Shakespeare's Imitations

Shakespeare's Imitations

Mark Taylor

Associated University Presses

Shakespeare’s Imitations

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Shakespeare’s Imitations

Mark Taylor

Newark: University of Delaware Press London: Associated University Presses

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For Anya with love . . . your capacity Is of that nature that to your huge store Wise things seem foolish and rich things but poor.

Democritus thought the infinite yields identical worlds, in which identical men fulfill without variation identical destinies; Pascal (who also could have been influenced by the ancient words of Anaxagoras to the effect that everything is within each thing) included with those identical worlds some worlds inside of others, so that there is no atom in space that does not contain universes; no universe that is not also an atom. It is logical to think (although he did not say it) that he saw himself multiplied in them, endlessly. —Jorge Luis Borges, “Pascal”

Contents Acknowledgments A Note on Shakespeare’s Text

9 11

Introduction 1. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Imitation and Translation 2. Henry IV and Proleptic Mimesis 3. Hamlet and Defective Mimesis 4. The Tempest and Imitatio Depravata Epilogue

15 34 66 107 142 171

Bibliography Index

173 181

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Acknowledgments THE PROBLEM WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, AS OSCAR WILDE REPORTEDLY said of clichés, is that they are all true. During my years with Shakespeare’s Imitations, I have benefitted immeasurably from the advice, questions, answers, doubts, affirmations, practical assistance, encouragement, unfailing cheerfulness, and good will of many people, whom it is now my great pleasure to thank. They are: Hundreds of students in English 329–330, who have read Shakespeare’s plays and poems with me for many years. Colleagues on several Manhattan College committees who supported my work with a summer research grant, a reduced teaching load, and, in 1998–1999, a year’s sabbatical leave. The professional librarians at Manhattan College, Dominick Caldiero, Maire Duchon, and Kate Shanley. Christine Retz, the indispensably supportive Managing Editor of Associated University Presses. Bill Pullis, my CyberGuru, who made many technical and technological problems simply go away. My colleagues in the Manhattan College Dante Seminar: Joan Cammarata, Ashley Cross, June Dwyer, Patrick Horner, Stephen Kaplan, John Keber, Jean Lutes, John Mahony, Rocco Marinaccio, John Nagle, Claire Nolte, Mary Ann O’Donnell, Judith Plaskow, Fred Schweitzer, Tom Smith, and Nonie Wanger. Other colleagues, well wishers, friends, and interested parties: Frank Bowers, Tony DiMatteo, Howard Floan, Charles Geisst, Betsy Gitter, Peter Greeman, Carol Hunt, Teresa Kennedy, George Kirsch, Doug Peterson, Bob Pinckert, Missy Pinckert, Robin Reid, Earl Rovit, Joe Wagner, and John Powell Ward. The five people who read the manuscript of Shakespeare’s Imitations in entirety at one stage or another: its first readers, Anya Taylor and John Nagle, whose suggestions and corrections made this study a much better book; William Slights, the originally anonymous, always understanding and sympathetic reviewer for the University of Delaware Press; and Jay Halio and Al Shoaf, who gave appreciative readings at a late stage. 9

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My children, Andy, Nicky, Jenny, and Kristin, and my grandchildren, Courtney, Dustin, Jack, and Lucas. Anya Taylor, again, my companion of forty years, to whom this book is dedicated. She is both source and destination of what is here.

A Note on Shakespeare’s Text THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE QUOTED THROUGHOUT THIS STUDY, EXCEPT where otherwise noted, is that of the one-volume Complete Works in the New Arden Shakespeare, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kasten (Walton-on-Thames Surrey [UK]: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1998). In some cases this text reflects the choices and emendations of earlier Arden editors. For instance, “mure raised” (rather than “Moon used” in the quartos or “morall downe” in the Folio) in Theseus’s “Now is the mure rased between the two neighbours” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.204–5) is the emendation of Harold F. Brooks in the second Arden edition, or Arden 2 (London: Methuen, 1979), vigorously defended by him in the second appendix to that edition. Where there are defensible alternative readings to those in the Arden’s copy texts (for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the 1600 quarto; for Richard II, the 1597 quarto with the deposition scene from the Folio of 1623; for 1Henry IV, the two quartos of 1598; for Hamlet, the second quarto of 1604–05 with some passages added from the Folio; and for The Tempest, the Folio), in passages germane to my argument, I discuss them. Despite the regularizing of some older forms, the Arden text remains closer to the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century quartos and the Folio of 1623 than do most other modern editions, and that proximity is, I think, desirable. The farther one strays from the words and spellings of these early texts, the farther, almost certainly, one strays from Shakespeare’s words as he wrote them down, and as his contemporaries read them. Early in The Tempest, for instance, Miranda expresses her dismay at the suffering of those whose ship, she believes, has sunk before her eyes. There are no quarto editions of the play; here is part of her speech as it appears in the Folio: O the cry did knocke Again t my very heart: poore oules, they peri h’d. ([1.2.8–9])

The Arden text reads: “O, the cry did knock / Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perish’d!” The Oxford text of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor 11

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(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) reads: “O, the cry did knock / Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perished.” And the text of the fourth edition, updated, of David Bevington (New York: Longman, 1997), an edition I regard highly, reads: “O, the cry did knock / Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perished.” In printing “perish’d,” the Arden is alone among these three modern editions in preserving this form from the Folio. Nowadays, the ‘d, an apostrophe representing an omitted e, is unquestionably an oddseeming ending for a simple past tense; if it slightly, and briefly, defamiliarizes Shakespeare’s text, I count that a gain. Shakespeare’s language is rich and strange: let it seem so.

Shakespeare’s Imitations

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Introduction 1

THE SUBJECT OF THIS STUDY IS SEVERAL CONSTITUTIVE ELEMENTS (OR parts, or features) of four plays by Shakespeare in connection or relation to each other. Many terms express in approximate ways these connections. Two—although not, of course, just any two—characters, speeches, incidents, motifs, and above all, for my purposes, scenes may be said to be repetitions of each other, or near-repetitions, repetitions with a difference. They can be copies, replicas, duplicates—or distortions, caricatures, parodies. They may resemble each other, be similar, conceivably be identical. Or they may be said to echo one another, or the first may resonate within the second, or the second may reflect, or offer a variation upon, the first. In a myriad of ways, the second may derive from, and owe its existence, sense, and coherence to, the first. All these terms will in fact occur in the pages that follow, but less often than the words “imitate” and “imitation,” to which they are subordinated. An incident or speech that imitates another one will echo it, and will repeat at least some of its elements, but the idea of imitation, which in the Renaissance is rarely absent from discussions of literary composition, eliminates mere accident and introduces an element of design, of purpose, of consciousness, even self-consciousness. In the simplest cases, responsibility for imitation will appear to belong to a character. In the second act of King Lear, for instance, Oswald says to Kent, “Why, what a monstrous fellow art thou . . . ,” and Kent responds, “What a brazen-faced varlet art thou. . . .” (2.2.24, 27), the form of his statement deliberately imitating Oswald’s and mockingly criticizing it, and him, for the too-familiar “thou,” one way that Oswald has obeyed Goneril’s order to “come slack of former services” (1.3.10). The playwright, Shakespeare, creates the words of both Oswald and Kent, but the happenstance that the words of the latter clearly mimic those of the former demonstrates the cleverness and ingenuity primarily of Kent and only secondarily of the playwright; it creates the illusion first of Kent’s real existence, then of his in-

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teriority and attentiveness, his ability to listen to Oswald and shape his response accordingly.1 More often, imitation will appear to belong to the play’s structure. Consider the connections between act 2, scene 3 and act 3, scene 1 of Much Ado about Nothing, in which Benedick overhears a conversation among Don Pedro, Claudio, and Leonato, and then Beatrice overhears one between Hero and Ursula. Each conversation is staged for the benefit of the eavesdropper, whose presence is known to the other characters. However, the two eavesdroppers, Benedick and Beatrice, believe that they are undetected and are hearing spontaneous private conversations, not ones contrived for their benefit. They believe they are outsmarting their friends at just the moment they are being singularly outsmarted by them, and both listen to complementary expositions—Benedick, that Beatrice “loves him with an enraged affection” (2.3.101–2), and Beatrice, that “Benedick loves Beatrice so entirely” (3.1.37). Benedick and Beatrice conclude that they are loved and that therefore they can and should love in return, and they express their affections in bursts of nearly identical language. “Love me?” asks Benedick. “Why, it must be requited” (2.3.215–16); Beatrice says, “And Benedick, love on, I will requite thee . . .” (3.1.111). If Beatrice had heard these words of Benedick, then she would be imitating him, perhaps on purpose, but since she has not heard him, her promise shows instead that on like occasions they use like words and therefore are deeply akin to one another. Her words still imitate his, but she is not imitating him (in the way Kent does Oswald). The whole of 3.1 has a similar connection to 2.3. Although their friends planned the elaborate devices “to bring Signior Benedick and the Lady Beatrice into a mountain of affection th’one with th’other” (2.1.345–46), they could not have planned, or have known, just how exactly the second practice would resemble the first, nor how her words would echo his. The reader’s or the spectator’s perception of this resemblance—of the latter scene’s imitation of the former—is one of the delights of the play to which it belongs. King Lear and Much Ado about Nothing will receive little attention in this book, but a substantial discussion of Richard II in chapter 2 will argue that scenes in act 5 tease us by pretending to imitate earlier materials in that play and then, finally, do not do so. From another perspective, however, the end of Richard II does imitate quite precisely its beginning, though this larger frame requires a view of events before the play begins. Antecedent 1. On interiority in Shakespeare, “The alienation or potential alienation of surface from depth, of appearance from truth, [which] means that a person’s thoughts and passions, imagined as properties of the hidden interiority, are not immediately accessible to other people,” see Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). I quote from page 5.

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to its action, and triggering it, was the assassination at Calais of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, an uncle to King Richard. Henry Bolingbroke accuses Thomas Mowbray of “plot[ting] the Duke of Gloucester’s death” (1.1.100), and although Mowbray denies the charge—“For Gloucester’s death, / I slew him not, but to my own disgrace / Neglected my sworn duty in that case” (1.1.112–14)—the curious terms of his denial appear to implicate Richard. So Mowbray’s continued presence would be an embarrassment, which can be relieved by exile: “The hopeless word of ‘never to return’ / Breathe I against thee upon pain of life,” Richard tells him. Mowbray contemplates the finality of his banishment and replies, “Then thus I turn me from my country’s light, / To dwell in solemn shades of endless night” (1.3.152–53, 176–77). And so, again, with assassination, ingratitude, political prudence, and exile, will the drama end, the characters played by different actors—Gloucester by Richard, Richard by Henry, Mowbray by Piers Exton. Taking “the King, what words he spake . . . / ‘Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?’” (5.4.1–2) as his cue, Exton assassinates the imprisoned Richard. Thus does Exton become an embarrassment to the present king. “They love not poison that do poison need, / Nor do I thee,” Henry tells him. “Though I did wish him dead, / I hate the murtherer, love him murthered” (5.6.37–40). Henry then pronounces Exton’s sentence: “With Cain go wander thorough shades of night, / And never show thy head by day or light” (43–44). In these shades of night Exton may well expect the companionship not only of Cain but also of Mowbray. Reading the action of Henry and the fate of Exton, we naturally find ourselves reevaluating the earlier action of Richard and the fate of Mowbray. What had seemed at the time (in act 1) to be Richard’s rather clumsy attempt to cover himself, appears in retrospect (as the play ends) to be an inevitable part of statecraft. Another way to describe the procedures of this book is to say that its chapters will look at parts of a play in the same kind of relation to each other that is commonly employed to understand a single element of the play in relation to something outside the play—a historical event, for example, or another text. It is known, for instance, that Shakespeare’s main source for act 4, scene 1 of Henry V is a passage from The Description of Germanie of Tacitus. The disguised King Henry’s encounter with the private soldiers Williams, Court, and Bates, on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, is modeled on Tacitus’s account of the experience of Germanicus, on the eve of another battle, when he walks, also in disguise, among his men, since “the fittest expedient to trie the truth” for “their minds would be best knowen, when they were by themselves; not overlooked: in eating and drinking they would utter their fear or hope.” But whereas the concealed Germanicus “joyeth in the praise of himselfe: some extolling the nobilitie of their Captaine: others his comely personage: many his patience and

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courtesie,” and so forth,2 and although the disguised Henry hears surely gratifying words about himself from a deceived Pistol (“The King’s a bawcock, and a heart of gold, / A lad of life, an imp of Fame, / Of parents good, of fist most valiant” [44–46]), in testing the temper of his army, he talks with three men who are unconvinced of the justice of his cause and the honor of his quarrel, which he must argue to them, with doubtful success.3 The scene in Shakespeare imitates the incident in Tacitus, art imitating life if we regard Tacitus as a historian, art imitating art if we think of him as a creative writer, a fabulist.4 But in either event the knowledge that Tacitus stands behind Shakespeare is invaluable to any reader’s response to, and understanding of, Henry V. That Henry finds it so difficult to convince Williams and the others of the rightness of his cause is a defect of his style of leadership that can be appreciated within the contextualizing example of Germanicus. Or perhaps it is Henry’s strength, that he can lead men who do not believe in him: this reading would make him perhaps more capable than Germanicus. The play Henry V’s use of Tacitus demonstrates the peril of considering a work of art in isolation from the circumstances that have fed into it. The reader does not need Tacitus to appreciate Henry’s difficulties in justifying his war to his men; but the reader possessed of Tacitus will recognize that Henry’s problem and consequent frustration—“subject to the breath / Of every fool whose sense no more can feel / But his own wringing!” (230–32), he comments, blaming a multiplicity of perspectives on the follies of others—were not ever thus: the soldiers of another general said, thought, and felt exactly what that general wished. Claiming to be “Twin-born with greatness” (230), Henry finds that even that condition does not erase the contrariness of others. Shakespeare’s imitations of materials outside his plays, such as Tacitus, will receive considerable attention in the pages that follow, but more important to this study are imitations of materials within the plays themselves. The former perhaps give some insight into how the playwright William 2. The Annals of Cornelius Tacitus. The Description of Germanie, tr. R. Grenewey (1598), book 2, chapter 3, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, vol. 4 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, and New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 410. 3. Arrogantly and disingenuously, the disguised Henry says to the men, “Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the King’s company, his cause being just and his quarrel honorable,” to which Williams replies, “That’s more than we know” (4.1.125–28). 4. A third possibility would regard Henry V as history and Tacitus as fable, in which case life is seen to imitate art, and the final possibility, in which both works are regarded as “real,” has history repeating itself. On Tacitus’s tendency to idealize Germany in order to display by contrast the “sexual depravity, greed, and obsession with rank and conquest” of his own imperial Rome, see John M. Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 13–15. I quote from page 14.

