionary (but not transitional) play is that it reveals the fate of individuals who threaten the precariously dualistic nature of English politics. Coriolanus is not the embodiment of Jacobean absolutism, but rather the avatar of Charles, Laud, and Strafford, to the extent that each of these notables requires containment when a skewed pursuit upsets consensus in the settled state. Charles transgresses the common law rights to property; Laud indulges an excessively “thorough” anti-Puritan campaign throughout England; Strafford attempts to impose Anglicanicism in Presbyterian Scotland. Coriolanus resembles all of these historical personages, each of whom is instrumental in advancing the state, but whose excesses are contained when they threaten the delicate balance of English consensualism. The play is also politically cautionary in its emphasis on the importance of ministering to the demands of the common culture, a practice that had just begun to show itself in the seventeenth century but that was not really undertaken by any early modern party or class until the civil war years; prior to 1640, despite anti-enclosure rhetoric and pockets of rebellion like the Midlands Rising, the common culture was largely an unthreatening political cipher, demanding little in the way of a vox populi argument made by Parliament or the Crown on its behalf: “The idea . . . that Parliament was responsible to the nation, suggested by comparatively few men in Elizabeth’s reign, quickly developed and matured in the first three decades of the seventeenth century. The parliamentary opposition . . . used it in the

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first place to strengthen an argument based on law and right, in the second place to justify an encroachment upon the realms of the king’s absolute power, and in the third lace to justify a new and aggressive procedure on the part of the commons.”66 Thus Coke famously said in Parliament in 1621, “I will not dispute with my Maister for his words, but when the kinge sayes he can not allowe our liberties of right, this strikes at the roote. We serve here for thousands of tenn thousands.”67 The general welfare argument was used by Parliament against Buckingham in 1626, when Buckingham’s opposition said that his actions “assume the Nature of the highest Offences. . . . The Welfare and Safety of the People and State, is the Supreme Law.”68 The common welfare argument was used by Parliament in order to marshal support against the Crown and vice versa, with little concern for the common culture, which does not affiliate itself with a party or faction until well into the civil war. Stone notes that the “revolution was certainly not a war of the poor against the rich, for one of its most striking features was the almost total passivity of the rural masses, the copyholders and agricultural labourers.”69

Coriolanus and Tragic Irony In an important discussion of the difficulty in generically classifying Coriolanus, O.J. Campbell termed the play a “tragical satire,” basing his claims largely on the play’s comedic rendering of Menenius, as well as its failure to take seriously Coriolanus’s self-proclaimed heroism and tragic stature.70 Maurice Charney later extended Campbell’s analysis by pointing out the satirical treatment of the extensive imagery in the play, of food and disease.71 The most recent and provocative discussion of the play’s complex relation to genre, however, is James Holstun’s discussion of the play’s “tragic superfluity.”72 Rather than simply seeing the play as a hybridized tragical satire, Holstun argues that the play openly satirizes the conventions of tragedy. Because Coriolanus, for example, is the figure most aptly monarchical in a government without a monarchy, Holstun concludes, “Coriolanus is the true superfluity that the action of the play must vent, for he is a tragic king-figure in a satiric drama that does not need a king. He is a tragic hero only in so far as he is tragically miscast.”73 Holstun argues that Coriolanus not only excludes the formal features associated with tragedy—”lyric meditation,” “tragic recognition,” “figurative language,” “images of the supernatural,”—but that the play also excludes a staple of the great tragedies, a crisis of kingly legitimacy and transition.

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Because the play instead meditates on the decline of the metaphor of the hierarchically structured body politic, and defends a more or less stable form of aristocratic republicanism, the play falls under the category “comedy of humors” rather than tragedy: Where the totalizing political vision of the tragedy of transition postulates a sick body politic that can be cured only through an act of political and psychological catharsis, the comedy of humors assumes a relatively stable underlying social structure that allows a gentler satiric correction of those characters whose intemperate humors cause them to aspire above their fixed positions in the social hierarchy. The comedy of humors tends to chasten and preserve its agents of disorder, rather than martyr them in a tragic ritual.74

While the tendency to see Coriolanus as departing from and satirizing tragic conventions is salutary, the recasting of the play as a satire can be misleading, particularly when the politics of the play are judged in historical context. Satire assumes, as Holstun implies, a relative degree of structural and institutional stability against which satirical critique can be directed. As Northrop Frye remarks, satire’s “moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured.”75 While the practical, workaday affairs of Rome improve when Coriolanus is finally removed, the internal policy contradictions—the unclear position on charity—have not been resolved, and “moral norms” have not been established. Furthermore, Coriolanus may not be tragically martyred, but he is not simply “chastened” either. I would suggest that irony explains better than satire the play’s formal and generic qualities in relation to its historical allegory. At its simplest level, irony expresses itself in terms of character and plot. Coriolanus, for example, makes frequent use of biting verbal irony, in spite of the soldierly inarticulateness ascribed to him by his peers. After the second citizen agrees to give his voice in exchange for a private showing of his wounds, Coriolanus says, “A match, sir. There’s in all two worthy / voices begged. I have your alms. Adieu” (2.3.76–77). Of course, Coriolanus wryly means the opposite of the plain sense, since he has been complaining all along that the poor unjustly receive alms from the senators, a use of irony belatedly understood by the second citizen, who exclaims after the ceremony, “He mocked us when he begged our voices” (2.3.154). Aufidius trades on this sort of irony when he announces that Coriolanus’s very “charity” expressed toward Volumnia is his own downfall: “Even so / As with a man by his own alms impoisoned, / And with his charity slain” (5.6.10–11). At times the irony is textually embedded, rather than employed self-consciously by a

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particular character. Thus Menenius says of Coriolanus, “O, he’s a limb that has but a disease; / Mortal to cut it off, to cure it easy. . . .” (3.1.298–299), precisely the criticism that Coriolanus (and Menenius) would level at the Tribunate. These forms of irony operate beyond the level of just linguistic punning, though. Irony, as Hayden White remarks, “points to the potential foolishness of all linguistic characterizations of reality as much as to the absurdity of the beliefs it parodies.”76 In terms of status or class beliefs, we have seen that class positions in the play typically subvert themselves, crossing over into seemingly incompatible platforms. Beyond their all-too-human commitment to food, the citizens and Tribunate occupy now a rights-based, now a paternalistic view of citizen-state relations. And Coriolanus, as we have seen, occupies at times a negative-libertarian, at times a eudaemonistic or republican political stance. Furthermore, as Quentin Skinner points out, early modern republicanism itself is an inherently ironical political posture, since any republican show of support for an organic polity is itself a bid to secure negative freedoms.77 Irony also serves better than satire as a tropological mode against which to measure Coriolanus’s loss of tragic stature by the end of the play. Frye writes that “satire is irony which is structurally close to the comic: the comic struggle of two societies, one normal and the other absurd, is reflected in its double focus of morality and fantasy. Irony with little satire is the non-heroic residue of tragedy, centering on a theme of puzzled defeat.”78 While Coriolanus’s defeat itself is straightforwardly enacted, audiences cannot be sure just what sorts of emotions ought to be released upon witnessing his death. Coriolanus is dispatched by two unidentified Volscian conspirators, who emerge from a faceless mob that recalls the Roman mobs so despised by Coriolanus throughout the play. If this final irony tends to work in a Brechtian way to pull our attention away from the tragic elements of Coriolanus’s downfall, Aufidius’s lowbrow, perfunctory requiem hardly is capable of stirring up a level of emotional response appropriate to a cathartic resolution. On a more thematic level, irony can function to point out the potentially recursive or inertial quality of events, the ways in which a play like Coriolanus simply keeps the political conversation going, as Richard Rorty might claim.79 Given the number of unresolved deep structural problems of the Roman state at the close of the play, comments that suggest the death of Coriolanus will conduce to peace—the tradesmen go about “singing in their shops” (4.6.7–9), and Rome sits “safe and still” (4.6.38–39)—take on an ironic quality, since we know better than to credit such optimism. To miss such irony is to miss the play’s allegorization and admonitory critique of the precarious nature of Jacobean politics. The mode of satire would be

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a more appropriate vehicle of historical mediation if the play set out to allegorize a clearly formulated, univocal aspect of Jacobean policy; but given the complexly unstable character of the Jacobean policy on charity and rights, irony makes us acutely aware that fiscal policy in the play and during the period is irreducibly dualistic in nature. In terms, finally, of historical emplotment, the play offers no redemptive narrative, no inquiry into historical possibilities akin to The Tempest’s reconstruction of an alternative strategy for dealing with masterlessness. There is thus sacrifice but no donor, Coriolanus’s death fostering political supineness, or equilibrium in the short term, rather than nostalgia for past political formations or confidence in political emancipation. If, as I have suggested, The Tempest plots history as it might have happened, history in its frozen potentialities, Coriolanus is a presentist play: its falsification of Coriolanus’s self-proclaimed absolutism, as well as its allegory of class overdetermination, provides a biting, yet very local commentary on the ironies of Jacobean politics.

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Chapter 3 Shylock as Homo Sacer?: Mercantilist Fallacies and Subjective Demand in The Merchant of Venice The Merchant of Venice perhaps rivals King Lear as the Shakespearean play that has most often been interpreted as an allegory of economic transition. Typical transitional readings of Merchant posit an ideological opposition between two broadly defined economic modes of production, and then locate the principal characters along these ideological axes. In the most sophisticated, counterintuitive of such readings, Walter Cohen argues that Antonio, the usurious merchant-financier, is the “harbinger of modern capitalism,” while Shylock is a retrograde, neo-feudal figure: “marginal, diabolical, irrational, archaic, medieval.”1 More recently, John Drakakis has argued that Shylock contradictorily embodies seigneurial and capitalistic qualities: “Shylock looks both backwards and forwards in the play. It is this double perspective that obscures what we think of as the passage to modernity, since it both challenges and facilitates a secular teleology.” 2 Eric Mallin has complicated things further, suggesting that Shylock’s capitalist ethos manifests itself in his ability to realize a Christian “plutocratic fantasy” of extravagant spending.3 One limitation of these provocative transitional readings is that the reigning sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economic theory is mercantilism, or as it is sometimes called, bullionism, which, although containing feudal and capitalist elements, is not reducible in practice to either mode of production.While mercantilists are often described as theorists of a favorable balance of trade—because they argued that a nation’s exports should exceed its imports—mercantilists also offered historically idiosyncratic theories of money, commodities, value, and the role of the state in

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economic affairs. As such, mercantilism should be treated as an early modern economic system unto itself. Mercantilism is in fact interesting more for its economic misjudgments than for its insights. Economic historians, Marx included, generally agree that early mercantilist doctrine fetishized money and the hoarding of wealth, adhered to neo-scholastic theories of value according to “just price” approximations, and misunderstood the importance of supply and demand in determinations of prices and exchange rates. Since mercantilism was by no means a consolidated system of economic thought during the late Elizabethan and Early Stuart epochs, and subject to ongoing scrutiny, most of these fallacies are laid bare in the mercantilist literature itself, particularly in the often scurrilous debates among the leading economic thinkers of the time, Gerard de Malynes, Edward Misselden, and Thomas Mun. In this chapter I argue that Merchant not only reflects some of the mainstream tenets of mercantilist theories, but also offers an immanent critique of such theories, particularly the mercantilist belief that value inheres naturally in commodities, including money-capital. Alongside an objective or naturalist theory of value, Merchant dramatizes an alternative value theory, a subjectivist theory of value. Economic subjectivism shares much with marginal utility theory and neo-classical economics, and can be found in the writings of some of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian economists, particularly Bernardo Davanzati’s Theory of Coins. While the subjectivist theory of value seems more modern than objective theories of value, both theories originate in medieval economic treatises, from which they are bequeathed to the early mercantilists. I thus argue that tensions between the two theories of value reflect a local division within early mercantilism rather than a fundamental conflict between feudalism and capitalism. Like traditional transitional readings, I align characters into two opposing camps, but these camps are pitched under the overview of mercantilist economic theory, rather than between the competing ideologies of Christian anticapitalism and capitalist profiteering. The economic reasoning of Morocco and Arragon, I argue, reflects some of the limitations of objective theories of value and the fetishization of money capital. The economic reasoning of Bassanio, Shylock and Portia, on the other hand, reflects some of the more sophisticated strategies of thinking of value as subjectively determined. Toward the end of the chapter, I discuss the extent to which transitional readings should take into account the formal elements of comedy, particularly the thrust of the play toward reconciliation.

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Medieval Theories of Value and the Just Price While economic historians have often argued that the medieval just price (iustus pretium) conformed to an “objective, inherent, value of articles of commerce,”4 or a metaphysical quality of a commodity, a revisionist tradition argues that the value of goods was usually determined simply by its market value under normal conditions. Abnormal conditions that would unfairly revalue a commodity might include price manipulations or monopolies, the sort of practices that would artificially raise prices and exploit consumers. The term “objective” might still be used to designate value, but “objective” did not imply any quantifiable, metaphysical essence; it rather described the natural price set by a market mechanism that was not ordinarily subject to control. As one historian writes of Aristotelian–Scholastic value theory: “There is one manner of valuation which is in a sense objective to the individual, namely the evaluation of the competitive market under normal conditions; normal competitive price is objective in the sense that the individual buyer can seller can do nothing to influence it; it is given to them. And this normal or natural price is the Aristotelian just price, for with Aristotle and his followers, the ‘natural’ is the ‘just.’ ”5 This leaves unexplained the precise economic forces that help to establish fair market value. On this question, economic historians believe that different theologians and branches of scholastic value theory provided varying answers and emphases. There are, roughly, three subtraditions of Aristotelian value theory.6 The first is the “cost of labor” theory of value found predominantly in Albert of Magnus’s economic writings. The labor theory assumes that the exchange value of goods is measured by the time and/or quantity of labor expended in producing a good. The fair price of an item, according to the labor theory, is meant to cover at the least the subsistence needs of the producer.7 An alternative theory of value, the market or demand conception, can be found principally in Aquinas’s writings. For Aquinas, human need or indigentia was the standard measure of value. Importantly, desire or voluptas is not considered a significant determinant of value. Insofar as needs are limited in this theory to staple products, rather than luxury goods, the market conception of value ignores the relativity of wants as divided between rich and poor.8 The fourteenth-century French theologian, John Buridan, and his nominalist followers, expanded Thomas’s discussion of indigentia to include nonrational, unpredictable human desires. The Buridan tradition also realized that needs and desires can only determine price and normal

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value if the former are considered in aggregate rather than on an individual, case-by-case basis. As Odd Langholm notes, “Individual wants or need, while explaining the desire to exchange and thereby also the nature of economic value as opposed to other kinds of value, cannot explain the actual or normal level of price. Only when indigentia is conceived as an aggregate phenomenon does its true economic significance emerge, for it becomes possible to view it in . . . the dimension of market participation. . . .”9 With the additional focus on scarcity in determining economic value, scholastic value theory laid the foundations for a unified economic theory of value. It is important to bear in mind that these economic branches should not be construed as rival traditions. Modern economic value theory, usually described as general equilibrium theory, understands value as a synthesis of the factors of labor, need, subjective desires, utility, and supply and demand.10 While recent economic historians seem to have offered a comprehensive theory of scholastic value formulation, they have not conclusively displaced an earlier tradition of historians who believed that the schoolmen associated just value with something objective or intrinsic to the commodity. In some passages of the Summa, for example, Aquinas does indeed suggest that a common item’s worth is determined by a quality that is essential to that item, a quality that denotes for Aquinas the general usefulness of a particular commodity. A horse’s worth, for example, inheres in its easily recognizable, useful qualities, including its strength and ability to run well.11 If asked how prices are determined from such a sense of fair value, just price theorists might resort to the common estimation, or even suggest that the state ought to fix prices absolutely. For those just price theorists who also held a labor theory of value, the idea behind the just price was to protect the producer of the useful item, respecting the Biblical mandate that “the laborer must be paid his hire.”12 Under natural or simple economic conditions, where labor was the fundamental factor of production, it seemed possible to estimate, across time and space, the general cost of producing different basic goods and maintaining the producer and his family. From this perspective, it is understandable that there has been considerable debate as to whether the iustus pretium signifies objective or intrinsic worth, or whether it signifies a bestowal or projection of value upon the item from external sources. When production and subsistence costs are relatively fixed, an item may acquire a predictable value over time, and hence can begin to seem like it has objective or intrinsic worth. Scholastic theories of value, when they focus on the labor factor, have often been compared to the Marxist theory of value, the fundamental difference being that for Marx, embodied labor signifies the alienation of the producer, rather than a fair, seemingly objective estimate of the cost of subsistence. I return

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to Marx’s labor theory below, but the important point is that one can find in scholastic value theory both objective and subjective estimates of value, depending on whether the theory emphasizes the labor element or the market mechanism.

Mercantilism and Objective Value Early modern mercantilist theory shares much with medieval just price theories. Mercantilists idiosyncratically tended to locate objective value in precious commodities like gold and silver, the hoarding of which would supposedly provide the country with riches. Much of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century economic thought is devoted to explaining the mechanisms by which English currency became devalued in relation to foreign currencies. According to Gerard de Malynes, the manipulation of exchange rates by foreign merchant-bankers resulted in the outflow of English gold and silver and a consequent rise in domestic prices. Malynes believed that the English crown could curtail exchange speculation and stabilize English currency by establishing fixed exchange rates through the Royal Exchange, rates that were to be vigilantly enforced by statutes and governmental intervention. Malynes’s contention that the government fix commodity values stemmed from his erroneous belief that precious bullion, independent of the influence of supply and demand, was the engine of trade and commerce. As such, he argued that the fair value should be established by the monarch: “Money must have its standing valuations onely by publicke authoritie of the Prince . . .”13 One of Malynes’s most polemical statements in this regard can be found in his Maintenance of Free Trade: “Money was invented and became the first wheele which stirreth the wheele of Commodities and inforceth the Action. But the third wheele of exchange of monyes betweene Countrey and countrey, being established and grounded upon monyes, is (in effect) like to the instrument that striketh the Clocke, being therein the thing Active, and Commodities and Monyes are become things Passive.”14 Malynes failed to realize that an exaggerated increase in the total, unconverted money-capital of English society would forestall production and economic advancement, and have the unintended consequence of reducing interest rates and depreciating the very value of money. As Marx observes, “If an untowardly large section of capitalists were to convert their capital into money-capital, the result would be a frightful depreciation of money-capital and a frightful fall in the rate of interest; many would at once face the impossibility of living on their interest, and would hence be compelled to reconvert into industrial capitalists.”15

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Malynes overstated the force of money in the economy because he failed to perceive that money is simply a conventionally established means of exchange, the value of which is established by market forces. This in turn led him to recommend a system of trade whereby England should primarily export goods in the quest to hoard gold and silver. Tending to mystify the power of money, Malynes described bullion as “soul of the body,” and asserted that “By money a trade is made for the imployment of it both at home and abroad. . . . Money doth rule the course of Commodities.”16 Thomas Mun, who ordinarily held a more sophisticated understanding of the influence of supply and demand on the worth of any commodity, also endowed money with its own productive agency: “Money begets trade and trade encreaseth money.”17 Bacon too shared this belief in the quickening, active power of money to stimulate the economy: “With much money in the land, there will ensure presently a great stand of trade.”18 Contemplating such remarks as the foregoing, Eli Hekscher, one of the foremost historians of mercantilism, noted that early modern economic theorists fetishized money: “As soon as the result of production, from the producer’s standpoint, no longer consists in other goods but in money, then the money yield appears as the only aim of economic activity. Other goods are then considered unwelcome since they are merely competing with one’s own products for the monetary equivalent.”19 Another economic historian puts the same criticism in more colorful terms: Midas was the parent of the Mercantile System. . . . Midas saw that, with treasure in his hand, he was wealthy. . . . He quite forgot that gold was only of use while it could command something else, and if that something else were changed into gold, his gold would be of no use whatever. Gold therefore, was only of use because of the multitude of things which were not gold.20

We should note that recent work on early modern mercantilism has emphasized the extent to which the mercantile “Midas fallacy” has been overstated. While Malynes certainly fetishized money-capital, one would be wrong to argue that Malynes’s contemporaries, Edward Misselden and Thomas Mun, did as well. Misselden, for example, recognized that the unpredictable force of supply and demand, rather than governmental policy or exchange speculation, determined prices and exchange rates: “It is not the rate of exchange, whether it be higher or lower, that maketh the price of commodities deare or cheape, as Malynes would here inferre; but it is the plenty or scarcities of commodities, their use or non-use, that maketh them rise and fall in price.”21 Because Misselden and Mun understood that the value of English currency was determined by the quantity of

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money circulating throughout the domestic economy, their remedy for the undervaluation of English currency was a favorable balance of trade rather than direct regulation of exchange rates. Both believed that if England exported more commodities than it imported, bullion would flow into the country, stimulating trade and providing the nation with a store of treasure that could be used as protection during wartime. Hence the popular epithet that money is the “sinews of war.” Mun writes, “Those princes which do not providentially lay up treasure, or do immoderately consume when they have it, will sodainly come to want and misery.”22 But while Misselden and Mun understood that money and commodities acquired value according to market fluctuations, they shared with Malynes the belief that national wealth was secured by the accumulation of treasure rather than domestic trade and commodity importation. There is thus negligible discussion in early mercantilist writings of the factors that contribute to the economic solvency and real wealth of a nation: quality of domestic goods, industrial manufacture, a higher rate of production than consumption, and the accessibility of a skilled labor market. Looking back on the shortsightedness of mercantile policy, Adam Smith remarked, Some of the best English writers upon commerce set out with observing that the wealth consists, not in its gold and silver only, but in lands, houses and consumable goods of all different kinds. In the course of their reasonings, however, the lands, houses, and consumable goods seem to slip out of their memory, and the strain of their argument frequently supposes that all wealth consists in gold and silver, and that to multiply those metals is the great object of national industry and commerce.23

We should pause to consider the wider implications of the early mercantilist theories of money and wealth. Since the early mercantilists were concerned above all to regulate trade and the outflow of goods, they paid little attention to consumption. Some of the fundamental preoccupations of modern economic theory—consumer preferencing, discretionary spending, the role of human desire and satisfaction in determining the worth of commodities—are not discussed in any elaborate way in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English economic thought. One modern economic historian has described the disparity between modern economic analysis and mercantilist protectionism as follows: Liberals, starting from the question: What is the end of economic activity? answered: Producing wealth for satisfying human wants, i.e. the ultimate end is consumption. . . . It is true that in mercantile literature of England, in the seventeenth century at least, production was not, as a whole regarded as the servant of consumption, and wealth brought into relation with the material

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In general, mercantilists endorsed objectivist theories of value, and so such theories overlap with even the most unreconstructed medieval theories of the just price. The mercantilists had a reasonable, if truncated, understanding of the concept of economic value, but they had a remarkably narrow view of the range of items that can potentially hold value. One might say that while some like Malynes held an objective theory of value, most held an objective theory of valuable goods. Another way to think of mercantilist dogma is as an objective theory of value once removed, or as a reified theory of value. Even the most sophisticated mercantilists typically argue that the vicissitudes of supply and demand will determine the worth of money, but then go on to argue that money, once endowed with value, acquires a vital energy to endow everything else with value.

Objective Valuation in The Merchant of Venice We can begin our discussion of The Merchant of Venice by thinking of the allegorical significance of the casket game in relation to the economic history outlined above. Morocco’s meditations on the caskets’ inscriptions might be interpreted as a parody of objective theories of value. When faced with taking action on the gold casket, whose inscription reads, “Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire,” Morocco reasons: “Why that’s the lady! All the world desires her; / From the four corners of the earth they come / To kiss this shrine, this mortal breathing saint. / The Hyrcanian deserts and the vasty wilds / Of wide Arabia are as throughfares now / For princes to come view fair Portia” (2.7.38–43).25 The value Morocco places on Portia is established by the degree to which she is publicly esteemed. This is an entirely conventional determination of Portia’s worth, one that derives neither from Morocco’s subjective estimation, nor from Portia’s self-estimation. Morocco’s inflated rhetoric suggests that such a common measure of Portia’s desirability is indisputable for being so widely held and geographically expansive. He would no doubt argue, at a more sober moment, that the standard set by “many men” descending from the “four corners of the earth” is a reasonable and fair approximation of Portia’s value. And if we argue this economic premise to its early modern, patriarchal conclusion, we can assume that Morocco would argue that this

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fair approximation is the basis from which one would begin to quantify and commodify Portia. Our intuitive modern notions of value seem to dictate that a conventional, public designation of the value of a “commodity” like Portia locates the origin of value extrinsically rather than intrinsically. But we have seen that to the late medieval and early modern mind, public estimations of a commodity can, over time, seem to reflect an intrinsic worth of the commodity. This will not seem counterintuitive if we think of value as something that fundamentally inheres in Portia, and is recognized as such by an imagined community of men; value does not inhere in the community of men who then project that value onto Portia. Portia does not gain worth because she is desired; she is desired because she has worth. That Morocco is working with an intrinsic notion of value is reflected in the Petrarchan quality of his paean to Portia, in which he mystifies her oxymoronically as a “mortal breathing saint”—certainly not a figure whose worth would be parasitical on the arbitrary standards of fallible men. We can gain a better sense of Morocco’s choice if we think of his reasoning in relation to a fundamental distinction between needs and desires. To the extent that Portia’s desirability is so intimately linked to worldly estimations of her worth, her value becomes far removed from Morocco’s subjective, unmediated interest in her. While one might assume that Portia’s reification serves to enhance her attractiveness to Morocco, I would argue that such reification devalues her, or at least dampens whatever active desires might otherwise influence his decision. Portia seems to acquire the status of something Morocco principally needs over and above something that he really desires; stated differently, his desire for her has been clinically shaped by his sense that he needs to have what every other man wants: “ ‘Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.’ / Why that’s the lady! All the world desires her” (2.7.37–38). Without pursuing here a fine analytical distinction between needs and desires, we can roughly distinguish the two by noting that while desires are often nonrational, especially in cases of incontinent conduct, needs are mostly determined by an application of instrumental reason. Morocco seems particularly exercised by the burial and “immuring” of Portia within the gold casket: “It were too gross / To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave. / Or shall I think in silver she’s immured. . . .” (2.7.52). Morocco momentarily seems to confuse the burial of the signifying form of Portia, the heavenly picture, with the burial of Portia herself. Portia has become so thoroughly objectified that, rather than acquiring the heightened animation of a fetish object, she is drained of sensuous vitality; she has been placed outside the realm of idiosyncratic passionate desire and within the calculative realm of publicly determined wants.

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Money, however, undergoes a much different transformation in the scene. It seems relatively uncontroversial to claim that, like the mercantilists described above, Morocco fetishizes money as an end unto itself rather than as a means to acquire the object of his desires and needs. Morocco’s case is especially interesting, though, because his desire for gold competes with his desire for Portia. Morocco says, “Never so rich a gem / Was set in worse than gold. They have in England / A coin that bears the figure of an angel / Stamped in gold—but that’s insculpted upon; / But here an angel in a golden bed / Lies all within” (2.7.54–59). Superficially, Morocco celebrates Portia’s worth. He argues that the imprint of an “angel” on English bullion simply denominates the value of the gold to which it is added. As a superficial marker of the weight and worth of bullion, the angel has no intrinsic value. His “angel,” on the other hand, is encased by the precious metal; since she “lies all within,” Portia is of a material piece with the gold itself, an unalloyed part of its substance and weight. If we look more closely, though, Morocco’s comments downgrade Portia’s value in relation to the value of gold itself. Recalling that Morocco confuses the form of Portia in the casket with Portia herself, the difference between “sculpted upon” and lying “all within” is the difference between an angel that is unconcealed and a bearer of value, and one that is “immured” in a casket and contained by the unmarked but pure value of the surrounding gold. Superficially, the gold casket is more attractive than the silver because Portia deserves a “golden bed” rather than a “cerecloth” in an “obscure grave.” But the lines also suggest that the golden casket is more attractive to Morocco not only for its superior quality to silver, but because it symbolically provides a more lustrous but confining “grave”—the figure lies “all within,” rather than simply enrobed with the cerecloth—for Portia herself. While this is no doubt an example of “anxious masculinity” belying its insecurities, the passage might also be seen to serve as a parody of the kinds of objective theories of value that circulated during the period. We can begin a discussion of Arragon’s choice of the silver casket by assessing his omission of any discussion about his own value relative to Portia’s. An estimation of Portia’s value would seem to be a necessary condition of Arragon’s ability to adjudicate properly whether he “deserves” Portia. In order to measure accurately his deserts against Portia’s, Arragon would need first to determine his own value, and then find some conventional means of commensurating his value with Portia’s. While Arragon does not offer a precise account of how he tabulates his own worth, he does suggest that the criteria on which he would determine value include the “estates, degrees, and office” that he thinks are often acquired unmeritoriously: “O that estates, degrees, and offices / Were not derived corruptly, and that clear honor / Were purchased by the merit of the wearer!” (2.9.40–42).

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Upon learning that he has chosen the wrong casket, Arragon exclaims, “Did I deserve no more than a fool’s head? / Is that my prize? Are my deserts no better?” (2.9.58–59). Arragon cannot answer the question because he has not appropriately compared his own value to Portia’s. But such a task would be impossible, in any case, because Arragon’s meritorious, public, and reductively masculine criteria of value—”estates,” “degrees,” “offices”—are not readily applicable to Portia, whose desirability would more conventionally be measured during the period according to the sorts of criteria earlier invoked by Morocco, namely inherited “fortunes” and “graces:” “Why that’s the lady! / I do in birth deserve her, and in fortunes, / In graces, and in qualities of breeding . . .” (2.7.31–33). If Arragon were to pursue a comparison between his and Portia’s merits and graces, he would need to compare relative values; but he could only weigh relative values by first establishing or appropriating some standard of value that could commensurate unlike qualities, some basis on which to judge whether Portia herself is worthy of his “achievements.” Given that his criteria for determining value do not seem relevant to Portia, he would ultimately face what might be described as a problem of incommensurability. In order to resolve such a problem, he would need to consider money in its double aspect, that is, money as a standard of value and money as a commodity itself that contains value. Monetary theorists, Marx included, describe this difference as between a nominalist and commodity theory of money. According to the nominalist theory, money is considered simply as an abstract sign of value and medium of exchange. According to the commodity theory, silver or gold can be bought and sold like any other commodity. Each commodity contains value as much as each determines the value of other commodities. Of course, Arragon never does set out to establish Portia’s merits, and so he bypasses the problem of attempting to compare unlike qualities without resorting to conventional standards. But this leaves unaddressed why he never undertakes to establish Portia’s value in the first place. When he says that the blinking idiot is unlike his “hopes and deserving,” he implies that he had assumed that he deserved Portia. When one deserves something, according to Arragon’s understanding of desert, one has actively achieved or earned what one believes is their due. This is somewhat different from Morocco’s belief that he deserves whatever he deems equivalently valuable to his own sense of worth. Arragon’s notion of desert is more like the handing over of a reward for meritorious conduct, a reward that curiously does not take into consideration the relative attractions of the item to be awarded. The issue here is not whether we should interpret Arragon’s conduct counterfactually, thereby raising the specter of A.C. Bradley and the notorious

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practice of endowing characters with psychological realism. Such a chase after character would entail dubious speculations about the extent to which Arragon decides not to raise the question of Portia’s value because he anticipates the economic impasse that awaits him. I would argue, instead, that the impasse inevitably comes into view for anyone concerned to push the economic logic in the scene to its inevitable conclusion. As I have noted, one of the problems besetting early modern mercantilist theory was its tendency to emphasize the commodity theory at the expense of the nominalist theory of money. In extreme forms this resulted in the practice of hoarding bullion in order to increase the real wealth of the nation. Judged from the perspective of the history of early modern economic theory, Arragon’s initial ruminations on the complex issue of desert, linked with his odd refusal to weigh relative values, inevitably raise the problem of commensurability that most mercantilists would not have been able to address sufficiently. That the scene seems to call attention to the problem of incommensurability is suggested by the radical difference between Arragon’s conduct and the framing conduct of Morocco and Bassanio. As I have already noted, Morocco draws a clear comparison between his own value and Portia’s, isolating comparable qualities such as “birth,” “fortune,” “grace,” and “breeding.” Morocco does not pursue the silver casket, but he has no problem comparing his value to Portia’s because their respective worth is measured according to a shared scale. Bassanio, for his part, insightfully comments that silver is a “common drudge / ‘Tween man and man,” (3.2.103–104), a comment that reflects at least a passing understanding of the function of a commodity like silver to act as a conventional standard that mediates commerce between individuals. If Bassanio were to take the silver casket’s inscription seriously, he doubtless would be able to resolve any commensurability problems by figuring silver (or gold) as an adjudicating standard. The more we take into historical perspective Morocco’s and Bassanio’s seeming sophistication in the area of comparing value, as compared to Arragon’s omission of such considerations, the more we begin to think that the scene offers more than a straightforward commentary on Arragon’s obtuseness or arrogance. Richard Halpern offers an original and complex interpretation of the theme of value in this scene, and so we should look at his argument in some detail. Appropriating Marx’s labor theory of value to interpret the casket game, Halpern argues that Arragon’s choice of the silver casket reflects his narcissism and overestimation of his intrinsic worth: Arragon’s choice is tautological as well as self-serving. When he says ‘I will assume desert,’ he reveals the circularity of his sense of worth, which is based

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not on comparing himself objectively with others but on narcissistic self-absorption. . . . Arragon is, in effect, the Fichtean philosopher who can say ‘I am I,’ or the twenty yards of linen which tries to express its value in twenty yards of linen. He represents not the value-relation but its short-circuiting.26