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Shakespeare works—summoning data from a capacious memory, it may be, or reflecting upon a volume of Tacitus (Englished in 1598 by Richard Grenewey) that lies open before him as he writes. The latter show how the plays, once written, work as integrated mechanisms, how their parts fit and serve to articulate each other. More important than Tacitus to an understanding of act 4, scene 1 of Henry V is act 2, scene 2, Henry’s confrontation with the traitors Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey before he leaves with his army for France. Both scenes oppose the king to three men; in the first he sentences them to death for their treason; in the second he argues that they should be content to risk death in order to serve him; in the first, almost incredibly, the condemned men welcome their impending executions (“Our purposes God justly hath discovered,” Scroop says, “And I repent my fault more than my death” [151–52]); in the second, entirely credibly, and sensibly, the men dread the moment they will have to fight (“We see yonder the beginning of the day,” Williams says, “but I think we shall never see the end of it” [89–90]). Other circumstances, phraseology, even the vocalic and metrical similarity of the pairs of names (Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey 㛳 Court, Williams, and Bates) establish the second scene as an imitation of the first.5 Together, the scenes show that other people have their own ideas of what is worthwhile; that the external world exists independent of Henry’s sense of it as an extension of himself, and that it can quite firmly resist even a king’s attempt to proceed as if everyone and everything agrees with him. When one thing seeks to resemble another and yet retains its own identity, that is imitation; when its original identity is lost—when it becomes that other thing, not merely becomes like it—that is transformation or metamorphosis or, as I shall usually write, translation, another major concern in the pages that follow. Imitation is to translation as simile is to metaphor. “If I do prove her haggard,” Othello says of Desdemona, his doubts of her fidelity now well advanced, “Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings, / I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind / To pray at fortune” (3.3.264–67). In this figure Desdemona is becoming, in Othello’s imagination, a wild hawk, not merely like a wild hawk, an imitation of one. By being translated into something nonhuman, she is being distanced from him, made easier to kill (though here he speaks only of releasing her). And when he does kill her, as she still insists on her innocence, he says, “O perjured woman, thou dost stone my heart, / And makest me call what I intend to do / A murder, which I thought a sacrifice!” (5.2.63–65). Othello shows here the same capacity for making things tolerable to himself by translating them, in his language, into other things. 5. For an extensive and detailed comparison of the two scenes, see Mark Taylor, “Imitation and Perspective in Henry V,” CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 16 (1986): 35–47.

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Desiring Hermia at least in part because Lysander does so, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Demetrius imitates Lysander: he is like him because they have chosen the same object of sexual desire, but Demetrius retains his own identity. Even in the night in the forest outside Athens, a time of extraordinary confusion, culminating in the pure zaniness of act 3, scene 2, the two men remain distinct from each other; not only do we see each as himself, which may not matter much, the two women do also. For Hermia, Lysander is always Lysander, the only one she desires, and similarly Demetrius for Helena. Contrariwise, however, when Demetrius and Lysander both come to desire Helena, reversing the initial circumstances of the play, there is a sense in which Hermia, insofar as the men conceive of her purely as an object of desire, has been translated into Helena. This translation depends upon perspective—Hermia has not changed for us—and from the perspective of the two young men it is absolute. Again, from our perspective, when Puck places the ass’s head upon Bottom, the weaver is perhaps simply himself, fundamentally (or at bottom) what he has always been, but now adorned with the head of an ass, thus (inadvertently) imitating an ass. When Bottom expresses a fondness for “a peck of provender . . . good dry oats . . . a bottle of hay” (4.1.31–33), we may read these strange culinary delights simply as further details of the imitation. From the perspective of Bottom’s fellow mechanicals, however, unaware of Puck’s agency, Bottom has become the ass. Indeed, as Peter Quince famously says, “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated” (3.1.112–13). So whether a particular action is imitation or translation may depend upon by whom it is seen, and from what angle. Nevertheless, imitation remains a kind of incomplete translation, and translation, a kind of perfected imitation. A third consideration of this book is the production of meaning in a literary text, which I take to be a consequence of imitation and translation, though it is not only they, of course, that produce meaning.6 In theory, at least, meaning inheres in every feature of a literary text; of every feature we may ask, and finally do ask, “What does this mean?”—that is, how is it to be understood fully in relation to the work of which it is a part, or how is that work to be understood as enlarged and completed in relation to it, this single feature? And then what does the work itself mean: what does Hamlet mean, what is it about, how does it integrate all of its parts once the meaning of each of them separately is understood, what account of its innumerable details makes most sense and leaves least out? Every part means something, and eventually responds to the question “What does this 6. Commentary on the meaning of poetic meaning is, of course, vast. One guide is the entry on “Meaning, Poetic” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger et al. (New York: MJF Books, 1993), especially valuable for its bibliography.

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mean?” Still, some parts inevitably foreground themselves as containers of meaning. This foregrounding can result from quantitative prominence, ambiguity, or opacity, or from its being imitated: if the play looks at element x a second time, then so should we. This process by which imitation produces meaning is simple. Preparatory to displaying the love letter that Hamlet supposedly addressed to Ophelia, Polonius tells Gertrude, Your noble son is mad. Mad call I it, for to define true madness, What is’t but to be nothing else but mad? (2.2.91–93)

The two sentences are highly rhetorical. The first word of line 92 repeats the last word of line 91, a figure called anadiplosis.7 The last word of line 92 is a variant of the first word of the same line, a figure called epanalepsis, which figure recurs in the larger unit of the whole sentence that constitutes lines 92–93, “Mad call . . . / . . . but mad.” Common to anadiplosis and epanalepsis is the repetition of a word, and only a highly specialized examination of the figures, such as this one, would describe them in terms of imitation instead of repetition. And the features of Shakespeare’s plays that will be examined in the following pages will almost always be larger than these sentences of Polonius, but, still, it is not inaccurate, although it may be unusual, to say that the first word of line 92 imitates the last of 91, that the last word of 92 imitates the two preceding, and that the last word of 93 imitates the three preceding uses. Nor does imitation end there; indeed, imitation is perhaps more evident as such when it fails to be exact duplication. When after another line (“But let that go”) Polonius concludes this speech, Gertrude demands “More matter with less art” (95), the voiceless medial stop in matter imitates the voiced medial stop in madder; the latter, indeed, a word Polonius has not used, gains its implied existence from the imitation. (The double comparative degree in the implied “more madder” complements Mark Antony’s famous double superlative degree in “the most unkindest cut of all” in Julius Caesar.) And then he says, “Madam, I swear I use no art at all” (96), where his artfully chosen first syllable imitates her imitating him. All of this sustained wordplay—call it repetition or echo or imitation—is extremely subtle; it will be a singularly alert and sensitive auditor who picks it up in the theater (though d for t is a common slurring in American speech, hence budder for butter); and an intent reader will find it, perhaps, only in a search for traces of madness in the play. For such a reader, the traces are there. It all amounts to a great deal 7. Compare sonnet 129, lines 7–9: “as a swallowed bait / On purpose laid to make the taker mad; / Mad in pursuit, and in possession so. . . .”

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of attention paid to the condition of madness whether it is Hamlet’s, as Polonius alleges, or his own, “matter,” or Gertrude’s, “Madam.” Even without all the other attention paid to madness in Hamlet, and of course there is a great deal of it, these few lines, carefully scrutinized, would establish its importance in the play—would produce madness as a meaningful construct—and that is done here primarily by the word’s imitations of itself. That which is imitated is ipso facto worth imitating; its worth established, it is therefore something meaningful, at least within the play.

2 Classical and Renaissance commentaries on imitation support my thesis that it can work both to produce and to isolate meaning in a text. Imitation is a form of creation and a means to it. Even the God of Genesis creates by imitation: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (1:26, King James version). No preexisting image, no figure of man as we know him. Through imitation we learn, and therefore much of what we have learned, as a part of ourselves, exists because of imitation. “Mime–sis is innate in human beings from childhood,” Aristotle writes, “—indeed we differ from the other animals in being most given to mime–sis and in making our first steps in learning through it—and pleasure in instances of mime–sis is equally general.”8 When, as children, we imitate the speech and gestures of others, our acts of imitation do not create, or bring into existence, this speech and these gestures absolutely, but the imitations do create them as our own features or properties. The desire to imitate on this level appears innate and unconscious, as Aristotle says; we imitate the sounds and speech patterns of our parents, their postures and movements, without being told to do so or knowing that we are doing so. Without human models before us, as wild children and then wild adults, we would still imitate—the sounds of beasts, for instance, or their conventions for satisfying appetites. Denied other ways of expressing ourselves and interrogating the world, we would be left with or return to imitation. In Plato’s Cratylus, Socrates asks Hermogenes a question. “Suppose that we had no voice or tongue, and wanted to communicate with one another. Should we not, like the deaf and dumb, make signs with the hands and head and the rest of the body?” “There would be no choice, Socrates,” Hermogenes obligingly replies, and then Socrates says: “We should imitate the nature of the thing; the elevation of our hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness; heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop to the ground; if we 8. Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b, tr. M. E. Hubbard, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 54.

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were describing the running of a horse, or any other animal, we should make our bodies and their gestures as like as we could to them. . . . We could not [do anything else] for by bodily imitation only can the body ever express anything.”9 In other circumstances—when, for example, he claims to have “good grounds . . . for dismissing [poetry] from our city,” chief among these grounds being that it is an imitation of an imitation10—Plato is deeply suspicious of imitation and its consequences, but here he regards it, in extreme cases, as the body’s only method of expression. For Aristotle, literary imitation, the mime–sis that is central to his famous definition of tragedy, for instance, seems to be an extension of the instincts we display in childhood: “The objects of this mime–sis are people doing things.”11 Literary imitation is as natural an act as any other form of imitation, and not entirely distinct from it. Since, after he has claimed that imitation is natural from childhood, as Thomas Greene explains, Aristotle “goes on to speak of the pleasure derived from pictorial representations, it might appear that the term mimesis used here means what it generally means throughout the Poetics, the imitation of ‘nature.’ But the statement that man learns first by imitation would on the other hand be more easily applicable to children copying or repeating the observed actions of adult ‘models.’ Aristotle apparently subsumes both meanings of mimesis under a single, more general concept.”12 This confusion, or conflation, of kinds of imitation remains a problem for theorists in the Renaissance. In On the Art of Poetry (1570,) Lodovico Castelvetro tries to resolve it: [T]he imitation which is natural to men and is implanted in them from childhood, the imitation through which they acquire their first knowledge, for which they all have a stronger aptitude than the other animals, and in the exercise of which they consequently take pleasure—such imitation consists in nothing but in copying models supplied by others and doing exactly as they do without knowing why. But the imitation required by poetry not only does not copy models set before it or duplicate something already made without knowing why it has been so made, but rather makes a thing in every way distinguishable from any made before that day and, so to speak, creates a model for others to copy. 9. Cratylus, 422e, 423a–b. Tr. Benjamin Jowett. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series 71 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 457–58. 10. Republic, 10,607b. Tr. Paul Shorey. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 832. 11. Poetics, 1448a, p. 52. In Hubbard’s translation Aristotle’s celebrated definition of tragedy (1449b) reads thus: “Well, then, a tragedy is a mime–sis of a high, complete action (‘complete’ in the sense that implies amplitude), in speech pleasurably enhanced, the different kinds [of enhancement] occurring in separate sections, in dramatic, not narrative form, effecting through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions” (p. 57). 12. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), 54.

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To do this the poet should know perfectly the reason he does what he does and should devote time and thought to discovering the subtlest reasons for the procedures he is called upon to follow.13

The child, Castelvetro says, copies models and makes something theoretically indistinct from them, but the creations of the knowledgeable poet are unlike what precedes them, although in fact imitation—“the imitation required by poetry”—remains part of the poet’s procedure. It is a crucial difference because it allows imitation to lead to the making of something new, essentially what poetic imitation means in the Renaissance. Thus does the poet’s awareness of his action make new his representation of what Aristotle calls “people doing things.” The creations of the poet, in Plato’s view, make truth more distant, not closer, and that is one reason why he must be banished from the Republic. “The producer of the product three removes from nature you call the imitator?” Socrates asks Glaucon, who concurs, and then Socrates elaborates: “This, then, will apply to the maker of tragedies also, if he is an imitator and is in his nature three removes from the king and the truth, as are all other imitators.”14 For Aristotle, however, and for those writers in the Renaissance who follow him in this regard, imitation allows greater proximity to the truth, not less. In a famous letter to Boccaccio, Petrarch writes, An imitator must take care to write something similar yet not identical to the original, and that similarity must not be like the image to its original in painting

13. Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry, tr. Andrew Bongiorno (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1984), 43. 14. Republic, 10,597e. Collected Dialogues of Plato, 822–23. One is fearful of assailing the logic of Plato, but something is flawed in the presentation of the artist’s (painter’s or poet’s) imitation as being three removes from nature, not two. Socrates says, “The painter, then, the cabinetmaker, and God, there are these three presiding over three kinds of couches” (597b, p. 822): in reverse order these kinds are the form or idea (God’s creation), the object made of wood and cloth (the cabinetmaker’s creation, modeled on the form), and a painting of this object (the painter’s creation, modeled on the object). The form, God’s creation, is the thing itself, to which nothing is prior; it cannot be at a remove from itself. The cabinetmaker’s imitation of this form, though enjoying a kind of secondary status, is thus at one remove from it, not two, and the painting, enjoying a tertiary status, is thus at two removes from the form, not three. That it is an imitation of an imitation is the most celebrated of Plato’s objections to poetry, but it is not the only one. “[T]here are some three arts concerned with everything,” Socrates says, “the user’s art, the maker’s, and the imitator’s,” but whereas the maker will proceed with his art only after consultation with the user, thus gaining an understanding of the object to be made, the imitator will not do this and thus will have no sense of “the good or bad effects in use of the thing [the user] uses” (10,601d, e, p. 826). Poets are undesirable, furthermore, for displaying a hero in unseemly fashion, “delivering a long tirade in his lamentations or chanting and beating his breast” (10,605d, p.831), in effect behaving like a woman (605e).

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where the greater the similarity the greater the praise for the artist, but rather like that of a son to his father. While often very different in their individual features, they have a certain something our painters call an “air,” especially noticeable about the face and eyes, that produces a resemblance; seeing the son’s face, we are reminded of the father’s, although if it came to measurement, the features would all be different, but there is something subtle that creates this effect. We must thus see to it that if there is something similar, there is also a great deal that is dissimilar, and that the similar be elusive and unable to be extricated except in silent meditation, for the resemblance is to be felt rather than expressed. Thus we may appropriate another’s ideas as well as his coloring but we must abstain from his actual words; for, with the former, resemblance remains hidden, and with the latter it is glaring, the former creates poets, the second apes.15

What Petrarch means by “a certain something,” “an ‘air,’” “something subtle,” “something similar,” what is “felt” but not “expressed,” the “elusive,” that which is available only to “silent meditation,” is the essence of the father—the truth about him—apparent in the son despite different discrete features or details. Therefore the imitator—the poet—captures the meaning of the original in spite of a multitude of superficial differences. And thus it is, in doing so, that the act of imitation assists in the production of meaning. The object of silent meditation, the “air,” though present in father as well as son, becomes immediate and recognized or understood in him, the father, only because of the imitation. In other words, the act of imitation, while creating the new poem (“the son”), has reciprocal benefits for the older poem (“the father”), which is better understood because of the new poem’s appearance.16 As a poet himself, the son Petrarch claims descent from his poetic father Ovid. At the end of the twenty-third and longest poem in the Rime sparse, for example, the canzone beginning Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade, Petrarch tells of the moment when he was hunting and came upon Laura, bathing naked in a spring. He watched until “she felt shame and . . . sprinkled water in my face with her hand. I shall speak the truth, perhaps it will appear a lie, for I felt myself drawn from my own image and into a solitary wandering stag from wood to wood quickly I am transformed and still I

15. Francesco Petrarca, Letters on Familiar Matters [Rerum familiarium libri] , XVII–XXIV, tr. Aldo S. Bernardo (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), XXIII, 19, pp. 301–2. 16. Illuminating discussions of this letter include Greene, The Light in Troy, 95–96; Donna B. Hamilton, Virgil and The Tempest: The Politics of Imitation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), 11–12; Reed Way Dasenbrock, Imitating the Italians: Wyatt, Spenser, Synge, Pound, Joyce (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 22–23; and Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 87–88.

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flee the belling of my hounds.”17 This account might well appear a lie to a reader who recalls Ovid’s story of Actaeon, changed by Diana into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds in Metamorphoses.. However, Petrarch “abstain[s] from [Ovid’s] actual words,” Italian not being Latin, and also he does not merely borrow and retell the story of Actaeon, he completes it. Explaining why he continues to look at the naked Laura, for instance, Petrarch says, “I, who am not appeased by any other sight, stood to gaze on her . . .” (Io perché d’altra vista non m’appago / stetti a mirarla).18 Seeing the son’s face in Petrarch, we are indeed reminded of the father’s, in whose tale we are invited to infer Actaeon’s motive, the failure of anything else to satisfy him, which Ovid had not presented. If Ovid is father of the creator of the Rime sparse, it is Virgil who is father of the creator of Petrarch’s epic on the Second Punic War, the Africa—Virgil, whom Petrarch elsewhere calls “the greatest and most illustrious of all poets.”19 In book 6 of the Aeneid, in the Underworld, to which Aeneas has been led by the Cumaean Sibyl, Aeneas’s own father Anchises points out to his son the soul of Augustus Caesar: One promise you have heard Over and over: here is its fulfillment, The son of a god, Augustus Caesar, founder Of a new age of gold, in lands where Saturn Ruled long ago; he will extend his empire Beyond the Indies, beyond the normal measure Of years and constellations, where high Atlas Turns on his shoulders the star-studded world.20

Coming almost at the very end of the first half of Virgil’s poem, when Aeneas’s travels are about done and his fierce battles to remain with his men on Italian soil are about to begin, these words are in some ways the meaning or point of the poem, the promise of Rome’s extension of itself “beyond the normal measure / Of years and constellations,” forever and everywhere. Little wonder, then, that in his own epic, Petrarch, bent on reviving Roman culture after a lapse (quite unforeseen by Virgil) of many centuries, should imitate this part of Aeneas’s vision. In book 9 of the Africa the Roman poet Ennius shows Scipio Africanus, Petrarch’s hero, a vision of the 17. Lines 154–60. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, tr. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), 66. 18. Ibid., lines 152–53. 19. “Petrarch’s Coronation Oration,” tr. Ernest H. Wilkins, PMLA 68 (1953): 1242. 20. The Aeneid of Virgil, tr. Rolfe Humphries (1951), ed. Brian Wilkie (New York: Macmillan, 1987; originally published 1951), 6,824–31 [p. 148].

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future, which includes the image of a young man “‘taking his rest / under the tender laurel.’” Scipio asks who he is, this youth who seems to ponder “‘in his heart . . . some high and noble purpose.’” He is, Ennius tells Scipio, “one of a late line of progeny whom Italy will bear in times to come. . . . That youth in distant ages will recall with his sweet notes the Muses, long exiled, and though by tribulations sorely tried he’ll lure the venerable sisters back to Helicon. He will be called Franciscus; and all the glorious exploits you have seen he will assemble in one volume—all the deeds in Spain, the arduous Libyan trials; and he will call his poem Africa.”21

In his most protracted imitation of Virgil, in the poem upon which he (mistakenly) placed his own hopes for immortality, for an eternal rest beside Helicon, Petrarch, with a confidence or audacity that must still strike one as amazing, substitutes himself for Augustus Caesar. The substitution, however, is not only an alteration of the Aeneid, it is also a reading of it, an interpretation, as again the imitation both reflects and illuminates the imitated model. Petrarch knew that Virgil had tied his own hopes to those of Caesar, that upon the survival of the emperor depended the survival of the poet, and so Anchises’s assertions about Caesar are implicitly ones also about Virgil. Substituting himself for Caesar, Petrarch makes this implication, this identification, explicit. Thus in these two places and many others does Petrarch suggest an “air” beyond measurement, thus is he a poet not an ape. What John Hollander writes of poetic echo, sometimes a version or kin of imitation, is pertinent here: “The rebounds of intertextual echo generally . . . distort the original voice in order to interpret it.”22 Imitation in Shakespeare, I believe, will similarly represent not only its own truth but also the truth of the object imitated—even, or especially, when that object resides in the same play. What would Plato say about a poet’s imitation of a literary original: that it exists at yet another remove from the truth? There is the idea or form of the thing; there is its manufactured representation at a single remove from it; there is the original poem that salutes the made thing (as “the painter . . . 21. Petrarch’s Africa, translated and annotated by Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), 9,298–99, 301, 303, 305–6, 314–22 [pp. 230–31]. 22. John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 111.

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tries to imitate . . . in each case [not] that thing in nature [but rather] the works of the craftsman”)23 and is at yet another remove; then there is the second poem that imitates the first at another remove still. (Or, to continue Plato’s statement about visual arts: Titian’s painting of Bacchus and Ariadne is at a further remove from reality than the relief on the Roman sarcophagus that, in part, it probably imitates.)24 Implicit in Petrarch’s view, however, is the belief that the second poem restores some of what the first poem imitates, thus thrusting its perceiver, the reader, closer to the original form. In An Apology for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney also turns Plato against himself. “Poesy,” Sidney writes, “therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture— with this end, to teach and delight.”25 Within poesy and among its creators Sidney distinguishes three kinds: first are “they that did imitate the inconceivable excellencies of God,” both various books of the Bible and pagan writers “though in a full wrong divinity . . . [like] Orpheus, Amphion, Homer in his Hymns, and many other, both Greeks and Romans.”26 “The second kind,” Sidney continues, “is of them that deal with matters philosophical: either moral . . . or astronomical . . . or historical”; again his examples are classical writers.27 Since the achievements of these figures depend more on their subjects (they “counterfeit only such faces as are set before them”)28 than upon their own talents, especially wit, Sidney seems to doubt that they are “indeed right poets” at all; if he were Petrarch, and not merely the English Petrarch, he would probably call them apes. Certainly they are inferior to practitioners of the third kind of imitation: “[T]hese third be they which most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be, but range only reined with learned discretion into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.”29 Sidney’s distinction between “what is,” which is 23. Republic, 10,598a. Collected Dialogues of Plato, 823. 24. Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, London, National Gallery, 35, and Roman sarcophagus, second century A.D., Rome, Palazzo Giustiniani. See Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1986, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 136–38, and plates 106 and 106b. 25. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill [Library of Liberal Arts], 1970), 18. Sidney’s use of “counterfeiting” in this definition resurrects that word’s original sense (< Old French contrefaire < Latin contra– + facere), to make against or in opposition to—in short, to imitate. 26. Ibid., 18–19. 27. Ibid., 19. 28. Ibid., 20. 29. Ibid., 20.

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not imitated, and “what may be and should be,” which is imitated, is crucial and extremely subtle: he contrasts the two conditions, but if “what may be and should be,” in fact, comes to pass, happens along, exists—will be, finally is—a logical and lexical possibility, then it is, and the opposed terms become identical. In ranging into what may be and should be, the poet after all is borrowing from what is. To reverse the terms: in expressing or imitating what is, the “right” or true poet, unlike imitators “that deal with matters philosophical,” finds himself representing at the same time “what may be and should be.” Therefore the imitation created by the poet, far from being at a greater remove from reality than that which it imitates, is closer to it, expresses a dimension of it. Imitation is thus not derivative but is an instrument for the discovery of truth, and the discovery of that truth is a component of the production of meaning. In book 3 of the Republic, Socrates interrogates Glaucon about narrative methods in Homer: Now [Socrates says], it is narration, is it not, both when he [Homer] presents the several speeches and the matter between the speeches? Of course. But when he delivers a speech as if he were someone else, shall we not say that he then assimilates thereby his own diction as far as possible to that of the person whom he announces as about to speak? We shall, obviously. And is not likening oneself to another in speech or bodily bearing an imitation of him to whom one likens oneself? Surely. In such case then, it appears, he and the other poets effect their narration through imitation. Certainly.30

This procedure, as Socrates goes on to explain, places epic poetry, in which the poet alternates between speaking in his own voice and imitating his characters (using direct discourse, we would usually say), midway between “one kind of poetry which works wholly through imitation . . . [that is,] tragedy and comedy, and another which employs [only] the recital of the poet himself, best exemplified, I presume, in the dithyramb. . . .”31 So literary compositions may present the voices of characters only (tragedy and comedy), the voice of the poet only (dithyramb), or a mixture of the two (epic). Shakespeare’s plays, tragedies, comedies, and histories, obviously present the voices of characters only—are, in Plato’s sense, entirely com-

30. Republic, 3,393b, c. Collected Dialogues, 638. 31. Republic, 3, 394c. Collected Dialogues, 639.

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pilations of imitations.32 This book seeks to refine the understanding of these imitations. Whereas Plato designates but two possibilities—either the poet speaks in his own voice, or he speaks in that of one of his characters33—I shall seek to find imitations within imitations, and sometimes further imitations within them, as, for instance, when Shakespeare imitates Hamlet, who imitates Guildenstern, who (as Hamlet presents him) imitates Hamlet.

3 Shakespeare’s Imitations contains chapters on A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Shakespeare’s major historical tetralogy and especially, within it, the first part of Henry IV; Hamlet; and The Tempest, in that order. Selected, or perhaps selecting themselves, because of their complex and varied manifestations of imitation, these plays also represent different kinds of plays— traditionally, all the kinds that Shakespeare wrote—as well as distinct and separated moments in his career of over twenty years as a dramatist. It is an agreeable coincidence, too, that these plays are as often read and performed, are as highly regarded, as much beloved, as any others by Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a comedy, according to the “Catalogue” of the great Folio of 1623, or romantic comedy in the terminology of more recent critics, probably dates to 1594 or 1595, two or three years after Shakespeare was sufficiently well established as a playwright to be attacked by Robert Greene, five or six years, probably, after he began writing for the London stage.34 The plays of the major historical tetralogy— history plays, redundantly, as well as by the usage of the Folio—may date 32. Shakespeare’s epyllia, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, obviously function as Homer’s epics in this regard, mixing the voice of a narrator—if not exactly of Shakespeare—with voices of Venus, Lucrece, and the other characters. However, Shakespeare’s short poems, the sonnets, do not correspond to the dithyramb as Plato describes it, for the sonnets mix many voices: the friendly and familiar tone of sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”), for example, sounding nothing like the chilly, impersonal voice of sonnet 94 (“They that have power to hurt and will do none”), and neither much like the imitations of both his own whining and his friend’s indifference in sonnet 71 (“No longer mourn for me when I am dead”). 33. But what then, for example, of books 9–12 of the Odyssey, where Homer imitates Odysseus reciting the saga of his adventures before arriving in Scheria, and in which Odysseus imitates many others, Polyphemus, Circe, and Calypso among them? 34. Greene’s words, from Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance, in which he parodies a line from 3 Henry VI (1.4.137), are well known: “[F]or there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene

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from 1595 to 1598 or 1599, with 1 Henry IV being written about 1596. Some five years later, in 1600 or 1601, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, a tragedy. Then a decade would pass before he wrote The Tempest, generally regarded as the last play he wrote without the substantial assistance of a collaborator; the editors of the first Folio, where it enjoys pride of place among the thirty-six plays included, call it a comedy, but for a very long time now readers have called it a romance, the last of four such that Shakespeare wrote in this, his fourth dramatic mode.35 We have, then, as the main objects of investigation in this book, a comedy, a history, a tragedy, and a romance, the first two written a few years after Shakespeare began writing plays, the third in about the middle of his career, and the last almost at its end. Insofar as the four demonstrate an intense concern with imitation, consequently, that concern is not confined to any particular time in the dramatist’s development, nor to any particular kind of play. The action of A Midsummer Night’s Dream concludes with the performance of another play, Pyramus and Thisbe. This play-within-the-play is formally a part of the celebration of the wedding of Duke Theseus and Queen Hippolyta, and informally, of two other weddings as well, those of Hermia and Lysander and of Helena and Demetrius. As a kind of commentary on love, commitment, fidelity, and accident, Pyramus and Thisbe imitates, and therefore interprets, many elements of the larger play of which it is part, and it imitates also both a tale in the Metamorphoses of Ovid and the “misadventur’d piteous overthrows” of the young lovers in Romeo and Juliet, perhaps the play Shakespeare had written most recently. This imitation shows how easily the materials of tragedy adapt themselves to comedy or farce. The Henry IV plays contrast the public world of court, battlefields, and grand actions with the private world of taverns, intimacy, and individual desire. They contrast the world from which Prince Hal has long absented himself, which he now seeks to enter, with the world where he has long dallied, which he will now be leaving behind. They contrast, in short, the world of King Henry in which Hal will become the most heroic figure with the world of Falstaff in which Hal has been the most admired figure. In many respects the second of these worlds imitates the first. In the first, men dispute the Crown of England: will it continue to belong to Henry and his heir, or will it pass to Mortimer, the designate of the Percys? In the other world, poor men strive by whatever means to gain gold coins—crowns. This imiin a country.” Quoted from Dennis Kay, Shakespeare: His Life, Work, and Era (New York: William Morrow/Quill, 1992), 163. 35. See Stanley Wells, “Shakespeare and Romance” in Later Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 8 (London: Edward Arnold, 1966, and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967), 48–79.

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tation reveals the sordid character of the thing imitated, the squabbles of royalists and rebels. But Falstaff’s world is a world of play, in which stolen crowns are returned to their owners, in which human actions are often without consequence. And in this world of play, there are plays, entertainments, dramatic vehicles: in act 2, scene 4 of 1 Henry IV, Hal and Falstaff’s two interludes miming the Prince’s fateful showdown with his father. These interludes in relation to that showdown correspond to Pyramus and Thisbe in relation to A Midsummer Night’s Dream with many small differences and one major one. Whereas in the comedy the imitation follows that which it imitates, in the history, the real encounter of father and son coming the next day, it precedes it, what I call proleptic imitation. Hamlet resembles A Midsummer Night’s Dream in containing a formal play-within-a-play—formal in the sense that The Murder of Gonzago, like Pyramus and Thisbe and unlike Falstaff’s “play extempore,” is performed before a court audience whose expectations of entertainment, at least at the beginning, are not much unlike our own when we attend the theater. The traveling players who perform Gonzago are professional actors distinct both in ability and training from the rude mechanicals whose staging of Pyramus is entirely ad hoc, but both companies exist on a social level well beneath that of their audiences, with whom, except for a theatrical event, they would never expect to associate. Although Gonzago falls in the middle of Hamlet, not in its final act, it, again like Pyramus, bears a complicated and problematic relationship to materials outside itself. Gonzago is an imitation of a play long in the players’ repertory—usually we would say a production, not an imitation, but there is a sense in which every play is a mime–sis, a representation as well as a fulfillment, of its script, and Hamlet’s addition of “a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines” makes this particular production quite other than even an attempt at duplication. Moreover, Gonzago offers also an uncanny imitation of recent events in the lives of the royal family of Denmark, which events peculiarly imitate, or are imitated by, the old play the players happen to possess. In the masque of act 4 of The Tempest, which celebrates the union of Miranda and Ferdinand, we have an observed theatrical performance in some ways akin to Pyramus and Gonzago, although it does not so much imitate preceding action as it enshrines the values of Prospero that triumph in that action. Similarly, the antimasque a scene earlier, in which “Ariel, like a harpy,” destroys the banquet set before Antonio, Alonso, and Sebastian, embodies the perverted values of those three men. But these resemblances will not receive much attention in my final chapter. The imitation that interests me, rather, is of one plot by another, of one homicidal conspiracy by another: the plan of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo to kill Prospero imitates the plan of Antonio and Sebastian to kill Alonso, although the principals in each assassination attempt are unaware of their counterparts.