When Halpern invokes the “value-relation” he refers to Marx’s belief that the exchange-value of two commodities is measured by the amount of embodied labor time necessary to produce each commodity. Since an equivalent amount of socially necessary labor is expended in the production of twenty yards of linen and one coat, the value of commodity B (the coat) comes to measure the value of commodity A (the twenty yards of linen). In Marx’s terminology, the coat becomes the equivalent form that mirrors or reflects the worth of the relative form, the twenty yards of linen. A commodity’s exchange value is thus determined in relation to other commodities, and the worth of any commodity is determined by its quantity of embodied labor. Halpern argues that Arragon “short-circuits” the nexus of exchange values by attempting to locate value within himself, rather than in relation to others.27 If we employ Marxian language, we might assume that Portia figures as the equivalent value-form to Arragon, the relative form. But I believe that the Marxian theory of value does not sufficiently explain Arragon’s conduct, since Marx’s labor theory of value posits a “cost-of-production” magnitude, namely labor-power, that serves as the standard measure of the value between any two commodities. There is no mention of embodied labor or a comparable standard of value by which we can compare the worth of Arragon and Portia. The problem is not that Arragon shortcircuits the nexus of exchange values of which he is a part. Rather, the scene is significantly agnostic on the whole question of exchange values. By choosing not to enter into the nexus of exchange values, Arragon avoids the difficulties of comparing unlike qualities in the absence of any conventionally established standards. I would suggest that the scene raises the very question of what would constitute a standard of value (labor-power? bullion? supply and demand)?, when comparing incommensurate qualities. Some of the most prescient mercantilists, Thomas Mun, for example, understood the double aspect of money, and so realized that the appropriate standard of measurement should be money, whose value, in turn, is established by supply and demand. But Arragon’s conduct (and Morocco’s conduct in relation to money fetishism) raise the very questions that the bulk of early modern economic theory was not sophisticated enough to answer. Both Morocco’s and Arragon’s reasoning behind the choices of the gold and silver casket, respectively, raise questions about the limitations inherent

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in money fetishism. Bassanio, unlike his competitors, chooses the winning casket because his reasoning is informed by a fundamentally different conception of value and wealth, a subjectivist theory of value. Critics have often noted that Bassanio chooses the winning casket partly because Portia coaches him to choose lead over silver and gold. Bernard Grebanier, for example, believes that Portia purposely employs the words “bred,” “head,” and “nourished” to suggest the rhyming “lead” to Bassanio.28 I believe that Portia does enable Bassanio’s winning choice, but that she does so not through suggestive wordplay, but by so radically destabilizing her own value in Bassanio’s eyes that Bassanio is liberated from conventional estimations of the attractiveness of the three metals. Prior to Bassanio’s choice of the lead casket, Portia represents herself as stereotypically feminine, endorsing the silence–obedience dyad of the humanist mandate that women be chaste, silent and obedient. She notes that a “maiden hath no tongue but thought” (3.2.8), and that she has already yielded half of herself to Bassanio: “One half of me is yours, the other half yours—/ Mine own I would say: but if mine then yours,—/ And so all yours!” (3.2.16–18). When she explicates the Trojan conceit, she exclaims that she stands for “sacrifice” (3.2.57), and she implicitly subjects herself to a “new-crowned monarch” (3.2.50). Bassanio does not seem to take Portia’s courtly self-effacement all that seriously, and at one point peremptorily says, “Let me choose, / For as I am, I live upon the rack” (3.2.24–25). Portia’s self-abasement, however, conspicuously absent during her encounters with Morocco and Arragon, inevitably calls into question any common or public estimates of her fair value, especially among ignoble men like Arragon and Morocco. If Portia had spoken the same lines to Morocco or Arragon, she would have perhaps lost some of her stature as a “mortal breathing saint.” We can imagine that Bassanio himself might find her effusive self-effacements curious, since he had earlier exalted her as “nothing undervalued to Cato’s daughter” (1.1.165–166). Portia’s comments momentarily render unstable or displace any notion that she has an objective value that can be determined outside of subjective appraisals of her worth, including her own estimations and those of her admirers. But how does this help to explain Bassanio’s seemingly inexplicable choice of the lead casket? For Bassanio to exchange all that he has for the lead casket requires that he first suspend customary notions he might hold about the fair value of both the casket and Portia, and then revalue both according to his own scale of value. When Bassanio chooses correctly he does so because he sees lead as not as desirable in itself, but desirable as the negation of or alternative to the other two overvalued caskets. Bassanio offers no positive argument for why he chooses the way he does because the lead casket really has no determinate value for him; it stands for the very

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absence of objective value. If pressed, Bassanio would be forced to explain his choice by responding voluntaristically: “The lead casket is valuable because I desired it.” Bassanio’s gambit is a good one, and he “wins” Portia for his iconoclasm. Judged from the perspective of early modern theories of value, the scene might be interpreted as an allegory of the strategies in thinking of value as subjectively rather than objectively grounded. One of the most influential early modern economic treatises was Bernardo Davanzati’s Treatise of Coins (1586), a treatise that offers an alternative to mercantilist money fetishism, and finds its ancestry in the Buridan tradition of subjective value. Davanzati, like Malynes and the early mercantilists, set out to investigate the genealogy of the value of money and commodities, but Davanzati focused on the microfoundations of the economy, the role of individual wants and desires in establishing price and value: “From what Root springs it, that one thing is worth just so much of another, rather than so much; worth this rather than that quantity of Gold? . . . All Men labour to become happy, and they think to find this Happiness in the Satisfaction of all their Wants and Desires, to answer which all Earthly Things were created very good. . . . All Men then do passionately covet all the Gold, to buy up all things for the Satisfaction of all their Wants and Desires, and so to become happy.”29 For Davanzati, value does not inhere in commodities themselves, but rather derives from unpredictable human desires, desires dictated by the relative measure of happiness procurable by different commodities. He also states quite clearly that money is nothing more than a conventional measure of worth, not desirable in itself, but simply because of the coveted objects it can acquire: “And he that has little Mony, can buy but few things, which are the only true Riches.”30 Davanzati’s consumer theory or subjective utility theory of value can also be found in Grotius’s The Law of War and Peace, where Grotius, departing from Aristotelian just price theories, argues that value reflects the common or publicly accepted need of an object: “The most natural measure of the value of each thing is the need of it, as Aristotle has rightly shown. This becomes the paramount consideration in the exchange of objects among barbarous people. Nevertheless this is not the only measure. For the desire of men, which controls the price of things, covets many things more than their need requires.”31 Bassanio’s case shows that he has put the logic of subjective demand to work on his own behalf. Neither enticed by conventional estimates of the worth of silver and gold, nor duped into thinking that any commodity possesses intrinsic value, he wills value into the lead casket by the force of his own choice. One consequence, however, of Bassanio’s choice, is that it unavoidably downgrades Portia’s worth. According to the logic of subjective

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demand, any item is worth as much as the purchaser is willing to pay for that item. While Portia’s objective value—the value superficially endowed by the “world” of men mentioned by Morocco—has been momentarily destabilized, her value fluctuates in proportion to what Bassanio can exchange for the lead casket. Of course, given that Bassanio is indebted to Antonio for the three thousand ducats, his pledge to give “all he has” is a pledge of less than nothing, and hence Portia’s value is severely compromised by Bassanio’s choice. Only with the resolution of the exchange of rings is Portia able to appropriate the implications of subjective demand in her own behalf, thereby reinvesting herself with value, but in the process taking herself outside both the real and symbolic market of supply and demand. Before turning to the exchange of rings, though, it will be helpful to turn to the early modern usury debates and Shylock’s relationship to the history of value theory.

Shylock, Usury and Subjective Worth It is well known that early modern anti-usury tracts inherited the Aristotelian-Thomistic belief that money, as a fungible or consumable good, is alienated from its owner once loaned, and so cannot accrue a profit for the lender. The money commodity should be distinguished from a house, for example, a non-fungible commodity over which the lender still retains proprietary rights and for which he can claim rent or other appropriate fees. Economic historians standardly argue that as early modern monetary theory gradually displaces canonistic economic theory, most commentators on usury begin to recognize that some amount of interest might be permissible. Qualifying the Aristotelian–Thomistic natural law position on usury, theologians followed Calvin and Bucer in arguing that certain usurious contracts were acceptable if the lender’s intentions were unsinful, and the transaction respected the rules of equity or charity. Merchants and economic theorists argued that credit instruments provided businessmen with access to capital, thereby stimulating trade and industry. R.H. Tawney and Norman Jones, two leading historians of early modern usury debates, both believe that the mid-seventeenth century relaxation of seventeenth-century anti-usury laws was conditioned by the new socioeconomic focus on usury that displaces the Christian and moral attack on lending with interest.32 I am not interested in disputing the accuracy of this global account of the early modern liberalization of usury, although I question its appropriateness as a frame for economic interpretations of Merchant. I am more

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interested at this point in noting an important feature of the usury literature at the turn of the seventeenth century, one that will bear on our discussion of value in the play. What we find, for example, in one of the most extensive seventeenth-century usury tracts is a sustained focus on the intentions, desires, and overall complicity of the borrower in a usurious transaction. In his Lectures on the 15. Psalme (1604), George Downame notes that there are two types of borrowers upon usury, those who borrow “either for necessitie, and so unwillingly: or without necessitie, and so willingly.”33 Borrowing upon necessity includes cases in which one borrows for want of food or apparel, or to maintain one’s family. Borrowing in the absence of necessity includes cases in which one borrows not out of need, “but either for pride, for ryot, or for covetousness. . . .”34 Downame’s discussion of prideful borrowing reads like a tirade against conspicuous consumption: “For pride and ostentation: as those who desiring to seeme better and wealthier than they are, refuse to containe themselves within the compasse of their calling, and estate, but desiring to beare an higher saile in respect of their diet, apparell, familie, and port, take up money upon usurie.”35 Downame vilifies those who borrow upon interest in order to finance “gaming or other pleasure, as whoredome, drunkennesse, belly-cheare, and such like. . . .”36 Downame’s emphasis on the accountability of the borrower in the usurious exchange parallels the focus we find in the more general economic literature on the role of the consumer’s tastes and desires in determining value. Since usury theorists describe money as a consumptible good, the borrower is figured as a buyer or consumer of money rather than simply a party to a monetary contract repayable with interest. One cannot satisfactorily judge the loan until one determines the value and use of the money to the borrower. Of course, this focus on the borrower is not designed to displace the accountability of the lender. But it inevitably mitigates the lender’s accountability, since the borrower’s idiosyncratic desires, tastes, and actions are now significant factors in determining whether the loan is morally acceptable. If we combine this focus on the borrower’s value system with the trend toward the subjective utility theory described above, we can begin to place the contract negotiated among Shylock, Antonio, and Bassanio in the context of early modern economic theory. If value is subjective, the lender might respond to anti-usury moralists that the borrower’s willingness to enter into a contract is a function of the borrower’s highly personalized, perhaps irrational, investment in a certain good. In the absence of any fixed notion of the just price of a commodity, the lender might enjoy a measure of immunity from blame. This in itself would not refocus moral responsibility onto the borrower, but since the subjective utility theory is historically

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coincident with the attention to the borrower’s motives in the exchange contract, the potential decline in the lender’s accountability might correspond with an increase in the borrower’s accountability. The two features described above—a focus on the borrower’s calculus of need and desire in the usury tracts, and the general extension of indigentia to include voluptas or effective demand—can help us rethink the way in which early modern economic theory, and perhaps contemporary audiences of the play, understood the terms of the bond. Shylock seems to have a sense of, in not the immediate reason for the bond, a general notion that the bond is outside the realm of necessity, that it is for the satisfaction of Bassanio’s desires. The clues include Shylock’s use of the term “wants” rather than needs or a similar term when he tells Antonio that he will “supply your present wants;” Antonio’s mention of the “ripe wants” of his friend; and Shylock’s reference to Bassanio as the “prodigal Christian” (2.5.15). The more general clue is that Shylock sees most Christian “gentlemen” as hyprocrites, fops, and unsober fools, so there is perhaps no fundamental difference in his mind between the needs and pleasures of fortune-hunters like Bassanio. But we can perhaps more clearly explain Shylock’s disinterest in Bassanio’s needs and desires by thinking about Shylock’s comments about his own system of value. Shylock explains to the Duke his preference for flesh over money: You’ll ask me why I rather choose to have A weight of carrion flesh than to receive Three thousand ducats. I’ll not answer that, But say it is my humor. Is it answered? What if my house be troubled with a rat, And I be pleased to give ten thousand ducats To have it baned? What, are you answered yet? (4.1.40–46).

Shylock not only speaks in this passage like an extreme subjectivist on value—there is no predictable or fair estimation of any item’s worth—but he relieves himself of the burden of explaining his decision. We can assume that he applies a similar principle to Bassanio and Antonio. One cannot begin to understand the exchange value to another individual of three thousand ducats, and so Shylock is willing to contract the bond with Antonio without further question. Moralists like Downame, however, would certainly want to know the use to which Bassanio’s loan is to be put; the use in this case, to pass as a wealthy suitor to a marriageable aristocrat, would certainly not qualify as morally permissible. But what of the early mercantilists, those who supported moderate lending on interest?

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Bassanio’s loan would not meet their criteria for a permissible loan either, since, as most mercantilists note, lending on interest is acceptable if it stimulates trade and industry, and facilitates an influx of bullion into the country. Given the wide circulation of both the so-called liberal theological and economic tracts on usury, the morally suspect quality of Bassanio’s loan would perhaps meet as much disapproval as Antonio’s recklessness and Shylock’s moneylending practices. But Shylock’s defense of subjective designations of value warrants some closer attention. We have seen that Buridan extended the Thomistic notion of indigentia as a source of value to include subjective desires, and that Davanzati, among others working in this tradition, offered a more comprehensive theory of value than the neo-scholasticism we find in the writings of the English mercantilists. But Buridan’s value theory did more than extend Thomistic indigentia to include voluptas. Buridan was especially interested in what he described as the “poverty of the rich” (indigentia excessus apud divites), according to which value is determined not simply by the force of desire but by an ability and willingness to pay for the objects of one’s desire. Hobbes’s definition of just value, for example, shares much with Buridan’s theory of subjective demand. Hobbes notes in the Leviathan that the “value of all things contracted for, is measured by the appetite of the contractors: and therefore the just value, is that which they be contented to give.”37 Later in the century, Nicholas Barbon reiterates the point that the just value is not merely determined by desire, but more specifically by the price the consumer is willing to accept: “ ‘Men crave those things that ‘provide the Ease, Pleasure, and Pomp of Like’. ‘But the Market is the best Judge of Value . . .: Things are just worth so much, as they can be sold for, according to the old Rule, Valet Quantum Vendi Potest . . .” ’38 Shylock’s speech to the Duke is clearly in keeping with the nominalist value formula. His assertion that he is justified in paying ten thousand ducats to rid his house of a pest exemplifies Hobbes’s comments that the value of goods and services is determined not simply by needs or unactualized desires, but by the ability and willingness to make payment in kind. Shylock’s defense of his claim to the bond is subtly framed so as to mitigate his responsibility for lending the money and setting the terms of the unimaginable bond. He does so by positioning himself in the speech as a hypothetical buyer or consumer, someone whose decision to commit a large sum of money to a seemingly frivolous purpose is not a matter of public or even rational scrutiny: “What if my house be troubled with a rat, / And I be pleased to give ten thousand ducats / To have it baned?” (4.1.44–46). The ten thousand ducats Shylock would pay to remove the rat recall the three thousand ducats Bassanio needs to “win” Portia. In both cases, the buyer/lender establishes the value of the desired item by the sum

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of money or goods he is willing to exchange for that item. The implication is that if a borrower is willing to yield a pound of flesh, then the borrower, not the lender or seller has established that a pound of flesh is a “just price.” Now an anti-usury moralist might still question the sanctity of the entire exchange, but the just price would still obtain exclusively between the lender and borrower. One suspects in the mind of at least some early modern thinkers, Shylock’s claim to the bond is justified by an entire tradition or branch of economic theory beginning in the fourteenth century. A substantial number of critics of Merchant have argued that Christian vice is projected onto Shylock, that Shylock serves as a mirror of Christian self-seeking or hypocrisy. C.L. Barber writes, “Shylock is the opposite of what the Venetians are; but at the same time he is an embodied irony, troublingly like them. So his role is like that of the scapegoat in many of the primitive rituals which Frazer has made familiar, a figure in whom the evils potential in a social organization are embodied, recognized and enjoyed during a period of license, and then in due course abused, ridiculed, and expelled.”39 A.D. Moody makes a similar argument: “In the end the trial turns out to have been a drama in which the Christians were engaged in resolving their inner contradiction, by casting out Shylock, the scapegoat fashioned in the likeness of their devotion to the world, and a reproach to their indifference to the life of the spirit and the love which it demands.”40 The most recent promoter of the theory of the scapegoating of Shylock is René Girard, who argues that the “symmetry between the explicit venality of Shylock and that of the Venetians cannot fail to be intended by the playwright,” and that Shylock’s request for the pound of flesh represents “one spectacular instance of that complete interpenetration between the financial and the human that is characteristic less of Shylock than of the other Venetians. Thus Shylock appears most scandalous to the Venetians and to the spectators when he stops resembling himself to resemble the Venetians even more.”41 The assumption behind these various scapegoating arguments is that Shylock’s vices—his un-Christian embrace of materialism or “worldliness,” his shameless moneylending practices, his retributive ethos—mirror the Christian vices that are overlaid by the superficial morality of Belmont and Venice. But given the argument I have made above, Shylock seems to scandalize the Christians not because of their “symmetry” or shared complictousness with the evils of the marketplace, but because Shylock bears a more sophisticated and detached relationship with the marketplace than the Christians. His understanding of the phenomenon of subjective value allows him to exploit the logic of the marketplace rather than be exploited by such logic. Another way to state this difference is that Shylock enjoys a

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meta- or second-order relationship to the marketplace while the Christians carry out only a practical, pre-theoretical relationship to the marketplace.

Shylock as Homo Sacer? To the extent that Shylock is scapegoated, and placed in a precarious relationship to both civic and natural laws, his experiences seem to approximate the fate of a historical figure whom Giorgio Agamben describes as homo sacer. Homo sacer (sacred man) is a term Agamben uses to describe marginalized individuals, most prominently appearing in antique and religious cultures, who are uniquely “set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law.”42 Typically, cultures that persecute or kill individuals without any legal or civic sanctions do so only if the victim has the status of a consecratio, that is, if the victim’s punishment or death can be justified by divine law. Individuals whose fate requires a suspension of civil law entirely—the limit case being one who can be killed with impunity—are thus sacrificial figures, for whom divine justice serves as a kind of compensatory juridico-moral framework under which their fate can be decided and ultimately legitimated. Distinct from these figures who can be killed because they are sacrificeable, homo sacer uniquely occupies a “zone of indistinction” in his status as a figure who can be “killed but not sacrificed,” as someone who is doubly excluded from both the ius humanum and ius divinum.”43 Agamben’s paradigmatic modern example of homo sacer is the concentration camp victim, who languishes in such a zone of indistinction seemingly beyond the reach and potential protections of civil and divine law.44 Consider first Shylock’s relationship to the ius humanum in the play. Prior to the trial scene, one of the fantasies held by the characters is that Shylock is not at all protected by the common law. Solanio tells Antonio, “I am sure the Duke / Will never grant this forfeiture to hold” (3.3.25–26); Bassanio, even after the trial scene gets underway, imagines that Shylock’s case can be settled outside of the law: “Wrest once the law to your authority. / To do a great right, do a little wrong, / And curb this cruel devil of his will” (4.1.213–214). The Duke himself is prepared to dismiss the case should Bellario fail to intervene: “Upon my power I may dismiss this court / Unless Bellario, a learned doctor / Whom I have sent for to determine this, / Come here to-day” (4.1.106). Prior to the trial scene the play continues to raise the possibility of placing Shylock outside the reach of the law, but then insists that the political repercussions of doing so would be too dire.

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Now, the reasons for keeping Shylock within the common law seem clearly stated. Portia responds that to lift the bond would set a wrong precedent: “ ‘Twill be recorded for a precedent, / And many an error by the same example / Will rush into the state.” (4.1.218–219). Antonio offers a more specific explanation for upholding the terms of the bond: “The commodity that strangers have / With us in Venice, if it be denied, / Will much impeach the justice of the state, / Since that the trade and profit of the city / Consisteth of all nations” (3.3.27–31). Antonio’s claim is not simply that the sanctity of law would be threatened if the bond were dissolved, but that the wealth of the nation would be compromised. This seems to be a reasonable argument. “As Alice Benston observes: This speech shows that he [Shakespeare] grasped a fundamental principle of free enterprise, namely that commerce and profit are contingent on the legal protection of property rights.”45 But we cannot rest assured that Antonio has clearly justified the play’s insistence on treating Shylock’s bond within a legal framework. Antonio does not consider at all the nature of the usurious commerce he has undertaken with Shylock: a usurious exchange has everything to do with profit, but, since goods will not have been exchanged, little to do with forms of commerce and trade that might enhance national wealth. There is an elision in Antonio’s remark that the legal disposition of an outrageously conceived usurious contract would impact the precious flow of English trade. Usury was widely held to stultify commerce, which suggests that a judicial dissolution of the bond might well represent an effort to facilitate trade, not hamper it by establishing an embarrassing precedent. Malynes warned, for example, that while “politicke” usury might be permissible, unregulated moneylending would entice too many merchants to leave trade altogether, thereby impeding commerce and the easy flow of goods.46 We might explain Antonio’s comment as a feeble declaration of bad faith: rather than admit the extrajudicial nature of the whole contractual affair, he tries to accommodate it to a normative legal framework, despite the costs he might incur in the process. Yet I would suggest that the resolution of the trial scene offers a surer insight than Antonio’s explanation of the play’s refusal to fully exclude Shylock from the ius humanum. In the simplest of terms, to keep Shylock under the law is to keep his money and goods under the law. Portia warns Shylock that, according to statute, an alien who seeks the life of a citizen, incurs the following penalties: “The party ‘gainst the which he doth contrive / Shall seize one half his goods; the other half / Comes to the privy coffer of the state . . .” (4.1.350–352). Antonio responds, of course, that he desires to have Shylock deed a portion of his goods over to Lorenzo and Jessica. The claims against Shylock are indeed extreme, as nearly every reader and playgoer notices, but they are

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extreme in their qualitative, not simply quantitative focus on his money and goods. There is a fine shift in emphasis away from Shylock to his effects, as if the law’s first office is to monitor the flow of vital capital. Shylock’s money is to be meticulously distributed, parsed like quantities of living flesh and at least partly hoarded in the Duke’s coffers—as if his capital needs to be placed under surveillance lest it turn vagrant and seek out another moneylender with whom to work collusively. We might argue that the play’s anxiety about treating Shylock as homo sacer is an anxiety about placing him outside not simply the spheres of common law and divine law, but outside those legal sub-branches—commercial law or the “law of nations”—that govern the very circulation of money-capital. This very thorough “double exclusion” would have the unintended effect of posing a symbolical threat to the state, a threat of kicking away the supports of mercantilist control by affording Shylock an excess of freedom with his own money. Shylock’s case warrants a slight revision of Agamben’s account of homo sacer that takes into consideration the ways in which juridical exclusions or “bans” might actually empower those individuals consigned to membership in out-groups: the benefits of rendering Shylock as homo sacer would be offset by the costs of having to acknowledge the marketplace truths that he can come to embody. Such truths, in this instance, include the nature of commercial relations in their defetishized aspect, the bare fact that the market has as its very motor the subjective tastes and desires of individual agents, rather than the interventions of the mercantilist state. But what of the ius divinum in the play? To argue that Shylock is scapegoated by the Christians, where scapegoating is defined loosely to mean projection, does not imply that he is also sacrificed. The projection of Christian vice onto Shylock expresses not only the Christians’ inability to follow New Testament imperatives—a gospel ethic of mercy, love, and humility, for example—but a fundamental fear that the New Testament ethic is not sufficient in itself to deter and ultimately punish vice (at least not adequately motivating in the earthbound realm). Shylock makes the Christians anxious not simply because he mirrors their vices, but because his seeming ability to avoid divine chastisement for those vices suggests a flaw or weakness in the very Christian system that would attempt to govern conduct by appeals to guilt or mercy. Mingled with projective Christian self-loathing, then, is the fear that there exists no immanently binding Christian framework that might prevent those commissions of vice that lead to such self-loathing in the first place. The scapegoating of Shylock can only serve its purpose if it is fulfilled in his ultimate sacrifice; and this fulfillment in sacrifice will only occur if Portia’s sermon on mercy succeeds in its hortative, not coercive power, to convince Shylock to relinquish his bond.47

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Consider further that Portia’s speech on mercy is consistent with the spirit of the medieval theory of objective value and the “just” price: the argument that mercy “blesseth him that gives and him that takes,” and that the prayer of mercy “doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy,” correlates with, in more purely economic terms, the maintenance of the sanctity of the just price over strict enforcement of a bond, the terms of which are ordinarily agreed upon by desiring and willing parties. We might recall here the historical shift from medieval just price theories to mercantilist protectionism. By arbitrarily fixing a “just price” or value of goods, mercantilist theory amounts to a kind of parody of medieval theories of the just price, the latter of which assume that self-evident natural laws, rather than state decrees, can dictate a fair value of an item to which contracting parties would adhere. One way of reading Portia’s exhortation to mercy, followed by the legal insistence to dissolve the bond, is as itself an allegory of the historical displacement of just price theories of value by state-controlled monitoring of value and goods. It is appropriate that this allegorical displacement is mediated by the play’s refusal to uphold Shylock’s defense of his bond—really a defense of a subjectivist theory of value. The possibility of seeing subjective valuation as normative immediately calls into question any natural law justification of an objective standard of value. It is as if the play allows for the restaging of this displacement in order to effect a second-order displacement by which positive law can trump natural law—or compensate for natural law’s inability to supervene over the forms of subjective valuation that Shylock uses to contract and then defend his bond. Shylock is never fully sacrificed to the ius divinium because the ius divinum, unable to enforce its own ideals, is forced to yield its jurisdictional power to the ius humanum.

Portia’s Subjective Value Much of this argument regarding Shylock’s appropriation of subjective value can help us to understand Portia’s character and the ring subplot in relationship to Shylock’s role in the play. Portia gives Bassanio the ring manifestly as a gift that betokens a transfer of her possessions to him. “This house, these servants, and this same myself / Are yours, my lord’s. I give them with this ring . . .” (3.2.170–171). The value of the ring, though, far from being fixed by the value of the endowments it represents, increases in value as the play unfolds, and—consistent with the logic of subjective demand—its value fluctuates in proportion to the extent that it is desired by any individual. Given that Balthasar, Portia in disguise, is the first

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individual who shows a desire for the ring (Bassanio, of course, never asked for the ring in the first place), Portia creates and manipulates her own circle of economic exchange whereby she reinvests the ring and herself with value. It is as if Portia has appropriated in her own behalf the destabilizing phenomenon of subjective demand that Shylock had implicitly used in defense of his bond. Portia’s strategy is to rely on the ring not simply to bind Bassanio to her, or even to test his desire for her, but fundamentally to reconstruct the nature of his desire for her. We may recall Portia’s earlier words to Bassanio, in which she itemizes her worth according to conventional early modern standards of the value of any woman. “I would be trebled twenty times myself, / A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich, / That only to stand high in your account, / I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends, / Exceed account. But the full sum of me / Is sum of something— which, to term in gross, / Is an unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpractised . . .” (3.2.153–159). Portia is being humbly self-effacing here, but she is acutely aware that these quantifiable, stereotypical goods—virtues, beauties, livings, friends—provide the measure of her commodified worth in the eyes of her suitors, Bassanio included. Such feminine virtues are so generic and categorizable that, as we have already suggested, they serve more or less to affix an objective value to Portia. The exchange of rings, though, radically destabilizes the nature of Portia’s worth in Bassanio’s eyes. As Balthasar, Portia evokes a range of emotions in Bassanio that exceed the objectively measurable qualities she describes during the casket scene. Bassanio’s perception of Balthasar’s “wisdom” (4.1.407), and his deserving of “tribute,” convince Bassanio that Balthasar deserves the ring. Bassanio exclaims to Portia, “What should I say, sweet lady? / I was enforced to send it after him. / I was beset with shame and courtesy. / My honour would not let ingratitude / So much besmear it” (5.1.215–219). That Bassanio’s respect for Balthasar’s wisdom, cunning, and worthiness is transferred to the undisguised Portia is reflected in Bassanio’s ultimate exclamation to Portia, after the disclosures at 5.1.266–278: “Sweet Doctor, you shall be my bedfellow. / When I am absent, then lie with my wife” (5.1.284–285). By the end of the play, the basis of Bassanio’s desire for Portia has become so complexly idiosyncratic—he seems equally exercised by her feminine “virtues” and masculine heroism—that the determinants of their bond would be difficult to measure on the scale of objective feminine worth. The play’s twinning of Shylock and Portia is obvious enough—she, like Shylock, employs Antonio as surety to Bassanio—but we should explore the extent to which the play differentiates the two characters, particularly in relation to the phenomenon of subjective demand. One interesting

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feature of the trial scene is the omission of any criticism of, or even curiosity about, the reasoning behind Antonio’s pledge of a pound of flesh as guarantor of the bond. Of course, discussion of Shylock’s so-described inhumane desire for the flesh dominates the scene, and so might be seen as preempting any interrogation of Antonio’s ridiculous decision to accept such a form of payment in the first place—that is, to criticize Antonio might displace blame from Shylock. But the scene’s purpose of demonizing Shylock doesn’t satisfactorily explain why Antonio’s foolishness is not mentioned even in a cryptically spoken aside. We do not expect the gibes of Lear’s taunting fool, but we do expect some reference to Antonio’s misjudgment. One might read this omission as implicating the Christians in the logic of subjective demand: Nobody seriously criticizes the terms agreed upon by Antonio precisely because they might have agreed to those terms if similarly circumstanced. Three thousand ducats can become equivalent to a pound or ten pounds of flesh as long as an assembly of consumers or borrowers is willing to fix value as such. The so-called scapegoating of Shylock stems from the Christians refusal to accept that they, in the position of consumers or borrowers, have the power to create a just price for virtually any desirable item. The relentless pressure put on Shylock to “give reason” for demanding the bond displaces attention from the equally appropriate, but unasked demand for Antonio, and implicitly any of his peers, to give reason for accepting the terms of the bond in the first place. The resolution of the exchange of rings offers a slightly different perspective on the logic of subjective demand. In order for Bassanio to reacquire the ring, Antonio pledges not his body, but his soul as surety: “I dare be bound again, / My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord / Will never more break faith advisedly” (5.1.251–253). By putting up his soul for the ring, Antonio endows the ring with an immaterial, non-quantifiable value. The standard by which the ring’s value is measured—Antonio’s soul—is a standard that cannot be readily commensurated like flesh, since there is arguably more of a baseline equivalence or measurability between men’s bodies than souls. Just as Portia’s value to Bassanio comes to depend on his non-aggregative, idiosyncratic desire for her, so the ring’s value becomes linked to the unmeasurable or non-quanitifable worth of Antonio’s soul. In neither case is there a standard of value—money or flesh—through which subjective desires can be expressed, aggregated, and hence used to establish a “just price.” By the end of the play, Portia seems to have de-commodified herself and the ring, for the value of neither can be conventionally measured. In this sense, Portia has taken herself and the ring outside of any real or allegorical marketplace, even though she partly relies on the logic

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of subjective demand—first exemplified in Shylock’s moneylending practices—to transfigure her value in Bassanio’s eyes. But it would be wrong to say that Bassanio and Portia appropriate subjective demand in a manner similar to Shylock’s. Shylock uses the law of subjective demand in relation to actual economic relating while Bassanio and Portia play at the logic of subjective demand in their courtship ritual. It is as if the play gradually distills the phenomenon of subjective demand to its barest phenomenological aspect, deriving, if not its metaphysical shell from its material kernel, then simply one particular means by which the value of any object or person can be measured.

Portia’s Gift Much of my argument regarding Portia’s gender re-valuation is indebted to Karen Newman’s illuminating discussion of exchange relations and gender transgression in the play. Appropriating Mauss’s theory of gift exchange, Newman makes a similar argument regarding the destabilization of Portia’s value. According to Mauss, a donor’s gift places a burden on the recipient to return a gift in kind after a suitable elapse of time. As such, the gift exchange is seen as non-altruistic and, in may cases, inherently competitive in nature. Newman argues that when Portia vows to “exclaim” on Bassanio should he lose or give away the ring, she plays the role of Mauss’s “Big Man,” the donor who gives more than can be returned. Portia’s gift of the ring, and her saving intercession during the trial—during which she subverts gender hierarchies by playing a male—allow Portia to short-circuit “the system of exchange and the male-bonds it creates, winning her husband away from the arms of Antonio.”48 Newman traces the extent to which Portia’s “transgressions”—her skills with language, her transvestism, her playing of a lawyer—“all interrogate and reveal contradictions in the Elizabethan sex/gender system in which women were commodities whose exchange both produced and reproduced hierarchical gender relations.”49 What my argument attempts to add to Newman’s analysis is an account of the ultimate goal of Portia (or of the play) in perverting the sex/gender system: that goal is to secure Bassanio’s desire while rendering such desire irreducible to utility calculations. If Portia’s conduct calls into question conventional gender assumptions, it is oriented toward reconstructing the nature of her desirability. This is not just a matter of women doing what men can do, or of allegorizing an “unruly” woman as such; it is rather a matter of coaxing men into desiring those “women on top,” or of compounding such

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non-standard attachments with the utterly conventional desires for the feminine qualities outlined in humanist conduct books. For this reason, the explanatory potential of Mauss’s theory of gift exchange is limited. If Portia’s strategy were primarily to put Bassanio under an obligation to love her through the gift of the ring, Bassanio’s love would take the form simply of a countergift, a reciprocal gesture more or less forced upon him (given the demands of the anthropology of gift exchange) by the burdensome nature of the original gift. The act of returning love to Portia as a means of reciprocation would serve simply to commodify Bassanio’s love—his love would take the form of a countergift to the ring—rather than alter the commodified or objectified status of Portia herself. This would be a bittersweet achievement of Portia’s, since she would ideally want him to desire her as an agent who is neither commodified nor objectified. Nothing about Portia’s value, or more specifically, the determinants of her value, will have changed. In this sense, the exchange of rings can be theorized in the context of Pierre Bourdieu’s reworking of Mauss’s theory of gift exchange, which itself had been reworked by Levi-Strauss. One of the limitations of Mauss’s original theory, according to Levi-Strauss, was its reliance upon a mystical force, called Hau, that Mauss assumed was the master concept or force that compelled the recipient to return gifts. In place of an exogamous or mystified force that governs the cycle of reciprocity, Levi-Straus suggested that the cycle of reciprocity is governed purely by the internal structural relations among giving, receiving and reciprocating. Mauss failed to see that an invocation of Hau allowed indigenous races to misrecognize and mystify the purely economic, rule-based character of exchange: “Hau is not the ultimate explanation for exchange; it is the conscious form whereby men of a given society, in which the problem had particular importance, apprehended an unconscious necessity whose explanation lies elsewhere.”50 Bourdieu, in turn, criticizes Levi-Strauss for assuming that the internal rules and by-laws governing exchange systems are predictable and automatic. For Bourdieu, Levi-Strauss reduces agents to the “status of automata or inert bodies moved by obscure mechanisms toward ends of which they are unaware.”51 Because a sufficient amount of time elapses between giving and receiving, systems of exchange are flexible and open-ended, oriented toward acts of improvisation that allow parties to manipulate symbolic and social capital. Thus, gifts might remain unreciprocated, and hence symbolically rejected. Bourdieu’s fundamental point is that gift exchange should not be considered as an exchange of equivalent economic values, but rather as a system that constantly blurs the line between the economic and noneconomic: “The gift economy, in contrast to the economy where equivalent values are exchanged . . . is organized with a view to the accumulation of symbolic capital (a capital of recognition, honor, nobility, etc.) that is

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brought about in particular through the transmutation of economic capital achieved through the alchemy of symbolic exchanges (exchange of gifts, words, challenges and ripostes, women, etc. . . .”52 Through a manipulation of the flexible rules of gift exchange, Portia increases her symbolic capital, rather than her purely commodifiable exchange value, and so blurs the line between economic and non-economic relations of exchange. Yet this line itself is further blurred to the extent that Portia does not transfigure or abandon her commodified value altogether; she also attempts to employ that value in exchange for Bassanio’s final pledge of fidelity to her. I am thinking of Portia’s (and Nerissa’s) threat to commodify their own bodies in recompense for Bassanio’s and Gratiano’s relinquishing of the rings. Comparing Bassanio’s gift to Balthasar to her own gift to the imagined lawyer, Portia remarks: “I will become as liberal as you; I’ll not deny him anything I have, / No, not my body nor my husband’s bed. / Know him I shall, I am well sure of it” (5.1.226–229). Nerissa likewise vows to give herself up to Balthasar’s imagined clerk as a means of countering Gratiano’s infidelity: “And I his clerk. Therefore be well advised / How you do leave me to mine own protection” (5.1.234–235). If the commodified object of Act IV was Antonio’s body, displaced in Act V by his soul, the bodies of Portia and Nerissa take up the economic slack as the material goods in Act V—commodities, though, that are represented as under the control and “protection” of their sovereign owners. To the extent that Portia and Nerissa threaten to prostitute their bodies as retaliatory gestures—as means to secure the exchange of Bassanio’s and Gratiano’s devotion—they do not merely recommodify themselves, crossing over to the sphere of material relations of exchange. They threaten to blur the very line between use and exchange value within the sphere of economic relations. As Luce Irigaray remarks, in cases of prostitution “the qualities of woman’s body are ‘useful’. . . . Prostitution amounts to usage that is exchanged. . . .”53 By the end of the play, Portia’s value has undergone a series of transformations: she is desired initially as a passive and exchangeable commodity, then as a symbolic and incommensurable good, and finally as a commodity endowed with the potential to enhance its exchange value through an exploitation of its very use value.