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Alonso is King of Naples, Sebastian is his brother, Antonio is the usurping Duke of Milan; they are three exalted figures, men possessed of gravitas, whose story invites tragic discourse. By contrast, Caliban is “a savage and deformed slave,” Stephano a butler, Trinculo a jester; their appearances and lowly stations suit them for farce, and indeed many of the incidents in which they are involved are farcical, even downright funny. “The ugliness of soul that proceeds from stupidity moves men to laughter,” Castelvetro writes, “and the same is true of the physical ugliness that is neither painful nor harmful, as proved by the fact that it is impossible to contain one’s laughter in the presence of an ill-formed and ugly face which is not the cause of pain to its possessor.”36 Yet in an imitation perhaps more perfect than those of the other plays, these men are representing the actions of their betters, and fortunately with as little success. “The subject of this book,” Erich Auerbach writes at the conclusion of his great work Mimesis, a book never far from my own thoughts, is “the interpretation of reality through literary representation or ‘imitation’. . . .”37 The subject of the modest study that follows is the interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays through their imitations of themselves.

36. Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry, 213. 37. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), tr. Willard Trask (1953; Garden City, NY: Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), 489.

1 A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Imitation and Translation A Vot’ress of My Order

A SUBJECT OF A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, THAT WHICH THE PLAY POSITS, examines, worries, endlessly repeats and reconfigures, and finally predicates statements and theses about, is change, the displacement (of persons, animals, desires, circumstances, thoughts, family and social structures) from one condition to another. Change, that is, is the exit from one state and the entrance into another: the first state is translated to the second, the second can be an imitation of the first. Beneath a bright moon, whose appearance changes continually through the month, affecting as it does so the tides of rivers and oceans and, it was long thought, the rhythms of the human female, according a prominent place to serpents whose bodily renewals each year, signaled by a new skin, make them an animal symbol of change as the moon is a heavenly one, the play tells of the changes of six individuals from a single state at the beginning to a married state at the end; changes of two of these individuals, Demetrius and Lysander, from lovers of one woman, Hermia, to lovers of another, Helena, and for Lysander further change back to the lover again of Hermia; change of the appearance of another man, Nick Bottom, from that of an urban artisan to that of an ass and back again; change of Titania from a fairy who does not love this ass to a fairy who does to a fairy, again, who does not. These are only some of the most obvious changes within the play. The play contains several different words, nouns and verbs, for aspects of these displacements and the actions that mark them: “change” itself, particularly as the root of “changeling,” a noun used to designate the little boy who sets Oberon and Titania quarreling at the beginning of the play; “imitate”; “transform”; “transfigure”; and, most interesting, “translate.” Pyramus and Thisbe, the play the rude mechanicals perform before the Athenian court in act 5, offers an adaptation of a story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, what we might call a changed version as well as an imitation of that story. In Shakespeare and Ovid, Jonathan Bate discusses the play in relation to 34

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its source in the context of “Renaissance conceptions of translatio and imitatio. Trans-latio: to translate is to bring across; it is to make a text from an alien culture speak in the distinctive language of the translator’s culture. . . . Imitation goes even further than translation in reconstituting the source-text in contemporary terms: for Spenser in The Shepheardes Calender, imitation of Theocritus and Virgil was a proper medium for reflection upon sixteenth-century ecclesiastical politics.”1 It should be noted that the Latin terms Bate uses to frame his discussion, translatio and imitatio, are found in English in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where their meanings are rather different from Bate’s definitions, though their relationship to one another as ways of representing one thing’s becoming another, or trying to, remains crucial; but as I shall show, as designations of degrees of displacement, it is translation that “goes even further,” and considerably so, than imitation. Given the extensive theorizing about imitation that prevailed among European writers in the sixteenth century, as well as Shakespeare’s many imitations of classical and contemporary models and the imitations of his own material with which this study is concerned, it is interesting to note that Shakespeare uses forms of the word imitate (including “imitate” itself, “imitated,” “imitation,” “imitations,” and, in Love’s Labor’s Lost, Holofernes’s precious “Imitari”) only twenty-two times in his works.2 Not one of these occurrences, moreover, designates literary imitation, the use of words to mime reality, which would include, for instance, Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as the imitation of an action. Rather, they describe people trying to look like other people (“‘I will imitate the honourable Romans in brevity’”), or like animals (“But when the blast of war blows in our ears, / Then imitate the action of the tiger”), or like inanimate objects (“Yet herein will I imitate the sun”).3 In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the word “imitate” occurs a single time, and none of its other forms at all. Since my general concern here is with instances of what I am calling imitation in the play, it will be instructive to look at the one instance that Shakespeare, or a character of his, terms imitation, for surely imitation in his plays must include, whether or not it is limited to, what is actually called by that word. In act 2, Titania explains to Oberon why she will not surrender to him the “little 1. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 131. As an example of “translation” according to his definition—allowing “an alien culture [to] speak in the distinctive language of the translator’s culture”—Bate cites George Chapman’s claim “in the dedicatory epistle to his translation of Homer’s Iliad that the character of Achilles ‘did but prefigure’ the Earl of Essex.” 2. The context of Holofernes’s usage is a pun on the name and nose of Ovid. He says, “Ovidius Naso was the man: and why, indeed Naso but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention? Imitari is nothing. . . .” (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.2.123–26). 3. 2 Henry IV, 2.2.117–18; Henry V, 3.1.5–6; 1 Henry IV, 1.2.192.

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changeling boy” that he so desperately covets. “The fairy land buys not the child of me,” she says, and then describes in a long sentence her friendship with the boy’s mother:4 His mother was a vot’ress of my order, And in the spiced Indian air, by night, Full often hath she gossip’d by my side; And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands, Marking th’ embarked traders on the flood: When we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind; Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait Following (her womb then rich with my young squire), Would imitate, and sail upon the land To fetch me trifles, and return again As from a voyage rich with merchandise. (2.1.122–34)

Such playful moments did not last because the votaress, “being mortal, of that boy did die; / And for her sake do I rear up her boy; / And for her sake I will not part with him” (135–38). In the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, females form strong friendships and enjoy moments of great intimacy with each other, but subjected to accidents of mortality, the growth of heterosexual desire, and the intrusions of men, this camaraderie does not last. The clarifying context of the doomed friendship of Titania and her votaress is the girlhood idyll once enjoyed by Hermia and Helena, who, in the wood outside Athens where Hermia and Lysander plan to flee at the beginning of the play, in times gone by often, “Upon faint primrose beds were wont to lie, / Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet,” as Hermia reminds her friend (1.1.215–16). Later, in the confusions of the forest, when Lysander and Demetrius—the former once indifferent to Helena and the latter having claimed to be positively “sick when I do look on thee” (2.1.212)—profess their love for her, professions she takes to be mockery, Helena suspects that Hermia is in league with them and consequently has failed to honor the claims of their long friendship. “O, is all forgot?” she asks, “All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?” and reminds her of that innocent time: We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, Have with our needles created both one flower, Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, 4. Although the punctuation is heavier in the First Folio than in a modern edition, the words there, too, form a single sentence.

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Both warbling of one song, both in one key, As if our hands, our sides, voices and minds Had been incorporate.

As in a single body, they flourished: So we grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition, Two lovely berries molded on one stem. . . . (3.2.201–11)

But now, she asks her friend, “[W]ill you rent our ancient love asunder / To join with men in scorning your poor friend?” (215–16). There is much irony in this situation: Helena is wrong about the feelings of Lysander and Demetrius and thus about the motives and behavior of Hermia, who, far from mocking her, is trying to comprehend her own abuse at the hands of two men who had a few moments earlier claimed to love her. At the same time, however, Helena is accurate in perceiving that the terms of what she and Hermia once enjoyed have changed; that the asexuality, or sexual latency, of childhood has yielded to the sexual identity of young womanhood, and that men, once of so little importance that they could be excluded from the company of females, now possess the power to drive women apart, even with no effort on their part. The notion that they were two parts of one greater whole—“Two lovely berries molded on one stem”—gives way to a sense of separation, of individuation, itself a stage on the way to union with a man. In the short run, as Helena shows us, the separation is not pleasant. As Marjorie Garber writes, “The advent of sexual love, in the case of Helena and Hermia, has brought about separation and differentiation, each here presented in the image of a fall.”5 The circumstances of Titania and her votaress are different, in part because they enjoy a kind of professional relationship (goddess and priestess) as well as friendship, in part because, older than Helena and Hermia, they have left their periods of sexual latency, perhaps long ago, and entered into alliances with men, Titania with the jealous Oberon (and also, Oberon will allege, with Theseus), the votaress with the unidentified father of the changeling boy. Therefore, their gossip and the other aspects of their association are not innocent because unknowing in the sense one would infer from Helena’s speech above that hers with Hermia were, but on the other hand the association possesses a special tenderness precisely because of their participation at other moments in the affairs of the world and of men. 5. Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), 34.

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Titania’s account of a typical day on “Neptune’s yellow sands” shows how women can be together, what they do and say, when often they are not together. The main thing the votaress does, according to Titania’s account, is comically exploit her accidental and unlikely resemblance to the sails of the ships that pass before them as they sit side by side on the shore, their mutual convexity. When the votaress sees the ships’ “sails conceive / And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind”—or, more prosaically, balloon out—she notes their resemblance to her own big-bellied condition (“her womb then rich with my young squire”), which evidently she exaggerates when she “Would imitate and sail upon the land / To fetch me trifles. . . .” So it appears at first as if the ships look like the votaress, who looks like them, which look like her, who . . . , the kind of vanishing regression produced by an object placed between two mirrors facing each other. But in fact Titania’s account of the votaress’s activity makes an important distinction between what she does and what the ships do. The distinction is between imitation and translation, simile and metaphor, likeness and identity. The votaress “imitate”s the sailing ships, as her pregnancy enables her easily and perhaps somewhat convincingly to do, much we assume to the amusement of herself and Titania, but there is never a question that she has become them; indeed, the point of the imitation, its payoff, must be that the votaress is obviously herself, a pregnant woman, who in one aspect only, her condition of being swollen, looks like a ship—but only if the ship is visible to be looked like (and looked at). The votaress looks like a sailing ship. In common with the words “like,” “as,” and “similar to,” “imitate,” as used here, joins together the extremes of a simile: she “would imitate [the ships] and sail upon the land” means she “would look like the ships as they sailed, or if they could sail, upon the land.”6 Equally, we might think, a sailing ship looks like a pregnant votaress—but that is not what Titania says; “we have laughed,” she tells us, “to see the sails conceive / And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind.” Whereas the votaress merely imitated the ships, before she does so the ships have been turned, or translated, into women impregnated by the “wanton wind” and revealing this conception in their big bellies. Literally, we would object, this cannot be so; the ships merely look like pregnant women, and, indeed, perhaps one would have to be a pregnant woman, or in the company of one, to detect the resemblance. But Titania’s words, which are not literal, do 6. “Extremes,” Winifred Nowottny’s term for “the two terms of a metaphorical relationship,” the vehicle and the tenor, seems not to have come into general use. And yet for the reason she gives, the need for “a terminology which in the act of pointing to the resemblance reminds us that it is only a partial resemblance,” the word thus used is helpful. See The Language Poets Use (1962; London: Athlone Press, 1968), 54.

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not posit mere similitude but rather, pointedly, contrast antic constancy with transformation. In imitating the ships, the votaress, always conscious of her act of imitation, retains her own identity, remains herself; conceived and grown big-bellied with the wanton wind, the sails lose their identity as sails and become pregnant women. So, at least, they do in the language of Titania, which makes the transformation of the sails the homage of an inanimate object to the female, and which makes the distinction, of critical importance throughout the play, between something remaining itself and something becoming something else. “A simile is also a metaphor,” Aristotle writes, suggesting that the former is a species of the latter, which is its genus; but it may be equally plausible to maintain, as some later rhetoricians have done, that metaphor is a species, a condensation or contracted form, of the genus simile, that in a metaphor there is always an implied and understood “like,” “as,” “as if.”7 If this implied “like” is not present, then the words point to a literal, physical, natural change and are not a figure of speech at all. Somewhat handicapped by the paucity of metaphor, as opposed to simile, in Homer and other early Greek poets, Aristotle offers examples of metaphor that are often his own adaptations of someone else’s similes. So Aristotle quotes Homer’s words, “Achilles rushed as a lion” (Iliad, 20), and calls them a simile, but his equivalent metaphor, “The lion rushed,” meaning the same thing, the lion standing for Achilles, is Aristotle’s own invention. The metaphor should not make us think that Achilles has become a lion but rather that, in the particulars of his strength, speed, and ferocity, for example, but not of his color, odor, or hirsuteness, he resembles one. Metaphor assumes the ability of the auditor or reader to discriminate and select; otherwise it cannot work. Without this ability, the auditor or reader may have no trouble understanding the Iliad, where Homer’s similes sort out shared qualities for him, but he will be at a loss confronting “th’embarked traders on the flood” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where we are certainly not to assume, for instance, that ships face the same perils of childbirth as the votaress. Nevertheless, the very structure of metaphor insists that x takes on some quality of y in some way that is stronger than the mere, perhaps 7. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, tr. George A. Kennedy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3, 4 (p.229). Kennedy comments: “In this chapter of the Rhetoric [simile] is treated as an expanded form of the metaphor: a metaphor, that is, with an explicit comparison, whether provided by a verb, adjective, or adverb. Later rhetoricians often reverse this concept, taking a metaphor to be an abbreviated simile. . . .” (229). In “What Metaphors Mean,” Donald Davidson refers to “the common theory that a metaphor is an elliptical simile” and quotes J. Middleton Murry (Countries of the Mind, 2d ser. [Oxford, 1931], 3) that a metaphor is a “compressed simile.” Sheldon Sacks, ed., On Metaphor (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 36 and 36n. Davidson demurs in this judgment.