The Economies of Comedy In broad outline, then, the culminations of the main plot and subplot emphasize sovereign control over and guardianship of goods, money, and value itself. Just as the mercantilist state governs and protects the flow of the

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country’s coveted commodity, money, so Portia and Nerissa “protect” their bodies, their most precious commodities in this still-patriarchal context. The very structure of comedy facilitates these resolutions. As Frye remarks, “Comedy is usually a movement from one kind of society to another. At the beginning of the play the obstructing characters are in charge of the play’s society, and the audience recognizes that they are usurpers. At the end of the play, the device in the plot that brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero. . . .”54 In terms of the play’s mercantilist allegory, the usurping elements include the embodiments of the extremes of objective valuation (Arragon and Morocco) and subjective valuation (Shylock, as well as Bassanio and Portia, prior to Act V). These extremes are eventually displaced not simply by the “second world” of law, but by the play’s valorization of different forms of economic protectionism. Despite this general resolution, the final scene does seem to warrant a disanalogy between Portia’s and mercantilist protectionism: Portia’s selfdeclared power to employ her commodity (her body) most effectively by integrating its use and exchange value contrasts to the (inadvertent) mercantilist tendency to devalue the use and exchange value of its precious commodity, bullion, by hoarding it. Yet such a disanalogy is rendered invalid at the moment it comes into view: the patriarchal conventions of comedy nullify Portia’s threat of self-commodification by keeping it at a safe level of amorous play. What we can finally say is that the structure of comedy does inform the play’s handling of its historical (economic) allegory, although we would be wrong to align particular characters with univocal ideologies or values: Portia and Bassanio, for example, figure as blocking characters (subjective valuers) prior to the trial scene, even though Portia supports throughout the trial, and then finally embodies in Act V, the play’s protectionist impulse. But given our ongoing functionalist view of character, we should not expect characters to embody any particular world view or delimited system of values. Returning to the question of transition, we can see that the history of value theory suggests that it would be reductive to fix particular theories of value to rival class interests. While different strands of economic theory are tied to the conduct of selected characters, these strands are not also tied to discernible bourgeois or aristocratic biases. Shylock and Portia at times hold to the same theory of value, but clearly do not share class positions. Now it is true that, from our perspective, objective valuation seems retrograde, and subjective valuation seems more modern, but given the widespread practice of money fetishism by the mercantilists well into the seventeenth century, we erroneously rely on historical retrospection when we find symptoms of a modern economy in the play.

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If the history of premodern value theory in relation to economism is not easily accommodated to orthodox Marxist models of base and superstructure, neither is it explainable as bearing “relative autonomy” with respect to economic relations. To argue that theories of objective and subjective value are relatively autonomous philosophical viewpoints still assumes, even though the causal nexus between base and ideology becomes complicated, that subjective valuation, for example, emerges under distinctly capitalist relations. But theories of objective and subjective valuation have a history in philosophical thought that is relatively autonomous to any given mode of production: they are more like a floating and mutating superstructural instances, the concretization of which can occur under varying socioeconomic circumstances. Consider Ernst Bloch’s comment in Art and Society on medieval literature in relation to material ideologies: But is the feudal society with its church really transmitted by what Giotto and Dante had in mind? Are there not also implications in their works that do not need the Middle Ages to be understood and brought to light? For example, are the great implications of ‘equanimity,’ ‘order,’ and ‘hierarchy,’ sufficiently explained by and limited to the feudal estate society? If they are missing in Cezanne’s works, are they unproducible and impossible to find in a classless society?55

Bloch suggests that notions of order can detach from particular modes of production, even resurface when the historical dialectic has achieved full sublation in a classless society. I have been suggesting that premodern value theory works similarly, as it can attach, in different incarnations, to such divergent ideologies as feudal, mercantilist, or neoclassical economics. As such, it would seem to be reductive to argue, as some critics have, that the play represents a “response to a conflict between two modes of production,” or a conflict between Venetian materialism and Christian anticapitalism.56 One should proceed cautiously here, though, lest one imply that theories of value or, in Bloch’s formulation, medieval theories of order, function like Arthur Lovejoy’s unit-ideas. According to Lovejoy’s “history of ideas” approach to interpretation, one can isolate from the philosophical field rarefied ideas like neo-Platonic emanationism or the great chain of being, and then argue that these ideas traverse particular historical epochs, influencing world views, all the while retaining their self-sameness and otherworldly status.57 Against such an approach, one might argue that theories of value always function at some level as legitimating ideologies—always require a thick description of their cultural work—but add the important caveat that no theory of value is particular to any historical mode of production.

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But we can make an even stronger claim than this, namely, that no theory of value is necessarily tied to the specific forms of economic rationality that we associate with material relations of exchange. We have seen, for example, that Merchant ultimately applies the theory of subjective value as an economic mode of relating to the realm of gender ideology: Portia’s use of subjective valuation to reconstitute the nature of her desirability and enhance her symbolic capital. This does not imply a view of value theory that is outside the purview of economic rationality altogether, as in Bataille’s belief that some forms of economic relating are inherently irrational or self-destructive. Portia, of course, stands to gain something from her appropriation of subjective valuation.58 It simply suggests the obvious point, one often not acknowledged by Shakespeare’s materialist critics, that not all means–end rationality is specific to capitalist relations, or any particular economic system for that matter. If there is an anagnorisis or cognitio in the play’s resolution that ties to its historical allegory, it is simply that the extremes of objective valuation and subjective valuation should be displaced by a system of economic protectionism. Merchant, like Coriolanus, is thus a presentist play, although, consistent with its comic frame, it endorses rather than takes an ironic position on its presentism.

Chapter 4 The Early Modern Veil of Ignorance: Natural Rights Theory in King Lear As is well known, materialist criticism of King Lear has frequently held that the play allegorizes the passage from feudalism to capitalism. I discuss the materialist readings of the play’s “two moralities” toward the end of this chapter, but I would first like to interpret Lear in the context of the history of ethical theory, particularly in relation to the early modern genealogy of natural rights discourse. This starting point in intellectual history can then open out into a discussion of the play’s perceived materialism and its place in the transition to modernity. I argue that Lear reflects, among other things, the historically vexed relationship between duties and rights. Lear does not simply set out to define, as many critics have noted, the practical– historical parameters of duteous service. The play more fundamentally offers a metaethical inquiry on the mutually entailing relationship between basic liberties and prima facie duties, and it meditates on the origin of first principles of justice in the absence of any shaping religious framework.

The Discourse of Natural Rights At the end of the seventeenth century, Luis de Molina noted that a right (ius) is a disposition (facultas) that has a double aspect: we divide ius into ius in re and ius ad rem. When we say in this second way that someone has a ius to something, we do not mean that anything is owed to him, but that he has a facultas to it, whose contravention would cause him injury. In this way we say that someone has a ius to use his own things, such as consuming his own food. . . . In the same way we say that a pauper has the ius to beg alms . . .1

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Molina’s commentary establishes two features of rights-talk that are developed earlier in the seventeenth century. First, although Molina focuses here on the active quality of rights, rights are both passive and active: the pauper has a right to beg as well as a right to receive alms. Second, rights are considered ownable faculties, which will evolve into the idea that rights assign proprietary dominion over basic necessities such as liberty, labor, and property, all of which are alienable benefits and goods. In the early decades of the seventeenth century, Francisco Suarez, for example, argued that ius is “properly wont to be bestowed upon a certain moral facultas which every man has, either over his own property or with respect to that which is due to him. For it is thus that the owner of a thing is said to have a ius in that thing . . .”2 When early modern rights theorists say that a right is something “due” to a person, they suggest that a rightholder has a potential claim over another person, a duty to respect the rightholder’s endowments or faculties. Modern theorists make explicit the argument that duties and rights are mutually entailing: any talk of a person’s rights implies an obligation on another party to forbear action that might threaten the basic liberties of the rightholder. Jeremy Bentham’s famous assertion that a discourse of rights is “nonsense upon stilts” stemmed from his belief that all rights can be redescribed as duties. According to modern usage, all rights are “correlative” with obligations. As H.L.A. Hart notes, the contention that rights and duties are correlative means that “every statement of the form ‘X has a right to . . .’ entails and is entailed by ‘Y has a duty (not) to . . .’ ”3 The important point is that neither a duty-based ethical theory that ignores the importance of rights, nor a rights-based ethical theory that neglects the nature of duty, can offer a comprehensive theory of social justice. A theory of justice centered solely on rights may tell us, as Mill thought, what sorts of entitlements “reside in persons,” but it will not carry the binding force to respect such rights.4 A purely duty-based theory, on the other hand, runs the risk of moral impersonalism, the performance of duty for duty’s sake, without recognizing the situated, contingent needs of the person for whose sake we might be acting. Christian ethics, which I discuss below in more detail, has often been described as implausibly grounded in obedience to commands. One commentator writes, “Duty is, as Wordsworth says, the stern daughter of the voice of God, and if we deny that there is a God her parentage becomes highly dubious. . . . Morality so far as we understand it might conceivably be thus based on divine commands, and therefore have, for us, a duty-based form; but if we reject this mythology and see morality as a human product, we cannot intelligibly take duties as its starting-point.”5 One way to think of Lear’s ceremonial love-test (which links the abdication scene with the scenes of distributive justice on the heath) is to see it

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as an allegory of a mock social compact, under which subjects profess to value duteousness to the sovereign over their basic freedoms. Under such a perverse contract, the protection of a subject’s rights to liberty or property ideally would not entail the sovereign’s duties of forbearance (consistent with standard contractarian arguments); rather, the subject’s duties require a professed willingness to transfer selected basic goods in exchange for exclusive rights to property. In response to the terms of Lear’s love-test, Goneril responds: “Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter; / Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty; Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare; / No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour . . .” (1.1.55–58).6 Goneril’s speech is more than a well-crafted extravagance. There is a legalistic pitch to the words “eyesight, space, and liberty,” as if she is clairvoyantly parodying the liberal mantra, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.” And although Goneril’s comments are carried out on the level of rhetorical play, her mention of alienable entitlements—space and liberty—are particularly interesting for being approximations of essential, basic “goods,” the sort of goods that will more formally come to be described by rights theorists like Grotius and Selden as natural rather than civil rights. While different contract theorists draw up different lists of basic goods, including self-preservation, liberty, or property, most early modern theorists assume that basic rights are not transferred in return for the goods and protections one enjoys in civil society. Goneril’s profession of love is impossible to trump because she seems capable of trading away seemingly inalienable goods on her father’s behalf. Of course, no character other than, perhaps, Lear, takes Goneril’s words seriously, and both Goneril and Regan simply add exclusive landholdings to their basic entitlements, figuring as free-riders who defect from the terms of the “compact.” But Lear mistakes rhetorical play for a binding contract, and one of the many ironies of the play is that Lear does indeed end up in a pre-political, natural environment on the heath, where he acquires a realistic appreciation of the complexities of the relationship between duties and basic entitlements. Cordelia complicates the mock-contractarian aspect of the abdication scene, because she is remarkably silent on the subject of inviolable benefits, goods or rights. She tells Lear: “You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me: I / Return those duties back as are right fit, / Obey you, love you, and most honour you” (1.1.96–98). Cordelia fails to invoke in her own defense the sorts of essential goods that Goneril waves about like inessential accretions of character. One way of explaining Cordelia’s reticence is to see her as taking rights so seriously that she refuses to even imagine, and hence articulate, the thought of relinquishing any personal entitlements. This helps to explain the nakedly retributive quality of her profession to return duties in

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kind to her father. Renaissance rights theorists, as I have discussed, began thinking of rights and basic goods as not merely possessions, but as dispositions or faculties, substantial traits of character that carry ontological weight. A duty, unlike a right, is an occurrent burden or responsibility that is realizable in action. What makes Cordelia’s response so repugnant to Lear is her refusal to imagine a compounding of her essential qualities with his own. To return duties in kind is to participate in a zero–sum game, to act responsibly without offering up any core aspects of oneself in the process. If the abdication scene illustrates the ethical chaos that can occur when actions stemming from duty are not governed by a supervening respect for natural and civil rights, the exchange among Goneril, Regan, and Albany in the fifth act illustrates the reluctance of the unredeemed characters in the play to imagine rights as bodily, inalienable faculties. Goneril suggests that Edmund’s self-promotion is disproportionate to the power Regan has conferred on him: “Not so hot! / In his own grace he doth exalt himself / More than in your addition,” to which Regan responds, “In my rights / By me invested, he compeers the best” (5.3.66–69); Albany, in an uncharacteristically clever moment, quips, “That were the most if he should husband you” (5.3.70). Modern editors have not determined whether Regan’s locution “in my rights” should be interpreted literally to mean that Edmund is invested “in” Regan’s rights, or glossed more loosely to mean that Edmund is invested “with” her rights. The ambiguity is important from the perspective of rights theory. To say that Edmund is invested “in” rather than “with” Regan’s rights implies that Regan enjoys monopoly ownership of the available store of rights, as if Edmund merely uses Regan’s rights (he has “usufructuary” rights, to borrow a concept from early modern rights discourse). On this interpretation, rights refer to scarce, loanable benefits rather than substantial endowments or faculties distributed across individuals. On the other hand, if Edmund were invested “with” Regan’s rights, he would be enjoying some proprietary claim, however tenuous, to Regan’s alienable powers. Albany’s remark clearly trades on the former, literal locution, “in her rights,” when he suggests that Edmund will participate in the full complement of Regan’s rights once the pair is married. Rights, or less technically, personal entitlements and goods, are either parodied (in Goneril’s speech), neglected entirely (in Cordelia’s refusal to engage the love-test) or, in the above exchange, posited as monopoly possessions. When duties are not coordinated with basic goods, duteousness is governed at best by impersonal command morality, exemplified by Lear’s peremptoriness and Cordelia’s aloofness during the abdication scene, or at worst by a character’s entirely subjective moral code, exemplified by the time-serving of an Edmund or Oswald. One question the play raises is how

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individuals come to understand and respect the nature of rights as such and in relation to duties. Does an appreciation of rights follow from intuition, the exercise of reason, perception of natural law? As a means to address these questions, I would like to introduce an additional term and concept, “care,” in relation to the duty-rights entailment. I argue that once a character’s sense of duty is mitigated by care, which I define broadly as a context-sensitive emotional attachment, a recognition of rights and the sanctity of personal autonomy may follow. Lear’s education or so-called redemption in the play can only be effected when empathy successfully mediates duties and basic goods. But in order to see the nature of this process at work, we need to return briefly to the abdication scene. After Cordelia has professed that she loves Lear according to her “bond, no more nor less,” and Lear has asked her to “mend her speech a little,” Cordelia tries to explain herself: “Good my lord, / You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me: I / Return those duties back as are right fit, / Obey you, love you, and most honour you . . . Haply, when shall wed, / That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry / Half my love with him, half my care and duty . . .” (1.1.95–102). Why does Cordelia add “care” to her second iteration of “duty” (“half my care and duty”), and what does this suggest about the relationship between the two terms? To what extent can “duty” and “care” be “halved” between persons? Cordelia believes that Lear raised her (begot, bred, and loved her) in accordance with his parental “duties.” In her avowal to return those duties “right fit,” she promises to “obey,” “love” and “honor” Lear. Cordelia assumes, in her conventional expression of a child’s duty toward a parent, that the father–daughter relationship is reciprocal from a moral standpoint: each participant is duty-bound to the other; each adheres to conventionally established standards of moral obligation. But Lear describes his relationship toward Cordelia as one governed by “care,” not duty: “here I disclaim all my paternal care, propinquity and property of blood” (1.1.113–114). Precisely how Lear narrows the field of care, and how he distinguishes care from duty, is not entirely clear, but he suggests the scope of the term when he exclaims that he will neighbor, pity and relieve, the “barbarous Scythian” (1.1.116), rather than his “sometime daughter” (1.1.120). To suggest that he will not extend this kind of solicitude toward Cordelia implies that at one time or another he had extended it toward her, or that this kind of moral caretaking is integral to the father–daughter bond. When Lear explains to Kent that he had thought to set his rest on Cordelia’s “kind nursery” (1.1.124), the suggestion is that for Lear, pity, relief, and nursing constitute the father–daughter bond both ways; sympathetic identification, not proverbial duty (to obey, love, and honor) is integral to that bond, and such sympathy should not yield to abstract commands.

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Lear expects that Cordelia has a duty to follow his commands and, if he desires, to relinquish any and all of her basic entitlements. Cordelia, however, assumes the unspoken sanctity of her autonomy and basic entitlements, all of which should trump or at least mitigate the duties that are demanded of her by Lear. Since Lear believes that care can only be discharged and received through the canons of formal duteousness, he impossibly attempts to yoke the content of care to the form of duty. Care, though, entails more than a discharge of one’s duty—it requires, among other things, a certain level of empathetic understanding from the caregiver, especially when the recipient of care is not explicit about his or her needs. Most caregivers, in turn, are not moral saints, and so may have their own minimal conditions of satisfaction before they will meet the needs of someone else. Lear’s preoccupation with duty for duty’s sake would theoretically override Cordelia’s sense of autonomy and, implicitly, her sense of her own basic right not to speak when pressured to exaggerate or lie about the nature of her feelings—a right simply to maintain her dignity in such an impossible situation. When Cordelia returns impersonal duty to Lear, she seems to be unwittingly mocking the entire system of command morality that overarches the conduct of all the characters. Kent’s character poses a problem for interpretation even more difficult than Cordelia’s or Lear’s, since his conduct during the abdication scene blurs any distinction between duty and care. After Lear formally has disinherited Cordelia, Kent assures Lear that Cordelia “does not love thee least” (1.1.150), defending his resistance as follows: “Be Kent unmannerly / When Lear is mad. What would’st thou do, old man? / Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak / When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour’s bound / When majesty falls to folly” (1.1.143–147). Richard Strier has argued that Kent’s conduct falls within a well-established tradition of virtuous, “morally mandated” disobedience: “Kent’s rudeness is chosen, under pressure, as a moral stance. He is operating at a borderline where Castiglione merges into Ponet. . . . Kent is acting like Buchanan’s ‘physician’ in refusing to acknowledge as legitimate the wishes of the king-asmadman.”7 Kent’s form of virtuous, if insubordinate counsel, Strier argues, is comparable to the resistance of Lear’s retainer, who advises Lear, “to my judgment, your Highnesse is not entertain’d with that ceremonious affection as you were wont.”8 Strier’s suggestion is that both Kent and Lear’s retainer show “unceremonious affection” or “loving plain-spokenness” rather than normative or ideal courtliness, what the retainer describes as “ceremonious affection.”9 On Strier’s account, “affection” in both its ceremonious and unceremonious versions is equated with “loving” advice. But I would argue that neither during displays of ceremonious nor unceremonious obedience do we find

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the measure of “loving” attention Strier describes and Lear really desires. That the Quarto is more sensitive to this implicit distinction is suggested in the Folio’s inclusion of “kindness” in the retainer’s speech. While the Quarto reads, “There’s a great abatement appears as well in the general dependants” (Q.1.4.53–55), the Folio reads, “There’s a great abatement of kindness appears as well in the general dependants” (1.4.54–55). By omitting (or failing to include) the term “kindness,” the Quarto suggests that while unceremonious affection can be unkind (“the very pretence and purpose of unkindness,” Lear says [1.4.64–65]), ceremonious affection need not of itself be “kind.” Such a distinction helps to explain why, in spite of Kent’s directness and commitment to virtuous resistance, the language he uses is still derived from the formal vocabulary of duteousness and courtiership. The force of Kent’s speech rests entirely on terms like “duty,” “honour,” and “majesty,” as if the only way he can apologize for his resistance is by embedding into his defense of Cordelia a meta-commentary on excusable disobedience. Such language and logic, however virtuously targeted, carries the kind of substance Lear does not care to hear at this moment. Lear seems to be holding out for affective language, even though such genuinely affective language is inappropriate to protocol. The only character who invokes a care ethic is Lear himself, who uses terms like “neighbor,” “pity,” “kind,” “care,” and “nursery.” The words Lear speaks and needs to hear are words that might comfort an aging man who looks toward retirement, dependency, sickness, and senility. Cordelia fails to deliver, and Kent’s virtuous duty is just a clothed version of Cordelia’s virtuous nothing. Kent explains and reexplains the honorableness of his disobedience, but he fails to touch Lear because he does not motivate (if it is at all possible) a more sentimentalist ethic. It is not that Kent is too plain; it is that he is too plainly formal. At one point Kent reminds Lear of the layered nature of their relationship: “Royal Lear, / Whom I have ever honoured as my King, / Loved as my father, as my master followed . . .” (1.1.129–131). Even here Kent’s aspiration to honesty deflates into a formal gesture. The coordinated syntax and rhythm of the lines suggest that Kent is reciting a courtier’s ideal notion of his triune relationship to the King. The emphasis on “love” is invoked, and no doubt felt, but it is not movingly communicated. The failures of the abdication scene thus partly stem from ethical misrecognition. We might pause here to compare this form of misrecognition to Stanley Cavell’s influential discussion of the relationship between shame and recognition in the play. Cavell suggests that one of the guiding premises of the play is that “recognizing a person depends upon allowing oneself to be recognized by him.”10 During the abdication scene, Lear attempts “to avoid recognition, the shame of exposure, the threat of self-revelation.”11

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Cavell is not entirely clear on the reasons for Lear’s shame during the abdication scene, but he suggests that Cordelia “threatens to expose both his plan for returning false love with no love, and exposes the necessity for that plan—his terror of being loved.”12 He further argues that Cordelia not only threatens Lear’s plans and need for love; she also makes Lear ashamed of the questionable nature of the relationship he imagines he has with his daughter: “It can be said that what Lear is ashamed of is not his need for love and his inability to return it, but of the nature of his love for Cordelia. It is too far from plain love of father for daughter. Even if we resist seeing in it the love of lovers, it is at least incompatible with the idea of her having any (other) lover.”13 Lear cannot recognize Cordelia because his shame prevents him from meeting her on her own terms. Shame is thus the linchpin in Cavell’s analysis, the most basic emotional response that infects Lear’s (and Gloucester’s) judgment. But I would suggest that throughout the abdication scene, Lear and Cordelia are at best naive apprentices in virtue, for whom shame, despite its seeming quality as a basic emotional response, is actually too sophisticated a moral emotion to be experienced by either character. In order to be incapacitated by shame, in the terms outlined by Cavell, one would need to experience some prior empathetic attachment with those who are perceived to be weighing the propriety of one’s conduct. Shame, unlike guilt, which ordinarily results from a transgression of specific rules, flows from a sense of one’s failure to meet public and personal expectations. In ethical terms, shame is a distinctly heteronomous and intersubjective moral emotion, not a cognitively private emotional response like guilt. Lear is not ashamed of his conduct toward Cordelia because his overriding commitment to an ethics of duty forces him to erect an emotionally restrictive boundary between them. His development of shame following the abdication scene is a step toward the dissolution of boundaries that will enable his redemption; shame is not so much the cause but the result of the moral chaos of the abdication scene. It will be helpful to think of this complex of duty, care, and rights in relation to Christian ethics, particularly early modern Protestant morality. Christian ethics in general is often identified as a composite of natural laws and divine commands. Proper conduct is guided by self-evident principles of benevolence and justice, principles that are per se nota because they appeal directly to an agent’s conscience. The revealed law of the Decalogue served to ratify the natural laws that were thought to be obfuscated since the Fall. As Susan Schreiner writes, “The law of nature, containing the principles of equity, justice, or rectitude, was imprinted by God on the hearts of all human beings. The Decalogue is a specially accommodated restatement of the law of nature, a restatement that brings a ‘clearer witness’

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of that which had become obscure.”14 Of course, for the English Protestant tradition, the law is superseded by the gospel, and moral rules primarily serve as reminders of the weakness of will among the reprobate and elect alike. Rightful conduct is effected, in turn, by an elicitation of grace, since Puritans like William Perkins, William Ames, and Richard Sibbes rejected moral perfectionism and the pagan practice of perfecting one’s character by acquiring virtues as disposition of character. This is an extremely simplified picture of Protestant ethics, but since Lear does not offer a sustained exploration of the complexities of theological ethics, the technicalities of the law–gospel relationship are beside the point. Lear’s critics have, I think, been correct to point to the play’s mostly secular dispensation. G. Wilson Knight pointed to the “preeminently naturalistic” quality of the gods in the play.15 I would suggest that there are Christian ethical elements in the play, but that they function purely to allegorize their own limitations in guiding ethical conduct. Tom o’ Bedlam speaks one of the most important lines in this connection: “Take heed o’ th’ foul fiend; obey thy parents; keep thy words’ justice; swear not; commit not with man’s sworn spouse; set not thy sweet heart on proud array. Tom’s acold” (3.4.76–79). For Tom and Cordelia, a command like “Obey thy parents” is too starkly formulated to direct conduct in conflictual situations, and its ambiguity leads to a number of early modern disputes on the nature of the duties and rights of children. Danby, for instance, in his discussion of early modern parent–children relations, quotes Thomas Becon’s Catechism, in which Becon writes, “The honour and obedience is great, I confess, which the children owe to their parents: notwithstanding, if they command anything contrary to the word of God, in this behalf they are not to be obeyed . . . We must obey God rather than men.”16 Danby then deduces that “Becon says, in effect, that parents must first be sensible before filial obedience can be expected at all. The duty is not all on the children’s side.”17 But nothing in Becon’s comment suggests that parents have to act “sensibly.” Becon says that parents have to obey God. Danby would need to provide more evidence to show that Becon believes that to act insensibly is to act against God. Even if Becon is suggesting that parents must always act sensibly, a number of Protestant writers argue the opposite, that Christianity permits a father’s harshness toward his child. In the Christian Man’s Closet (1581), William Lowith asks, “How many causes be there set down, of ingratitude, contumacie, stubbornesse and disobedience, for which a father may disinherit his sonne?” to which he answers, “If the child will not give due regarde, and reverence to their Parentes, although they be furious and waywarde.”18 Hobbes and Filmer claimed that paternal dominion is absolute, stemming from divine right or, for Hobbes in particular, tacit consent.19

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And if early modern political and moral theory does allow that parents might act irascibly toward their children, part of this permissibility follows from the complaint that the Decalogue is so vague that untoward children can find immunity from disobedience so long as they play lip-service to the bare command, “Honor thy father and mother”: In A Discourse for Parents honour, and Authority over their Children (1591), the author complains that this kind of profession can excuse a corrupted conscience, and that parents have no recourse if their children neglect the command: “For let a sonne be negligent in performing of that one command, honour thy father, what may the father do in such a case, it puts over no punishment into the father’s hands, no none at all.”20 An extended discussion of early modern parent–child relations is not my concern here. I am suggesting that nothing about Lear’s behavior toward Cordelia and Kent, nor Cordelia’s toward Lear, is inassimilable to a conventional understanding of early modern ethics. Lear doesn’t create problems for himself, Cordelia, and Kent because he acts in an un-Christian way. The abdication scene allegorizes the limitations of any ethical system which holds that actions stemming purely from duty, in the absence of affective considerations, can effectively motivate conduct. Now Protestant theory tirelessly promotes a context-sensitive, affective ethic of neighborlove and equity to compensate for the limitations of command morality. But what makes Lear a problem play from the perspective of the history of ethics is that a constituent feature of Christian ethics, monarchical commands, are pivotal to the main action, but the play then excludes any extended treatment of the Christian remedies—agapeism, equity, infused or imputed virtue—that might counterbalance the inefficacy of such commands. All of this suggests that Christian readings of the tragic conventions of the play mistakenly assume that Lear acts sinfully in the early scenes, then undergoes an enlightening pilgrimage and purgative bout with madness before he can reconcile with Cordelia and find regeneration. Bradley famously suggested that the play should be entitled The Redemption of King Lear.21 Roy Battenhouse writes that the “tragedy as a whole is shaped by a Christian sense of history . . . [Lear] must become an outcast so that he may discover the ‘no good divinity’ of the notion that ‘I’ was everything.”22 For S.L. Bethell, “Lear, after being bound upon his fiery wheel in this life, attaining humility and patience . . . is fit for heaven.”23 Oscar James Campbell writes, “The real redemption of Lear comes when he awakens from the delusions of his frenzied mind to discover Cordelia and her unselfish enduring love.”24 Critics who argue that Lear’s conduct derives from a fatal character flaw uncritically support observations such as Regan’s regarding Lear’s just

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deserts: “To wilful men / The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters” (2.4.272–274). The play rather suggests that while Lear’s injuries must serve in part as Lear’s schoolmasters, the injuries themselves are not procured as much as inherited from the inefficiencies of an ethical system in which he is placed. In his discussion of the radical elements in Lear, Jonathan Dollimore supports J.W. Lever’s belief that tragedies like Lear are not fundamentally about any “character with a socalled ‘fatal flaw,’ whose downfall is brought about by the decree of just if inscrutable powers . . . the fundamental flaw is not in them but in the world they inhabit: in the political state, the social order it upholds, and likewise, by projection, in the cosmic state of shifting arbitrary phenomena called ‘Fortune.’ ”25 I agree with the spirit of Lever’s formulation, but would refine his comment by noting that the relevant “flaw in the world,” the ambiguities of early modern moral theory, are not directly linked to ideologies of state or class power. The flaw is simply built into a system of morality that cannot achieve in practice what it upholds in theory. To return, then, to our earlier discussion of care in relation to duties and rights, the play raises a question that early modern treatises on the passions do not clearly answer: What type of moral training is necessary for the development, not simply adjustment, of moral emotions such as pity and benevolence, and other-regarding virtues such as charity and justice? For eighteenth-century moralists such as the earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, individuals are naturally endowed with a nonrational, emotional moral sense. Proper moral action is comparable to aesthetic beauty: benevolence, for example, is emotionally pleasing both to witness and promote. The early scenes suggest that such aesthetically salient benevolence is blocked by moral rigorism and a proper sense of duteousness; emotional responsiveness is not inborn but needs to be cultivated through experience and ethical training. Since seventeenth-century commentaries on the passions assume that individuals are naturally endowed with a range of passions, they instead focus on the ways in which passions can be manipulated. Thomas Wright, for example, in The Passions of the Minde in General (1604), discusses in five out of six chapters the “essence” of passions, the undesirable effects of inordinate passions, the means of mortifying passions, and the means of discovering passions in others. Only in one chapter, entitled the “The Meanes to Move Passions,” does Wright focus on ways of developing and eliciting emotions. Wright makes the familiar claims that orators can stir up emotions in their auditors only if orators themselves display corresponding emotions, or that music is a valuable device for eliciting passion.26 Beyond this, Wright has little to say on how adults are able to develop morally relevant emotions.