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accidental likeness of simile. And here we may be reminded that the English word “translation” derives from the Latin translatio, which word both translates the Greek word metapherein and is translated by the English word “metaphor.” Metapherein < meta, over + pherein, bear, carry; translatio, pp. of transferre < trans, over, across + ferre (itself obviously < pherein), bear, carry. The author of the Ad Herennium writes, Translatio est cum verbum in quandam rem transferetur ex alia re, quod propter similitudinem recte videbitur posse transferri, which Harry Caplan translates, “Metaphor occurs when a word applying to one thing is transferred to another, because the similarity seems to justify this transference.”8 Metaphor and translatio are thus exact synonyms, and “translation” is pretty close. Also pretty close is the Greek metamorpho–sis (meta + morphe–, form, shape), which suggests that the form of one being is carried over to another, that of an ass, let us say, to a man, or that the man is carried over into the form of an ass. Leonard Barkan calls metaphor “that ancient double of metamorphosis.”9 A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Shakespeare’s play of metamorphosis, or change, one of whose important sources is the Metamorphoses of Ovid. But all is not change that seems to be change, as Titania’s careful distinction between “imitation” and translation shows, and contrariwise that which does not seem to be change may in fact be so. The pages below will spell out some of the many implications of transformation in the play, and of ways in which its metamorphoses resemble each other, with later moments imitating earlier ones. From this perspective we shall see how Bottom, the lover of Titania, imitates Pyramus, the lover of Thisbe, and how the translation of the former into an ass prefigures the translation of the latter into an inhabitant of the celestial realm, the lowest becoming the highest. We shall see, also, how physical walls stand for paternal wills throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream and work to shape the destinies of Hermia, Lysander, Pyramus, and Thisbe inside the play and of Juliet and her Romeo outside it. And finally we shall see how fully Pyramus and Thisbe imitates the larger play of which it is a part, with Peter Quince’s problems with intractable, often obtuse actors mirroring those of Duke Theseus with the citizens of Athens.

The Apotheosis of Pyramus The play that Peter Quince and his company of rude mechanicals present to their audience of Athenian aristocrats in act 5 of Shakespeare’s play— 8. [Cicero] ad C. Herennium, tr. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1954; 1989), 342–43. 9. Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 267.

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“The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe,” to give it once the whole title that Peter Quince uses when first he mentions it (1.2.11–12)—oscillates between poles of imitation and translation, likeness to other things and identity with them, in its problematical correspondences to a tale in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to Romeo and Juliet, and to A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself. Thus Shakespeare revisits and revises several writers or works: his “favourite classical author, probably his favourite author in any language”;10 his second tragedy, perhaps his own most recent play;11 and the love stories of this very play, that involving Helena, Hermia, Lysander, and Demetrius, and also the romance of Bottom and Titania. Additionally, the presentation of the play about Pyramus raises questions about the nature and circumstances of theatrical production and thus mimes and critiques the presentation of the larger play of which it is a part. Like Love’s Labor’s Lost and The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has no single, major source for a plot that is rather more convoluted than those of the other two plays, and is thus distinctly unlike Pyramus and Thisbe, which draws its plot from one of the world’s best known compilations of stories.12 When, early on (1.2.11–12), Quince identifies to the other mechanicals the play they are to begin rehearsing in the hope that it will be chosen for performance “before the Duke and the Duchess, on his wedding-day at night” (6–7), we may guess that he was pointing to a story as well known to the literate members of the audience,13 either in Ovid’s Latin 10. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, vii. 11. Most commentators date the compositions of the two plays near each other, in the mid-1590s, with Romeo placed as early as 1594 and as late as 1596, and Dream as early as 1595 and as late as 1596. 12. Geoffrey Bullough comments: “No one source combines [the] elements [of] . . . 1. The marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta; 2. The courtship and difficulties of the four young lovers; 3. The fairy world with its spells and quarrels; 4. The misadventures of Bottom; 5. The play of Pyramus and Thisbe.” Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. 1, 368. 13. If A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first performed at a noble marriage, as many scholars believe, then the literate members of the audience might be most members of the audience. Bullough (Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. 1, p. 367) writes: “The emphasis on weddings suggests that [the play] was originally written for the marriage of some noble” and “Surely it was written for a summer wedding in view of the title and the theme of midsummer madness or enchantment.” Andrew Gurr points out that “Theories that [A Midsummer Night’s Dream] was written for a wedding celebration have led to conjectures about more than thirteen different social occasions for which it might have been composed.” William Shakespeare: The Extraordinary Life of the Most Successful Writer of All Time (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995), 173. Dennis Kay reviews several of these conjectures in Shakespeare: His Life, Work, and Era, 190–92. Recently, however, Stephen Greenblatt cautions that “while the story [of performance at a royal wedding] is both charming and at least plausible, there is not a shred of actual evidence that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was ever performed at, let alone written expressly for, such a wedding.” The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: Norton, 1997), 805.

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or in Arthur Golding’s English translation of 1567, as it seems to be to Bottom, who claims that it is “A very good piece of work, I assure you, and a merry” (14–15), though, curiously in the light of this judgment, he does not know whether Pyramus is a lover or a tyrant.14 Then, as the parts are assigned in this scene, and as the play is rehearsed in 3.1 and finally chosen by Theseus in 5.1, over the objections of Philostrate, it is likely that, among those in the audience who knew Ovid’s tale, anticipation to see it dramatized increases, while, simultaneously, from the oxymoronic abstract, “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth” (56–57), questions about what Quince could possibly have done to Ovid must arise. So when Pyramus and Thisbe finally gets under way at about 5.1.108 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is preceded in the consciousness of the audience not only by the reputation constructed for it in the larger play, but also by rather general knowledge of another version of it, Ovid’s. This awareness contrasts with the reason that one of the daughters of Minyas, the king of Orchomenus in Boeotia, chooses to tell this tale to her sisters in the Metamorphoses: “because it was not stale nor common,” not well known, that is, it “seemed good” for the occasion (4, 64).15 Several circumstances about the selection as entertainment of the story of Pyramus in the two works are of interest here. In Shakespeare the story forms a playwithin-a-play, and similarly, in Ovid, it is a story-within-a-story—a story that is told directly by one woman to several others and only indirectly to Ovid’s reader, who is eavesdropping in a way analogous to the spying of the audience to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A woman speaks to her sisters, that is, and a company of artisans entertains some Athenian aristocrats, and in both cases “we” have the accidental good fortune to perceive what is going on. In each work Pyramus is chosen only after three other works are tantalizingly dangled before us. The daughter of Minyas, Ovid tells us, had such store and choyce of tales she wist not which to tell. She doubted if she might declare the fortune that befell To Dircetes of Babilon whome now with scaly hide

14. Quince says, “You, Nick Bottom, are set down for Pyramus,” to which Bottom responds, “What is Pyramus? A lover or a tyrant?” (1.2.19–20), which makes it seem that he does not know, or has forgotten, the play he has assured his colleagues is “A very good piece of work . . . and a merry” (14–15). Conceivably, however, Bottom’s questions should be paraphrased thus: “How do you wish me to play this Pyramus—as a lover or a tyrant?” Many lovers are tyrants, even to those they love; and many tyrants profess love for that which they tyrannize—for instance, Shakespeare’s Henry V, who tells Princess Katherine, “I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it” (Henry V, 5.2.172–73). 15. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation (1567), ed. John Frederick Nims (New York: Macmillan, 1965).

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In altred shape the Philistine beleveth to abide In watrie Pooles; or rather how hir daughter taking wings In shape of Dove on toppes of towres in age now sadly sings: Or how a certaine water Nymph by witchcraft and by charmes Converted into fishes dumbe of yongmen many swarmes, Until that of the selfsame sauce hir self did tast at last. . . . (4, 53–61)

Dercetis, or “Dircetes,” her shape altered into that of a fish; her daughter sprouting the wings of a dove; a nymph turning young men into fish, a change that becomes her own fate: all possibilities are perfectly consistent with Ovid’s theme of metamorphosis, yet (surely to the disappointment of Ovid’s reader) it is none of them but rather a tale of “how the tree that usde to beare fruite white in ages past, / Doth now beare fruite in manner blacke, by sprincling up of blood” (4, 62–63) that is chosen, because relatively unknown, even though the change in the color of a fruit is less obviously enthralling than what happens to people. Asked by the duke for a “play / To ease the anguish of a torturing hour” (5.1.36–37), Philostrate, “our usual manager of mirth” (35), presents to him “a brief how many sports are ripe” (42), a list of ready entertainments. Theseus first rejects “‘The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung / By an Athenian eunuch to the harp,’” a story about “my kinsman Hercules” that he has already told Titania (44–45, 47). Then he rejects “‘The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, / Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage’” for a similar reason: “That is an old device, and it was play’d / When I from Thebes came last a conqueror” (48–51). And last he rejects “‘The thrice three Muses mourning for the death / Of learning, late deceas’d in beggary’” as inappropriate, “Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony,” which suggests that he must know the story, and therefore that it too is old hat (52–53, 55). So however much we might like to see them dramatized,16 to Theseus these tales are stale and common, presumably unlike the tedious brief scene of young Pyramus, which Theseus chooses despite Philostrate’s warnings that “There is not one word apt, one player fitted,” that this play “is not for you” (65, 77). The story of Pyramus and Thisbe, then, is chosen in both works after three alternative entertainments have been considered and rejected. Nor is that the extent of Shakespeare’s reliance upon Ovid’s frame story. Surely it is significant that the second possibility rejected by Theseus, “‘The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, / Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage,’” 16. Especially if they are, respectively, as has been suggested from time to time, adaptations or parodies of Lyly, the “Athenian eunuch,” Marlowe, “the Thracian singer,” and Spenser, author of Teares of the Muses.

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though based specifically on the first incident in book 11 of the Metamorphoses, the tale of Orpheus, calls to mind the circumstances and fate of the daughters of Minyas, one of whom tells of Pyramus and Thisbe, in book 4. At the beginning of this earlier book, the other women of Thebes gather to celebrate new rites in honor of Bacchus, but the daughters of Minyas will not join the celebration since Alcithoe, speaking for her sisters as well, “Stiffly doth denie that Bacchus is the sonne / Of Jove” (4, 2–3). Instead, these daughters pay homage to Pallas as they weave and tell several tales, starting with that of Pyramus, “To ease our labor while our handes about our profite walke” (48). And they miss few opportunities, as they do so, to denigrate Bacchus, as if reverence to more than a single god is beyond their ability. So the daughter who will tell of Pyramus says, “Whyle that others idelly doe serve the God of wine, / Let us that serve a better Sainct Minerva, finde some talke / To ease our labor . . . ” (46–48). After Leuconoe describes the transformation of the sea nymph Clytie into a sunflower, “at hir tale all [her sisters] wondred: some denide / Hir saying to be possible: and other some replide / That such as are in deede true Gods may all things worke at will: / But Bacchus is not any such” (329–32). And when Alcithoe concludes her tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, “Mineus daughters still their businesse plie / In spight of Bacchus whose high feast they breake [disregard] contemptuously” (482–83). Every reader of Ovid must be aware that for this almost gratuitous irreverence there will come a day of reckoning;17 indeed, as much suspense attends the development of the story of the daughters of Minyas as that of the tales they tell. And like these tales, the continuing frame story, too, ends with metamorphosis, as the daughters watch incredulously while “the flaxe the which they spun / Did flourish full of Ivie leaves” and vines, and “The threede it selfe in braunches forth did spring” (489–91); then the sisters’ eyes become highly sensitive to light: they “were compeld / To hide their heades, one here and there another, for to shun / The glistring light” (500–502); and finally their translation is complete: featherless, “yet with shere and velume wings they hover from the ground” (507); “In houses they delight / And not in woods: detesting day they flitter towards night: / Wherewith they of the Evening late of Latin take their name,18 / And we in English language Backes or Reermice call the same” (510–13)—or bats. Tipsy Bacchanals tearing poor Orpheus to bits, the entertainment The17. In some ways the fate of the daughters anticipates the story of Arachne in book 6, punished for refusing to pay the respect due to Minerva. 18. They are vespertiliones: “tectaque, non silvas celebrant lucemque perosae / nocte volant seroque tenent a vespere nomen.” Ovid, Metamorphoses, with an English translation by Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1956), book 4, lines 414–15 (vol. 1, p. 206). 1, 206).

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seus rejects for his wedding, is obviously not the same thing as the metamorphic fate of the daughters of Minyas, suffered because of their stated irreverence towards Bacchus, but both denouements occur in the midst of revels honoring the god of wine, when usually controlled women succumbed to the irrational motives inside them and “gadded on a rout” (11, 40), ran amok, the Thracian women explicitly, the daughters’ neighbors implicitly. And all the victims are punished because of their perceived disdain—toward the Thracian women (“behold yoon same is he that doth disdeine / Us women” [11, 7–8]) or toward the god himself. It is noteworthy that female irrationality is thus invoked as background to a play so concerned with the operations and absences of reason (“reason and love keep little company together nowadays”), but where those most clearly afflicted with unreason, Demetrius and Lysander, are not women but men. More important, however, is the dynamic that develops between the stories told by the daughters of Minyas and the story about them. The Metamorphoses, in this way like the Decameron, the Canterbury Tales, and other highly sophisticated collections of favorite, sometimes quite simple stories, often seems to subordinate events in the lives of its many narrators (we might say “lesser narrators,” recognizing Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer as greater narrators) to the events they narrate, only, suddenly, to thrust the former events into the foreground—reminding us that life is going on, so to speak, for the narrators as well as their characters.19 So if, when we read in Ovid about Pyramus, Thisbe, Clytie, and some others, we tend to forget the daughters of Minyas, we are finally reproved for our inattention by witnessing the magnitude of their punishment and having to acknowledge that all along they were at least as important as what they had to say. In similar fashion, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Bottom and his company are performing their play, things are happening simultaneously to them, the performers, and also to their aristocratic audience. Stories told and plays acted do not confer immunity upon their creators. It is perfectly evident, for example, that the audience to Pyramus and Thisbe, far from passive, is displaying itself, growing, and changing as the performance unfolds. Quince’s prologue stimulates Theseus’s curiosity about what will follow: “I wonder if the lion be to speak” (5.1.151) he asks, and after the lion has done so, he is appreciative: “A very gentle beast, and of a good conscience” (224). Demetrius is cynically attentive throughout, 19. A well-known analogy might be the blunder of Chaucer’s Pardoner. It is entirely possible to forget that the story of the three drunken men’s quest to destroy Death is the Pardoner’s own tale until, at its conclusion, he overreaches himself and invites “sire Hoost” to “kisse the relikes everichon,” with most regrettable consequences. (The Pardoner’s Tale, The Canterbury Tales, VI (C) 943–44, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin [The Riverside Press], 1957), 154.