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Lear suggests that the development of moral sympathy is mostly a responsive process, meaning that it results from tragic personal experiences set in motion by the kinds of fateful events represented during the early scenes. The consequences of such events include Lear’s and Gloucester’s acculturation to distress, out of which evolves, at a significant cost, sympathetic moral abilities. The structure I outline is to an extent typically tragic in that it follows a cycle of fallenness and redemption; it is atypically tragic in that the limitations of command morality set the events in motion, rather than characterological willfulness and vice. To this extent, the conduct of the otherwise base characters in the play—Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund—functions to resolve the play’s moral ambiguities by creating the conditions under which the well-intentioned characters can develop proper moral capacities. Regan and Goneril seem so modern not because they anticipate historical capitalism necessarily, as Marxist readings have suggested (more on this later). They are indeed rational maximizers, whose decisions are governed by a means-end calculus. But one way to understand their relation to the so-called redemptive pattern in the play is to see them as “donors,” analogous, for example, to Prospero’s role as donor in The Tempest (as described in chapter 1). Regan and Goneril’s early conduct impels a process through which their ethos of efficiency and utility, rather than Lear’s hubris or Cordelia’s insensitivity, sends Lear into homelessness, wherein after unprecedented trial he awakens to the realities of social inequities. Lear does not drive such a process; the process is the consequence of the sisters’ rationalizing world view interposing itself between the tensions I have been describing between duty and care. Thus the more insensitively Goneril and Regan treat Lear, the closer he comes to cultivating an ethic of care. Consider Lear’s remark to Goneril, in the Quarto, after she has reprimanded him for supporting a “riotous” retinue: “Who is it that can tell me who I am? / Lear’s shadow? I would learn that, for by the marks / Of sovereignty, knowledge, and reason / I should be false persuaded I had daughters” (Q. 1.4.218–221). René Weis, editor of the Longman edition, paraphrases “sovereignty, knowledge and reason” as “kingship, experience and reason.” But we should perhaps not read “knowledge” as interchangeable with “experience.” Lear’s moral development moves from an ethic based on ratiocination and customary knowledge to one based on personal experience and empathy. The Quarto lines emphasize the extent to which Lear’s ratiocinative ethic misleads him, and imply that he will go on to cultivate an alternative ethic. The Quarto, in other subtle ways, emphasizes Lear’s growth toward such an affective ethic. In his unforgettable speech in which he wishes that Goneril give birth to a “child of spleen,” Lear’s final Quarto line reads, “that

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she may feel-that she may feel / How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is . . . “(Q.1.4.254–256) The Folio line, in an otherwise minor editorial cut, mutes Lear’s preoccupation with empathy by omitting the iteration: “that she may feel / How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child” (1.4.277–278). That the Quarto approaches the ideal play by emphasizing a shift in focus from an ethic of commands to one of sentiment is represented in the Folio’s curious addition of the Fool’s speech at 2.4. The Fool says, “Father’s that wear rags / Do make their children blind, / But father’s that bear bags / Shall see their children kind, / Fortune, that arrant whore, / Ne’er turns the key to th’poor” (2.4.46–49). The Fool is being misleading in more than a self-consciously satirical way. When the Fool suggests that “fortune never turns the key to the poor,” he is imagining Lear in the position of beggar to his own children. But the Fool fails to envisage Lear in his eventual (allegorical) role of potential beneficiary to the poor (when Lear expresses his charitable sentiments on the heath). The play will go on to suggest that there is indeed a sense in which the fortuitousness of events allows for a representation of a fairer distribution of goods. The Folio, by adding the Fool’s speech, misleadingly suggests that there is no such positive outcome for the poor, ignoring the fact that Lear transforms from King to beggar to enlightened and potential beneficiary of the poor by the play’s end. Gloucester, like Lear, develops away from an ethic of duty toward one of care. After conducting himself duteously, if only tentatively so, for much of the first two acts, Gloucester sacrifices duty for empathy when he extends aid to poor Tom: “Go in with me. My duty cannot suffer / T’obey in all your daughters’ hard commands. / Though their injunction be to bar my doors . . . Yet have I ventured to come seek you out / and bring you where both fire and food is ready” (3.4.136–141). Gloucester’s seemingly spontaneous goodness should be evaluated against his remarks regarding Lear’s madness: “Cans’t thou blame him? / His daughters seek his death. . . . I am almost mad myself. I had a son, / Now Outlawed from my blood” (3.4.150–155). Gloucester’s disobedience of Goneril and Regan, and his concern for Tom, derive largely from a projection of his relationship with Edmund onto Lear’s relationship with Goneril and Regan. It might be laboring the obvious to argue that both Gloucester’s and Lear’s care ethic is shaped by personal experiences, but such a responsive ethic motivates the play’s culminating representation of justice as fairness. The most famous comment on distribution and affective morality is spoken by Gloucester to Edgar: “Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens’ plagues / Have humbled to all strokes. That I am wretched / Makes thee the happier. Heavens, deal so still! / Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man, / That slaves your ordinance, that will not see / Because he

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does not feel your pow’r quickly; / So distribution should unto excess, / And each man have enough” (4.1.64–71). While there have been many conflicting interpretations of Gloucester’s charitable sentiments and Lear’s “take physic pomp” speech, many recent readings locate in these lines either subversion or officialdom. Judy Kronenfeld has recently offered a decisive critique of the radicalist interpretations, including, for instance, Danby’s belief that the passage marks a “Christian leveling of society” and Walter Cohen’s claim that it signifies a rejection of “all class hierarchy” and anticipates Winstanley’s Digger utopia. In her attempt to re-historicize these passages and offer a “demystification of contemporary demystification,”27 Kronenfeld writes, “In fact, contra all our critics, ‘distribution,’ ‘excess,’ and ‘enough,’ as well as ‘the superflux’ are all terms that belong to the traditional and authoritative, not to say, authoritarian, discourse of charity, as controlled and orchestrated by Elizabethan and Jacobean legislators and administrators . . . and other governmental mechanisms of charity, which had at least the partial motive of maintaining the existing hierarchical social order.”28 Kronenfeld argues convincingly that Gloucester’s charitable sentiments do not meet strict Protestant criteria for selfless neighbor-love. For example, Gloucester’s charitable sentiments seem to exemplify the sort of reactive pity criticized later in the century by Sir Thomas Browne: “Hee that relieves another upon the bare suggestion and bowels of pity, doth not this so much for his sake as for his own: for by compassion we make another’s misery our own, & so by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also.”29 And when Gloucester exclaims, “I see feelingly,” he seems to be open to the kind of criticism Mandeville will level at indiscriminate almsgivers: “When sores are very bare or seem otherwise afflicting in an extraordinary manner, and the Beggar can bear to have them exposed to the Cold Air, it is very shocking to some People. . . . it touches their Pity feelingly.”30 Why, though, must we interpret Gloucester’s lines as either orthodox Protestant, on the one hand, or revolutionary and dissenting, on the other? Kronenfeld has gone a way toward contextualizing these lines in terms of orthodox Reformation views on almsgiving, but her argument overlooks the fact that the sentiments here have their place in the history of moral philosophy, and not just in the history of economic and political thought. If Kronenfeld is correct to note that Gloucester’s sentiments do not meet strict criteria of Protestant neighbor-love and unselfish almsgiving, she never asks to what, if any, normative moral philosophy, they do belong. The sentiments of Edgar and his fellows are partly explainable but not sufficiently captured by typical charges against mechanical charity. The conditions under which charity is referenced in Lear are unusual in that they dramatize a pre-political, natural environment, inhabited by man

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“unaccommodated,” in which egalitarian gestures are made. As a means to place Lear’s theory of distribution in the context of the history of ethics, I would like to offer a brief comparison of two early modern theories of distribution. The first is John Downame’s conventional Christian exhortation to give alms, a duty-based theory of equal distribution. The second is Grotius’s natural law theory of distribution, fundamentally a rights-based theory of justice. Just as the play insists that Protestant command morality cannot direct conduct during the abdication scene, so it suggests that command morality does not offer a compelling exhortation to effect a fair distribution of goods. The Grotian natural law framework carries more explanatory force, but with some limitations brought out in the play itself. In his Treatise of Beneficence, Downame argues that individuals do not enjoy exclusive rights to inherited or acquired property. Downame assures his readers that God retains property ownership of all resources, and merely distributes to individuals the right to use what has been allotted to them: It is not onely an act of mercy but also of justice to give alms to the poore, because the Lord, who is the chiefe owner of our goods, having appointed all that wee can spare to their use, it is not our owne, but their portion allotted unto them which they have as good right unto as we have to the rest, because it is ratified unto them by the same authoritie.31

Downame reminds his readers that God’s original grant of property was meant to be distributed equally among all individuals; those who have been granted a larger parcel of land should act as stewards or intermediaries through whom the disadvantaged can receive their deserved portion of God’s patrimony: “God hath given unto us our riches immediately himself, but unto the poor mediately by us, whom he hath injoyned to performe unto them these duties of mercie and Christian charity.”32 Almsgiving results neither from a recognition of another’s natural right to property nor even from an inclination to give altruistically; it follows from God’s unchallengeable command to perform one’s duty: for as it is the will of the Master that he should deed them, so also they should be fed by him, and not forcibly take it from him by fraud or violence . . . the name . . . that the Apostle useth to signifie almes, and . . . to signifie those that give them, which doe not import a meere gift out of free choyse, but a ministration and service, which we are required to doe unto those of the same family, who neede our help, at the appointment of our great Lord and Master.33

In the Rights of War and Peace, Grotius opens his discussion of the origins of property rights by imagining a pre-political natural order, a benign state

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of nature, in which all people enjoyed the right to “use” or “occupy” parcels of the “common store” of land and goods: “All things, as Justin says, formed a common stock for all mankind, as the inheritors of one general patrimony. From hence it happened that, every man seized to his own use or consumption whatever he met with; a general exercise of a right, which supplied the place of private property.”34 Eventually, given an appreciation of the scarcity of resources, such casual “use” rights, according to which individuals simply shared the abundant stock of goods, are transformed into more conventionally understood rights of property, those that designate exclusive, individual ownership rights. But Grotius emphasizes that such property rights are overridden under conditions of extreme necessity: “in cases of extreme necessity, the original right of using things, as if they had remained in common, must be revived; because in all human laws, and consequently in the laws relating to property, the case of extreme necessity seems to form an exception.”35 One of Grotius’s fundamental points is that the exhortation to charity during times of necessity is conditioned by the inviolability of the natural law of self-preservation. Such a natural law is not established by God, but rather derived either from an exercise of pure reason or extrapolated from an observance of customary behavior: The existence of the Law of Nature is proved by two kinds of argument, a priori, and a posteriori, the former a more abstruse, and the latter a more popular method of proof. We are said to reason a priori, when we show the agreement or disagreement of any thing with a reasonable and social nature; but a posteriori, when without absolute proof, but only upon probability, any thing is inferred to accord with the law of nature, because it is received as such among all, or at least the more civilized nations.36

Importantly, for Grotius the law of nature is conceptually prior to divine law: “Now the Law of Nature is so unalterable, that it cannot be changed even by God himself.”37 It follows that a charitable action does not stem from one’s obedience to an implicit or revealed command, such as the Golden Rule, but rather from a recognition of the natural right of self-preservation that each individual enjoys as part of the right to use the goods of the common store: Now among Theologians . . . it is a received opinion, that if in urgent distress, any one shall take from another what is absolutely necessary for the preservation of his own life, the act shall not be deemed a theft. A rule not founded, as some allege, solely upon the law of charity, which obliges every possessor to apply some part of his wealth to relieve the needy; but upon the original division of lands among private owners, which was made with a reservation in favour of the primitive rights of nature.38

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Since Grotius’s fundamental premise is the natural right to receive alms when conditions of necessity obtain, the almsgiver’s duty is directed immediately to the rightholder, rather than mediated through a Godly duty. Downame, on the other hand, stressing the unexceptionable Christian duty to relieve the poor, makes few references to the “rights” of the poor; when he does ascribe rights to the poor, he offers a purely derivative and voluntaristic theory of rights: a person has a right to alms simply because God makes such a demand on the almsgiver. It should be noted that Grotius’s claims were subject to the kinds of criticisms usually directed at natural law theories. Henry Ireton during the Putney debates, and then later Samuel Pufendorf, argued that the Grotian framework offered no safeguards for property owners against invocations of common right. John Selden made a similar argument that Grotius too optimistically assumes that property owners would be willing to relinquish exclusive rights in order to act charitably.39 The implicit criticism here is that Grotius assumes too readily that the simple perception of a natural law will carry binding force. Grotius’s presumption of rationality gains force from a more fundamental premise of altruism. In order to see how Downame’s and Grotius’s alternative accounts of charity relate to Lear, we can return turn to Gloucester’s famous comments on distribution. Gloucester tells Tom: “Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens’ plagues / Have humbled to all strokes. That I am wretched / Makes thee the happier. Heavens deal so still! / Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man, / That slaves your ordinance, that will not see / Because he does not feel, feel your pow’r quickly; / So distribution should undo excess, / And each man have enough. Dost thou know Dover?” (4.1.64–71). Gloucester realizes that distributive justice will not be upheld by automatic obedience to heaven’s “ordinances” or rules of charity. His comments highlight the limits of a moral program like Downame’s, in which charity ideally follows from a sense of doing one’s duty for duty’s sake. Now the limitations of Gloucester’s purely responsive, affective ethic are as obvious to us as they were to some early seventeenth-century moralists. We have already discussed the kinds of criticism that even Mandeville, an apologist for self-interested conduct, would make of these gestures. But Gloucester’s problem is not simply that his charitableness is reactive or even self-serving. From the Grotian perspective, Gloucester fails to recognize that Tom or any beggar has a natural claim to an equal distribution of goods. For Gloucester to recognize Tom’s claim on him, he must recognize Tom as an autonomous agent, endowed with inalienable rights, one of which is the right to self-preservation. Although Grotius’s position is more explanatory here, given the play’s secular explanation of charity in the face of the Christian failure, Grotius

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posits too readily, as I have noted, that the simple perception of a natural law like the right to self-preservation will warrant redistribution under conditions of necessity. Rather, care and empathy are mediating steps toward such a recognition. Empathy would, ideally, force someone like Gloucester to occupy the standpoint of another, and thereby appreciate the minimal conditions of existence to which any individual is entitled. Gloucester is certainly closer to achieving this awareness than he or any other character was during the first half of the play. But Gloucester’s preoccupation with his own redemption restricts his ability see Tom as an autonomous, rightsbearing individual. This is not to say, as Dollimore does, that the exchange between Gloucester and Tom illustrates the failure of empathy to effect social justice. For Dollimore the scene demystifies the official Christian belief that emotional responsiveness—pity, empathy, benevolence—is adequate to meet the demands of social justice. Dollimore claims that, given the fact that kings and nobleman ordinarily do not have firsthand experience of poverty, a system of justice grounded in pity is at best gestural and ad hoc in nature. For Dollimore, kindness is, “relatively, a very precious thing but as a basis for human kind’s self-redemption it is a nonstarter . . . the society of Lear is structured in such a way that to wait for shared experience to generate justice is to leave it too late. Justice, we might say, is too important to be trusted to empathy.”40 Since Dollimore is concerned to point out the radical elements in the play, he omits an explanation of what he takes to be an ideal or more efficient system of justice. We have seen that the first half of the play insists that an impersonal system of justice is partly responsible for Lear’s and Gloucester’s dispossession. If justice cannot be “trusted to empathy,” it is not clear to what it can be entrusted. Dollimore demystifies empathy, but in the process mystifies justice. One problem here is that Dollimore does not make a distinction between ethics and metaethics. Ethics is concerned with the system of practical directives established to guide conduct—these precepts will be found in scripture, sermons, homilies, conduct manuals, the poor laws and related economic treatises. Metaethics has a higher-order concern to investigate and theorize the origins and justification of first principles of ethics, in this case, the principles of social justice. Metaethical inquiries will be found in philosophical or theological treatises and, I would argue, in the fictive realm of a play like King Lear. In the realm of fiction, the concern may be not simply to allegorically ratify or subvert socially established ethical directives, but rather to place entire ethical systems under scrutiny, and imaginatively reconstruct prevailing theories of justice. From a metaethical perspective, empathy and emotional attachments are integral features of a system of justice, but not integral in the unrealistic

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sense that every act of justice derives from a situated emotional tie between a caregiver and the beneficiary of a charitable act. Empathy should be thought of as a necessary step toward recognizing and establishing rights; once such rights become established features of social justice, empathetic responsiveness would theoretically function as a supererogatory, rather than necessary component of practical conduct. The problem with Gloucester’s comment is not that it reflects the ethical limitations of empathy as such; it reflects the limitations of empathetic responses that do not mediate an understanding of and respect for rights, from which duteous conduct can follow. And for the play’s allegorization of these metaethical concerns, we need to look at Lear’s comments on distribution. When Goneril suggests that Lear has too many retainers, Lear responds, “O reason not the need. Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest things superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady: / If only to go warm were gorgeous, / Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st, / Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need—/ You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need” (2.4.259–266). Given Lear’s later experience of abject poverty, in which he finds himself bereft of even the “poorest things,” his exclamation to “reason not the need” is spoken much too quickly. To say that even beggars enjoy what they do not need displaces attention from those goods that beggars need but do not enjoy. Lear’s early comments on social justice approach inclusion in the Grotian framework, since his thinking about primary goods is not at all guided by Christian moralizing. But Lear’s admonition to “reason not the need” is also a refinement of the Grotian principle that dictates one should “reason the need.” For Grotius, one comes to an understanding of basic needs through an apprehension of self-evident truths. Lear’s early comment shows that one cannot begin to understand basic necessities by a detached exercise of pure reason. Only when Lear is fully dispossessed on the heath will he rethink his position on needs and superfluities. He says to the Fool, “How dost, my boy? Art cold? / I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow? / The art of our necessities is strange, / And can make vile things precious” (3.2.68–71). Lear learns that under conditions of unimaginable adversity beggars find necessity in precisely those barest things that might otherwise seem superfluous. While Gloucester only thinks of Tom’s needs in relation to his own wretchedness—as if Tom’s needs would change in proportion to Gloucester’s hardships—Lear recognizes the Fool as an autonomous “fellow,” one who shares his misery and hence enjoys an equal claim to the straw; and one who Lear insists should enter the hovel during the tempest: “In, boy; go first. You houseless poverty—/ Nay, get thee in” (3.4.26–27).

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Dollimore argues that because Lear does not recognize the autonomy of his imperiled fellows, his expressions of concern stem from self-pity: “Lear experiences pity mainly as an inseparable aspect of his own grief: ‘I am mightily abus’d. I should e’en die with pity / To see another thus’ (4.7.53–540). His compassion emerges from grief only to be obliterated by grief. He is angered, horrified, confused and, above all dislocated. Understandably then he does not empathize with Tom so much as assimilate him to his own derangement. Indeed Lear hardly communicates with anyone, especially on the heath; most of his utterances are demented mumbling interspersed with brief insight.”41 While it is true that Lear projects the causes of his dispossession onto his fellows—he poignantly questions whether Gloucester’s “daughters brought him to this pass” (3.4.61)—he does not likewise project the lived experience of his dispossession onto those fellows. With respect to his past situation, Lear cannot help but think from the position of his bounded self. With respect to his present situation, however, Lear introjects and universalizes the suffering of an imagined community of those who are psychically and materially impoverished. We can see this at work in his comments on distribution. He exclaims, “Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, / That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, / How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, / Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you / From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this! take physic, pomp; / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, / that you mayst shake the superflux to them / And show the heavens more just” (3.4.28–36). From his short-lived and localized experience of poverty, Lear imagines the experiences of “naked wretches” generally. From this position he does not reach the narrow conclusion that kings or nobles should attend more closely to the claims of the poor; rather, he more abstractly concludes that disembodied “pomp” universally should expose itself to poverty. While Lear does not use the term “rights” to justify the deserts of the poor, his comments at this point are more explicable in relation to the Grotian natural law rather than Christian framework. He defends redistribution not on the basis of performing Christian duty. Importantly, when Lear concludes that his duty to redistribute will “show the heavens more just,” he implies not that he is following a divine command, but suggesting that such conduct will equalize inequities caused by the heavens themselves. His justification stems from a simple recognition of the basic necessities any other individual needs in order to survive. He must, as he himself realizes, strip himself down to the position of an “unaccommodated” individual before he can understand the lowest common denominators of existence: “unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here” (3.4.101–103).

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It will be helpful to situate Lear in the context of the history of ethics by considering Lear’s comments on distribution in relation to one of the most influential modern theories of redistribution, John Rawls’s theory of justice (with which Grotius’s theory shares some similarities). In order to provide a more empirical, less metaphysical account of the establishment of justice as fairness and the priority of the right over the good, Rawls has introduced the original condition, a hypothetical, nonhistorical, “device of representation,” in which, under a veil of ignorance, a group of individuals conceived ontologically prior to their constituent features and endowments, and unaware of personal life-histories, class-status, wealth, and so on, convene to determine binding principles of justice. They do recognize, however, that each participant values certain primary goods, including basic rights and liberties. These basic rights, which each person imagines anyone would need in order to pursue their particularized interests in civil society, include the “right to liberty, free speech, religious worship . . .”42 Despite the historical incompatibilities between the liberal conditions presupposed by Rawls’s original condition, and the early modern state structure, the radical ways in which Lear’s original condition departs from the liberal version is instructive for thinking about early modern moral personhood. Exiled into a pre-political, uncultivated mental and social environment, Lear in his madness, Edgar disguised as poor Tom, and Gloucester once blinded, all find themselves disconnected and clouded by a “veil of ignorance”, which prevents mutual recognition of physical and personal qualities. Lear, much as the participants in the original position, comes to understand the basic necessities that any person needs only when he is stripped of personal endowments. One fundamental difference is that the Rawlsian participants settle upon these basic necessities by undergoing a thought experiment, whereas Lear actually descends to a position that approximates a state of nature before he understands the importance of basic necessities such as shelter, food, and property. The other important difference between Lear’s and Rawls’s position on justice is that the Rawlsian participants in the original condition come to agree on basic necessities after undergoing rational choice optimizing. Each participant realizes that in order to put to use their particular endowments and talents—of which they are momentarily ignorant under the veil—they will require a baseline of certain rights. This feature is a departure from the Grotian natural law framework, where basic rights are essential components of the natural order of things, understandable through an exercise of right reason, rather than instrumental reason. One criticism frequently made against the original condition is that Rawls’s conception of moral personhood is too thin, that the self cannot so easily detach from its individual qualities and endowments in any rational

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choice situation; a related criticism is that it is not clear that under the veil of ignorance most rational choosers would agree on a basic set of primary goods. Michael Sandel writes, “This sort of objection would be likely to fix on the account of primary goods or some other aspect of the thin theory of the good and argue that it is biased in favor of particular conceptions of the good and against others. It might questions the thinness of the thin theory of the good, claiming that it undermines the fairness of the initial situation . . . that it is implicated too deeply in the contingent preferences of, say, Western liberal bourgeois life plans, and that the resulting principles are the product of prevailing values after all.”43 Lear shows that rather than intuit primary goods or the thin conception of the good, rather than assume (based on the autonomous exercise of reason) that there are fundamental necessities—life, wealth, freedom—which any rational individual would desire, other things being equal—Lear, Gloucester, and Edgar must learn what the most basic or primary goods are. Following from these experiences they derive some notion of a kingdom of ends, as expressed in their comments on redistribution. In relation to the three theories of justice discussed thus far—the Christian, Grotian, and Rawlsian—Lear’s comments on distribution share more with both the Grotian and Rawlsian models. But, as I have been suggesting, what sets the play apart from the Grotian and Rawlsian positions is its insistence that context-sensitive empathy, rather than perceptions of natural laws or rational choices, can mediate the dialectical relationship between rights and duties. What makes the ethical dimension so complex and unique is that the play seems to be constructing a theory of distributive justice that is more secular than the Christian theory, but less rationalistic than the natural law theories. In a recent book on natural law in English Renaissance literature, R.S. White acknowledges that Lear’s and Gloucester’s charitable gestures are shaped by their personal experiences of “need”: “It is one of the play’s starkest ironies that tenants, paupers, and beggars . . . are able to understand the basis of mutual aid in hardship, while kings, with all the resources at their disposal to eliminate poverty, cannot; that only need can recognise need, and, spurred by reason and conscience, try to meet it.”44 Since White argues for the triumph of the reasonableness of natural law (which he equates with natural goodness and benevolence) by the end of the play, he invokes “reason” in order to explain the motive force behind Lear’s and Gloucester’s thoughts on redistribution. White argues that Lear, having been educated to revise his early comment—“O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous”—by the end of the play has “entered a new ethical arena, where ‘need’ must be ‘reasoned’. . . . The lesson is one that can be learned by Lear only in extreme adversity,

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divested of his pomp and ceremony.”45 White tends to collapse a distinction between what he describes as Lear’s newly acquired rational ethic and what I have been describing as a sentimentalist ethic. There is no evidence that Lear’s enlightened reasonableness directs his sympathy; sympathy alone motivates his benevolence. While White suggests that Lear and Gloucester are redeemed once they acquire a reasonable understanding of natural law, my argument has been that the limitations of natural law create the conditions under which Lear and Gloucester acquire a nonrational, moral sense. My argument thus far has been that, through the influence of empathy, the play performs an immanent critique of the context-insensitivity of command morality and duteousness. From this critique the play derives a sense of natural entitlements, the very existence of which do not, or more normatively speaking, should not depend on contingent historical circumstances like the decline of absolutism and rise of bourgeois freedoms. The play takes seriously the possibility, however idealized, of the unreconstructed naturalness or givenness of natural rights. Here we can turn again to Giorgio Agamben, who makes the following suggestive remark on the historical emergence of natural rights: [What lies at the basis of national and “biopolitical” development and vocation of the modern state is] not man as a free and conscious political subject, but, above all, man’s bare life, the simple birth that as such is, in the passage from subject to citizen, invested with the principle of sovereignty. The fiction implicit here is that birth immediately becomes nation such that there can be no interval of separation [scarto] between the two terms. Rights are attributed to man (or originate in him) solely to the extent that man is the immediately vanishing ground (who must never come to light as such) of the citizen.46

Agamben’s point is that natural entitlements lose their very quality of naturalness when they become conflated with citizenship, when the historical “birth” of citizenship somehow has become so fused with natural entitlements that rights seem to follow from rather than precede the nation-state that theoretically holds them as sacrosanct. Agamben extends Hannah Arendt’s observation that the figure of the modern refugee points to the fundamentally constructed nature of a discourse of sacred and inalienable rights, which breaks down “at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other human qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human.”47 I would suggest that Lear offers a counternarrative to this position: Lear posits the indefeasible quality of basic goods and rights precisely at the moment that Lear becomes the play’s

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“refugee,” which in turn allows him to extrapolate the notion that any “bare life” deserves such basic goods both conceptually and temporally prior to being a subject, let alone citizen. The title of Arendt’s essay is “Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” It might seem appropriate, given what I have been arguing, that a transposition of Arendt’s title captures the political and ethical trajectory in Lear: “Decline of Absolutism and the Beginning of the Rights of Man.” This, however, would imply that the play allegorizes a particular narrative of the historical emergence of a discourse of rights. I would suggest, rather, that the play’s immanent critique of the limitations of command morality allows for Lear’s dispossession and his glimpse of the sanctity of basic human goods. At work in Lear is a counterfactual process of defetishization, similar to what we saw in The Merchant of Venice. Just as subjective value is not restricted to post-feudal modes of production, so the presence of natural entitlements should not be restricted to a particular historical discourse of rights promoted by an emerging nation-state. Although Lear shares some of the basic ethical viewpoints that one finds in the work of Grotius, Pufendorf, eighteenth-century moral sense theories, and even Rawls’s theory of justice, it would falsify the ethical project of the play to argue that Lear anticipates these philosophical doctrines. On the contrary: the play theorizes the manifestly non-transitional, i.e., nonhistorically specific existence of natural rights—or attempts to derive the existence of natural entitlements independent of any historically particular discourse of rights. One of the play’s hypotheses is that such entitlements are in potential articulation under the aspect of any philosophical position or concrete mode of production. The ethical thought-experiment in the play thus imagines the fulfillment, in Agamben’s terms, of Lear’s ethical potentiality through a gradual negation of his actuality, definable as the sum total of his personal and political effects.48

Lear Among the Marxists This focus on the play’s allegorization of a problem in the history of ideas clearly departs from the many materialist and Marxist readings that situate the play in the context of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In the following pages I offer a critique of the materialist interpretations of the play, and then discuss the appropriateness of thinking of the play in terms of Marx’s ideas about social justice. I then move to a discussion of the formal structure of the play in relation to the traditional Marxist interpretations and the play’s derivation of first principles of justice.

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As I noted in the introductory chapter, the foundational transitional readings generalized about feudal and capitalist values, and assigned characters to either camp according to sociopolitical allegiances. In Danby’s influential discussion of the play, Edmund embodies the acquisitive values of the new age of instrumental reason or “nascent capitalism,” and Lear’s reign is the “feudal state in decomposition. It is imperfect in its form and operation . . . but it pays nominal allegiance at least to Nature and Kindness. Of this Nature and Kindness Cordelia is the full realization.”49 One of the problems with Danby’s discussion of transitional ideologies is that he too often elides the spheres of intellectual and economic history (and omits a satisfactory account of the feudal economy). His characterization of the old feudal world as organic, cooperative, and governed by right reason does not capture the system of vassalage and tenure that served as the engine of the feudal economy. Danby’s argument is compelling when he argues that Lear is an “allegory of ethical systems,” but the organizing antinomy of such an ethical allegory—the old world of right reason and the new world of instrumental reason—does not correspond neatly to an opposition between “the old economy and the new business methods.”50 Halpern has improved upon such broadly transitional readings by integrating topical research with Marxist historiography. In a fascinating reading of the play, Halpern argues that Lear does not simply reflect broadly defined feudal values of right reason. Rather, Lear shares with King James the neo-feudal belief that property holdings are distinguishing marks of sovereignty. For Halpern, the cultural signs of feudalism, “honor,” “loyalty,” and “generosity,” are “implicated” in property ownership and James’s (and Lear’s) fundamentally materialist form or kingship. Quoting from the Trew Lawe, in which James argues that the “king is Dominus omnium bonorum and Dominus directus totius Dominii, the whole subjects being but his vassals, and from him holding all their lands as their over-lord,”51 Halpern suggests that the feudal theory of kingship, unlike the theory of the king’s two bodies, “envisions not a mysterious transmission of power but a legal transmission of property, with the king as little more than a particularly privileged landlord.”52 Halpern further suggests that James’s feudal conception of the state should be read as a “defense of absolutist principles directed against the growing power of the House of Commons,” ultimately leading to an “ideological battle between crown and Parliament” that “took place partly on feudal terrain, where the historical priority of each institution was debated.”53 Although Halpern acknowledges that Lear does not offer, in turn, an unqualified defense of absolutism, and “undercuts some of the pretensions of absolutism,”54 he concludes that the play “nevertheless shows

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no interest in siding with the only political institution capable of challenging royal authority. Lear’s critique of absolutism is, in the main, economic rather than political. . . . taking political in its most restricted sense—for Shakespeare is less interested in institutional battles for control of the state apparatus than he is in the ultimate constituents of class power.”55 Because Halpern restricts his discussion of Jacobean politics largely to James’s Trew Lawe, his conclusion that James’s “absolutism” (and Lear’s qualified absolutism) follows from a neo-feudal conception of property is a provocative, but partial estimation of James’s embrace of neo-feudalism. We can gain a slightly different perspective on James’s relationship to feudalism by looking at the parliamentary debates of 1604 and 1610. As early as the 1604 Parliament, the House of Lords began petitioning James to convene a discussion of feudal benefits that, according to Parliament, the Crown continued to enjoy at the expense of the subject’s liberties. Under the system of landholding in Anglo-Norman society, kings and lords distributed land to tenants in return for occasional services, including military assistance and personal services to the lord, or fixed services such as “socage,” payment of a money rent. When land was held in a family for long periods of time, the claims of lordship gradually diminished, but complications arose when the land changed hands within families. Feudal incidents describe the range of rights lords exercised during these points of succession.56 James enjoyed the benefit of a number of feudal incidents, mostly tied to landholdings. To give an example of the nature of the debates concerning feudal benefits, it will be helpful to consider the parliamentary grievance against wardship, James’s most lucrative feudal incident. When a tenant-in-chief died, the tenant’s heir, if of full age, was required to pay a fee to the king (“suing out one’s livery”) in order to maintain the new tenant’s hold on the land. If the heir was a minor, the king acquired the land and rights of the minor or “ward.” Through the Court of Wards and Liveries, formally established under Henry VIII, the king gained revenue by selling the land and, in some cases, the ward himself. The king also held the power to arrange the marriage of the ward, since, as Sir George Carew explained in defense of wardship, the king’s purpose was “to imitate and approach as neere as may be, the offices and duties of a natural father.”57 While earlier monarchs relied to some extent on the sale of wardship as a source of subsidiary income, James and Charles depended on such sales as among their principal sources of revenue. Not unexpectedly, Parliamentarians generated a list of grievances against the sale of wardships: the Crown monopolistically set land prices beyond actual worth; wards were unjustly separated from their families; and the processes of adjudicating cases of wardship were unduly expensive. Because James understood the unpopularity of wardships, he commissioned Robert Cecil, as early as

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1603, to establish what one historian has described as a “revolutionary change” in the sale of wardships by allowing tenants “to purchase during their own lifetime—as it were in advance—the wardships and marriages for their heirs.”58 But Parliament was not satisfied, and during the 1604 session, the Lords attempted to begin a discussion with James on wardship, among other feudal incidents, but James refused to hear their complaints. The Lords reintroduced the issue of tenures during the 1610 Parliament, offering a yearly payment to the Crown in exchange for the dismantling of the Court of Wardships and other feudal incidents. The treasurer responded that “touching the dependance upon tenures, such as, marriage, wardship, primier sessin, relief, respect of homage, and the like, which are only the burthens of Tenures . . . his majesty is pleased when he shall understand what recompence will be offered for them.”59 What follows, according to the parliamentary record, is a series of tedious monetary negotiations between the lords and the Crown, until James finally insisted on a price of 200,000 pounds for the abolition of the Court of wardships, as well as miscellaneous feudal incidents (excluding feudal tenures). According to one historian, James’s final asking price was sufficiently high that it “clear killed whatever chance might be left of the great contract being implemented.”60 The issue of wardships reflects well the pragmatic, business-like nature of Jacobean politics. James embraced anachronistic feudal incidents fundamentally because they contributed to the economic solvency of the Crown, and not primarily because they served as legitimating symbols of unconditional power. James took steps in 1603 and 1610 (by issuing Salisbury’s Instructions) to curtail the scope and corruption of the sale of wardships, and he was willing to relinquish most of his remaining feudal privileges for the right price. While James’s feudal conception of the king as landlord is expressed in the Trew Lawe in absolutist rhetoric, the Trew Lawe, written in 1595, does not reflect James’s purely fiscal relationship to feudalism in the settled state. Halpern has reformulated James’s mantra “No Bishop, No King,”61 into the phrase, “No Land, No King,” but it seems that the more fundamental, if less provocative, reformulation should simply be “No Money, No King,” as it suggests that James, in good mercantilist fashion, was potentially willing to trade the conventional signs and trappings of monarchical power for hard cash. Lear is, of course, preoccupied with the distribution of property, and Halpern argues convincingly that Lear’s neo-feudal conception of property is reminiscent of James’s. It is not clear, though, that the focus on property rights is part of the play’s larger inquiry into the nature of early modern absolutism, or the economic “constituents of class power.” We can begin to see from the controversy over feudal tenures that terms like royal “absolutism”