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both to the play’s action and to the duke’s observations, responding to his doubts about the lion, “No wonder, my lord; one lion may when many asses do” (152–53). Most of all, perhaps, Hippolyta becomes involved in the play and concerned about the fate of its characters. Initially, she is a very unappreciative audience, saying “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard” (208), and then an impatient one, declaring “I am aweary of this moon. Would he would change!” (245–46), but then, caught up in Pyramus’s expressions of grief, she becomes truly involved—“Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man” (284–85)—to a greater degree, perhaps, than anyone else in the audience. In the nearly two hundred lines between the end of the prologue, line 150, and Thisbe’s last words, line 342, there are 41 separate, brief (five are three lines long, the rest shorter) speeches by characters not members of the cast of Pyramus—by Theseus (17), Demetrius (13), Hippolyta (6), and Lysander (5). And what of those who do not speak, most notably Helena and Hermia? Are they too polite to interrupt a play they are watching, too attentive to its action to wish to compete with it, too pleased that they have finally won their men, too excited about the wedding nights soon to come? These are decisions for the actors playing their parts and the director to work out, but one way or another, especially since the remarks of Theseus et al. keep calling our attention to the audience watching Pyramus, they must be worked out: the two women continue to play even as they watch Bottom and his company of players. Theseus, too, can have some very complicated business to perform here. His desire “To ease the anguish of a torturing hour” suggests that this anguish can be eased, only, not eliminated, and a persuasive intermixture of his comments on Pyramus with his anticipations of personal sexual delights soon to follow are a real challenge to an actor. Similarly, the rude mechanicals do more than merely play their parts. How fully they might be recognized as improvising rather than reciting is a matter that will be considered below, but Snug’s words of comfort to the ladies in the audience, “Then know that I as Snug the joiner am / A lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam” (220–21), succinctly demonstrate the double purpose of these players. However all of these matters are worked out in a given production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, somehow we are to be made aware that Pyramus and Thisbe is woven into the action of the larger play, the weft crossing its warp for two hundred lines, not alien material that is cleanly inserted. To put it another way, Pyramus and Thisbe is a diversion for its aristocratic audience, and it is that for us, too, but it is also an occasion for that audience to continue to display itself to us in significant ways. The lesser story, interesting in itself, serving the purposes also of the greater story, is another way that Ovid is operating inside Shakespeare’s play. In his discussion of Shakespeare and Ovid, Jonathan Bate notes that “A Midsummer Night’s Dream [is] Shakespeare’s most luminous imitatio of Ovid,” but the reason for that is not the inclusion of a story from

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the Metamorphoses, which Bate finds to miss Ovid’s point, but rather the presence of “all the marks of true Ovidianism: a philosophy of love and of change, the operation of the gods, animal transformation, and symbolic vegetation” translated “out of the play-within [Pyramus] and into the play itself.”20 To these Ovidian elements, I would add this cooperation of the small tale in the exfoliation of the larger work’s meaning. The reason for the failure of Quince’s version of Pyramus and Thisbe to achieve a proper Ovidian end, according to Bate, is its lack of a proper metamorphosis. In Ovid that metamorphosis, which is forecast by the daughter of Minyas when she chooses the story of Pyramus over the other possibilities, turns the fruit of the mulberry tree from white to black or deep purple. When Pyramus stabs himself, his “bloud did spin on hie / As when a Conduite pipe is crackt, the water bursting out . . . ,” and “The leaves that were upon the tree besprincled with his blood / Were died blacke. The root also bestained as it stoode, / A deep darke purple colour straight upon the Berries cast” (4, 147–48,150–52). And when Thisbe dies, she prays to the “unhappie tree” beneath which the lovers were to meet that “Blacke be the colour of thy fruite and mourning like alway,” a prayer that is granted: “For when the fruite is thoroughly ripe, the Berrie is bespect / With colour tending to a blacke” (191, 194, 199–200). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the transformation of the mulberry is assimilated to the love-in-idleness flower: “where the bolt of Cupid fell,” Oberon tells Puck, “It fell upon a little western flower, / Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound” (2.1.165–67). Shakespeare’s substitution of one flower for another, and his removal of it from the Pyramus story to the stories of Titania and then Lysander and Demetrius, is part of what Bate means by translation “out of the play-within and into the play itself.” Still, according to Bate, this translation leaves the “Pyramus and Thisbe” of Shakespeare’s play without a metamorphosis. For Bate, Peter Quince “is a literalist. . . . He is bounded by the letter [of Ovid’s story] and accordingly fails to perceive the spirit: his script leaves out the point of the story. . . . Quince’s dramatization . . . ends with the death of the lovers; there is no Ovidian metamorphosis. . . .”21 This analysis ignores Pyramus’s final judgment on himself, which declares a metamorphosis, whether the idea for it belongs with Quince or, more probably, with Bottom. Pyramus stabs himself and then speaks his last words: 20. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 132. Bate notes also: “As Leonard Barkan has observed, the blood-coloured mulberry into which Pyramus and Thisbe are metamorphosed is replaced by the flower named love-in-idleness which works metamorphic magic when squeezed upon a sleeper’s eye.” Shakespeare and Ovid, 138. Barkan’s discussion is found in The Gods Made Flesh, 257. 21. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 132.

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shakespeare’s imitations Thus die I, thus, thus, thus! Now am I dead, Now am I fled; My soul is in the sky. Tongue, lose thy light; Moon, take thy flight. Now die, die, die, die, die. (294–300)

And die he does. And as he does so, if he is to be believed, he, or his soul, ascends into the sky: My soul is in the sky. That is a translation—not of the color of fruit, as in Metamorphoses 4, but of the condition of a man, from mortal to god, as in Metamorphoses 9, for instance, the story of Hercules.22 This translation is underscored by the presence in the next line, “Tongue, lose thy light” (which illogically combines “Tongue, lose thy voice” and “Eyes, lose thy light”), of the figure of speech known in classical rhetoric as hypallage, called also the Changeling, which is characterized by George Puttenham as words “changing their true construction and application, whereby the sense is quite perverted and made very absurd.”23 This perversion of sense points to an especially dramatic change, as the sense of eyesight is attributed to the organ the tongue, and equally dramatic is the change Bottom declares of his own condition. So Shakespeare’s Pyramus and Thisbe does have a point, and although it is not the point of Ovid’s tale, it is very much an Ovidian point, the translation not of a flower but of a hero. The play-within-the-play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ends with its protagonist declaring his apotheosis, which as we shall see is also an imitation of the apotheosis of Bottom.

Tragedy and Farce Readers of Romeo and Juliet find hardly a hint of the heights and glories of Shakespeare’s tragic art to come, whereas even those readers who find As You Like It or Twelfth Night somehow superior to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (as I do not) will usually admit that qualitative differences among these comedies are of degree rather than kind.24 The woods outside Athens 22. In Ovid, Jove explains his actions to the other gods: “When [the soul of Hercules] is rid of earthly drosse, then will I lift it hygher, / And take it unto heaven.” Metamorphoses, tr. Golding, 9, 305–6. 23. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), 3, 15. A facsimile edition, intro. Baxter Hathaway (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970), 182–83. 24. In “Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool,” George Orwell notes that “some of the most actable [of Shakespeare’s plays] such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream are the least admired” by

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are far nearer to the Forest of Arden, the court of Theseus to the court of Orsino, than anything in Verona is to the terrible heath in King Lear or Macbeth. Words and phrases like “experimental” and “apprentice work” are often used to describe Romeo but not A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and since the two plays were almost certainly written in close proximity to each other, that may be why the tragedy appears to precede the comedy and not vice versa. In some ways, perhaps, Romeo is less sure what it wants to be. While acknowledging “premonitions of disaster before the death of Mercutio,” Susan Snyder argues that in the early acts of his play “Shakespeare is playing on comic expectations” of his audience. This technique extends even to devices of plot. The “feud functions in Romeo very much as the various legal restraints do in Shakespearean comedy. Imposed from outside on the youthful lovers, who feel themselves no part of it, the feud is a barrier placed arbitrarily between them, like the Athenian law giving fathers the disposition of their daughters which stands between Lysander and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—something set up in order to be broken down.”25 The comic direction of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is never in doubt, or if it is, it is so only for the briefest moment, when Egeus claims as “the ancient privilege of Athens” the right to put a disobedient daughter “to her death”—before Theseus tells Hermia almost immediately that an available alternative to death, should she persist in her desire for Lysander, would be “to abjure / For ever the society of men” (1.1.41, 44, 65–66). Celibacy—“For aye to be in shady cloister mew’d, / To live a barren sister lovers of Shakespeare. (From Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, 1950. Reprinted in Frank Kermode, ed., Four Centuries of Shakespeare Criticism [New York: Avon, 1965], 519). Notwithstanding Pepys’s famous declaration that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life” (Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances, 1590–1890, ed. Ga–mini Salga–do [New York: Harper & Row, 1975], 117), I wonder whether Orwell’s estimate was ever widely true. William Hazlitt writes: “It is astonishing that Shakespear should be considered, not only by foreigners, but by many of our own critics, as a gloomy and heavy writer, who painted nothing but ‘gorgons and hydras, and chimeras dire.’ His subtlety exceeds that of all other dramatic writers, insomuch that a celebrated person of the present day said that he regarded him rather as a metaphysician than a poet. His delicacy and sportive gaiety are infinite. In the Midsummer Night’s Dream alone, we should imagine, there is more sweetness and beauty of description than in the whole range of French poetry put together” (Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, ed. Ernest Rhys [1817; London: Dent, and New York: Dutton (Everyman’s Library), 1936], 245). More recently, though not recently, Frank Kermode writes, “I should myself be prepared to maintain that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Shakespeare’s best comedy.” Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (New York: Viking, 1971), 203. Comparative evaluation is out of favor in academic circles these days (though it abounds elsewhere with lists of the hundred best novels, athletes, etc., of the twentieth century, or second Millennium), or else, probably, few would disagree with Kermode. 25. Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 64, 59–60.

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all your life” (71–72)—may not seem particularly attractive, either to Hermia or to the audience, but it is not death, and from it reprieve can always be granted; it is a part of what Susan Snyder calls “evitability,” a set of conditions that can always be altered, “ways of creating new situations when the old ones become impossible.”26 These matters bear upon our interpretation of the tragic climax of Romeo and Juliet in relation to its comic double, the deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe. In both plays a man and a woman go to unusual lengths to circumvent obstacles posed by their families and meet; when the man arrives at the prearranged meeting place, unforeseen circumstances convince him that the woman is dead, though she is not; he shows his devotion by killing himself; finding his dead body, the woman kills herself. It is barely conceivable that, having used this story from Ovid in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare saw that it was not only or necessarily funny and therefore demonstrated its tragic thrust by altering it for Romeo and Juliet, but it is far more likely, as the common assumption, supported by the above analysis, that Romeo is the earlier play shows, that tragedy became translated into comedy—or if not that, into caricature, burlesque, farce.27 “Hegel remarks somewhere,” Karl Marx writes, famously, “that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”28 Romeo, Juliet, Pyramus, and Thisbe may hardly be world-historic personages, at least not in Marx’s sense, nor their deaths world-historic facts, but the probable order of their fates shows the metamorphosis of tragedy into farce. Pyramus and Thisbe translates the conclusion of Romeo and Juliet; working with essentially the same materials of devotion, selflessness, external impediments, frustrated purpose, and accident, it revises their literary mode so that what had been tragedy, “A pair of star-cross’d lovers” undergoing “The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love” (Prologue 6, 9), becomes farce, whose purpose “is to provoke the spectator to laughter” with such means as “the surprise of sudden appearance or disclosure, the 26. Ibid., 41 and passim. 27. Pyramus and Thisbe is highly risible to its two audiences because of its exaggerations, the quality of its language, the histrionics of its characters, and the tendency of the players to step out of character, but it is not risible to its participants to the extent that we can imagine them as real. Pyramus’s belief that Thisbe is dead and her knowledge that he is dead are as tragic facts for them as Romeo’s belief that Juliet is dead and her knowledge that he is dead are for them. Seen from the inside, Pyramus and Thisbe tries to be a tragedy, though seen from the outside it may not be very successful, as Peter Quince acknowledges early on. If tragedy is about death and dissolution and comedy is about renewal, then Pyramus is as surely, though not as successfully, a tragedy as Romeo. 28. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2d (New York and London: Norton, 1978), 594.

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mechanism suggested by excessively physical action, repetition, gross exaggeration of character, frequent sexual byplay, and so on.”29 On the other hand, as two actors in the Chamberlain’s Men imitate the characters Romeo and Juliet—play them but not become them, explicitly stand for them—so do two actors in the same company imitate Bottom and Flute, perhaps equally convincingly. But then Bottom and Flute imitate Pyramus and Thisbe, an imitation not at all convincing since we have been party to it from the start of the play. And unlike the men who play them, moreover, Bottom and Flute are not professional actors. Still, it is perfectly plausible, depending upon casting and similarities of staging, that a spectator might perceive Bottom’s imitation of Pyramus, for instance, as itself an imitation of (let us say) Richard Burbage’s imitation of Romeo. Despite the translation of literary mode, many elements of Pyramus seem to ape those of Romeo. The last word spoken by each expiring lover is one such element. Romeo says, “Thus with a kiss I die” (5.3.120). Juliet says, to Romeo’s dagger,”There rust, and let me die” (170). Imitating his mentor, but going him several better, Pyramus says, “Now, die, die, die, die, die” (5.1.300). Thisbe is very clever, repeating the last word of the others, but hiding it in another word, thus concealing her imitation: “Adieu, adieu, adieu” (342).30 And since “adieu” means not only “farewell” (i.e., forever) but also “See you later,” Thisbe’s variation signals the farcical, or at least nontragic, nature of the theatrical event in which she finds herself.

29. L[eo]. H[ughes]. and T. V. F. B[rogan]., “Farce,” in Preminger and Brogan, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 402. 30. The perception of Thisbe’s die is certainly subtle; is it therefore unlikely? The recent work of Terence Hawkes and other performance critics is so insistent on the improvisational nature of performances of Shakespeare’s plays, the validity of actors’ interpolations (like the dying Hamlet’s “O,o,o,o,” following “The rest is silence” in the first Folio’s version of his last speech), and the fact, which it is, that “there is no pristine manuscript of any of Shakespeare’s plays” that it is well to remind ourselves that the legitimacy of readers’ responses to printed versions of the plays is not an invention of the nineteenth or twentieth century. (See the title essay of Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process [London and New York: Methuen, 1986], 87.) The extended and diffuse publishing enterprise that brought nineteen of Shakespeare’s plays into print, in quarto editions, between 1594 and 1622, and then thirty-six of them, eighteen for the first time, in the great first Folio of 1623, testifies that the plays were read, not only seen onstage. Whatever we may know now of the vagaries of Elizabethan printing houses, the probability is that the readers of these plays believed they were reading the unmediated compositions of William Shakespeare. These men and women were, as John Heminge and Henry Condell tell us at the beginning of the Folio, “the great Variety of Readers. From the most able, to him that can but spell. . . .” To hypothesize that “the most able” were very able indeed, close readers who might have remembered the dying words of Romeo and Juliet and seen (what probably no auditor heard) “die” inside of “adieu,” is simply to make them as clever as we are, not to turn Shakespeare into Borges or Nabokov.