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do not capture the pragmatic course of Jacobean political negotiations. Furthermore, it would be difficult to find examples of such realpolitik at work in any of Lear’s comments in the play; indeed, one might argue that Goneril’s and Regan’s practical ethos approaches Jacobean pragmatism more so than Lear’s. Halpern’s shift away from the political toward the economic constituents of power in the period and play is salutary. I have been suggesting, though, that the play’s ethical inquiry supervenes over local political and economic allegories. This is not just a matter of shifting focus toward yet another topical current in the play, the ethical, as opposed to the political or economic; although the ethical allegory does not apologize for Lear’s behavior, it explains his behavior without assuming that he instantiates any contemporary ideological values, whether political absolutism or neo-feudal materialism. Here again the assumption is that the play’s principal allegory is of a theoretical, not practical nature. Materialist interpretations more frequently focus on tensions between the aristocracy and rising bourgeoisie rather than tensions between the state and Parliament. Drawing on Lawrence Stone’s account of the crisis of the aristocracy, Rosalie Colie points to a conflict in the play between an aristocratic ethos, defined by Stone as “one of voluntary service to the State, generous hospitality, clear class distinctions, social stability,” and “a paternalist and patronizing attitude towards economic dependents and inferiors.”62 Consistent with Danby’s less narrowly defined “two moralities,” Colie argues that the trials of Lear, Gloucester, and Kent reflect the decline of the aristocratic ethos that is threatened by the “falsity of a cowardly, braggart ‘new man,’ ” like Oswald.63 Halpern offers a more sophisticated rendering of Colie’s argument by noting the extent to which rising courtiers during the period, allegorized in the play by Oswald, attempt to legitimate their insecure class position by adopting the insubstantial signs rather than substance of aristocratic pedigree. Halpern writes, “Lacking a distinguished lineage, landed wealth, or military prowess, Oswald can only adopt the manners, gestures, bearing, and clothing of a gentleman: in short, the consumption-signs of aristocracy.”64 Neither Colie nor Halpern precisely defines the date of the historical emergence of the “new men” that are held to be allegorized in the play. As has been noted in the introductory chapter, Robert Brenner has argued that the long-term transition to capitalism was not the product of polarized opposition between an emergent bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy, but rather the product of structural change within the aristocratic classes as a whole, a change that reinforced aristocratic power. Given that one segment of the earliest agrarian capitalist class was fundamentally a newly empowered, rather than embattled landowning class, one that enjoyed state protection, we should be wary of reading Lear as an allegory of early modern

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class differentiation. It is true that, according to Brenner’s argument, property owners who did not respond to the new mode of production lost power and prestige, and faced a cultural crisis of legitimation in the terms outlined by Colie and Halpern. Yet, the sum total of these structural changes would demand a more complex allegorization than the Colie–Halpern argument allows. Since one segment of the aristocracy lost power, and one gained power, we should assume that the segment that gained power retained some of their so-called neo-feudal values, and in many cases incorporated such values into an emergent courtier ethos. If Lear offered a convincing allegory of these changes, one would expect that the “new men” like Oswald would share fundamental values or traits with Kent, rather than figure as stark foils to such loyal retainers; one would also expect to find some dramatization of the overlapping interests of these newly bourgeoisified aristocrats with the neo-feudal state itself. More problematic still is the fact that the true commercial presence in the early seventeenth century—the competitive merchant capitalists such as the Merchant Adventurers and East-India combine—are nowhere to be found in a play that supposedly allegorizes “the age of mining and merchant-venturing,” according to Danby.65 The scheming of an Edmund or the seeming frugality of Goneril are perhaps necessary conditions for a capitalist ethos, but they are clearly not sufficient conditions. Yet, it is true that a retainer like Oswald pursues a course of conduct so unlike Kent’s that one cannot help but see the two characters as foils; and one feels compelled to interpret Oswald’s self-seeking as informed by a sensibility that seems more modern than Kent’s outmoded selflessness. But, from a historical perspective, the difference between the two retainers becomes understandable in the context of the late thirteenth-century emergence of “bastard feudalism,” a crucially relevant historical phenomenon oddly neglected by Lear’s materialist critics. Bastard feudalism describes the practice, beginning as early as 1270, under Edward I, in which the traditional tenurial bond, the practice of a lord’s “allotting” a parcel of land to a vassal in return for military service, is replaced by or supplemented with the establishment of a personal, paid contract between the lord and retainer. Typically, the lord of a large household hired a number of liveried retainers to perform miscellaneous services, which might include serving as a witness to contracts, or simply contributing to domestic work. Many of these services were sufficiently corrupt—pressuring voters during parliamentary elections, for example—that the retainers often functioned more as mercenary thugs than honorable retainers.66 According to one welldocumented case in the years 1450-52, the retainers of the Duke of Norfolk were known to “ambush, assault, grievously wound, take prisoner, seize cattle and sheep, enter land forcibly and disseise occupants, and stir

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up an insurrection in the countryside.”67 There is evidence of similar crimes and mischief among retainers in the early sixteenth century, particularly highway and domestic robbery. As J.G Bellamy notes, There are references which show that the felon in the households and retinues of the magnates was not an infrequent problem. . . . What then are we to make of felons like James Ferrer who were to be found in the retinues and households of the upper classes? The answer must surely be that they were there to handle what are euphemistically called “heavy” duties. They probably served as their masters’ “enforcers,” whose threatening presences was called for when stubborn tenants had to be brought into line, when debts had to be collected, and when hostile witnesses and jurors had to be spoken to.68

If we recall Kent’s description of Oswald, the play seems to be allegorizing precisely this sort of mercenary retainer of bastard feudalism. Kent describes Oswald as a “superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave . . .” (2.2.16–19). Oswald carries out Goneril’s “heavy duties” in a manner that approximates the bastard-feudal retainer’s conduct described in the above passage. Oswald does reflect the emergence of a new sort of retainer, but given that such a figure emerges in the late Middle Ages, we risk anachronism when we describe him as newly emergent Renaissance courtier.

Marxism and Justice While Colie’s and Halpern’s interpretations might be described as top-down, as the decline of a feudal aristocracy and rise of bourgeois elements frame much of their interpretations, a more radical, bottom-up form of criticism reads the play as an allegory of lower-class critiques of property rights. Walter Cohen situates his interpretation of Lear’s and Gloucester’s comments on distribution in the context of seventeenthcentury sectarianism: “An important historical precedent for Lear’s social insight was the ‘backward-looking and idealized communism,’ that, according to Christopher Hill, the lower classes of Tudor England opposed to feudalism and capitalism alike.” 69 Arnold Kettle writes that Lear’s “direct personal contact with ruling-class inhumanity leads him to question the validity of property itself and the authority and exemption from elementary human moral values it confers.”70

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While not all of the radicalist readings are Marxist in affiliation, the use of terms like “communism,” and the notion that Lear questions the “validity of personal property,” suggest that the play endorses the equalization or abolition of property ownership entirely. These readings seem to elide distinctions between a just distribution of property and the abolition of property altogether. Kronenfeld has already criticized the radical interpretations by noting that the play’s comments on redistribution reflect the exhortations to charity one would find in standard conduct books during the period. As a supplement to her work, I would like to consider how Marx might have interpreted the play’s comments on distributive justice. In order to understand Marx’s notions of distribution we need to understand his ideas on rights. In On the Jewish Question, Marx writes that the rights of man as expressed in the American Constitution and French Declarations of 1789 and 1793 are “nothing but the rights of a member of civil society, i.e. the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community.”71 This sort of critique is expressed more boldly in The Holy Family: “The recognition of the rights by the modern state has no other meaning than the recognition of slavery by the state of antiquity had.’ ” 72 For Marx, talk of justice and rights was “ideological nonsense” because a discourse of rights legitimates an agonistic conception of society, one in which individuals treat each another as discrete monads in search of protection from claims against their person and property. To redistribute wealth because each individual deserves his or her share is not a remedy for social injustice: redistributive practices do not transform society in such a way that a harmony of interests among men will result in the supersession of justice entirely: “After labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety . . . .”73 As one commentator writes, Marx’s ideal of social life is one “in which each member finds his satisfaction by offering his product to others, for criticism and appreciation.”74 These comments suggest that the rhetoric of redistribution in Lear will not meet the criteria of Marx’s ideal of social life, in which juridical concepts of justice and rights are unnecessary. In fact, the brief emergence of something approaching a hybridized natural rights and sentimentalist justification of fair distribution is not reprised in the play, and is displaced by a purely meritocratic, hierarchical system of civil rights. Kent claims that Lear erroneously gave Cordelia’s “dear rights / To his dog-hearted daughters” (4.3.44–45), and Cordelia remarks, “No blown ambition doth our arms incite, / But love, dear love, and our aged father’s right” (4.4.27–28). Albany’s closing speech reaffirms the meritocratic system of civil rights

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when he suggests to Edgar and Kent, “For us, we will resign, / During the life of this old Majesty, / To him our absolute power: [to Edgar and Kent] you to / your rights, / With boot and such addition as your honors / Have more than merited” (5.3.2997–303). It is true that any reference to natural rights is not appropriate during this closing scene of political restoration. But such a mention of the “rights” of Kent and Gloucester seems to be gratuitous and compensatory, as if the play’s final turn toward meritocracy attempts to press back into the realm of the unimaginable the awareness of natural rights that is briefly glimpsed by Lear on the heath. But, by force of contrast, this radical departure from the egalitarianism of the middle sections of the play makes the earlier invocation of the basic necessities of the poor all the more memorable, the absence of such an invocation all the more conspicuous.

Tragic Function, Tragic Character Tragedy has often been described as a ritual of containment. René Girard argues, for example, that by sacrificing the protagonist, tragedies “quell violence within the community and prevent violence from erupting.”75 Although Girard emphasizes the violent agon chronicled in tragedy, his model is consistent with Tillyard’s and Ribner’s belief that tragedy reaffirms sacred, natural and social concordances.76 The reactionary nature of tragedy is underscored in recent reinterpretations of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, according to which the protagonist’s error in judgment and hamartia need to be cleansed before his ethos or character-type can adequately reflect the communal ethos of the polis.77 Such views of the reactionary function of tragedy implicitly come under attack in the materialist and radicalized accounts of tragedy one can find in the work of, among other cultural materialists, Franco Moretti and Dollimore. Morretti argues that, far from consolidating power, tragedy performs a task of “radical dissolution” by disentitling the “monarch to all ethical and rational legitimation.”78 We have encountered a more expansive version of this argument earlier in Dollimore’s belief that tragedy articulates the late Elizabethan and Jacobean crisis of order by offering a “critique of ideology, the demystification of political and power relations, and the decentering of ‘man.’ ” 79 The aim of this chapter has been to situate Lear in the history of ideas without making recourse to oversimplified reflective or mediational models of interpretation. I have retained the focus on tragic scapegoating, but have suggested that Lear’s sacrifice can be explained on a metaethical

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level: the text’s resolution of the internal ambiguities of command morality require and set in motion Lear’s so-called hamartia, degradation, and eventual anagnorisis. The assumption here is that there is at least one coherent design to the play, even if, as pluralist readings argue, there is no single, overarching order in the play. This argument does assume that, on the metaethical level, Lear expresses, in modified form, Aristotle’s dictum that character emerges from plot. The plot in turn (or at least one current in the plot) issues from a local problem in intellectual history, rather than from, as in Aristotle’s scheme, the imitable conduct of virtuous and vicious men. Thus, rather than think of the instrumental reason of Goneril, Regan, and Edmund in relation to the early modern history of class conflict, one might think of such instrumental reason in relation to the structural logic and totality of the play. The precipitating cause of the turmoil faced by Lear and his fellows is not the willfulness or vice of any particular character, but rather the inefficiencies of the moral system that directs and evaluates the conduct of all of the characters. The play is as concerned with weighing the circumstances that make possible the conduct of a Goneril or a Regan as it is with evaluating their conduct according to an intuitive scale of good and evil. The play offers, in turn, a reformulated theory of justice—in which duties, rights, and affections are interlinked—through the dramatization of the dispossession and education of Lear. Rather than think of this process as reflecting the redemption of Lear, we might think of it more abstractly as the “redemption” of the ethical system whose reformulation is enabled by the dispossession and education of Lear—an example of a theory that reflects its own derivation in practice. Since a dispossessed king is a powerful vehicle by which to reflect the main thrust of the reformulated theory, the instrumental reason of a Goneril and Regan should be seen as integral steps that set in motion Lear’s education and the play’s derivation of first principles of justice. It may be instructive to think of this process by returning finally to Rawls’s original condition. For Rawls, the original condition is entered into by instrumentally rational agents, those who desire to establish a list of basic, inalienable goods that will help them pursue a plurality of mutually disinterested ends once in civil society. Lear’s rational agents, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund, are not the deliberants in the original condition as they would be in Rawls’s theory, but the means by which Lear (and to a lesser extent Gloucester) enters into the original condition on the heath. It is as if the seeming “modern” elements in the play (Regan, Goneril, and Edmund) are instrumental in undermining instrumentality as such, as if their early decisions initiate a series of events that culminate in egalitarian principles of justice. The so-called proto-capitalists are thus rationally free,

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but from the perspective of the trajectory of the play’s ethical allegory, functionally constrained. But then what of the role of pity, fear, and catharsis in such a rendering of the tragic elements of the play? By eliminating psychic causes and personal motives grounding the action of the characters, I seem to be treating characters solely as functions, thereby mitigating or even nullifying the affective dimensions of the conventions of tragedy. However, if we recall the distinction between ethics and metaethics, we can see that the distinction between “character issuing from action” and “action issuing from character” is a false one. Characters are subject to identification and judgment on the ethical level, on the level of psychological realism. When we think of the play on a metaethical level, that is, in relation to the history of moral theory, characters serve in functional roles to allegorically mediate philosophical and theological doctrine. The two modes of analysis meet at the point where functional and historical analyses help to explain (but not excuse) the conduct of the characters. The pity we extend toward Cordelia and Lear, the revulsion we direct at Goneril and Regan, are sentiments directed at ethical agents in imaginable, conflictive situations. To take note of the limitations inherent in the system of ethics that is depicted in the play is to recognize simply that a flexible moral system would more efficiently shape conduct.

Chapter 5 “Damnéd Custom . . . Habits Devil”: Hamlet’s Part-Whole Fallacy and the Early Modern Philosophy of Mind While there are a number of recent Marxist and class-based transitional interpretations of Hamlet, most transitional readings focus on Hamlet’s radical inwardness as the distinctively philosophical, “modern” element in the play. In this final chapter, I argue that Hamlet is a radical behaviorist rather than radical innatist or precursor of Cartesian dualism.1 What shapes Hamlet’s behaviorism is the early modern assimilation of the Augustinian theory of the ineradicability of vicious habits (consuetudines), a theory that, in its extreme Conformist and Puritan strains, mutated into a holistic theory of sin, according to which an inveterate evil habit was considered a sin unto itself, superadded to the individual sins that comprised the offending habit. Hamlet’s theological construal of habituation helps both to explain his irresolution (his preoccupation with habits and patterns of sin rather than discrete sins allows him to submerge in his mind at key moments the murder of his father) and to explain his sense that personal identity or subjective states are identical with customary behavioral dispositions. Because he reifies and objectifies habits, Hamlet imagines persons to be constituted by behavior, custom, and dispositional states all the way down, so that they are unendowed with what Derek Parfit would describe as any further facts to their psychological identity, such as disembodied minds or thoughts.2 I argue that part of the reason that critics have assumed that Hamlet is preoccupied with inspecting the contents of his private self is that they typically mistake the obsession shown by Hamlet’s peers in the play to “pluck out” Hamlet’s “mystery” for what is usually described as Hamlet’s own inner gaze. Critics have conflated the third-person statements about

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Hamlet’s mental states with Hamlet’s first-person reports, reports that aim to understand the role of behavior, habit, and custom in knowing and acting, rather than to explore any Cartesian theater of the mind. I suggest that for most of the play Hamlet is a radical “Rylean” behaviorist, inasmuch as he believes mental phenomena and predicates gain meaning only when they are identified in a one-to-one relationship with behavioral predicates. To describe Hamlet as a radical behaviorist, rather than precocious Cartesian-dualist, suggests that he shares much with but, importantly, does not simply reflect early modern, Reformed views on sinful habituation. While most contemporary theologians follow Augustine in arguing that repetitive sinful conduct might lead to a nearly irreversible habit of sin, few suggest, as Hamlet does, that intentional states are reducible to habitual dispositions. Hamlet’s exaggerated, tendency to strictly equate habits and intentions thus places him outside the theological contexts on which much of his views on habitual sin are based. I hope to show that the very fact of Hamlet’s manipulation and misinterpretation of this prevailing early modern position on sinful habituation sets his conduct apart from that of the other Shakespearean principals discussed in the previous chapters. In each chapter, we have seen that Shakespeare’s protagonists “actantially” serve to disclose, at times resolve, whatever functional contradictions are allegorized in a particular play. Hamlet, however, does not function in kind, since he brings a complexity to a prevailing early modern world view that is not internally irrational or contradictory. I argue that this characterological “freedom” in respect of the play’s historical (theological) allegory is what makes Hamlet seem more like a novelistic protagonist rather than dramatic type. To the extent, then, that Hamlet is at all “modern,” his modernism does not lie in the particular ideological content of his world view. It lies simply in Hamlet’s characterological “autonomy” with respect to his exegesis of the theological presuppositions that frame his conduct.

Hamlet’s Behaviorism In an exemplary innatist reading of Hamlet, A.P. Rossiter describes Hamlet as “the first modern man,” and argues that the most important Renaissance philosophy connected with Hamlet “was the skepticism of Montaigne . . . which set men’s minds to the discovery of what in this mutable world was enduring and stable, and whose method led to Descartes, whose method of doubt is the foundation of all our modern scientific theories about man.”3 Rossiter is not entirely clear on the relevance of Montaigne and Descartes to the play, but he sounds loosely Cartesian-dualist when he suggests that

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the play expresses a conflict between “mind-sense (the sense of our own being, in the mind) and the self-sense of ourselves as agents in a world of things outside the mind,” and that the play’s “dilemma is concerned with the mind’s experiences of itself as a mind, supposed unitary, in contact with its experiences of a world perhaps also unitary, but certainly assumed to be other than the mind experiencing it.”4 He sounds more dualistic when he suggests that Hamlet is a “thing of mind and mechanism.”5 Recent criticism has supported Rossiter’s claims. Regarding Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia, William Kerrigan writes, “The author of the letter . . . wants above all to be believed. He really loves; his oath can be trusted. The letter seeks to fuse these truths, but in laying doubts to rest Hamlet simultaneously, like Descartes with his cogito, raises them.”6 Employing a more postmodern vocabulary, Francis Barker argues that in telling the Queen, “But I have that within that passes show,” Hamlet “asserts against the devices of the world an essential interiority . . . an I, which if it encounters the world in anything more than a quizzical and contemplative manner, must alienate itself into the environment which inevitably traduces the richness of its subject by its mute and resistant externality.”7 For Barker, though, Hamlet is still a “transitional,” contradictory text, for while the play gestures toward a private place of subjectivity, “at the centre of Hamlet, in the interior of his mystery, there is in short, nothing.”8 Terry Eagleton, too, sees Hamlet as a symptomatically bourgeois-individualist text: “Hamlet is a radically transitional figure, strung out between a traditional social order to which he is marginal, and a future epoch of achieved bourgeois individualism.”9 Other critics have more freely celebrated these transitional features of the play, particularly its preoccupation with inner worlds. For Lena Ashwell, Hamlet reveals, “Man is no longer the miserable worm of the old Catholicism or slave of the ancient Feudalism, but freed by the Renaissance, trying the newly-fledged wings, both wings of Reason, the intuitive and the intellectual, the deductive and the inductive, perceiving at last both the subjective and the objective, the worlds within as well as the worlds without . . .”10 In some earlier, more radical interpretations, the objective realm drops out entirely, and Hamlet is described as a radical skeptic. Santayana writes: “Had Hamlet tried to justify his temperament by expressing it in a philosophy, he would have been an idealist. He would have said that events were only occasions for exercising the spirit; they were nothing but imagined situations meant to elicit a certain play of mind.”11 Ivan Turgenev offers a less Berkleyean, but no less radical account of Hamlet’s skepticism: “Hamlet is, beyond all things else, analysis and egoism, skepticism personified. He lives only to himself. He is an egoist, and as such can have no faith in himself; for no man can have faith save in that which is outside self and above self.”12

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It is difficult to know exactly which speeches the critics cited above have in mind when they offer their impressionistic “inwardist” readings of the play, but most contemporary discussions of Hamlet’s supposed belief in a division between internal and external realms refer to Hamlet’s first extended comment on the death of his father. During the opening ceremony, the Queen asks Hamlet, “Why seems it so particular with thee” (1.2.74–75), to which Hamlet responds, “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’/ ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, / Nor customary suits of solemn black . . . That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, / For they are actions that a man might play, / But I have that within which passeth show” (1.2.74–88).13 For Katharine Eisaman Maus the passage shows a “hiatus between signs (“trappings and suits”) and what they signify (“that within”).14 For Anne Ferry the passage sets up an “organizing distinction” between “is” and “seems,” and reflects the existence of an “inner life” or “real self.”15 I would like to take a close look at this exchange, for while most commentators concentrate on Hamlet’s response to his mother, they pass over the important dialogue that precedes the speech. There the Queen informs Hamlet that “Thou know’st ‘tis common, all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity,” to which Hamlet says, “Ay madam, it is common”; then the Queen asks him, “Why seems it so particular with thee?” to which Hamlet responds, “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’ ” (1.2.72–76). What has happened between these lines is that the referent of “common” in Hamlet’s comment is no longer equivalent to the referent of “particular” in the Queen’s question. The “it” Hamlet describes as “common” clearly refers to the belief, which the Queen has just advanced, that “all that lives must die.” But the Queen’s comment can be understood in two sharply different ways. If she is using “it” as a pronoun for “all that lives must die” then her question can be paraphrased as, “Why, Hamlet, given the fact that all that lives must die, does your father’s death seem to you to be a particular or exceptional occurrence?” But if the Queen’s use of “it” refers not to “all that lives must die,” but rather to Hamlet’s behavioral responses to his father’s death and the entire ceremony and context, her question can be much differently paraphrased as, “It is common for most people to respond to death after a certain fashion, but your behavior, Hamlet, seems particular, idiosyncratic. Why?” In the light of Hamlet’s next comment (“Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems,’ ”) and his ensuing speech, the former paraphrase loses sense, for if the “it” refers throughout the exchange to a common or uncommon fact about death, then Hamlet’s next remark (“it is. I know not seems”) would mean that his father’s death is exceptional rather than seems exceptional, which is a statement about an external event, one that has little to do with Hamlet’s

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preoccupation with how he himself “seems” relative to how he himself “is.” The latter paraphrase is more meaningful, because it establishes that the “it” in the Queen’s question refers to Hamlet’s dejected condition and his behavioral response to his father’s untimely death. This detail may seem tedious, but it makes all the difference in correctly interpreting what follows, for when Hamlet describes this “it,” or his behavior, as something that does not seem, but is, he is not implying a necessary chasm between “is” and “seems,” or any hiatus between signifier and signified. Rather, Hamlet is suggesting that how he “is” is equivalent to how others think he “seems,” and that his particular behavior, which has been duly witnessed by the observing court, should not at be construed as false “seeming.” But then how to account for Hamlet’s next comment that custom and behavior cannot “denote” him truly, that he has that “within which passeth show?” Hamlet begins the remark with, “Tis not alone my inky cloak . . . That can denote me truly,” which suggests, given the force of “alone,” that Hamlet believes not that “being” is set rigidly against “seeming,” but that the two states supplement each other. He does not say that being is more true or valid than seeming; he says only that a person can be a certain way in addition to seeming a certain way. Maus passes over this important distinction in her brief comment on Hamlet’s speech. Maus writes, “For Hamlet, the internal experience surpasses the visible—its validity is unimpeachable. The exterior, by contrast, is partial, misleading falsifiable, unsubstantial.”16 Maus recognizes in her use of “partial” the importance of “alone” in Hamlet’s speech. She then equates “partial,” however, with three adjectives similar in meaning to each other, but not implied by the more neutral-sounding “partial” itself. Hamlet suggests that behavior is a partial record of his turmoil; he does not suggest that it is misleading, unsubstantial, or falsifiable. More important, a distinction should be drawn when interpreting these lines between propositional attitudes and propositional objects and contents. A propositional attitude is an intentional stance or mode of apprehending the world, while the propositional object refers to whatever particulars are intended by that attitude. While Hamlet clearly draws a distinction between a propositional attitude and an existential mode of being—“I act” and “I am”—he does not then claim that how he acts and how he is are not identical states. Hamlet’s remarks suggest that there can always be a one-to-one or parallel connection between a certain behavioral event and a certain psychological event, even though acting and being would be two templates that comprehend the same event. How else can we reconcile Hamlet’s suggestion just prior to the speech that his “seeming” behavior “is” and his sense that seeming and being are two separate modes of experience? And, looking forward a bit, why would Hamlet ecstatically announce

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to Horatio, on the subject of the King’s guilt, “unkenneled” during the Mousetrap, that “we will both our judgments join in censure of his seeming,” if he believes that “seeming” is usually nothing more than shamming? If Hamlet is indeed suggesting that how he feels is remarkably different from how he acts, then we would have to assume that his dejection and “obstinate condolement” (1.2.93) are disingenuous, which is at least intuitively false, given the “too, too sullied flesh” (1.2.129–159) soliloquy that follows. What Hamlet does keep private is his suspicion about the murder, but that suspicion is a psychological state experienced in addition to or over and above the dejected behavioral state, not the true internal version of the false external manner. Again, Hamlet’s use of the particle “alone” justifies this distinction, for he saying that he “is” more than what his behavior might suggest, and that “more” might be located within, although even here it is only incidentally true that “more” is something different from the behavioral state. What all this suggests is that the force of “within” loses a lot of its radical bite (historically speaking), for if in many cases the within and the without are identical, and the within is something often just added to the without, then the mystery requires very little plucking in order to be discovered. Before looking at what I take to be Hamlet’s true obsession in the play, his theological understanding of “habit” (which contributes to his radical behaviorism, rather than radical innatism), it is worth noting that the “to be or not to be” speech is not necessarily a speech about Hamlet’s subjective world either. When Hamlet famously asks, “to be or not to be,” that is the question, Whether ‘tis nobler . . .” (3.1.57–58), the query is not specifically concerned with Hamlet’s reversion to an inner state or essential interiority; nor does it suggest that Hamlet’s mind is a mirror to the world, subject to self-inspection. Hamlet’s question is a question about his existence as an object among other objects in the world. To question one’s existence does not entail apprehending or exploring one’s mysterious interiority, or even seeing oneself as an isolable subject, alienated from the objective realm. If Hamlet had immediately followed, “tis nobler” with for any of us to. . . .” the sense of his query would not have changed, although with this modification (as egregious as it is), it would become more clear that his question is not at all about subjectivity and the closed world of his ego, or about any breach he intuits between external and internal reality. Ernst Tugendhat offers this gloss on the very un-Cartesian nature of the query: “It is a question that is obviously not theoretical. Someone who poses it is not asking whether something can be asserted, that is, whether it (he himself ) is or is not, or more precisely, will or will not be. On the contrary, this question concerns the issue of whether the questioner says yes or no in a practical sense to the being that impends at every moment.”17

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I will return to some more of Hamlet’s inward-seeming speeches later, but here I want to consider the many third-person reports on the status of Hamlet’s private thoughts. Claudius advises Rosencranz and Guildenstern to observe Hamlet and “to gather / So much as from occasion you may glean, / Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus, / That opened lies within our remedy” (2.1.14–18). Polonius later tells Claudius that he will “find / Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed / Within the center” (2.2.157–159). Hamlet recognizes that Guildenstern is determined to draw out his inner convictions: “You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery . . .” (3.2.350–353). Ophelia describes Hamlet as the “observed of all observers” (3.1.152–153). We should note that Hamlet too seeks to unfold the mystery of his peer’s mental contents. He tells Guildenstern: “You were sent for, and there is a kind of confession in your looks, / which your modesties have not craft enough to color” (2.2.275–277). And of course Hamlet is determined to “unkennel” Claudius’s “occulted guilt” (3.2.77). Because, as I argue below, Hamlet is more concerned in his monologues with habit, custom, and behaviorism than he is any ghost in the machine, I think that these third-person reports about Hamlet usually give the impression that he is preoccupied with his inner world. But while these passages suggest that everyone seeks the contents of everyone else’s mind, they do not suggest that anyone in particular seeks the contents of his or her own mind. Critics perhaps have been too ready to infer from Hamlet’s sense that Guildenstern and the others attempt to access his mystery that (1) Hamlet himself believes he has a mystery to be accessed and (2) if he does, he reflects on that mystery or cares at all to interpret it. Ordinarily, in the history of the philosophy of mind, the “problem of other minds” follows naturally from the belief that mental states are incorrigible and accessible only to the subject of those states. These passages do not suggest that the problem of other minds is a consequence of incorrigible subjectivity, although they do raise the possibility that the problem of other minds is antecedent to the discovery of private states. It is also worth noting that there is nothing specifically Cartesian and dualistic in any of the above passages. To recognize that inward states exist is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Cartesianism. Cartesianism fundamentally posits two different substances, non-extended spiritual mind, and extended bodily matter governed by mechanical laws. Because Descartes had separated minds from bodies, much of later seventeenthcentury philosophy was devoted to explaining the interaction between the two substances in terms of parallelism or occasionalism and Godly intervention. And once Descartes separated mind from body radical, rather than methodological skepticism ensued, since the contents of one’s own mind

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were considered introspectible and private, while the contents of another’s mind were considered more opaque. It would be a misinterpretation of any of the passages mentioned so far to suggest that they anticipate this kind of radical dualism. We can turn now to Hamlet’s early comments to Horatio and the nature of custom in order to establish what in particular is idiosyncratic about Hamlet’s world view. After explaining to Horatio that Denmark’s revel-filled customs are more “honored in the breach than the observance” (1.4.16), because they shame Denmark in the view of other nations, Hamlet suggests that just as the custom “takes / From our achievements, though performed at height, / The pith and marrow of our attribute. So oft it chances in particular men / That for some vicious mole of nature in them . . . By the o’ergrowth of some complexion . . . Or by some habit that too much o’erleavens / The form of plausive manners—that these men . . . Shall in the general censure take corruption / From that particular fault” (1.4.15–38). In this extended simile, Hamlet draws a comparison between the acquired custom or tradition that has besmeared Denmark’s reputation and the inner, inherited defect that, having been manifested and become habitual, is accounted by third-person reports as the defining feature of a particular individual. In the full analogy Hamlet is suggesting that imprudent custom is to the pith and marrow of Denmark’s “attribute” as some single defect or “complexion” is to an individual’s otherwise virtuous character. Hamlet’s logic is perplexing: he compares an “acquired” tradition or custom with a behavioral disposition that is described as an inherited and unchangeable defect of nature. For Hamlet’s standpoint to gain sense he must be making one of two assumptions: either acquired tradition and custom are like inner defects because they are both unchangeable, or inner defect is not really an inherited quality but rather like custom and tradition, which would be “more honored in the breach than in the observance” (1.4.16). Since Hamlet describes the “vicious mole” as “nature’s livery,” an unchosen “origin,” it seems to be the former rather than latter connection that holds the analogy together. What the speech establishes, I think, is Hamlet’s preoccupation with habit, custom, and behavioral traits, particularly his sense that habits can overburden to such an extent that they can become naturalized deformities. Hamlet’s revulsion at habit and custom shows more clearly during the closet scene, after he mistakenly kills Polonius and then scolds his mother for her untimely liaison with Claudius. Hamlet advises his mother to stop wringing her hands because he will wring her heart, “if it be made of penetrable stuff, / If damned custom have not brazed it so / That it proof and bulwark against sense” (3.4.35–39). He then importunes her to confess herself to heaven, for otherwise she will “spread the compost on the weeds / To

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make them ranker,” and then Hamlet exclaims, “Assume a virtue, if you have it not. / That monster custom, who all sense doth eat, / Of habits devil, is angel yet in this . . . Refrain to-night, / And that shall lend a kind of easiness / To the next abstinence; the next more easy; / For use almost can change the stamp of nature” (3.4.160–165). Why is Hamlet so unwavering in his belief that the Queen and his uncle have acquired a firm disposition toward evil? Why is he is so sure of their inclination toward habitual sin, beyond his knowledge of the one sinful act? His moralizing is generic rather than specific, since his belief that one unrepented sin is enough to “spread the compost on the weeds / To make them ranker” is expressed as a belief and hypothesis rather than an inference based on evidence. Beyond the simple fact of their cohabitation since the murder, how have the Queen and Hamlet’s uncle shown evidence of the kind of steady degeneration toward evil that Hamlet describes during the bedroom scene? Hamlet’s remarks on habit and custom can be better understood if we consider that he is echoing a conventional Augustinian obsession with habit or consuetudo, which is taken up in the seventeenth century by writers and theologians such as Jeremy Taylor and Richard Baxter. A brief detour into the Augustinian tradition will bear out the relevance of this historical and theological context. Throughout the Manichaean controversy, when he was “more Pelagian than Pelagius,”18 Augustine found it difficult to reconcile his notion of absolute self-determination with his belief that compulsory evil could bind the human will. He eventually began to explain the nature of evil in psychological terms, invoking consuetudo, or habit, to explain the permanence of habitual, repetitive evil in the soul of the impenitent sinner. For the older Augustine, habitual sin stubbornly insinuated itself into the inner life of the sinner until it became second-nature. For Augustine’s opponent, Pelagius, in contrast, habits were insidious, but not intractable, and the sinner could shed internalized evil by means of baptism, conversion, and ascetic discipline. In his Commentary on Romans 7:17–18 Pelagius writes: “Before [sin] became a habit, therefore I did it willingly . . . It lives as a guest and as one thing in another, not as one single thing; in other words, as an accidental quality, not a natural one.”19 For Pelagius, a sinful habit could arraign the will, but only as “some threadbare outer garment,” always subject to disabusal.20 Peter Brown sums up the main lines of the controversy: “for Augustine, habit established itself in profound, unconscious layers of the personality: it worked, he thought, like the tendencies of the reformed drunkard toward alcoholism; it betrayed itself—as it would betray itself for Freud—even by so innocent a phenomenon as a slip of the tongue. . . . for Pelagius, by contrast . . . habit remained essentially external to the personality: it was a rust, a rust that could be rubbed off.”21