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In addition to the stories of Romeo and Juliet and Pyramus and Thisbe, there is in these two plays another story of young lovers making their ways, defining themselves, confronting their problems: that of Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius. This story, in some ways the main plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, does not closely resemble the action of Romeo and Juliet, nor is it directly imitated or parodied by Pyramus and Thisbe; to their literary modes of tragedy and farce, it adds comedy since the four lovers find a personal happiness that elevates them in the political hierarchy of Athens—they are present in the play’s last scene, as Egeus is not31— and, according to the conventions of comedy, will contribute to the regeneration of their society and promise it a future. Thus, two of the stories end with the deaths of the lovers and the third with their marriages, perfect illustrations of Byron’s famous distinction between tragedy and comedy— “All tragedies are finish’d by a death, / All comedies are ended by a marriage”32—except that, as already noted, other considerations make Pyramus more farcical than tragic. In any event, since there are four people in the finally happy group, as many characters thrive in the three stories as perish. Nevertheless, connections among the three stories are too complicated to permit a simple opposition of happy and unhappy endings. In all three, parental opposition is a major obstacle to satisfaction of the lovers’ desire. This opposition is most obvious in Egeus, who prefers Demetrius to Lysander as a mate for Hermia for no reason he can state or we can see. He is “Full of vexation” that she presumed to choose for herself, and to Theseus he “beg[s] the ancient privilege of Athens: / As she is mine, I may dispose of her; / Which shall be either to this gentleman, / Or to her death, according to our law / Immediately provided in that case” (1.1.22, 41–45). To the extent that the stock figure of the senex iratus requires any specific motives, we probably infer that Hermia’s choice somehow underlines for this old man his increasing loss of authority over everyone and everything, and even his nearness to death. Lord Capulet, Juliet’s father, at first seems very distant in attitude from Egeus; when Paris first presents his suit to him, Capulet says, “But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart, / My will to her consent is but a part, / And she agreed, within her scope of choice / Lies my consent and fair according voice” (1.2.16–19): a

31. Egeus is not present in act 5 in the First Quarto of 1600. In the First Folio of 1623 he essentially replaces Philostrate in act 5, where he speaks for the first time after Theseus asks, “Where is our usual manager of mirth?” ([35]). Since managing mirth was clearly the task of Philostrate as Master of the Revels—in the Folio, Theseus commands him to “Stirre up the Athenian youth to merriments” (1[.1.13])—the Folio’s substitution for him of Egeus in act 5 is inexplicable and therefore certainly wrong. 32. Lord George Gordon Byron, Don Juan, ed. Leslie Marchand (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), canto 3, stanza 9.

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suitor must first himself win her, and Capulet’s consent and voice—his agreement and advice—operate only within her range of choice. It is an admirable and most modern-seeming position, and Juliet would be a lucky girl to have such a father; but under the assault of Paris’s continued pressure, his desire to advance his daughter socially in marriage to a kinsman of Prince Escalus (“The most you sought was her promotion,” Friar Laurence tells Capulet when Juliet appears to have poisoned herself, “For ’twas your heaven she should be advanc’d” [4.5.71–72]), and his hope that her sadness, which he believes incorrectly was caused by the death of Tybalt, will be assuaged by quickly marrying, he changes. Even now, however, his insistence and impatience follow from his approval of Paris, not opposition to Romeo of whose place in his daughter’s heart he has no knowledge. In the play of Pyramus, finally, Thisbe’s father is mentioned only once, when Pyramus apostrophizes the “lovely wall, / That stand’st between her father’s ground and mine” (5.1.172–73); right after the play has ended, Bottom explains that “the wall is down that parted their fathers” (346–47).33 It would appear that Thisbe’s father had seen it as in his best interest to maintain the wall that separates the would-be lovers. Such a reading would be consonant with Golding’s Ovid, which tells us that Pyramus and Thisbe “had bene man and wife, / But still their Parents went about to let [prevent] which (for their life) / They could not let [allow, but also, ironically, prevent]” (4.77–78). A father, therefore, stands in the way of all three alliances. As Susan Snyder points out, the feud in Romeo and Juliet is a kind of equivalent of the irrationality of Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but as an impediment to the desire of the lovers it finds support in the determination of Capulet, which is faintly reflected, also, in the determination of Thisbe’s father. When Duke Theseus reverses his earlier support of Egeus (“To you your father should be as a god”) and the law of the land and tells Egeus, “I will overbear your will” (4.1.178), he points to that faculty, the will (“an ‘appetite’ of the intellect . . . normally guided by the intellect” and instructed by knowledge, opinion, and sense),34 whose strength is paramount in these three fathers, of Hermia, Juliet, and Thisbe. For Theseus to overbear Egeus’s will is figuratively to breach a wall of paternal opposition that can separate any lovers, and that, quite literally, does separate Pyramus and Thisbe (the “lovely wall, / That stand’st between her father’s ground and mine”). The three stories I am discussing are all concerned with wills and 33. The father of Thisbe is referred to another time, though not in the play-within-theplay, when the mechanicals first meet to discuss their proposed entertainment for the Duke and Quince claims the role of Thisbe’s father for himself (1.2.57). Nothing comes of this. 34. John Erskine Hankins, Backgrounds of Shakespeare’s Thought (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1978), 107.

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walls, and I wish to suggest that the latter, physically constructed impediments, function as analogues of the former, intangible paternal determination, a relationship intensified by sound, so that if we (almost) hear will as wall, or vice versa, we are justified in doing so. But children, as well as their fathers, possess wills; one could say that the argument between Hermia and Egeus is a battle of wills. In consequence, fathers construct walls not only as expressions of their own wills but where the contrary wills of their children demand them. A sentence in the “victory song” of Finnegans Wake will be instructive here: “Broken Eggs will poursuive bitten Apples for where theirs is Will there’s his Wall.”35 In Joyce’s novel, which seeks to roll all the myths and stories of the world into one, this sentence astonishingly conflates the mortal action of Adam and Eve, a cause, with the fate of Humpty Dumpty, the effect that follows (“poursuive”) from it, so that the eating of the forbidden fruit, which happens because “theirs is Will”—because the will of Adam and Eve prevails over the commandment of God—produces the splattered remains of poor Humpty. The word “fall” does not occur in the sentence, but it is implied, the literal fall of the egg replacing the figurative fall of man.36 The sentence, moreover, not only joins two stories together, it suggests that their conjunction is but one instance of a universal principle or law: where there is a will, there will be a wall; where human determination (what we might call willfulness, doing as one pleases irrespective of what one knows of the consequences) exists, physical machinery to punish it will come into being. This law is manifested in the implied will/wall puns of the two plays—implied, because the two words, as we shall see, appear only once in close compass. Here, however, in Shakespeare, the wall that punishes the will in Joyce becomes also the wall that enforces the will. So we may infer that the will of Thisbe’s father, of whom otherwise we know nothing, has created the “sweet and lovely wall” (Pyramus’s attempt at irony) that “stand’st between” the two houses; that the will of Capulet has created the ineffectual barrier to which Benvolio refers when he tells Mercutio that Romeo “ran this way and leapt this orchard wall” (Romeo, 2.1.5); and that the will of Egeus, finally overborne by Theseus, corresponds, figuratively, to the wall of “ancient privilege” that protects Athenian fathers, and that it is mirrored in the real wall of Pyramus and Thisbe. This second effect points to the Pyramus and Thisbe romance as an imitation of the Hermia and Lysander romance, superficially different stories in which 35. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939; New York: Viking [Centennial Edition], 1982), 175. This passage is called a “victory song” in Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944; New York: Viking-Compass, 1973), 125. 36. The word “fall” does, however, conclude the immediately preceding sentence: “Cleftfoot from Hempal must tumpel, Blamefoot Gardener’s bound to fall.”

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lovers seek to overcome obstacles constructed by fathers’ wills. Their doing so, sometimes, revives and expands the original form of the proverb: where there’s a will (or a wall), there’s a way. In these two plays Shakespeare appears quite obsessed with the word “wall.” Of its 63 occurrences in his works, most (27) are in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a distant next most (8) are in Romeo and Juliet.37 In the first scene of the tragedy Samson and Gregory say “wall” five times in seven lines (12–18): “I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s”; “That shows thee a weak slave, for the weakest goes to the wall”; “’Tis true, and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall; therefore I will push Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his maids to the wall.” Insulting, belligerent, provoking to violence, sexually assertive and threatening, the exchange anticipates much that is to come in the play. The word “wall,” here, has no particular bearing on Lord Capulet’s wall, let alone his will, though it is interesting to note how fiercely Samson asserts his own will two speeches later: “I will show myself a tyrant: when I have fought with the men I will be civil with the maids—I will cut off their heads” (21–23). In act 1, scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the rude mechanicals first survey the play they will present four acts later, no mention is made of the wall that will be such an obstacle to Pyramus and Thisbe, but in act 3, scene 1, the rehearsal, Peter Quince observes that Pyramus and Thisbe “did talk through the chink of a wall” (cf. Golding: “the wall that parted house from house had riven therein a crany / Which shronke at making of a wall,” 83–84), and Bottom recognizes the corollary of this observation, that “Some man or other must present Wall” (3.1.59–60, 63). In Golding the lovers blame the wall for coming between them: “O thou envious wall (they sayd) why letst thou [do you prevent] lovers thus?” (4, 91). Attributing envy to the wall, and apostrophizing it, they thus personify it and will allow the declarations of Quince and Bottom to seem a little less peculiar. Tom Snout, who had earlier been marked for the role of “Pyramus’ father” (1.2.60), of whom nothing more is heard, will play this singularly demanding role, perhaps because he is a doubter: “You can never bring in a wall,” he says (3.1.61). An animal, celestial luminousness, a man-made physical structure, two humans—“Lion, Moonshine, Wall, and lovers twain” (5.1.149)—these, plus the voice of Peter Quince as Prologue, are the dramatis personae of Pyramus and Thisbe. Staged human beings are probably necessary for a play; an animal is not exceptional as Lance’s dog Crab, “the sourest-na37. I take these figures from The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare, ed. Marvin Spevack (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973). Timon of Athens uses the word thrice, and several other plays and poems twice or once.

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tured dog that lives,” shows in The Two Gentlemen of Verona; in the absence of modern theatrical lighting, a lantern “playing” the moon, even carried by Robin Starveling, adorned with “bush of thorn,” is less implausible than crude, though it could have been dispensed with if Quince had possessed Shakespeare’s ability to create with mere words “the moon, the governess of floods, / Pale in her anger” (2.1.103–4). The truly remarkable character in Pyramus is Wall—a joint contrivance, we have seen, of Quince, Bottom, and Snout; although it is customary to blame them for excessive literal-mindedness, it can be argued equally that their perceived need to invent this character is a stroke of rare brilliance. Jonathan Bate writes that “Lion, Wall, and Moonshine are there to be impersonated in as literal a way as possible . . .” in part because Quince “is bounded by the letter [of the story] and accordingly fails to perceive the spirit.”38 Perhaps so; but any obstacle to the satisfaction of lovers’ desire will seem to those lovers the consequence of an evil will directed against them, not just a morally neutral thing that happens to be in the way. Thus Pyramus’s “O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall,” “O wall, O sweet and lovely wall,” and “O wicked wall” progress from ingratiating entreaty to despairing insult, and show how personally we take frustration. Shakespeare does something similar in Much Ado about Nothing when Seacoal overhears Borachio claim “what a deformed thief this fashion is” and tells his companion, in an aside, “I know that Deformed; a has been a vile thief this seven year; a goes up and down like a gentleman. I remember his name” (3.3.121–24). Quince has an inanimate object move about the stage and speak; going him one better, Seacoal transforms an abstract adjective into a proper noun, Deformed, the name of a thief. But in a play where female virtue, male honor, the truth itself are so readily deformed—made misshapen, turned ugly, disfigured39—Seacoal’s literal-minded mistake penetrates to a reality most of the characters cannot see. In Pyramus and Thisbe the reiterated “wall”s and the presence of Wall make concrete and visible the circumstances, parental wills, that separate the lovers. When finally the lovers go off toward their ill-fated meeting at “Ninus’ tomb,” Wall announces that his function has been fulfilled, Thus have I, Wall, my part discharged so; And, being done, thus Wall away doth go. (202–3)

38. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 132. 39. Analogous to Seacoal’s problem with “deformed” is Quince’s with the word “disfigure,” which he uses, interestingly, to mean “figure”: “Ay, or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine” (3.1.55–57).

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Theseus comments, “Now is the mure rased between the two neighbours,”40 and Demetrius, having the last word on the subject, agrees, “No remedy, my lord, when walls are so willful to hear without warning” (204–7). Walls are willful; walls have or express wills; wills call walls into being: “where theirs is Will there’s his Wall.”

The Most Lamentable Comedy of Bottom and Titania Pyramus and Thisbe is an imitation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in another sense as well. Both are plays with characters, action, complications, and resolutions, beginnings, middles, and ends; both are performed before audiences—respectively, Duke Theseus and his court, and ourselves. Whether or not we share the problems of Theseus, Hermia, Demetrius, et al. in the play’s early acts, we cannot fail to be struck, in act 5, that these people, their problems solved, are now doing exactly what we are doing: watching a play. We have paid our money to see more talented and bettertrained actors playing Theseus and Bottom than Theseus is privileged to watch—that is, the actor Bottom as the character Pyramus, not the actor Will Kemp (let us say) as the character Bottom);41 our own imaginations have less to amend, and presumably we behave ourselves better and do not interrupt the play. In fact, of course, we get to watch two plays: the play of Theseus, which he does not get to see, and the play staged for Theseus, that is Pyramus, during which, in a manner of speaking, we join Theseus in the audience. Throughout Hamlet, similarly, we watch a Hamlet who is unaware of our presence, but we also, at one point, join this Hamlet in watching The Murder of Gonzago—even as we continue to keep an eye on the prince. The play Pyramus and Thisbe forcibly reminds us that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play, too, albeit a superior one, and so reminded—made aware, that is, of the theatricality of all about us—we come to view the actions of Theseus not only as the involvement of a duke in the lives of his 40. “[M]ure rased” is Harold Brooks’s emendation of a very uncertain and often emended line, “mural down” replacing “Moon used” in the quartos and “morall downe” in the Folio. His intelligent discussion of the problem leaves me not quite convinced that his is the proper solution. See A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London and New York: Methuen [The Arden Shakespeare, Arden 2], 1979), 159–62. 41. The demands upon the actors who play the rude mechanicals—originally the comic actors in the Chamberlain’s Men—can hardly be overstated. These men must do a convincing job playing Bottom, Flute, and the others—they should leave us unaware that we are suspending our disbelief—and at the same time, as Bottom and Flute they should do an obviously amateurish job playing Pyramus and Thisbe. What could be more difficult than a good actor playing a bad actor?

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citizens, but also as the ideal of a director, originally a prompter,42 imposed upon his players. Duke Theseus desires to uphold “the ancient privilege of Athens,” the laws, and the entitlements of old men like Egeus; Director Theseus desires to move those who respond to him toward an end appropriate to a comedy (hence acknowledging celibacy as an alternative to death and finally overbearing the will of Egeus): the two purposes are not entirely compatible. Or better, perhaps, Theseus as director instructs Theseus as duke, and in contriving a comic play, he learns how to design a comic society. In his function as director, Theseus imitates and is imitated by Peter Quince, whom T. W. Baldwin proposed as a farcical representation of an Elizabethan prompter.43 In the rehearsal of Pyramus and Thisbe in act 3, scene 1, Quince tells his actors when to speak and where to move— “Speak, Pyramus. Thisbe, stand forth.” (76)—and also what to say and when not to speak. To Flute’s “I’ll meet thee, Pyramus, at Ninny’s tomb,” Quince responds, “‘Ninus’ tomb,’ man! Why, you must not speak that yet. That you answer to Pyramus” (91–93). These words bizarrely echo Theseus’s earlier invitation to Hermia to speak, “What say you, Hermia?” and then his command that she take a little more time to make up her mind, that she not speak that yet: “Take time to pause, and by the next new moon . . . Upon that day either prepare to die . . . Or else to wed Demetrius . . . Or on Diana’s altar to protest / For aye, austerity and single life” (1.1.46, 83, 86, 88–90). It is not only the action of Pyramus and Thisbe proper, but all the circumstances surrounding it—the idea to perform a play, casting, reciting the lines—that imitate the main events of the larger play. Even in going into the forest, Quince and his men are imitating the four young lovers, however different their purposes. Dukes and directors, nominal authorities, do not always find it easy to impose their wills upon others. Nor do fairy kings: Oberon is powerless to make Titania release the changeling boy to become “Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild” (2.1.25) until, her mind and heart confused by her dalliance with Bottom, 42. The prompter, Gerald Eades Bentley writes, “had to carry out a good many of the functions of a modern stage manager, seeing that the props were ready to be brought on, boys were ready to sing offstage or on, offstage noises were ready, musicians were ready before they had to come on stage. . . .” The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 82. Insofar as Elizabethan acting companies had someone to whom the tasks of a modern director were assigned—someone to tell the actors where to stand on the stage, when and where to move, even how to speak a line—that someone was also probably the prompter. See T. W. Baldwin, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927), 122–45. 43. Baldwin, Organization and Personnel, 135.