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In the Confessions, Augustine describes the force of habit as a permanent chain or addiction: “My enemy held my will in his power and from it he had made a chain and shackled me. For my will was perverse and lust had grown from it, and when I gave in to lust habit was born, and when I did not resist habit it became a necessity.”22 He describes his divided will as a “disease of the mind, which does not wholly rise to the heights where it is lifted by the truth, because it is weighed down by habit.”23 In his discussion of the irreversibility of habit in Libero Arbitrio he suggests, “even when we see what is right and will to do it, we cannot do it because of the resistance of carnal habit, which develops almost naturally because of the unruliness of our mortal inheritance.”24 Writing in the early decades of the seventeenth century, William Ames remarks that customary sins, “old through daily multiplication, beget an evil habit.” Thomas Goodwin describes the process of sinful habituation as a mysterious transformation: “every sin in us, by a miraculous multiplication, inclines our nature more to every sin than it was before . . .”25 In his Commentarie on The Epistle to the Galatians, Willam Perkins elaborates the insidiousness of sinful habituation, drawing no fundamental distinction between the enormity of a single sin and many smaller sins: “we are admonished to take heed of every sinne for there is so sinne so small but hath his waight, and such a waight, as will presse downe to the bottomlesse pit . . . and though some bee greater than other, and sinke a man deeper into condemnation, yet many small sinnes will as easily condemne, as a few great, like as sands, though but small in quantity, yet being many in numbers, will as soone sinke the ship, as if it were laden with the greatest burden.”26 And Sir Thomas Browne warns, “bad habits must undermine good, and often repeated acts make us habitually evil; so that by gradual depravations, and while we are but staggeringly evil, we are not left without Parentheses of considerations, thoughtful rebukes, and merciful interventions, to recall us unto ourselves.”27 The theological focus on the relationship between habit and sin reaches a high point later in the century, with Jeremy Taylor’s Unum Necessarium. Taylor sounds Hamlet-like when he describes sin as infectious and overspreading, as something that, if not immediately repented of, can easily transmute into a vicious habit. For Taylor, a habit is a sin unto itself, “a proper guiltiness of its own,” added to the individual sins that comprise the composite sinful habit: “For every man is bound to repent instantly of every known sin; he sins anew if he does not, though he add no more of the same actions to his heap. But it is much worse if he sins on; not only because he sins oftener, but because if he contracts a custom or habit of sin, he superadds a state of evil to himself, distinct from the guilt of all those single actions which made the habit.”28 Richard Baxter expresses a similar concern that vicious habits are more

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corrupting than sinful acts: “The great duties and the great sins are those of the heart. There is the root of good and evil. . . . The inward habit of sin is a second nature: and a sinful nature is worse than a sinful act.”29 The seventeenth-century obsession with the relations of habit to sin (and particularly the theological nicety that a vicious habit is a sin unto itself, added to the single sins that make up the habit) supports a kind of theological holism which suggests that the evil sum is different from and worse than its evil parts. If we believe that Hamlet has assimilated this Augustinian understanding of consuetudo, we can perhaps more readily understand his famous delay.30 Since Hamlet has internalized the logic of consuetudo, the force and specificity of the “original,” unpardonable sin, the murder of his father, becomes submerged under a higher-order preoccupation with the newly objectified sinful habit that he ascribes to his mother and uncle. One of the reasons that Hamlet expends so much energy convincing his mother to forswear his uncle’s bed and practice abstinence (“for use almost can change the stamp of nature”), is that he is as offended by the idea of imperturbable sin as a theological abstraction as he is the corrupt act. The insidious nature of consuetudo is momentarily apprehended by the Queen herself, for she will later intuit the force of Hamlet’s admonition, or at least the theological commonplace that sins beget more sins: “To my sick soul (as sin’s true nature is) / Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss (4.5.17–19). E.K. Chambers is one of many critics who have noted Hamlet’s preoccupation with universals: “the interest of the universal, not of the particular, is always dominant with Hamlet; not his mother’s sin but the frailty of woman, is his natural theme.”31 Chambers seems to have only half understood Hamlet’s view on the relationship between parts and wholes—it is not that the nature of women supersedes a concern with the nature of sin, but that the nature of sinful habits outweighs a concern with the nature of sinful acts.32 It is a curious phenomenon that critics have frequently used the term habit to describe Hamlet’s so-called habit of thinking without discussing Hamlet’s thinking about habit. Bradley writes that it is Hamlet’s “one-sided nature, strengthened by habit . . . and years of speculative action” that explains his irresolution. J.C. Bucknill suggests that for Hamlet “the habit of putting desires into action had never been formed.” Hazlitt comments that Hamlet’s “habitual principles of action are unhinged . . .”33 Dr. Maudsley writes that Hamlet’s “reflective indecision” is a stage an individual undergoes before he can acquire “by exercise a habit of willing.”34 Rev. C.E. Moberly notes, “Hamlet’s grief is increased by his mental habit of seeing all that goes on around him under the form of reflection.”35 This critical preoccupation with Hamlet’s habits would be understandable if each critic were responding to Hamlet’s settled dispositions, but there is no

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governing logic connecting all the different points about all of Hamlet’s supposedly different habits. In fact, an alternative school of thought, call it the Brecht school, argues that Hamlet plays too many contradictory roles in the play, that he suffers a “personality diffusion”36—a critical stance not easily compatible with one that finds in Hamlet so many habitual patterns of thought. Given that the term habit is spoken as many times as it is in the play, and given the historical context I have outlined, one begins to think that the critical heritage has confused Hamlet’s views on habit with Hamlet’s habits. This may be worth more than academic speculation, for if one exaggerates Hamlet’s paralyzing habits of mind, one uncritically explains away his delay, which I have suggested can be understood partly as a consequence of his keen sensitivity to the philosophy of habitual sin. Hamlet’s revulsion at habit and dispositional behavior does not only manifest itself in his theologically inspired utterances on consuetudo. The causal nexus between his understanding of habit and his delay can be better understood if we consider the consequences that Hamlet’s position on habit and custom have on his interpretation of his father’s request that he avenge his murder. After the Ghost has decreed that Hamlet remember him, Hamlet decides to empty his mind of all extraneous and potentially interfering data he has collected during his thirty years: “Remember thee? / Yea, from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past / That youth and observation copied there, / And thy commandments all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmixed with baser matter” (1.5.97–104). According to these lines, Hamlet appears to be squarely within the innatist framework. Upon contemplating his father’s command, he seems to advert to a private and subjective mental realm, the “book and volume of his brain.” But insofar as we define a subjective realm (as Hamlet’s critics traditionally have) as an impenetrable hidden region, set apart from the seemingness of external conduct, Hamlet is not necessarily invoking a subjective realm when he refers to his “brain.” He is merely saying that his brain is usually the place that stores memories, knowledge, and associations between impressions and events, and that the command to revenge, this new and unexpected event, can be more easily understood if it is separated from all the other acquired images and associations in his brain. Hamlet does not separate his mind from the world; he separates old and new information within his mind. What his brain consists of, where it is located, whether it is connected to psychological events or his body or even whether it is continuous with the objective world, are not at issue in this monologue. While Hamlet clearly wants to keep the command to avenge his father’s death private from his peers (excepting Horatio), he is more concerned with keeping it private from all his other thoughts.

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The problem here is that Hamlet has underestimated the importance of memory and association to understanding and action. In Marjorie Garber’s psychoanalytic reading of the play, Hamlet’s memory of his father and his father’s command lead to endless repetition and hence impede effective action.37 But Hamlet’s commitment to remember the command halts action because, as a number of early modern philosophers held, memory enables action through association with other memories. It is not that Hamlet does not act because he remembers and repeats in his mind the mandate, but that the substance of the mandate is rendered less meaningful outside of any prior mental associations and images of what constitutes an act of revenge. Associationism as a systematic empiricist doctrine is usually connected with Locke and David Hartley, but the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were equally preoccupied with a form of associationism, having been influenced by Aristotle’s views on memory and hexis in De Anima and the Parva Naturalia. Aristotle writes, “recollection occurs inasmuch as one experience naturally succeeds another . . . when we are recollecting we keep stimulating certain earlier experiences until we have stimulated one which the one in question is wont to succeed.”38 In De Anima et Vita Juan Luis Vives, commenting on Aristotle’s psychology of memory, suggests that recollection occurs “by steps, from cause to effect; from the latter to instrument; through the part to the whole; from this situation to person . . .”39 In The Treatise of Man, Descartes writes, “the recollection of one thing can be excited by that of another which was imprinted in the memory at the same time”40 In Human Nature, Hobbes, in an effort to relate all mental content to sense-experience, introduces the term “discursion” to describe the processes by which ideas succeed one another as conceptions in the mind: the “cause of the coherence or consequence of one conception to another, is their first coherence or consequence at that time when they are produces by sense: as for example, from St. Andrew the mindeth runneth to St. Peter, because their names are read together. . . . When a man hath so often observed like antecedents to be followed by like consequents, that whensoever he seeth the antecedent, he looketh again for the consequent.”41 Hamlet breaks all of these associative rules, for when he lodges the commandment “all alone” in his memory, “unmixed” with any prior conceptions or “baser matter” he disassociates revenge from anything with which he is personally familiar, and any customary outlets through which he might pursue justice. He is quite unlike his dramatic forebear, Hieronimo of The Spanish Tragedy, who determines, however ineffectively, to make his revenge mandate both publicly understandable and resolvable (by making recourse to public law) and privately familiar by associating Horatio and revenge with signs and tokens, such as the bloody handkerchief he carries

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with him, and Bel-Imperia’s admonishing letter. Hamlet has associated the revenge mandate solely with the ghost and the ghost solely with the revenge mandate, so that when confronted with either one he recalls the other, in a binding tautological association that contributes to his paralysis. Thus he cannot check the truthfulness of the ghost’s commandment against his own intuitions and knowledge, and he resorts to external behavioral reports as evidence, much as the other characters rely on his behavior to infer his mental contents. This partly explains why he is motivated by exemplary conduct, by the impassioned player who invokes Hecuba, or by Fortinbras’s feats in war. In his relentless assault on habit and custom, Hamlet refuses to take seriously the possibility that virtuous habits might provide antidotes to vicious ones. Hamlet takes too far Montaigne’s admonition that “habituation puts to sleep the eye of our judgment;”42 For Hamlet, de-habituation puts to sleep his eye of judgment. In this context, one of the many reasons that Laertes is a clean foil to Hamlet is that he recognizes the indispensable role habit and custom play in promoting understanding and directing action. Unlike Hamlet, Laertes is self-reliant, suspicious not of his own acquired traits and knowledge about given events, but of third-person reports. Upon learning of Laertes’s single-minded course to avenge the murder of his father, Claudius worries that Laertes, “is in secret come from France, / Feeds on his wonder, keeps himself in clouds, / And wants not buzzers to infect his ear / With pestilent speeches of his father’s death” (4.5.88–91). Whereas Hamlet counsels others and himself on the perils of custom, Laertes’s charisma threatens to replace older customs with newer ones. The Messenger remarks to Claudius that “the rabble call him lord, / And, as the world were now but to begin, / Antiquity forgot, custom not known, / The ratifiers and props of every word, / They cry, ‘Choose we! Laertes shall be king!’ ” (4.5.103–106). Nor does Laertes deny the integral role custom plays in properly venting emotional states. After he learns of Ophelia’s death Laertes remarks, “Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, / And therefore I forbid my tears; but yet / It is our trick; nature her custom holds, / Let shame say what will be. When these are gone, / The woman will be out” (4.7.185–187). Given Laertes’s obedience to custom and Hamlet’s abhorrence thereof, it is fitting that the moment at which Laertes most inspires Hamlet, and the moment Hamlet most identities with Laertes, occurs during the graveyard scene, when Laertes uncharacteristically overthrows custom and leaps into Ophelia’s grave. Hamlet will later remark about Laertes that the “bravery of his grief did put me / Into a tow’ring passion” (5.2.78–80). I have argued thus far that Hamlet should not be described as a symptomatic Cartesian, and that he is more preoccupied with worldly habits and dispositions than he is with inner landscapes. His views on habit are

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un-modern for another reason, though, which a brief detour into early modern rationalism will make clear. Descartes and Pascal both argue that exercises of reason and habit are interdependent: a rational calculus is first employed to direct action and belief, and then reason abdicates its directive power to the blind but effective workings of habit. Pascal writes, “How few things can be demonstrated. Proofs only convince the mind. Habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed. . . . Who ever proved that it will dawn tomorrow, and that we shall die? It is then habit that convinces us and makes us so many Christians . . . We resort to habit once the mind has seen where the truth lies, in order to steep and stain ourselves in that belief which constantly eludes us.”43 Descartes argues that passions can be rechanneled by the rational formation of habits: “although the movements (both of the gland and of the spirits and brain) which represent certain objects to the soul are naturally joined to the movements which produce certain passions in it, yet through habit the former can be separated from the latter and joined to others which are very different.”44 For Descartes, the control of passions follows from the formation of new and corrective habits, themselves directed by the light of reason. As Jon Elster describes these rational-choice strategies: “Anyone can do anything; the smallest amounts of will-power suffice for the most extraordinary feats of self-control, given an understanding of the psychological mechanism by which habits are formed and changed. Hexis in Aristotle, custom in Pascal and habit in Descartes are all seen as the end result of non-habitual actions.”45 According to the Cartesian and Pascalian rational-choice scenario, the rational agent precommits belief and conduct based on a rational meansend calculus (e.g., Pascal’s famous wager), after which habits serve to maintain the original decision to believe and/or act in a particular way. Rational-choice theory can help as a heuristic device to explain Hamlet’s dilemma. Hamlet remarks a number of times that he is bereft of a sufficient level of passion that would thrust him into action (e.g., in the “O, what a rogue and peasant slave I am,” monologue [2.2.550–606]). From a rational-choice perspective, Hamlet’s problem is not that he lacks the passion to act, but that he has not in the first place weighed the costs and benefits of executing the revenge that would rouse and direct the ensuing passions. Unlike Ulysses who binds himself to the mast in anticipation of the beguiling Sirens, or Pascal who stands to gain infinitely and lose negligibly by believing in God, Hamlet performs no effective calculating because, once having been chosen as his father’s instrument of revenge, he abdicates the belief that he has any choice at all to make: “O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!” (1.5.188–189). For Pascal and Descartes, the intending agent is provided with the freedom to apply reason

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as a binding strategy; once the agent has precommitted, habit is introduced as the executor of reason’s dictates. Hamlet is indeed a rational chooser, and there is always “method in his madness,” but he does not exercise rationality under the right circumstances: he applies reason in a number of cases— what is the “To be or not to be” speech if not an internal rational-choice monologue?—except in relation to the case that most requires precommitment based on a cost–benefit analysis, the decision to kill Claudius, to exact revenge. Each post-ghost moment for Hamlet is the repetition of an overcompensating rational-choice dialogue, even though every moment, except for the first moment, should be controlled by habit. Descartes and Pascal proportion a maximum of habit to a minimum of reason. Hamlet proportions a maximum of reason to a minimum of habit. Why Hamlet is unable to apply a cost–benefit procedure to the ghost’s command is a question for another kind of approach to the play: it can be explained, perhaps, from a psychoanalytic standpoint or from the standpoint of the history of patriarchy or the sociology of revenge. We have seen thus far that Hamlet takes an Augustinian–Protestant position on the refractory nature of customary sin. This perhaps contributes to his miscalculated decision to unburden himself of all memories and dispositional attitudes—contributes, that is, to his less theologically conditioned suspicion of habit and custom. But if on the one hand he believes habit and custom are dangerous for the reasons he outlines—their role in the naturalization of sin, their obtrusive and empirical nature—he seems on the other hand as convinced as his peers that external behavior provides infallible clues to another’s private attitudes and intentions. There seems to be if not a contradiction, then something inconsistent about his suspicion of the nature of habits on the one hand and his servility to them on the other, the latter suggested in his belief that one can infer from observables another’s mental states (e.g., the conscience of the king). My belief is that Hamlet truly does not believe he can infer mental contents from behavioral manifestations, that he perceives the world as a radical behaviorist would. And I think Hamlet’s radical behaviorism is not anachronistic but is implied by his extreme Augustinianism. A radical behaviorist is someone who believes that mental predicates are simply descriptions of physical behavior, that mental states as individuated private spaces that cause action do not exist. In the Concept of The Mind Gilbert Ryle argued that all mental happenings are reducible to their physical manifestations, that the belief in unwitnessable mental events is based on a category-mistake—for instance, the mistaken sense one might have that a “university” is some further entity added to the particular buildings that comprise our ordinary understanding of what “university” signifies. For Ryle, the Cartesian category–mistake assumes that “mental processes

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are causes and effects, but different sorts of causes and effects from bodily movements.”46 Although the mind belongs to the same category as bodies, these “spectral machines” are not necessarily governed by rigid mechanical hypotheses. Faced with the difficulty of explaining mental states that are not overtly expressible as behavioral dispositions, Ryle suggested that psychological statements are not accounts of mental happenings but hypothetical reports; that is, to say “I feel pain” entails expressing pain in a certain manner given a particular context and stimulus. And in his attempt to discredit the notion that acts are caused by certain motives located in the mind, Ryle famously suggested that “to explain an inner act as done from a certain motive is not analogous to saying that the glass broke, because a stone hit it, but to the quite different type of statement that the glass broke, when the stone hit it, because the glass was brittle.”47 For Ryle, to discover another’s motives for action is simply “to form an inductive, law-like proposition, analogous to the explanation of reactions and actions by reflexes and habits, or to the explanation of the fracture of the glass by reference to its brittleness.”48 Ryle’s counterintuitive analytical behaviorism has frequently been criticized because it fails to account for sense-experiences or “qualia,” color perceptions, for example, the kinds of sense-data that seem to exist without a behavioral component. In order to counter the commonsense objection to radical behaviorism—that we ordinarily assume that thoughts and ideas can occur without showing themselves—Ryle introduced his notion of dispositional properties, arguing that a person’s so-called mental experience in the absence of a corresponding behavioral manifestation is simply a disposition to behave given the adequate stimulus: “To possess a dispositional property is not to be in a particular state, or to undergo a particular change; it is to be bound or liable to be in a particular state, or to undergo a particular change, when a particular condition is realized.”49 It is easy to miss the subtlety in Ryle’s theory of dispositional property. A disposition to behave in a particular way should not be associated with a particular mental state. Dispositions are not states at all until they are actualized by certain conditions, and only then do they become behavioral states. It is not difficult to imagine the problems a radical behaviorist would meet when interpreting another’s behavior. If mental predicates are identical in a one-to-one relationship with behavioral predicates then how to account for disingenuous behavior on the one hand or unexpressed beliefs on the other? Not all radical behaviorists are as sophisticated as Ryle, who was able to marshal a number of clever counterarguments to these objections. If we return to the play, we see that Hamlet struggles with these questions when he deliberates whether or not to murder Claudius while the latter is at prayer. Contemplating the murder, Hamlet thinks, “And how his

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audit stands, who knows save heaven? / But in our circumstances and course of thought, / ‘Tis heavy with him; and am I then revenged, / To take him in the purging of his soul, / When he is fit and seasoned for passage?” (3.3.83–86). If we read this alongside the previously discussed passage in which Hamlet condemns his mother and Claudius for both the murder of his father and liaison, we should ask on what basis Hamlet might even contemplate the idea that Claudius could purge his own soul through prayer? What seems to stay Hamlet’s hand is his sense that Claudius’s act of praying might lead to at least a “relish” of salvation, if not absolution. Hamlet’s critics have often found Hamlet’s deferral readily explainable, even predictable, given Hamlet’s appreciation of the context and the possibility of Claudius’s salvation. Bradley describes Hamlet pauses as a “pretext,” but one associated with a “perfectly genuine” feeling, which any God-fearing Elizabethan would understand. Yet Hamlet’s pause seems to haunt John Dover Wilson, who, after agreeing with Bradley’s impressionistic interpretation, writes, “After all there had been ‘no relish of salvation’ in the King’s act of prayer: Hamlet need not have hesitated, even on his own showing.”50 It is not clear what Wilson’s final stand is on the propriety of Hamlet’s reasoning, but Wilson clearly is not as comfortable as Bradley with the assumption that any Elizabethan would have found Hamlet’s pause unremarkable. Laertes seems to have no problem imagining cutting Hamlet’s “throat i’th’ church!” (4.7.125), and Claudius avers that “No place indeed should murder sanctuarize,” (4.7.126). While these outbursts do not prove that Hamlet’s deferral was uncustomary, they do suggest that for Hamlet to discharge his duty under the circumstances would not have been unthinkable. It seems that Hamlet misunderstands what Claudius and any abiding sixteenth- and seventeenth-century believer would have known quite well: if inner purity and an expectation of an elicitation of grace are not availing, then no external act of prayer or confession can remove the sinful taint. Thus Claudius, just before he kneels and Hamlet enters, after reflecting that “my stronger guilt defeats my strong intent” (3.3.40), asks, “But, O, what form of prayer / Can serve my turn? Forgive me my foul murder’? / That cannot be, since I am still possessed / Of those effects for which I did the murder, / My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. / May one be pardoned and retain th’offense” (3.3.52–55); and just after Hamlet leaves Claudius worries that “Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (3.3.97–98). Hamlet has not overheard these words, but why should he need to hear them in order to settle any doubt he might have regarding Claudius’s repentance? Hamlet’s belief that Claudius is perhaps “fit and seasoned for passage” is inconsistent with all the evidence he has collected up until this point, and clearly inconsistent with Claudius’s understanding of his own guilt. What blinds Hamlet to the unredeemed

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state of Claudius’s soul is his inability to imagine Claudius’s inner convictions without inferring them from the conventionalized act of prayer. Hamlet seems to think, as any behaviorist would, that there is no spectral machine inside Claudius, motivating his action and harboring unexpressed thoughts and passions. While Hamlet does not completely ignore the possibility that Claudius is unrepentant in spite of prayer, he defers action on the basis of the weight he gives to Claudius’s ritualistic conduct, rather than on any intuition he has about Claudius’s relative integrity or baseness. It is as if the theological warrants for Hamlet’s obsession with customary behavior have inadvertently warranted his belief that mental events do not exist beyond their behavioral realizations. Hamlet’s dilemma is that when he is self-regarding he discerns no habits of his own but when he is other-regarding he discerns only habits and the behavior of those around him. I have introduced as a framework Ryle’s theory of dispositional behavior because his is the most systematic and influential account provided by the analytic tradition (which I have loosely been referring to throughout this chapter). But while Ryle’s theory makes Hamlet’s behaviorism more understandable, it does not imply that Hamlet is “modern” in anticipating Ryle’s position, since radical behaviorism can follow from an exaggerated internalization of the theological precedents I have already mentioned. If we return to the Augustinian context, we can see that the Augustinianism theory of consuetudo can lead, in its extreme versions, to the kind of behaviorism I have been attributing to Hamlet. In spite of his insistence that even the most unreflective habits stem from the sinner’s dispositional will, Augustine conceived of sinful habits as so overmastering and intractable that they begin to resemble objectifications of evil, embodiments of what were once conscious, controllable actions. The objectification of habit makes consuetudo such a naturalized form of evil that it resembles a form of the Manichaeanism it aims to subvert. Of course, the habit is still a product of the individual will of the unregenerate sinner, rather than the creation of any evil demiurge, yet the reification of habit relocates the figure of the gnostic-type creator within the impenitent’s soul. As such, Augustine’s anti-Pelagianism often looked like a reversion to his earlier Manichaeanism. An extreme reading of this process by which habits become naturalized might suggest that individuals are composed of habits all the way down, that selves or minds do not exist apart from patterns of conduct that have become second-nature. This view of the centrality of habits to personal identity has both premodern and modern supporters. For instance, Etienne Gilson describes the Thomistic theory of habitus in the following manner: “If the habits of a being draw it close to the ideal type toward which it is tending, they are good habits. If, on the contrary, they draw it away from

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this ideal, they are bad habits . . . Habits are not only qualities and accidents, but they are the qualities and accidents which lie closest to the nature of a thing, and which come closest to entering into its essence and integrating themselves into its definition.”51 For Aquinas the essence of a “thing” consists in its habits. Jeremy Taylor is so obsessed with ranging virtuous habits against vicious habits that one wonders whether it is possible to imagine a subject posited without or aside from its acquired virtuous or corrupt dispositions: “For till habits supervene, we are of a middle constitution . . . divided between good and evil.”52 In the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards writes that “Tis this [Divine Establishment] that must account for the continuance of any such thing, anywhere, as consciousness of acts are past; and for the continuance of all habits, either good or bad: and on this depends everything that can belong to personal identity.”53 Since Lars Engle has recently drawn attention to the pragmatic features of Shakespeare’s plays,54 it is also worth noting that John Dewey, in his rigorous anti-absolutizing, anti-Freudian pragmatic account of habit and conduct in Human Nature and Conduct, argues that habits exert a hold upon people because “we are the habit,” and that “all habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self. In any intelligible sense of the word will, they are the will.”55 Like these theologians and philosophers who construe habits as the “essence of the thing,” integral to “personal identity,” “constitutive” of the “self,” and who assert that the subject is always infected or graced with a set of virtuous or vicious habits, suspended in a “middle constitution” until habits supervene, Hamlet too identifies customary conduct with subjective states. Now it is true that for Augustine, Aquinas, Ames, and other theologians, habits refer to not simply hardened, external manners, but inner states, spiritual infusions, or inheritances of original sin. Donne realizes the distinction when he puts this question to God: “When thou bidst me to put off the old man, dost thou mean not only my old habits of actual sin, but the oldest of all, original sin? When thou bidst me purge out the leaven, dost thou mean not only the sourness of mine own ill contracted customs, but the innate tincture of sin imprinted by nature?”56 Ames, concerned more specifically with the importance of waging virtue against vicious habits, writes, “virtue is a condition or habit by which the will is inclined to do well. The virtuous habitus does not confirm a perfect constitution of mind, but rather a “general state of mind of various degrees of perfection.”57 And describing the indelible impression the Holy Ghost left in his memory after conversion, Lancelot Andrewes writes, “So in vigour, as His vigour is not brunts only or starts, impetus, but habitus, that it holdeth out habit-wise . . . leaving an impression, such an one as iron red-hot leaving in vessels of wood . . .”58 Descartes too recognized the instrumentality of

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inner habits when he described virtues as “ingrained habits or dispositions (habitudes) in the soul.”59 What makes Hamlet’s construal of the theology of habit so narrow is precisely his failure to distinguish between acquired habits and innate or mental habits. It is striking to consider that despite his repeated use of the term “habit,” not once does Hamlet describe habits as inherited sinful defects, spiritual infusions or, as Richard Hooker and others describe the sacraments, “habits of faith.”60 According to Hamlet’s narrow understanding of the theological tradition, habits are identified with external visages (the “habit” of his father “as he lived” [2.4.136–137]); consequences of lust (“that monster custom . . . Of habits devil” [3.4.162–163]); and social custom or personal conduct (Osric’s “habit of encounter” [5.2.189], the habit that too much o’erleavens / The form of plausive manners” [1.4.129–130], and “foregone all exercise of custom” [2.3.293–296]). Surely if Hamlet were a card-carrying idealist, Protestant affective individualist, or Cartesian dualist, he would make some reference to disembodied habits of mind and their distinction from patterned overt actions. In situating Hamlet’s conduct, then, in relation to our continuing focus on functional contradictions or fallacies, we might consider that Hamlet’s particular fallacy is a species of the fallacy of composition described earlier in regard to the mercantilist fetishization of money. The fallacy in this particular case takes on the character of a part-whole fallacy, in which Hamlet at key moments fails to take seriously the intuitive, if ultimately unproveable notion that individuals indeed do consist of more than just the sum total of their habitual dispositions. The more technical way of saying this is to say that Hamlet misconstrues a very basic view of part-whole relations that has its roots in classical philosophy, and which modern philosophy has come to describe as a theory of emergence.61 The theory of emergence holds simply that wholes do often exceed their constituent parts, the most obvious example being chemical as opposed to physical reactions. In the realm of the philosophy of mind, emergence is used to justify mental realism and physical nonreductionism—two mind–body theories that hold that mental events are directly caused by physical events like firing neurons, but that are not reducible to such events in terms of substance or kind. Hamlet’s intuitive understanding of emergence in relation to prevailing doctrines of sin somehow prevents him from seeing the structure and logic of emergence in relation to the mind–body connection. Hamlet cannot sustain the belief that his mother might acquire future habits of virtue to set against her habits of sin, as if he rewrites Luther’s paradoxical iustum et peccator as peccator et peccator. In place of Eliot’s notion that Hamlet lacks an objective correlative for his despondency, I would suggest that Hamlet simply lacks a logical correlative for his delay: his seeming embrace of an

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unwarranted, embedded premise—that individuals relate to their habits as habits are related to sin—underwrites his idiosyncratic move from theological holism to behavioral monism.

Ghost in the Machine or Machine in the Ghost? I have not yet discussed the extent to which a central theological issue raised by the play—whether the ghost is Protestant, Catholic, pagan—bears on Hamlet’s handling of the theology of habit. Rather than rehearse the competing positions in the critical heritage, it will be helpful to describe some early modern beliefs about ghosts that are common to multiple doctrinal positions. In a foundational text on pneumatology, De cura pro mortius gerenda, Augustine introduces the term similitudo hominis to describe the purely imagistic and inhuman nature of specters.62 As Jean Claude-Schmitt says of Augustine’s position, such an apparition is “completely foreign to the consciousness of the person whom it depicts as living.”63 Following Augustine, medieval writers introduced a range of terms—species, similitudines, figurae, formae, umbrae—to underscore the “quasi” nature of the signifying image and to emphasize the fundamental remove from which the specter stood in relation to the individual it impersonated. When we turn to the early modern treatises on pneumatology, we find that, as Stephen Greenblatt has recently demonstrated, both Protestants and Catholics routinely ask six principal questions about the nature of ghosts: Quis? Quid? Quare? Cui? Qualiter? and Unde?64 The set of answers to each question helped to establish the relative malignancy or benignity of the ghost in question. Ghosts who made visitations at night, especially in deserted places such as graveyards, were judged to be demonic, as were ghosts who vouchsafed their identities to melancholics.65 While one can multiply case studies that explain the practice of discerning spirits, I am more interested in pointing out the thoroughness of the tests performed to ascertain a ghost’s true identity. The very practice of discerning spirits suggests a fundamental distinction between private intentions and outer behavior. Such dualism does not entail that a ghost take on the irreducible complexity of an individual’s mental world. A ghost’s deception might simply include overtaking the manifest likeness of the form and body it has usurped. Whether it also assumes the thoughts and intentions of an individual is an entirely different matter, but within the realm of possibility. The thoroughness of the questions posed about ghosts suggests that, despite Augustine’s belief that even the most clever of spirits are only pale and distant approximations of real people, a ghostly deception could

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involve more than simply assuming the behavioral manifestations of the body it has overtaken. The philosophical question of whether there exists a ghost in the machine thus becomes the question of whether there exists a demon in the ghost. And this is a question that a behaviorist, like Hamlet, would not be equipped to answer properly. As in his idiosyncratic embrace of the theology of habit, Hamlet also misconstrues or self-consciously flouts much of the conventional early modern wisdom for discerning a spirit’s true nature. Battenhouse and others, for example, note that Hamlet ignores the cumulative evidence of the ghost’s manifestly un-Christian, if not purely demonic, character. The ghost, for example, fails all of the tests remarked in Lavater’s popular treatise on ghosts: it unashamedly holds forth about revenge, fails to offer requisite comfort to Hamlet and his peers, neglects to act contritely and humbly, and appears murkily at night rather than in the bright daylight.66 Hamlet’s response after his first encounter with the ghost—“It is an honest Ghost, that let me tell you” (1.1.135)—hardly suggests that he conforms to skeptical protocol. Of course, Hamlet responds so incautiously because the ghost seems to be the majestic incarnation of his dead father, rather than an impersonal, folkloric specter. And he does entertain the thought that the spirit may be a devil assuming a “pleasing shape” (3.1.539). But his tendency to credit the ghost seems to be of a piece with his practice of assuming a correspondence between thought and behavior. From the moment he hears of the ghost from Horatio, Hamlet is preoccupied with the ghost’s physical appearance and expressions. He asks if the figure was “armed” (1.2.228), whether the figure looked “frowningly” (1.2.231), and whether its hue was “pale or red” (1.2.233). Horatio has already informed Hamlet that the ghost refused to speak during the initial sighting, and so it may seem understandable that Hamlet asks only about the ghost’s appearance. But Hamlet might have aired any number of questions, either to himself or to Horatio (seeking his trusted friend’s surmise), that would address the ghost’s intentions and motives. Horatio, for his part, has earlier ruminated on precisely the question on which Hamlet is silent: “In what particular thought to work I know not; / But, in the gross and scope of my opinion, / This bodes some strange eruption to our state” (1.1.67–68). Hamlet seems to require a face-to-face encounter, from which he can record the ghost’s expressions, before he can begin hypothesizing about the ghost’s project. Hamlet’s idiosyncratic treatment of the ghost is more clearly revealed during the bedroom scene. In response to his mother’s question, “Whereon do you look,” Hamlet responds, “On him, on him! Look you how pale he glares. His form and cause conjoin’d, preaching to stone, / Would make

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them capable” (3.4.124–127). The description of his father’s “form and cause conjoin’d” starkly represents Hamlet’s difficulty in recognizing discrepancies between forms and causes, expressions and intentions. Forms and causes are so welded together that there seems to be little distinction between the inner and outer individual. When Hamlet avows that his father’s temper could move stone itself, he seems to be unwittingly measuring his own passivity and interpretive obtuseness at reading the signs of another’s expressions. And to reinforce the point, he then warns the Queen not to look upon him, “Lest with the piteous action you convert / My stern effect” (3.4.128–129), as if she too wields the power of gesture to sway her son, despite the possible deceptiveness that may be shaping those gestures. Bearing in mind Hamlet’s behaviorism and its relation to the traditions I have been outlining, we can speculate about the nature of the stimulus that would be required to motivate Hamlet to avenge his father’s murder. What critics and perhaps Hamlet himself mistakenly presuppose is that Hamlet needs to assume the right frame of mind in order to effectively act, even though, behavioristically considered, the required causal connection operates in reverse: the effective “mental” state will follow from the proper behavioral disposition or behavioral act. This sounds like a logical contradiction, as it suggests that in order for Hamlet to act he needs to first have acted, but the relationship between mental and behavioral happenings can be distributed between two or more persons. For Hamlet to acquire the right mental state and conviction entails that he at least witness another’s revenge act; since he identifies behavioral events with mental events, witnessing another’s act would provide him simultaneously with an example of the behavior and an example of the requisite mental state. Hamlet simply needs a precedent. There is ample evidence in the play that suggests Hamlet is motivated or at least inspired by the exemplary conduct of his peers. Upon learning of Fortinbras’s ability to rouse his country to arms, Hamlet ruminates, “Examples gross as earth exhort me. / Witness this army of such mass and charge, / Led by a delicate and tender prince . . .” (4.4.47–49). Not Fortinbras, however, but Laertes has the potential to stir Hamlet to action, given their parallel roles in the play. Following their confrontation in the graveyard, Hamlet tells Horatio that “to Laertes I forgot myself, / For by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his” (5.2.76–78). But if Laertes is the character to provide Hamlet with the stimulus to action, Hamlet himself is the object of Laertes’s act of revenge: given the logic of Hamlet’s behaviorism—that the example of revenge is a necessary condition of motivation—the implication is that for Hamlet to realize the ghost’s command, Laertes must prosecute his own self-appointed duty, even

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though the achievement of the latter action would preclude the achievement of the former. The murders unfold fittingly, for the point at which Laertes furnishes Hamlet with Hamlet’s precedent—the moment Laertes wounds Hamlet—is followed by Hamlet’s successful wounding of Claudius.

Hamlet’s Tragic Hamartia The romantic practice of psychologizing and idealizing Hamlet’s character tended to allow some character critics, Hazlitt, for example, to underplay the tragic dimensions of the play. Hazlitt writes, “The character of Hamlet stands quite by itself. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be . . .”67 For Hazlitt, Hamlet is the most “amiable of misanthropes,”68 the play itself quite unlike Lear, which is “distinguished by the greatest depth of passion.”69 Hazlitt so universalizes Hamlet—”it is we who are Hamlet”70—that he exaggerates empathetic and identificatory pity at the expense of the distancing effects of fear, the fear that would flow from a recognition of the qualities in Hamlet that seem alien, disturbing, out of joint. As John Kinnaird explains so well: Hazlitt embraces the myth of an incapacity in Hamlet’s character for “deliberate action” because this premise enables him, as it does all the Romantics, to project onto Hamlet’s figure their own ambivalence toward tragedy: i.e., their obsession with evil in the world, their longing to escape from knowledge of it in themselves, their pessimistic sense that suffering changes nothing and the world must go on as it is.71

Although he does not generically label the play, Hazlitt would no doubt agree with George Steiner’s contention that the romantics heralded the “near-tragic” quality of great drama: “ ‘Near-tragedy’ is precisely the compromise in an age that did not believe in the finality of evil. It represents the quality of the romantics to enjoy the privileges of grandeur and intense feeling associated with tragic drama without paying the full price.”72 Objecting that romantic interpretations of the play had neglected to consider the “emotional side of Hamlet’s character,”73 A.C. Bradley approached the play from a less sentimentalizing but still psychologizing perspective. Unlike Hazlitt, Bradley focused on Hamlet’s “quite abnormal”74 state of melancholy. Hamlet’s reflectiveness, for Bradley, serves as

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partial cause and principal symptom of his melancholy, which in turn impedes action: “Hamlet’s reflectiveness doubtless played a certain part in the production of that melancholy, and thus was one indirect contributory cause of his irresolution. . . . The melancholy, once established, displayed, as one of its symptoms, an excessive reflection in the required deed.”75 For Bradley, however, Hamlet’s melancholy explains his delay, but not his “tragic mystery,” because the purely “psychological point of view is not equivalent to the tragic nature.”76 Bradley thus concludes, somewhat vaguely, that the connection between that “genius and Hamlet’s failure . . . gives to the story its peculiar fascination and makes it appear . . . as a symbol of a tragic mystery inherent in human nature. Wherever this mystery touches us, wherever we are forced to feel the wonder and awe of man’s godlike ‘apprehension’ . . . at the same time are forced to see him powerless in his petty sphere of action . . . we remember Hamlet.”77 If Bradley reclaims in this comment the tragic aspect of Hamlet’s character by divinizing, rather than simply universalizing, Hamlet’s speculative genius, at other times he explains Hamlet’s tragic stature by demystifying his character. Brooding over Hamlet’s cruel treatment of Ophelia and his insensitivity toward the fate of Rosencranz and Guildenstern, Bradley writes, “that this embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality, should be induced on a soul so pure and noble is profoundly tragic, and Shakespeare’s business was to show this tragedy. . . .”78 One problem here is that if we base our case for Hamlet’s tragic stature on his insensitivity, his tragic complexion pales considerably in relation to Macbeth’s, Lear’s, and even Othello’s. Seemingly at a loss to penetrate Hamlet’s tragic mystery, Bradley constructs an atypically tragic figure whose meditative reaches are too godlike to prompt our identification, and whose sins are too venial to evoke our fear and horror. What seems to explain the romantic and neo-romantic difficulty of locating the tragic aspect of Hamlet is the Aristotelian assumption that catharsis functions to purge or purify our emotions. We tend to assume that tragedy fundamentally should affect us corporeally, that tragic catharsis releases a flood of pathological affective states. The problem with the romantic and neo-romantic interpretations of Hamlet’s tragic quality stems from the difficulty of reconciling the intellectual component of Hamlet’s idiosyncrasy with the kind of tragic sublimity that emerges from extremes of passion. Tragic catharsis seems to require the kind of palpable emotional investment in character that, for the romantic tradition, at least, Hamlet’s speculative genius does not foster. Aristotle, however, for whom emotions are intimately linked with evaluative judgments, also suggested that tragedy functions to educate or train

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the emotions and, by extension, the intellect.79 Summarizing this educative role of catharsis, Jonathan Lear remarks, “Tragedy . . . provides us with the appropriate objects toward which to feel pity and fear. Tragedy, one might say, trains us or habituates us in feeling pity and fear in response to events which are worthy of those emotions. Since our emotions are being evoked in the proper circumstances, they are also being educated, refined, or clarified.”80 In this sense, catharsis can indeed follow from an internalization of the kinds of intellectual character “flaws” of a Hamlet. The shift in focus from the eliminative to educative functions of tragedy, from corporeal adjustment to cognitive training, can help us integrate not simply Hamlet’s intellectualism with the conventions of tragedy, but both with the theological focus on habit that is allegorized in the play. Critics have sometimes claimed that Hamlet’s role as overzealous theologian and confessor is utterly conventional in nature. Felperin, for example, notes, “As for Hamlet himself, he takes on the role of a preacher, to be sure, specifically the chief virtue-figure of the morality, who tries to redeem the sinner from the snares of the Vice, usually . . . by preaching him into repentance with Scriptural quotations and exempla . . .”81 But rather than see Hamlet as mouthing homiletic and archaic exempla, I have suggested that he appropriates and misreads the theological dispensation of a very precise term and concept, habit and its synonyms and cognates. Given Hamlet’s absorption in the theology of habit, followed by his unwarranted derivation of behaviorism from a theory of sin, we might describe Hamlet’s error as an error of interpretation, or an error of exegesis. Whether or not we think of such an error as tragic hamartia, we can imagine that part of the catharsis in the play lies in issuing an educative lesson and warning about the consequences of speculation—speculation, that is, about a narrow theological crux, rather than speculation about the transcendent sublimities described by the romantics. Given the entirely local determinants of Hamlet’s problem—the incapacities and consequences that result from his investment in such a theologically arid position—Hamlet’s demise approaches (for this critic at least) tragicomedy rather than pure tragedy. But what of the play, finally, in the context of our focus on transition? What distinguishes Hamlet from the other principals discussed in the previous chapters—Prospero, Coriolanus, Shylock, Lear—is that he is the one character whose primary function is precisely not to operate functionally in terms of mediating plot in relation to historical allegory. The play does not inherit an unresolved political, moral, or philosophical impasse or contradiction, which it then exposes or resolves through the functional, “actantial” agency of its characters. Rather, the energy of the play is concentrated

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on the complexities Hamlet brings to bear on a theological commonplace. The text does not bring a pathology to its character; Hamlet brings a “pathology” or illogicality to the text. Doubtless, as so many critics have noted, this makes Hamlet seem relatively naturalistic and unconstrained, as he approaches the status of novelistic protagonist rather than dramatic type. But I would emphasize, finally, that if Hamlet is indeed “modern” in this respect, his modernism emerges when he looks outward, not inward, when he sets out to interpret theological history, rather than himself.

Notes

Introduction 1. Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 401–402; Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 107; Arthur Riss, “The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language,” ELH 59 (1992): 53–75; Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen, 1984), 36. 2. Christopher Caudwell, “English Poets: The Period of Primitive Accumulation,” in Marxist Literary Theory, ed. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne (London: Blackwell, 1996), 92. 3. John Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 46. For an influential collection of essays on Shakespeare, culture, and ideology, many of which tend to rely on transitional schemas, see Shakespeare in a Changing World, ed. Arnold Kettle (New York: International Publishers, 1964). For important recent critiques of transitional schemas, see David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject,’ ” in Culture and History, ed. David Aers, ed. 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 177–202; The Culture of Capital: Properties, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry S. Turner (New York: Routledge, 2002), especially the introductory essay, in which Turner remarks that the “‘transition to capitalism’ in England is best undertaken not as the history of a latent system perpetually on the cusp of emergence but as an analysis of the specific forms that capital might take and of the specific locations and modes of activity in which these forms appeared” (9–10). For an incisive comparison of Marxist-transitional arguments and more recent cultural materialist studies, those that take a non-Marxist approach to assessing material objects and culture, see Douglas Bruster, “The New Materialism in Renaissance Studies,” in Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Curtis Perry (Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2001), 225–238.

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4. See Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1588–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 5. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 642. 6. Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1602–1649 (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), 48. 7. Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 49. 8. J.C.D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 18. For further statements on revisionist methodology, see Paul Christianson, “The Causes of the English Revolution,” Journal of British Studies 15 (1976): 40–75; and R.C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited, 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 1998). For “post-revisionist” reaffirmations of early modern class ideologies, see Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London: Longman, 1989). For a spirited Marxist critique of revisionism, see James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000). 9. Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 64. 10. Ibid., 9. 11. Ibid., 242–246. 12. See, e.g., Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); and William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 13. 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 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 48–71. 14. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Part One, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1993), 64. 15. Ibid., 65–66. 16. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 135. 17. Jorge Larrain, Marxism and Ideology (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1983), 47. 18. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–186. 19. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 52–65. 20. Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 13. 21. Jonathan Dollimore, “Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism,” in Political Shakespeare, 10.

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22. See Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), chap. 2; Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and G.R. Elton, The Parliament of England, 1559–1581 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 23. Cust and Hughes, eds., Conflict in Early Stuart England, 16. 24. Kevin Sharp, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of SeventeenthCentury Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15. 25. Foundational studies on the “transition debates” include Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1947); and a series of essays published in Science and Society in the 1950s, which are collected in the volume entitled Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. and intro. Rodney Hilton (London: Verso, 1976). Important recent contributions to the transition debates include Rodney Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History (London: The Hambledon Press, 1985); The Brenner Debate, ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: An Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1991) and The Origin of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999). For an informative critique of Brenner’s theory of the transition, see Alan H. Carling, Social Division (London: Verso, 1991), chap. 2. For the most recent, magisterial assessment of the role of status and class during the transitional period in Europe generally, see Richard Lachman, Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For a detailed, non-Marxist account of the transition, see Robert S. Duplessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 26. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1969), 99. 27. Ibid., 100. 28. Ibid., 101 29. Ibid., 120. 30. Ibid., 120–121. 31. Ibid., 121. 32. This summary of Brenner’s argument is based on his account of the transition in “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review 104 (1977), 25–92, reprinted in The Brenner Debate. For Brenner’s more recent contribution to the debate, see his “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism,” in The First Modern Society, ed. A.L. Beier et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 271–304. 33. Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development,” 78. 34. See Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1978), especially chap. 21. 35. Karl Marx, Capital III (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 377–378, cited in Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 489. 36. Much of my thinking on “immanent critique” has been influenced by Seyla Benhabib’s assessment of the strategy as it is employed by Marx and the

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37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Notes Frankfurt School. See Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), chap. 1. This is a very loose application of the term “constellation” as used in a series of writings by both Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. See, e.g., Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973): “By themselves, constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the ‘more’ which the concept is equally desirous and capable of being . . .” (162). For informative discussions of the range of meanings that the term “constellation” carries in Frankfurt School writings, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), chaps. 12–13; and Susan Buck-Morrs, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977), chap. 1. Eric Mallin undertakes a similar project in Inscribing the Time: “I proceed on the assumption that historical contexts must demonstrably play into plot, theme, genre, image, or staging; the drama’s central literary features must be apposite to or cognate with some significant cultural fact or presence and so create a representational resonance with history.” Eric S. Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 6. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 29; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 151–239. Bryan Reynolds, Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2003), 6–7. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 6. G.K. Hunter, “A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy,” Essays and Studies 21 (1968): 112, cited in Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986), 35. Elmer Edgar Stoll, Art and Artifice in Shakespeare: A Study in Dramatic Contrast and Illusion (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1933). Ibid., 48. Ibid., 51. Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 71. Levin L. Schucking, Character Problems in Shakespeare’s Plays (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1959), 134–143. Ibid., 190. Leo Kirschbaum, Character and Characterization in Shakespeare (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), 61. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 62. Madeline Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), 234–235.

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54. In addition to Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare, see Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 55. In a sophisticated version of this argument, Paul Delany remarks that Lear, while omitting the “essential elements of the transition from feudalism to the mercantile economy as the great increase in the use of money,” “represents the neoclassical economy of the Renaissance, not directly, but rather through an exploration of the philosophical concepts and moral values that are typically associated with that economy” (24–25). Delany then suggests that transitional values are divided between rival camps in the play: “Edmund, Regan, and Goneril extend their political ruthlessness to the personal realm by espousing a strict and often brutal functionalism in social life; their opponents, on the other hand, are addicted to precedent and ceremony, whatever the cost in efficiency” (26). See Paul Delany, “King Lear and the Decline of Feudalism,” in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps (London: Verso, 1995), 20–38. 56. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 125–129. 57. Franco Moretti, “The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of Sovereignty,” in Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. John Drakakis (London: Longman, 1992), 45–83. 58. See Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980). 59. See, e.g., Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), chaps. 7–8. For a comprehensive discussion of the revisionist accounts of early modern ideology, see Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), chap. 4. For a good introduction to historical sociology, see Dennis Smith, The Rise of Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 60. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: A History of Power from the Beginnings to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 61. My view of the text–context interaction is slightly different in this respect from Eric Mallin’s notion of “inscription”: “The act of inscribing history in texts may begin authorially as an attempt to contain or reify chaotic meanings. . . . But it more often becomes, in spite of itself, the practice of protracting and replicating a chaos of histories through the artistic medium.” Eric Mallin, Inscribing the Time, 15. While I thoroughly agree with Mallin’s chaos or “contagion model” of history as against a deterministic model, I would argue that generic conventions tend to influence whether a particular play imposes structure and logic onto its historical referents or replicates historical contingency. 62. For an early approach to integrating genre theory and new historicism, see Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York: Methuen, 1988). More recently, there has been a salutary return to formalist concerns by recent cultural materialist critics working within and beyond the early modern period. See, e.g., Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

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Notes 1995); Jean Howard, “Competing Ideologies of Commerce in Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part II,” in The Culture of Capital ed. Henry S. Turner, 163–182; and Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Stephen Greenblatt, it should be noted, has emphasized that new historicist methodology should refocus, rather than dispense with, generic distinctions among texts: “As soon as you collapse everything into something called textuality, you discover that it makes all the difference what kind of text you are talking about. The collapse licenses a certain kind of attention and invites the questions that literary critics characteristically ask, but at the same time it calls for a sharp attention to genre and rhetorical mode …” Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 23. For an excellent discussion of Greenblatt’s earlier comments on the relationship between genre and new historicism, see Stephen Cohen, “Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism,” in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2002), 18–41.

Chapter 1 1. See Myra Jehlen’s “History Before the Fact; or, Captain John Smith’s Unfinished Symphony,” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 677–692. 2. See, e.g., Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Routledge, 1986); Peter Hulme and Francis Barker, “ ‘Nymphs and reapers heavenly vanish’: the discursive con-text of The Tempest,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Routledge, 1985), 191–205. 3. Some of the recent influential arguments that either make cursory reference to or omit entirely questions of economic relations in their discussion of The Tempest include, Hulme, Colonial Encounters; Hulme and Barker, “ ‘Nymphs and reapers heavenly vanish’: the discursive con-text of The Tempest”; Thomas Cartelli, “Prospero in Africa: The Tempest as Colonialist Text and Pretext,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (Methuen: New York, 1987), 99–115; Alden T. Vaughan, “Shakespeare’s Indian: The Americanization of Caliban, “Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988); 137–153; Ronald Takaki, “The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,” The Journal of American History (1992): 892–911. 4. The one notable example, which I discuss at length below, is Paul Browne’s essay entitled “ ‘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 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) 59. See also the brief discussion of vagabondage in Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 47–56.

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5. The rise of masterlessness also complicates an already counterintuitive poststructural understanding of historical process without a subject. Outside the parameters of any discursive understanding of what would constitute a Renaissance subject, but yet also deeply connected with the vicissitudes of history, the masterless man is in one sense the perfect metaphor for antihumanist history; yet on the other hand he is also a very real, very oppressed historical presence during the early modern period. He is, paradoxically, the embodiment of history without a subject. 6. I borrow these terms from Mary Louis Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, London 1992). 7. See Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991), chap. 2. 8. William Harrison, A Description of England, ed. George Eden (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 185. 9. The classic account of enclosures and the decline in villeinage is R.H. Tawney’s The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). 10. Cited in Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution, 1640–1660 (New York, Barnes and Noble, 1966), 281. 11. Marx was inclined toward this view, although his opinions on vagabondage seemed to have changed throughout his writings. In The German Ideology Marx writes, “These vagabonds, who were so numerous that, for instance, Henry VII of England had 72,000 of them hanged, were only prevailed upon to work with the greatest difficulty and through the most extreme necessity. The rapid rise of manufacture, particularly in England, absorbed them gradually.” Karl Marx, The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1993), 74. It is difficult to tell in this passage whether Marx believes vagabonds were reluctant to work, or whether Tudor culture was reluctant (or able) to employ them. In Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, Marx writes of the newly dispossessed peasants: “Such a mass would be reduced either to the sale of its labour power or to beggary, vagabondage or robbery as its only source of income. History records the fact that it first tried beggary, vagabondage and crime, but was herded off this road on to the narrow path which led to the labour market by means of gallows, pillory and whip.” Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, trans. Jack Cohen, intro. and. ed. E.J. Hobsbawm (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 111. Marx seems to be invoking history or an immanent, materialist dialectic as an agent here, rather than idleness of the vagabonds themselves. In Capital Marx writes of the new proletariat: “these men, suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances” Karl Marx, Capital I, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 686. Marx offers here a compromise position: on the one hand, the feudal peasantry was not immediately convertible into a wage-laboring proletariat; on the other hand, “stress of circumstances” (unemployment?) created the conditions of vagabondage.

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12. C. Lis and H. Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), 48. 13. A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 16. 14. Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 120. 15. Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13–14. 16. Ibid., 210. 17. The revisionist economic history suggests that W.K. Jordan’s classic description of vagrancy was dogmatic, to say the least. Jordan writes, “There is no doubt whatever that vagabondage was widespread, that it was organized, and that it imposed on rural village communities burdens and dangers with which they could not cope. The evidence is abundantly clear that this class was feared by all elements in the society and that the incredibly harsh penalties against it were to a large degree justified.” See W.K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England: 1480–1660: A Study in the Changing Pattern of English Social Aspirations (London: Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1959), 78. 18. Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: a Critique of NeoSmithian Marxism,” New Left Review 104 (1977): 77. 19. See D.M. Palliser, “Tawney’s Century: Brave New World or Malthusian Trap?” Economic History Review 35 (1982): 339–353. Palliser is referenced in A.L. Beier’s article, “Poverty and Progress in Early Modern England,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A.L. Beier et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 201. 20. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 49. 21. Beier, Masterless Men, 26. 22. Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England, 1603–1658 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 51. 23. David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 37. 24. C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 147. 25. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Penguin Books, 1968), 285. 26. Ibid., 26c. 27. Thomas Carew, Coelum Britannicum, in The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 163. 28. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944). 29. See Sir Henry Nicholls, A History of The English Poor Law, 3 vols. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898), 1: 183. 30. Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 1: 361. 31. Cited in James, Social Problems, 287. 32. Nicholls, History of the English Poor Law, 159.

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33. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 385. 34. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 157. 35. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on The Principle of Population, ed. Anthony Flew (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 101. 36. Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 433. 37. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 88. 38. Karl de Schweinitz, England’s Road to Social Security (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1943), 42. 39. Henry Robinson, The Office of Addresses and Encounters (London, 1650), 2. 40. See Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development,” 25–92. 41. Ibid., 78. 42. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: An Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1992), 10. 43. Stuart Proclamations, 53. 44. Cited in Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 17. 45. “Nova Britannia”, in Tracts and other papers relating principally to the origin, settlement, and progress of the colonies in North America, from the discovery of the country to the year 1776, 4 vols., ed. Peter Force (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1963), Part VI, 1:19. 46. Force, Tracts, Part XIII, 3:4. 47. Captain John Smith, “Description of New England”, in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 3 vols., ed. Philip Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 1:338; hereinafter cited in the text as DP. 48. Ibid., 138. 49. William Strachey, A True Repertory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, in A Voyage to Virginia in 1609, ed. Louis B. Wright (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1964), 68–69. 50. Colonel Norwood, A Voyage to Virginia, in Force, Tracts, Part X, 3:15. 51. Captain John Smith, The Proceedings of the English Colonies in Virginia (1612), in Complete Works, Vol. I; hereinafter cited in text as P. 52. Captain John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia (1623), in Complete Works, Vol. II; hereinafter cited in text as GH. 53. James Lang, Conquest and Commerce: Spain and England in The Americas (New York: Academic Press, 1975), 115. 54. David Bertelson, The Lazy South (New York, 1967), 29, cited in Lang, Conquest and Commerce, 15. 55. See Jack Greene, Pursuits of Happiness (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 56. Wesley Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial Experiment (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1964), 35. 57. Ibid., 38. 58. Captain John Smith, A Map of Virginia, in Complete Works, 1:148.

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59. Captain John Smith, New England’s Trials (1622), in Captain John Smith: A Select Edition, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 197. 60. See Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company, chap. 2. 61. All citations from The Tempest taken from the Signet edition, ed. Robert Langbaum (New York: Signet), 1964. 62. See Michael Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society (London: Pelican Books, 1975), 82. Feudal exploitation traditionally aimed to restrict peasant movement across the land, particularly during the high Middle Ages, when rents in kind were commuted to money rents. Faced with increasingly coercive feudal tenures, discontented serfs frequently made attempts to flee manorial life in search of more independence in the expanding towns. The earliest “masterless” movement was thus the well-known flight of the serfs. 63. Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London: Verso, 1985), 78. 64. Cited in Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1993). 65. See William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Routledge, 1988), note 172, Act. II. Sc. ii. 66. See Walter Cohen, Drama of A Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 401. 67. Hulme and Francis Barker, “ ‘Nymphs and reapers heavenly vanish,’ ” in Alternative Shakespeares, 203. 68. Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 122. 69. Ibid., 296, fn., 65. 70. Paul Brown, “ ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Political Shakespeare, 59. 71. Ibid., 55. 72. Ibid., 57. 73. Ibid., 49. 74. See Myra Jehlen’s “History Before the Fact; or, Captain John Smith’s Unfinished Symphony,” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 677–692. 75. When Walter Cohen suggests that Prospero shares with Hamlet “his contact with the audience, his humanism, and perhaps even his bourgeois traits,” or that the utopianism of the play hints “at the antithesis of capitalism and the abolition of class society, at the formation of a post-bourgeois world,” the assumption is that the play focalizes a series of class antagonisms, much the way Brown suggests the play tests the bearings of a dominant ideology. But I have suggested that the play is belated, in the sense that the play works through and offers a reversal of the unintended effects of prior class antagonisms and social conduct. See Cohen, Drama of A Nation, 401–402. 76. Lucien Goldmann, Cultural Creation in Modern Society, trans. Bart Grahl (Saint Louis: Telos Press, 1976), 76–78. 77. See Robert Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980); and J.B. Bury’s The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry Into Its Origin and Growth (New York: Macmillan, 1932). For a more balanced assessment of Renaissance views on progress, see Hans Baron, “Querelle of Ancients and

Notes

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

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Moderns,” in Renaissance Essays, ed. Paul O. Kristeller and Philip P. Wiener (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 281–282. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 119–129. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 128. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 193. Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 61. Ibid., 64. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1990), 24. Ibid., 26.

Chapter 2 1. See J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975), 349. 2. See Arthur Riss, “The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language,” ELH 59 (1992): 53–75: Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 164–195. 3. Riss, “The Belly Politic,” 52. 4. Ibid., 54. 5. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1978), 161. 6. On the non laissez-faire nature of the early modern state, see Ian Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 29–40; and C.P. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 7. See Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1963), especially chap. 5. 8. See Thomas Sorge, “The Failure of Orthodoxy in Coriolanus,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York: Routledge, 1990), 237. 9. For discussions of feudal exploitation see Michael Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society (Penguin Books, 1972); and Rodney Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History (London: Verso, 1990). 10. It is surprising that while so many transitionalist readings appropriate Raymond Williams’s distinction between residual and emergent cultures in Marxism and Literature, more do not make reference to Williams’s landmark work, The Country and the City, in which he demystifies sentimentalized

184

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Notes accounts of pre-capitalist organicism: “Take first the idealization of a ‘natural’ or ‘moral’ economy on which so many have relied, as a contrast to the thrusting ruthlessness of the new capitalism. . . . the social order within which this agriculture was practised was as hard and brutal as anything later experienced. Even if we exclude the wars and brigandage . . . the uncountable thousands who grew crops and reared beasts only to be looted and burned and led away with tied wrists, this economy . . . was an order of exploitation of a most thoroughgoing kind: a property in men as well as in land. . . .” Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 37. Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 49. Ibid., 167–168. Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9. Ibid., 63. See Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Wood writes that “while Plato and Aristotle maintain quite explicitly that direct economic producers should not rule, they are by no means equally explicit that the primary purpose of the state is the protection of private property. They think that the chief goal of the well-ordered polis is to encourage human beings to fulfill their rational nature by the achievement of true moral virtue” (130). Marcus Tullius Cicero, On The Commonwealth, trans. George Holland Sabine and Stanley Barney Smith (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1929), 132. Cicero, On Duties, ed. M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9, 95. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 111. A.A. Long, “Cicero’s Politics in De Officiis,” in Justice and Generosity: Studies in Hellenistic Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Andre Laks and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 234. Cited in Long, “Cicero’s Politics,” 235. Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 132. Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 132. Francesco Guicciardini, Dialogue on the Government of Florence, ed. and trans. Alison Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85. Ibid., 90. Cited in J.P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London: Longman, 1986), 151. Ibid., 161. Ibid., 153. Cited in Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution, 152–153. Ibid., 151–152.

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31. Sir George Nicholls, A History of the English Poor Law, 3 vols. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898), 1: 167. 32. Ibid., 213. 33. Ibid., 227. 34. Ibid., 236. 35. See Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict in England, 1603–1658 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 21. For an overview of poverty legislation in England, see Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988). 36. See Margaret Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution: An Essay in Constitutional and Political Thought in England, 1603–1645 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 105. Judson adds, “It would be strange to find Coke, who stood for property and other rights in Parliament, talking general welfare at the expense of the subject’s rights, and it would be unusual to discover royalist judges admitting the dilemma in ordinary law when they were not facing it in the wider sphere of government” (106). 37. All cites taken from William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. R.B. Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 38. Quentin Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives,” in Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. Richard Rorty, Jerome B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 207. 39. Ibid., 213. 40. For a provocative account of Coriolanus’s “absolutism,” see Jonathan Goldberg, James I and The Politics of Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 186–193. 41. John of Salisbury, Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67. 42. Ibid., 67. 43. Provision for the Poor (London, 1597). 44. William Perkins, A Treatise of Christian Equity (London, 1604), 26. 45. Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England, 1603–1658 (Cambridge, 1986), 51, cited in Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 136. 46. Ibid., 136, 138. 47. Ibid., 138. 48. Robert Wilkinson, A Sermon Preached at Northampton (London, 1607), 2–3, cited in Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, 140. 49. Wilkinson, A Sermon Preached at Northampton, E4. 50. Ibid., E-E1. 51. Ibid., E2. 52. Ibid., E1. 53. See A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985). 54. Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. R.B. Parker, 41.

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55. On Leveller anti-Normanism see Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1995). 56. See King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 187. 57. Janet Adelman, “ ‘Anger’s My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwarz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 132. 58. Ibid., 132. 59. Susan Dixon, The Roman Mother (Norman: Oklahoma, 1988), 2. 60. Ibid., 135. 61. Ibid., 188. 62. Ibid., 9. 63. Ibid., 120. 64. Ibid., 122. 65. Ibid., 134. 66. Judson, The Crisis of The Constitution, 279. 67. Ibid., 286. 68. Ibid., 292. 69. Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 54. 70. Oscar James Campbell, Shakespeare’s Satire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), 200, 208. Cited in Maurice Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 142. 71. Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays, 142–196. 72. James Holstun, “Tragic Superfluity in Coriolanus,” ELH 50 (1983): 485–507. 73. Ibid., 489. 74. Ibid., 503. 75. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 223. 76. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 37. 77. In terms more familiar to post-Marxist class theory, we might say that characters in the play occupy what Erik Olin Wright describes as “contradictory locations within class relations”: “Instead of regarding all positions as located uniquely within particular classes and thus as having a coherent class character in their own right, we should see some positions as possibly having a multiple class character. . . .” Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London: Verso, 985), 43. For an important historical survey of early modern class structures, one that also acknowledges the fluidity of class positions during the period and in the play, see Theodore B. Leinwand, “Shakespeare and The Middling Sort,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 284–303. 78. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 224. 79. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially chap. 4, on irony.

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Chapter 3 1. Walter Cohen, “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism,” in New Casebooks: The Merchant of Venice, ed. Martin Coyle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 45–72. 2. John Drakakis, “ ‘Jew, Shylock is my name’: Speech Prefixes in The Merchant of Venice as Symptoms of the Early Modern,” in Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium, ed. Hugh Grady (London: Routledge, 2000), 105–121. For other interpretations that rely on transitional schemas or that find symptoms of a market economy in the play, see Michael Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750, vol. 1, trans. Ruth Crowley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), chap. 7; and Frederick Turner, Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 5. 3. Eric S. Mallin, “Jewish Invader and the Soul of State: The Merchant of Venice and Science Fiction Movies,” in Grady, ed., Shakespeare and Modernity, 142–167. 4. Eric Roll, A History of Economic Thought (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), 46. 5. Odd Langholm, Price and Value in the Aristotelian Tradition: A Study in Scholastic Economic Sources (Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities, 1979), 32. For an earlier critique of the theory of intrinsic value, see Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 60–62. 6. I owe much of this summary of the scholastic branches of value theory to Langholm’s Price and Value in the Aristotelian Tradition. 7. Hannah Robie Sewall, The Theory of Value Before Adam Smith, in Publications of the American Economic Association, Third Series, vol. II, n. 3 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1901), 15. 8. Langholm, Price and Value, 85–105. 9. Ibid, 109. 10. Ibid, 31. 11. Sewall, The Theory of Value Before Adam Smith, 16. 12. On the relationship between labor and the just price see Lewis H. Haney, History of Economic Thought (New York: Macmillan Company, 1949), 99–100; Raymond de Roover, “The Concept of the Just Price: Theory and Economic Policy,” Journal of Economic History 18 (1958): 418–434; and Langholm, Price and Value, 61–84. 13. Gerard de Malynes, England’s View, in the Unmasking of Two Paradoxes (London, 1603), 8. 14. Gerard de Malynes, The Maintenance of Free Trade (London, 1622), 6. 15. Karl Marx, Capital III (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 378, cited in Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 489. As Elster remarks, “Although the view that money might generate profit independently of production is indeed preposterous, it was the foundation of mercantilist reasoning for a long time. We find the seventeenth-century

188

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Notes cameralists arguing that wars would never run an economy down so long as the money remained in the country, as if soldiers could be fed on gold and silver” (489). Malynes, England’s View, 189. Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (London, 1663), 20, cited in Bruno Suviranta, The Theory of the Balance of Trade in England: A Study in Mercantilism (Helsingfors, 1923), 72–73. Cited in Lars Magnusson, Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language (London: Routledge, 1994), 162. Bacon, though, was quick to point out, along with Machiavelli, that money is decidely not the sinews of war: “Neither is money the sinews of war (as it is trivially said), where the sinews of men’s arms, in base and effeminate people, are failing.” Francis Bacon, “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,” in Francis Bacon: The Essays, ed. and intro. John Pitcher (London: Pengin Books, 1985), 148. Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2 vols., trans. Mendel Shapiro (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1935), 2: 138–139. Henry Dunning Macleod, Principles of Economical Philosophy, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1872–1875), 1: 50, cited in Suviranta, The Theory of the Balance of Trade, 115. Edward Misselden, The Circle of Commerce (London, 1623), 21. Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure, cited in Suviranta, The Theory of the Balance of Trade, 48. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 4.1, 472, cited in Suviranta, The Theory of The Balance of Trade, 115. Smith’s account of mercantilism is accurate as a description of the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century economic writers—Bodin, Hales, Malynes, Misselden, and perhaps Mun—but he exaggerated the extent to which later seventeenth-century mercantilists identified money and wealth, and saw money as the principle form of capital. A glance at late seventeenth-century mercantilist doctrine certainly shows a less reductive identification of money and wealth than seems to prevail in early mercantilism. Charles Davenant recognized that, “Gold and Silver are indeed the Measure of Trade, but that the Spring and Original of it, in all Nations, is the Natural or Artificial Product of the Country; that is to say, what this land or what this Labour and Industry produces.” Magnusson, Mercantilism, 153. Suviranta, The Theory of the Balance of Trade, 160. All citations taken from William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Brents Stirling (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1990). All citations are noted in text. Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 190. Ibid., 188–190. Bernard Grebanier, The Truth About Shylock (New York: Random House, 1962), 250–251. Bernardo Davanzati, A Discourse Upon Coins, trans. John Toland (London, 1696), 15.

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30. Ibid., 20. 31. Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), 2.12, 351. 32. I owe much of this summary of the usury debates to Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and R.H. Tawney’s introduction to his edition of Thomas Wilson’s Discourse Upon Usury, intro. and ed. R.H. Tawney (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925). See also John T. Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957); and Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969). 33. George Downame, Lectures on the XV Psalme (London, 1604), 316. 34. Ibid., 317. 35. Ibid., 320. 36. Ibid., 320. 37. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Book I, cited in Langholm, Price and Value, 135. 38. Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade (London, 1690), 15, cited in Langholm, Price and Value, 135. 39. C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 168. 40. A.D. Moody, “The Letter of the Law,” in The Merchant of Venice: Critical Essay, ed. Thomas Wheeler (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), 86. 41. René Girard, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 246. 42. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 82. 43. Ibid., 82–83. 44. See “The Camp as the ‘Nomos’ of the Modern,” in Agamben, Homo Sacer, 166–180. 45. Alice N. Benston, “Portia, The Law, and the Triparite Structure of The Merchant of Venice,” in Wheeler, ed. The Merchant of Venice: Critical Essays, 171. 46. Gerard de Malynes, Consuetudo, vel lex mercatoria, or the Ancient Law-merchant (1636), 222–223, cited in Jones, God and the Moneylenders, 161. 47. For a foundational essay on the role of New Testament morality in the play, see Barbara K. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 327–433. 48. Karen Newman, “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 26. 49. Ibid., 37. 50. Claude Levi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, in The Logic of the Gift, ed. Alan Schrift (New York: Routledge, 1997), 55–56. 51. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Logic of Practice,” in Schrift, ed. The Logic of the Gift, 190–191. 52. Ibid., 235. 53. Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” in Schrift, ed. The Logic of the Gift, 185. 54. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 162. On the “two worlds” of comedy, see Elliot

190

55. 56.

57.

58.

Notes Krieger, A Marxist Study of Shakespeare’s Comedies (London: Macmillan Press, 1979), 1–7. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 41. Cohen, “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism,” 61; and Krieger, A Marxist Study of Shakespeare’s Comedies,” where Krieger remarks that “in Venice, possession of material substances, of gold, determines one’s position within the social order. The Belmont atmosphere emerges or gets articulated in part so as to contradict the Venetian materialism” (7). Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 3–23. I owe much of my understanding of Lovejoy’s notion of the genesis of ideas to Michael Bristol’s excellent overview of Lovejoy’s study in Michael D. Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1990), 145–151. See Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carlo Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 116–129. For a critique of Bataille’s theory of expenditure, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspective for Critical Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 134–149.

Chapter 4 1. Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 53. 2. Ibid., 55. 3. H.L.A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights,” in Rights, ed. David Lyons (California: Wadsworth, 1979), 17. 4. Cited in J.L. Mackie, “Can There Be A Right-Based Moral Theory,” in Theories of Rights, ed. Jeremy Waldron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 186. 5. Mackie, “Can There Be A Right-Based Moral Theory,” 171. 6. All cites taken from William Shakespeare, King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition, ed. René Weis (London: Longman, 1993). For the sake of convenience, all passages will be cited from the First Folio text, The Tragedy of King Lear (1623), unless otherwise noted. 7. Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 183. 8. Ibid., 184. 9. Ibid., 184. 10. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 50. 11. Ibid., 57–58. 12. Ibid., 62.

Notes

191

13. Ibid., 70. 14. Susan Schreiner, “Calvin’s Use of Natural Law,” in A Preserving Grace: Protestants, Catholics, and Natural Law, ed. Michael Cromartie (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdman’s, 1997), 57. 15. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Tragedy (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1964), 188. 16. See John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 116. 17. Ibid., 116. 18. William Lowith, The Christian Man’s Closet (London, 1581), 26. 19. See Jeffrey Blustein, Parents and Children: The Ethics of the Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 20. A Discourse of Parent’s Honour and Authority Over Their Children (London, 1591), 28. 21. See A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: MacMillan and Company, 1904), 235. 22. Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary, ed. Roy Battenhouse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 444. 23. Cited in Sylvan Barnet, “A Christian Approach to Shakespeare,” A Journal of English Literary History 22 (1955): 90. 24. Ibid., 91. 25. Cited in Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 194. 26. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 149–294. 27. Judy Kronenfeld, “‘So Distribution Should Unto Excess, And Each Man May Have Enough’: Shakespeare’s King Lear—Anabaptist Egalitarianism, Anglican Charity, Both, Neither?” ELH 59 (1992): 756. 28. Ibid., 758. 29. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, ed. C.A. Patrides (Penguins Books, 1977), 35. 30. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. Phillip Harth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989), 268. 31. John Downame, Treatise of Beneficence (London, 1617), 170. 32. Ibid., 170. 33. Ibid., 170–171. 34. Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, trans. A.C. Campbell (Westport: Hyperion Press, 1993), 86. 35. Ibid., 92. 36. Ibid., 24. 37. Ibid., 22. 38. Ibid., 92. 39. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 76–100,143–173. 40. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 192.

192

Notes

41. Ibid., 192–193. 42. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), chap. 3. For useful commentaries on Rawls’s theory of justice see Reading Rawls: Critical Studies on Rawls’ Theory of Justice, ed. and intro. Norman Daniels (New York: Basic Books,); and Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 43. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 27. 44. R.S. White, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 202. 45. Ibid., 202. 46. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 128. 47. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979), 299, cited in Agamben, Homo Sacer, 126. 48. On Agamben’s recent considerations on the relationship of potentiality to actuality, see Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), parts 3–4. 49. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature, 138. 50. Ibid., 8. 51. James I, Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies, in The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917), 62, cited in Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 221. 52. Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 222. 53. Ibid., 223. 54. Ibid., 224. 55. Ibid., 224. 56. See Michael Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London: Longman, 1995); John Hudson, The Formation of The English Common Law: Law and Society in England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta (London: Longman, 1996); H.E. Bell, An Introduction to the History and Records of the Court of Wards and Liveries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). 57. Bell, An Introduction to the History and Records of the Court of Wards and Liveries, 112. 58. Ibid., 142. 59. Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England (London: T. Curson Hansard, 1806), 1,127. 60 Ibid., 1,127. 61. Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 222. 62. Rosalie Colie, “Reason and Need: King Lear and the ‘Crisis’ of the Aristocracy,” in Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism, ed. Rosalie L. Colie and F.T. Flahiff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 193. 63. Ibid., 204. 64. Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 244.

Notes 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74. 75.

76. 77.

78. 79.

193

Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature, 46. See Michael Hicks, Bastard Feudalism. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 101. Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 334–335. Arnold Kettle, “From Hamlet to King Lear,” in Shakespeare in a Changing World, ed. Arnold Kettle (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964), 171. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question”, in ed. The Collected Works Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 3: 162, cited in Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 63. Marx and Engels, Theses on Feurbach, in Collected Works, 5: 133, cited in Lukes, Marxism and Morality, 63. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Selected Works, 2 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 2: 24, cited in Lukes, Marxism and Morality, 57. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 118. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 13, cited in Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. John Drakakis (New York: Longman, 1992), 15. See Drakakis, Shakespearean Tragedy, 11–13. Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York: Urizen Press, 1979), cited in Drakakis, Shakespearean Tragedy, 6. Franco Moretti, “The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of Sovereignty,” in Drakakis, Shakespearean Tragedy, 46–47. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 4.

Chapter 5 1. For recent Marxist interpretations of Hamlet, see Peter Stallybrass, “ ‘Well grubbed, old mole’: Marx, Hamlet, and the (un)fixing of representation,” in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London: Routledge, 2001), 16–30; and Richard Halpern, “An Impure History of Ghosts: Derrida, Marx, Shakespeare,” in the same volume, 31–52. 2. See Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), particularly part three, for Parfit’s radical conception of personhood as successive selves. 3. A.P. Rossiter, Angel With Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961), 187. 4. Ibid., 172. 5. Ibid., 185. 6. William Kerrigan, Hamlet’s Perfection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 65.

194 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

Notes Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen, 1984), 36. Ibid., 37. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (London: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1986), 74. Lena Ashwell, “Reflexions from Shakespeare” (1923), cited in Readings on the Character of Hamlet, ed. Claude C.H. Williamson (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1950), 423. George Santayana, Obiter Scripta (1936), in Readings on the Character of Hamlet, 639. Cited in L.C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes and An Approach to Hamlet (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 198. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. A.R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin Books, 2001). Citations will be quoted in text. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1. Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 6. Maus, Inwardness and Theater, 4. Ernst Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, trans. Paul Stern (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 27. See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 148. See Pelagius’s Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, trans. Theodore de Bruyn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 103–104. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 170. Peter Brown, “Pelagius and His Supporters: Aims and Environment,” Journal of Theological Studies 19 (1968): 104. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore, MD Penguin Books, 1961), 164. Ibid., 172. Saint Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 106. Thomas Goodwin, The Aggravation of Sin (1637), in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, 12 vols., ed. John C. Miller and Robert Halley (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864), 4: 158. William Perkins, A Commentarie or Exposition Upon the First Five Chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians, in Workes, 3 vols. ed. T. Pickering (1631), 2: 269. Sir Thomas Browne, Christian Morals, in Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, ed. C.A. Patrides (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 432. Jeremy Taylor, Unum Necessarium (1655), in The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor, 10 vols. (London: Longman, 1861), 7: 152. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (1678), in The Practical Works of The Reverend Richard Baxter, 23 vols., ed. William Orme (London: James Duncan, 1830), 2: 531. I am assuming that Shakespeare had been sorting through these Augustinian theological niceties in advance of the full-scale preoccupation with sinful habituation that begins in the early decades of the seventeenth century. But given

Notes

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

195

the Augustinian background on the subject of sinful habituation, I would describe Shakespeare as precocious but certainly not prophetic in his handling of the nuances of the theology of habit before the subject exercises the imagination of post-Elizabethan Puritans and Anglicans. Sir Edmund K. Chambers, Hamlet (1894), in Readings on the Character of Hamlet, 189. Thomas Goodwin, Aggravation of Sin, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, 12 vols., ed. John C. Miller and Robert Halley (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864), 4: 158. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1818), in Readings on the Character of Hamlet, 48. Dr. Maudsley, Body and Mind (1875), in Readings on the Character of Hamlet, 135. Reverend C.E. Moberly, Introduction to Hamlet (1873), in Readings on the Character of Hamlet, 123. Wylie Sypher, The Ethic of Time Structures of Experience in Shakespeare (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 69, cited in Bert O. States, Hamlet and The Concept of Character (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 17. For a discussion of Hamlet’s role-playing see David Leverenz, “The Woman in Hamlet : An Interpersonal View,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwarz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 110–128. See Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers (New York: Methuen, 1987). See Howard C. Warren, A History of Association Psychology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 25. Ibid., 31. René Descartes, Treatise of Man, trans. Thomas Steel Hall (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). 90. Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994). 17. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Custom, and That We Should Not Easily Change a Law Received” (1595), in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, 3 vols., ed. and trans. Jacob Zeitlin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf ), 1: 95. Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 274, cited in Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 48. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul (1649), cited in Vance G. Morgan, Foundations of Cartesian Ethics (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994), 168. Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 56. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), 19. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 43. For an informative discussion of Ryle’s theory of dispositional properties, see D.M. Armstrong, The Nature of Mind in Readings in

196

50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Notes Philosophy of Psychology, vol. I, ed. Ned Block (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). See John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 244–246. Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Octagon Books, 1983), 256. Taylor, Unum Necessarium, 166. Jonathan Edwards, Original Sin (1758), in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 17 vols., ed. Clyde A. Holbrook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 3:405. See Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: The Modern Library, 1922), 24. John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 149. William Ames, Marrow of Theology, ed. John D. Eusden (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1965). 224. Lancelot Andrewes, Ninety-Six Sermons (1606), cited in Jonathan F.S. Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 79. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul (1649), cited in John Cottingham, Partiality and the Virtues, in How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues, ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 71. See Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V (1597), in Works, 3 vols., ed. John Keble (Clarendon Press, 1971), 2: 309–311, 2: 392–393. On the history of the doctrine of emergence, see Brian P. McLaughlin, “The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism,” in Emergence Or Reduction? ed. A. Berckermann, J. Kim, and H. Flohr (De Gruyter, 1992), 49–93. Jean-Claude Schmitt explains Augustinian pneumatology in Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 17–24. Schmitt’s work is described in illuminating detail in Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 21. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 102–150. Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 118–142. Roy W. Battenhouse, “The Ghost in Hamlet : A Catholic ‘Linchpin,’ “Studies in Philology XLVIII (1951): 161–192; Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 111–114. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1906), 81. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 79. John Kinnaird, “Hazlitt and the ‘Design’ of Shakespearean Tragedy: A ‘Character’ Critic Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977): 38.

Notes

197

72. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 133. 73. A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan and Company, 1965), 83. 74. Ibid., 86. 75. Ibid., 86. 76. Ibid., 102. 77. Ibid., 102. 78. Ibid., 82. 79. Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 191–218. 80. Ibid., 196. 81. Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 51.

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Selected Bibliography Abercrombie, Nicholas, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner. The Dominant Ideology Thesis. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980. Adelman, Janet. “ ‘Anger’s My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus.” Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays. Ed. Murray M. Schwarz and Coppelia Kahn. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, 129–149. Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. New York: The Seabury Press, 1973. Aers, David. “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject.’ ” Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing. Ed. David Aers. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992, 177–202. Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Ed. and Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. ———. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. ———. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1969. Archer, Ian. The Pursuit of Stability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Aston, T.H. and C.H.E. Philpin, eds. The Brenner Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ———. On Free Choice of the Will. Trans. Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993. Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1961. Barber, C.L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958. Barbour, Philip, ed. The Complete Works of Captain John Smith. 3 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Barker, Francis. The Tremulous Private Body. London: Methuen, 198. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carlo Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Battenhouse, Roy, ed. Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ———. “The Ghost in Hamlet : A Catholic ‘Linchpin.’ ” Studies in Philology 48 (1951): 161–192.

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Beier, A.L. “Poverty and Progress in Early Modern England.” The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone. Ed. A.L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640. London: Methuen, 1985. Bell, H.E. An Introduction to the History and Records of the Court of Wards and Liveries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953. Benhabib, Seyla. Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Bloch, Ernst. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. Blustein, Jeffrey. Parents and Children: The Ethics of the Family. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. London: MacMillan and Company, 1904. Braunmuller, A.R., ed. William Shakespeare, Hamlet. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. ———. “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism.” The First Modern Society. Ed. A.L. Beier, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 271–304. ———. “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism.” New Left Review 104 (1977): 25–92. Bristol, Michael D. Shakespeare’s America, America’s Sakespeare. London: Routledge, 1990. Brown, Paul. “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism.” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 48–71. Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Bruster, Douglas. “The New Materialism in Renaissance Studies.” Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Ed. Curtis Perry. Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2001, 225–238. Burgess, Glenn. Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Callinicos, Alex. Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Campbell, Oscar James. Shakespeare’s Satire. New York: Oxford University Press, 1943. Carew, Thomas. Coelum Britannicum. The Poems of Thomas Carew. Ed. Rhodes Dunlap. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949. Carling, Alan H. Social Division. London: Verso, 1991.

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201

Cartelli, Thomas. “Prospero in Africa: The Tempest as Colonialist Text and Pretext.” Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. Ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor. Methuen: New York, 1987, 99–115. Caudwell, Christopher. “English Poets: The Period of Primitive Accumulation.” Marxist Literary Theory. Ed. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne. London: Blackwell, 1996, 91–102. Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Charney, Maurice. Shakespeare’s Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. Christianson, Paul. “The Causes of the English Revolution.” Journal of British Studies 15 (1976): 40–75. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On Duties. Ed. M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. On The Commonwealth. Trans. George Holland Sabine and Stanley Barney Smith. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1929. Clark, J.C.D. Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Cohen, Stephen. “Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism.” Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements. Ed. Mark David Rasmussen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, 18–41. Cohen, Walter. “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism.” New Casebooks: The Merchant of Venice. Ed. Martin Coyle. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998, 45–72. ———. Drama of A Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Colie, Rosalie. “Reason and Need: King Lear and the ‘Crisis’ of the Aristocracy.” Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism. Ed. Rosalie L. Colie and F.T. Flahiff. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974, 185–219. Craven, Wesley. The Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial Experiment. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1964. Cust, Richard and Ann Hughes, eds. Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642. London: Longman, 1989. Danby, John. Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear. London: Faber and Faber, 1961. Davanzati, Bernardo. A Discourse Upon Coins. Trans. John Toland. London, 1696. Roover, Raymond de. “The Concept of the Just Price: Theory and Economic Policy.” Journal of Economic History, 18 (1958): 418–434. Delany, Paul “King Lear and the Decline of Feudalism.” Materialist Shakespeare: A History. Ed. Ivo Kamps. London: Verso, 1995, 20–38. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Descartes, René. Treatise of Man. Trans. Thomas Steel Hall. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972. Dewey, John. Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology. New York: The Modern Library, 1922.

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Jones, Norman. God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Jordan, W.K. Philanthropy in England: 1480–1660: A Study in the Changing Pattern of English Social Aspirations. London: Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1959. Judson, Margaret. The Crisis of the Constitution: An Essay in Constitutional and Political Thought in England, 1603–1645. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Kerrigan, William. Hamlet’s Perfection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Kettle, Arnold, ed. Shakespeare in a Changing World. New York: International Publishers, 1964. Kinnaird, John. “Hazlitt and the ‘Design’ of Shakespearean Tragedy: A ‘Character’ Critic Revisited.” Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977): 22–39. Kirschbaum, Leo. Character and Characterization in Shakespeare. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962. Kishlansky, Mark. Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England. London, 1986. Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire: Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Tragedy. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1964. Krieger, Elliot. A Marxist Study of Shakespeare’s Comedies. London: Macmillan Press, 1979. Kronenfeld, Judy. “ ‘So Distribution Should Unto Excess, And Each Man May Have Enough’: Shakespeare’s King Lear—Anabaptist Egalitarianism, Anglican Charity, Both, Neither?” ELH 59 (1992): 755–784. Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Captain John Smith: A Select Edition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Lachman, Richard. Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Lang, James. Conquest and Commerce: Spain and England in The Americas. New York: Academic Press, 1975. Langbaum, Robert, ed. The Tempest. New York: Signet, 1964. Langholm, Odd. Price and Value in the Aristotelian Tradition: A Study in Scholastic Economic Sources. Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities, 1979. Larkin, James F. and Paul L. Hughes. Stuart Royal Proclamations. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Larrain, Jorge. Marxism and Ideology. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1983. Lear, Jonathan. Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Leinwand, Theodore B. “Shakespeare and The Middling Sort.” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 284–303. Leverenz, David. “The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal View.” Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays. Ed. Murray M. Schwarz and Coppelia Kahn. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, 110–128.

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Lovejoy, Arthur O. Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Lowith, William. The Christian Man’s Closet. London, 1581. Lukes, Steven. Marxism and Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Mackie, J.L. “Can There Be A Rights-Based Moral Theory.” Theories of Rights. Ed. Jeremy Waldron. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, 168–181. Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge, 1978. Macleod, Henry Dunning. Principles of Economical Philosophy. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1872–1875. Macpherson, C.B. Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Magnusson, Lars. Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language. London: Routledge, 1994. Mallin, Eric S. “Jewish Invader and the Soul of State: The Merchant of Venice and Science Fiction Movies.” Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millenium. Ed. Hugh Grady. London: Routledge, 2000, 142–167. ———. Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on The Principle of Population. Ed. Anthony Flew. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970. Malynes, Gerard de. Consuetudo, vel lex mercatoria, or the Ancient Law-merchant. London, 1636. ———. The Maintenance of Free Trade. London, 1622. ———. England’s View, in the Unmasking of Two Paradoxes. London, 1603. Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees. Ed. Phillip Harth. Penguin Books, 1989. Mantoux, Paul. The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Marx, Karl. Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations. Trans. Jack Cohen. Ed. and Intro. E.J. Hobsbawm. New York: International Publishers, 1989. ———. Capital, Vol. I. Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1967. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology, Part One. Ed. C.J. Arthur. New York: International Publishers, 1993. Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. McLaughlin, Brian P. “The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism.” Emergence Or Reduction? Ed. A. Berckermann, J. Kim, and H. Flohr. New York: De Gruyter, 1992. Misselden, Edward. The Circle of Commerce. London, 1623. Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. Moody, A.D. “The Letter of the Law.” The Merchant of Venice: Critical Essay. Ed. Thomas Wheeler. New York: Garland Publishing, 1991, 79–101. Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975.

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Moretti, Franco. “The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of Sovereignty.” Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. John Drakakis. London: Longman, 1992, 45–83. Mun, Thomas. England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade. London, 1663. Nelson, Benjamin. The Idea of Usury. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969. Newman, Karen. “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 19–33. Nerlich, Michael. Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750. Vol. 1. Trans. Ruth Crowley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Nicholls, Sir Henry. A History of The English Poor Law. 3 vols. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898. Noonan, John T. The Scholastic Analysis of Usury. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. Palliser, D.M. “Tawney’s Century: Brave New World or Malthusian Trap?” Economic History Review 35 (1982): 339–353. Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Parker, R.B. ed., William Shakespeare, Coriolanus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Patterson, Annabel. Shakespeare and the Popular Voice. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Peltonen, Markku. Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Perkins, William. A Commentarie or Exposition Upon the First Five Chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians. Workes. 3 vols. Ed. T. Pickering. London, 1631. ———. A Treatise of Christian Equity. London, 1604. Pocock, J.G.A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 1944. Postan, Michael. The Medieval Economy and Society. London: Pelican, 1975. Poulantzas, Nicos. Political Power and Social Classes. London: Verso, 1978. Pratt, Mary Louis. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, London 1992. Prosser, Eleanor. Hamlet and Revenge. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967. Rappaport, Steve. Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. Reynolds, Bryan. Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2003. Riss, Arthur “The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language.” ELH 59 (1992): 53–75. Robinson, Henry. The Office of Addresses and Encounters. London, 1650. Roll, Eric. A History of Economic Thought. London: Faber and Faber, 1938. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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Rossiter, A.P. Angel With Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures. Ed. Graham Storey. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961. Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. ———. Unrevolutionary England, 1602–1649. London: Hambledon Press, 1990. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949. Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. Trans. Teresa Lavender Fagen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Schrift, Alan, ed. The Logic of the Gift. New York: Routledge, 1997. Schucking, Levin L. Character Problems in Shakespeare’s Plays. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1959. Sewall, Hannah Robie. The Theory of Value Before Adam Smith. Publications of the American Economic Association. Third Series, vol. 2, no. 3. New York: Macmillan Company, 1901. Sharp, Kevin. Remapping Early Modern England:The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Sinfield, Alan. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Skinner, Quentin. “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives.” Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy. Ed. Richard Rorty, Jerome B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Slack, Paul. Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman, 1988. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations. Ed. Edwin Cannan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Smith, Dennis. The Rise of Historical Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Sommerville, Johann P. ed. King James VI and I: Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640. London: Longman, 1986. Sorge, Thomas. “The Failure of Orthodoxy in Coriolanus.” Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. Ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor. New York: Routledge, 1990, 225–241. States, Bert O. States. Hamlet and The Concept of Character. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961. Stirling, Brents, ed. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1990. Stoll, Elmer Edgar. Art and Artifice in Shakespeare: A Study in Dramatic Contrast and Illusion. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1933. Stone, Lawrence. The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Strier, Richard. Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

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Suviranta, Bruno. The Theory of the Balance of Trade in England: A Study in Mercantilism. Helsingfors, 1923. Tawney, R.H. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Taylor, Jeremy. Unum Necessarium (1655). The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor. 10 vols. London: Longman, 1861. Tennenhouse, Leonard. Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres. New York: Methuen,1988. Tuck, Richard. Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Tugendhat, Ernst. Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination. Trans. Paul Stern. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. Turner, Frederick. Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Turner, Henry S. ed. The Culture of Capital: Properties, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 2002. Underdown, David. Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Warren, Howard C. A History of Association Psychology. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921. Weis, René, ed. William Shakespeare, King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition. London: Longman, 1993. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. White, R.S. Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Wilkinson, Robert. A Sermon Preached at Northampton. London, 1607. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Williamson, Claude C. H., ed. Readings on the Character of Hamlet. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1950. Wilson, John Dover. What Happens in Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Wilson, Thomas. Discourse Upon Usury. Ed. and Intro. R.H. Tawney. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925. Wood, Ellen Meiksins, The Origin of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999. ———. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: An Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States. London: Verso, 1991. Wood, Neal. Cicero’s Social and Political Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Wright, Erik Olin. Classes. London: Verso, 1985. Wright, Thomas. The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604). Ed. Thomas O. Sloan. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1971. Zˇizˇek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1990.

Index

Adelman, Janet, 70–71 Adorno, Theodor, 176, n. 37 Aers, David, 173, n. 3 Agamben, Giorgio, 99, 101, 133–134 Althusser, Louis, 7, 9–11 Ames, William, 154 Andrewes, Lancelot, 164 Aquinas, Thomas, 82 Archer, Ian, 28 Arendt, Hannah, 192, n. 47 Aristotle, 157 Armstrong, D.M., 195, n. 49 Ashwell, Lena, 147 Augustine, Saint: Confessions, 154; Libero Arbitrio, 154 Barber, C.L., 98 Barbon, Nicholas, 97 Barker, Francis, 45–46, 147 Battenhouse, Roy, 167 Baxter, Richard, 194, n. 29 Becon, Thomas, 119 Beier, A.L., 28, 29 Bell, H.E., 192, n. 56 Bellamy, J.G., 140 Benhabib, Seyla, 175, n. 12 Benston, Alice, 100 Bloch, Ernst, 109 Blustein, Jeffrey, 191, n. 19 Boal, Augusto, 193, n. 77 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 106–107 Bradley, A.C., 19, 169

Brenner, Robert, 11–13, 29, 33–34, 138 Bristol, Michael, 190, n. 57 Brooks, Cleanth, 21 Brown, Paul, 6, 47–48 Brown, Peter, 194, n. 21 Browne, Sir Thomas, 124 Bruster, Douglas, 173, n. 3 Bucknill, J.C., 155 Burgess, Glenn, 56 Buridan, Jean, 81–82, 97 Campbell, O.J., 74 Carew, Thomas, 30 Carroll, William C., 174, n. 12 Caudwell, Christopher, 1–2 Cavell, Stanley, 117–118 Chamberlen, Peter, 27 Chambers, E.K., 155 Character (function), 19–22, 45, 47, 49–52, 108, 122, 142–144, 146, 171–172 Charney, Maurice, 74 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 57 Clarke, J.C.D., 4 Claude-Schmitt, Jean, 166 Cohen, Walter, 79, 182, n. 75 Colie, Rosalie, 138 Coriolanus, 14–16, 53–77: custom, 69–70; Midlands Rising, 66–68; negative liberties, 62–63; paternalism, 63–65;

210

Index

Coriolanus—continued republicanism, 61–62; tragic irony, 74–77; Volumnia, 70–73 Cowell, John, 59 Craven, Wesley, 37 Cust, Richard, 8–9 Danby, John, 2, 119, 135 Davanzati, Bernardo, 93 Delany, Paul, 177, n. 55 Deleuze, Gilles, 32 Descartes, René, 157, 159 Dewey, John, 164 Dixon, Susan, 71 Dobb, Maurice, 33 Dollimore, Jonathan, 8, 128–130 Donne, John, 196, n. 56 Doran, Madeline, 20 Downame, George, 95 Downame, John, 125 Drakakis, John, 79 Eagleton, Terry, 147 Elster, Jon, 159, 187, n. 15 Elton, G.R., 8 Engle, Lars, 164 Felperin, Howard, 51, 171 Ferry, Anne, 148 Feudalism, 11–13, 41–42, 55, 136–137, 139–140 Foucault, Michel, 29 Frye, Northrop, 18, 50, 108 Fuller, Nicholas, 58 Functional contradictions, 5–9; and class, 33–34

Gilson, Etienne, 163 Girard, René, 98, 142 Goldmann, Lucien, 182, n. 76 Goodwin, Thomas, 154 Grady, Hugh, 20 Grebanier, Bernard, 92 Greenblatt, Stephen, 166, 178, n. 62, 196, n. 62 Greene, Jack, 36 Grotius, Hugo, 93, 125–127 Guattari, Felix, 32 Hakluyt, Richard, 34 Halpern, Richard, 4–5, 27, 90–91, 135–136, 138 Hamlet, 16–17, 145–172: ghosts, 166–168; habitual sin, 152–160, 164–166; inwardness, 146–152; radical behaviorism, 160–163; tragedy, 169–172 Haney, Lewis H., 187, n. 12 Harrison, William, 27 Hart, H.L.A., 112 Hartlib, Samuel, 27 Hazlitt, William, 169 Hekscher, Eli, 84 Hill, Christopher, 140 Hirst, Derek, 29, 66 Hobbes, Thomas, 30, 97, 119, 157 Holstun, James, 74–75 Hooker, Richard, 164 Hudson, John, 192, n. 56 Hughes, Ann, 8–9 Hulme, Peter, 45–46 Irigaray, Luce, 107

Garber, Marjorie, 195, n. 37 Genre, 17–19: comedy (Merchant of Venice), 107–110; irony (Coriolanus), 74–77; romance (The Tempest), 49–51; tragedy (King Lear), 142–144; (Hamlet), 169–172

Jameson, Fredric, 21–22, 50–51 Jones, Norman, 94 Jordan, W.K., 180, n. 17 Judson, Margaret, 60

Index

211

Kermode, Frank, 44 Kerrigan, William, 193, n. 6 Kettle, Arnold, 140 King Lear, 16, 111–144: bastard feudalism, 139–140; class, 138–139; distribution, 125–131; duty, 115–117; feudal incidents, 136–138; justice, 140–142; passion, 121–124; rights, 112–115, 133–134; tragedy, 142–144; two moralities, 134–135; veil of ignorance, 131–133 Kinnaird, John, 169 Kirschbaum, Leo, 20 Kishlansky, Mark, 8 Knight, G. Wilson, 21, 119 Kronenfeld, Judy, 124 Kymlicka, Will, 193, n. 74

McLaughlin, Brian P., 196, n. 61 Mercantilism, 83–86 Merchant of Venice, 15, 79–110: comedy, 107–110; gift exchange, 102–107; homo sacer (Shylock), 99–102; objective value, 86–91; subjective value, 92–94; usury, 94–96 Moberly, C.E., 155 Molina, Luis de, 111–112 Montaigne, Michel de, 158 Montrose, Louis, 8 Moody, A.D., 98 Moretti, Franco, 142 Mun, Thomas, 85

Lamming, George, 44 Langholm, Odd, 82 Lear, Jonathan, 171 Lever, J.W., 121 Leverenz, David, 195, n. 36 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 106 Long, A.A., 57 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 109 Lowith, William, 119

Palliser, D.M., 29 Parfit, Derek, 145 Parker, R.B., 63, 69 Pascal, Blaise, 159 Patterson, Annabel, 66–67 Peltonen, Markku, 56–58 Perkins, William, 64, 154 Pocock, J.G.A., 53 Polanyi, Karl, 32 Postan, Michael, 41, 182, n. 62 Poulantzas, Nicos, 183, n. 5 Poverty: 27–33 (The Tempest); 66–69 (Coriolanus); 123–128 (King Lear) Prosser, Eleanor, 196, n. 65

Macherey, Pierre, 13 Macpherson, C.B., 30 Magnusson, Lars, 188, n. 18 Mallin, Eric, 176, n. 38, 177, n. 61 Malthus, Thomas, 32 Malynes, Gerard de, 83–88 Mann, Michael, 24 Mantoux, Paul, 32 Marx, Karl: The German Ideology, 7; The Holy Family, 141; On the Jewish Question, 141, 179, n. 11 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 148–149

New Historicism, 23–24, 47–49 Newman, Karen, 105

Rappaport, Steve, 28 Rawls, John, 131–132, 143–144 Reynolds, Bryan, 18 Riss, Arthur, 54–55 Robinson, Henry, 32 Rorty, Richard, 76 Rossiter, A.P., 146 Russell, Conrad, 3, 8 Ryle, Gilbert, 160–161, 163

212 Saint Croix, G.E.M. de, 57 Salisbury, John of, 63 Saltern, George, 58 Sandel, Michael, 132 Santayana, George, 147 Schreiner, Susan, 191, n. 14 Schucking, L.L., 20 Selden, John, 127 Sharpe, Kevin, 9 Skinner, Quentin, 61–62, 76 Smith, Adam, 32, 85 Smith, Captain John, 34–35, 38–39 Sommerville, Johann P., 58 Sorge, Thomas, 55 Stallybrass, Peter, 193, n. 1 States, Bert O., 195, n. 36 Steiner, George, 169 Stoll, E.E., 19–20 Stone, Lawrence, 2–3 Strachey, William, 35, 44 Strier, Richard, 116–117 Suarez, Francisco, 112 Suviranta, Bruno, 188, n. 23 Sypher, Wylie, 195, n. 36 Tawney, R.H., 94 Taylor, Jeremy, 154, 164 The Tempest, 14, 40–52: commodification, 42–45;

Index fetishization, 51–52; master-servant relations, 41–48; new historicism, 47–48; romance, 50; utopianism, 50–51 Tuck, Richard, 190, n. 1 Tugendhat, Ernst, 150 Turgenev, Ivan, 147 Turner, Henry, S., 173, n. 3 Underdown, David, 29 Usury, 94–96 Virginia colony, 34–40 Vives, Juan Luis, 157 Warren, Howard C., 195, n. 38 Weis, René, 122 White, Hayden, 18, 49, 76 White, R.S., 132–133 Whitelocke, James, 59 Wilkinson, Robert, 67–68 Williams, Raymond, 183, n. 10 Wilson, John Dover, 162 Wood, Neal, 184, n. 15 Woodbridge, Linda, 174, n. 12 Wright, Erik Olin, 42, 186, n. 77 Wright, Thomas, 121 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj, 51–52