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When I had at my pleasure taunted her, And she in mild terms begg’d my patience, I then did ask of her her changeling child; Which straight she gave me, and her fairy sent To bear him to my bower in fairy land. (4.1.56–60)

Oberon gets what he wants, finally, because of his ingenuity and patience, not because of the respect due his high station. The language of the director, or prompter, is more evident still in the instructions Oberon gives Puck to intercede on behalf of Helena with Demetrius: A sweet Athenian lady is in love With a disdainful youth; anoint his eyes; But do it when the next thing he espies May be the lady. Thou shalt know the man By the Athenian garments he hath on. Effect it with some care, that he may prove More fond on her than she upon her love. . . . (2.1.260–66)

These are the circumstances, Oberon tells Puck; this is what you are to do, where, when, and how. Honestly trying to obey his director, Puck acts— and makes Lysander “More fond on her,” Helena, “than she upon her love,” Demetrius. Oberon can no more know that there are in the forest two men in “Athenian garments” than a director can know, for instance, that the discharge of an onstage cannon will set his theater on fire, stopping the play in the first act.44 Dukes, directors, and even fairy kings are not God, though they try to be. When Theseus seeks to help Egeus at the beginning of the play, it is as if he is enforcing fidelity to a script. Egeus begs “the ancient privilege of Athens”—ancient, since time immemorial, the way things have been done always. Distracted by his own romantic affairs, rather fixated on his wedding four days hence, probably wishing that Egeus, Hermia, and the whole disagreeable business would just go away, Theseus is, at first, ill-disposed toward innovation and improvisation, and toward justice or rethinking the laws of Athens. Then Hermia refuses to act the role of obedient daughter (“she is mine,” Egeus says, “and all my right of her. . . .”), for it is not what she will do best, not the role for which she is naturally cast; driven by desire “In such a presence here to plead my thoughts” (61), not any more than Theseus by some sense of justice in the abstract, she asks 44. The fate, of course, of Henry VIII, and the Globe, on 29 June 1613.

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shakespeare’s imitations that I may know The worst that may befall me in this case, If I refuse to wed Demetrius. (62–64)

The “worst” would have her choose between death or the celibate life, both better possibilities than Demetrius (“So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord, / Ere I will yield my virgin patent up / Unto his lordship” [79–81]), but certainly not very good. So when Lysander, left alone with her, proposes escape to a “place [where] the sharp Athenian law / Cannot pursue us” (162–63), Hermia jumps at the opportunity for a congenial role and the chance to manage, or direct, her own affairs. And off they go, followed by Demetrius, who is himself rejecting the easiest plot—constancy to Helena to whom once he “Made love” (107)—that two young men and two young women could enact to achieve their own happiness, with one Jack for each Jill. Rather, Demetrius fancies himself in love with Hermia, thus imitating the feelings of Lysander whose love for Hermia authenticates her as an acceptable love object for others. Demetrius falls victim to that “mimetic desire” of which René Girard writes and initiates an action that is perhaps far more common than the tidier plot for which it is substituted.45 As Theseus has trouble controlling the people of whom he is nominally in charge, so does Peter Quince find his company of players all but intractable. His problems begin with Bottom, who wishes to expand the dramatic mode of Pyramus and Thisbe and his own participation in it. Assigned a role before anyone else, that of protagonist, no less than the male title role, Bottom asks whether Pyramus is “A lover or a tyrant.” Learning Pyramus is “ A lover, that kills himself most gallant for love,” Bottom acknowledges that he is up to the challenge, and yet, he says, “—yet my chief humour is for a tyrant”—and quotes some tyrannical, pseudo-Senecan rant (1.2.20–21, 25–26). Quince next assigns Flute the role of Thisbe, which Bottom wants—“And I may hide my face, let me play Thisbe too”—and then, to Snug the role of the lion, which Bottom also covets: “Let me play the lion too. I will roar that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me” (48–49, 66–67). Initially, Bottom is satisfied neither with the role he is assigned as it is defined nor with that role alone. And in this unwillingness to 45. In René Girard, A Theater of Envy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), passim, and elsewhere. For Girard “mimetic desire” is an extremely complicated matter, whose dynamics, in six chapters of this book, he explores in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mimetic desire explains matters as simple as falling in love with a buddy’s girlfriend, as complex as ritual and symbolic sacrifice. In his first chapter, on The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Girard describes how Proteus, “fully convinced by the idolatrous language of [his friend] Valentine . . . [becomes] converted to the cult of Sylvia” (13). Something like this, I believe, attracts Demetrius to Helena.

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be what he is asked to be, and to be that only, Bottom may be seen to be imitating Hermia, who also resists being what she is asked to be, and who, on her way to being what she wants to be (the wife of Lysander), must also try some other parts—the girl loved by two boys, the girl loved by no one at all. If the actor Bottom’s relationship to the characters in Pyramus and Thisbe is thus somewhat problematical, much about the nature of that play is itself uncertain. By what are its actors to be guided as they perform their parts, and how faithfully do they follow their guide(s), or try to? “Is all our company here?” Quince asks, and Bottom replies, “You were best to call them generally, man by man, according to the scrip” (1.2.1–3). So there is a script, or promptbook, of the play, held appropriately by Quince, the play’s prompter. When the mechanicals meet in “a marvelous convenient place for our rehearsal” (3.1.2–3), are we to assume that each of them has pages of his own part, from which, in the event, only Bottom and Flute get to read small bits before Puck interrupts the company and effects its dispersal? Such written documents are never mentioned, although Quince says to the other men, “Come, sit down, every mother’s son, and rehearse your parts” (68–69). On the other hand, from the moment of Bottom’s request to Quince to “Write me a prologue, and let the prologue seem to say we will do no harm with our swords” and Quince’s promise that “we will have such a prologue” (16–17, 21), the Ur-script, the promptbook, is something to be added to and revised. Since, moreover, Quince pledges that the prologue will be “written in [alternating lines of] eight and six” syllables, the ballad measure; since Bottom requests that it be “written in eight and eight”; and since, when we hear it, it is in fact iambic pentameter (3.1.22–24, 5.1.126–50), beginning, “Gentles, perchance you wonder at this show,” we may ask whether the prologue itself has gone through several drafts. A very unstable commerce is thus established between what the actors are working with and what they are doing with it. When first he mentions this play to Theseus, Philostrate describes it as “some ten words long, / Which is as brief as I have known a play; / But by ten words, my lord, it is too long” (5.1.61–63). Even if “ten words” understates the length of the play, by “as brief a play as I have known,” Philostrate must be pointing to a vehicle that is briefer than what will be performed a few minutes later. The invisibility of the promptbook, the addition to its contents of a prologue, which may be changed after it is added, the failure of what we see to correspond to what Philostrate describes—all these matters open up to question the degree of improvisation in the actual performance. The script of Pyramus and Thisbe is further destabilized by Bottom’s desire somehow to include in it an account of his mysterious adventure with Titania. Awaking, trying to recall the previous night, to work out the details of his “most rare vision,” of “a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was,” Bottom plans to enlist his prompter’s help:

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I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called “Bottom’s Dream,” because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death. (4.1.203–5, 212–17)

Earlier, Quince had planned to cast his prologue in ballad stanzas, but when the prologue is recited its form is different. Now Bottom claims he will sing a ballad at Thisbe’s death—presumably Thisbe’s, but the pronoun in “her death” has no grammatical antecedent, and even more curiously Bottom plans to sing it “in the latter end of a play,” not “the play—but there is no ballad there, or anywhere else in Pyramus and Thisbe. However, there is a prologue to that play, in iambic pentameter, and the meaning of Bottom’s “most rare vision” does insert itself into the play, where Bottom had said it would be, at Thisbe’s death. For the dying Pyramus’s declaration that “My soul is in the sky” (5.1.299) is not only the Ovidian metamorphosis appropriate to Pyramus and Thisbe, as I claimed earlier (pp. 45–46), it is also, highly condensed, the promised “ballad of this dream”: it is “‘Bottom’s Dream.’” Never quite in his own persona, Nick Bottom is twice “A lover, that kills himself most gallant for love”: as an ass, he is the lover of Titania, his death the sleep he forecasts in the last line he speaks in her presence, “I have an exposition of sleep come upon me” (4.1.38);46 and as Pyramus, he is the star-crossed lover of Thisbe and dies at his own hand. Bottom’s romance with Titania, like Pyramus and Thisbe, is a play-within-the-play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The other events of that larger play—a middleaged man and woman waiting to be married, two boys and two girls struggling to pair off in a manner satisfactory to all, a father reluctant to grant his daughter independence, half a dozen amateur actors preparing a show— all these are easily mistaken for parts of everyday reality, which require as little suspension of disbelief as anything one could see in the theater.47

46. Sleep as the image of death is conventional in Elizabethan poetry. Death is implied by Sidney’s appositives for sleep, “The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release, / The indifferent judge between the high and low” (Astrophil and Stella 39, “Come sleep, O sleep, the certain knot of peace”), and in his “To be or not to be” soliloquy, Hamlet twice equates them: “To die—to sleep, / No more,” “To die, to sleep; / To sleep, perchance to dream” (3.1.60–61, 64–65). 47. The phrase “willing suspension of disbelief” is used so commonly in literary criticism and elsewhere that it will be well to remember exactly how, and for what purpose, Coleridge first uses it. Describing the original plan for the Lyrical Ballads, he writes that his own “endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of

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None of these things is real, but so realistic—so familiar, so like things we have ourselves known and done—is, for instance, the wrangling of Hermia and Egeus in the first scene that we readily accept it as the way things are. But a man being made to look like an ass and then being swept away by a goddess, and two lovers who kill themselves because of the silliest, most improbable misunderstanding—these are things apart from reality, one above it (because we recognize with regret that Bottom’s fate could never be our own), the other below it (because we congratulate ourselves that we’ll never be duped so easily as poor Pyramus and Thisbe). Bottom’s attempt to describe his indescribable dream, his sustained hypallage—“The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was” (209–12)—jumbles the contents of a verse of St. Paul: “The things which eye hathe not sene, nether eare hathe heard, nether came into ma–s heart, are, which God hathe prepared for them that loue him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9, Geneva Bible). This imitation is well known; I think Paul’s next verse is relevant, too, to Bottom’s situation: “But God hathe reueiled them unto vs by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deepe things of God.” The first verse tells of the inadequacy of the senses to appreciate the kingdom of God; the second says that the Spirit of God, something beyond the human senses, will nevertheless allow us to penetrate to this mystery. Bottom had experience and knowledge of, was shown and became a part of, that for which he has now no words, the extrasensory kingdom, the bottom of God’s secrets. The Golden Ass of Apuleius, with its transformation of Lucius into an ass who is relieved of that condition by Isis and initiated into the “mysteries,” mediates between disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us. . . .” (Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, vol. 2, ch. 14, pp. 6–7. In volume 7 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Bart Winer [Princeton: Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series 75), 1983].) Coleridge will write “persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic” as he does in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; these persons are very far from normal human experience, yet “investing them with human interest and a semblance of truth” will allow the reader to pretend to forget that distance. Wordsworth’s contributions, like “Simon Lee,” “The Thorn,” and “The Idiot Boy,” appear “to give the charm of novelty to things of every day,” but these poems, too, contain make-believe, though seemingly less far from normal human experience. Bottom’s dalliance with Titania is above the norm, and “Pyramus and Thisbe” is below the norm, and so we are aware of suspending our disbelief to enjoy them; the actions of Theseus, Helena, Egeus, et al. are, by contrast, “normal”—ordinary, everyday—but they too are make-believe and require our (no doubt easier) compliance in their illusion.

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Bottom and the words of Paul, as Frank Kermode has argued.48 “Apuleius,” Kermode writes, “after his transformation, might not speak of the initiation he underwent; but he was vouchsafed a vision of the goddess Isis. St. Paul was initiated into the religion he had persecuted by Ananias in Damascus. What they have in common is transformation, and an experience of divine love. Bottom has known the love of the triple goddess in a vision.”49 Bottom’s language imitates Paul’s, but his experience imitates that of Lucius. An irony of the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that two men love Hermia and no one loves Helena, though Helena shares the name of the most beautiful woman of antiquity, for whom the Trojan War was fought; possesses the fair, blond beauty admired in the love sonnets of the Renaissance; and receives, proleptically, the blessing of Ovid in the Ars amatoria: “Who wants Hermione [of which “Hermia” is a variant], if Helen is his for the taking?”50 And Helena is very beautiful—“O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!” (3.2.137), a newly smitten Demetrius says to her, but despite his hyperbole, she is a woman, not a goddess, not perfect or divine. But Titania is a goddess, perfect and divine, what lovers ask their sweethearts to be, and Bottom alone knows her. What Jan Kott writes of Titania, that she “is the night double of Hippolyta, her dramatic and theatrical paradigm,”51 is true of her in relation also to Helena. Indeed, perhaps all women aspire in the eyes of their lovers towards identity with that goddess. As Leonard Barkan writes, “When Bottom is singled out from his companions in the woods, transformed, and confronted with the Fairy Queen, he is vouchsafed a visionary experience, indeed, that special sort of sacred vision that is granted only to the (apparently) undeserving. . . . Titania moves from the enchantment of her senses (the sound of Bottom’s song; the sight of his body) to a state of rapture in recognition of his virtue. Bottom meanwhile is to attain a sublime state pulled upward by his love of the divine.”52 With Titania, Bottom imitates an ass—looks like one, but despite Quince’s misprision, “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated” (3.1.112–13) and a fondness for honey, dry oats, and hay, remains a man.53 48. Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, 207. The “mysteries” are the pre-Christian mystery religions of Greece, like those of Demeter and Persephone– practiced at Eleusis. 49. Ibid., 209. 50. Ovid, The Art of Love, tr. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press/Midland, 1974), 151 (Ars amatoria, 2, 699). 51. Jan Kott, The Bottom Translation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 44. 52. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, 262–63. 53. Cf. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, “Bestial Buggery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 126: “Bottom is clearly

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With Thisbe, Bottom imitates Pyramus. Pyramus and Thisbe itself both imitates Bottom’s interlude with Titania and completes it. It is Titania’s promise to Bottom that “I will purge thy mortal grossness so / That thou shalt like an airy spirit go” (3.1.152–53). Dying, therefore about to be purged of his own mortal grossness, Pyramus can keep the promise Bottom made to sing his dream at Thisbe’s death, actually a little before it: “My soul is in the sky.” The interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe remains the farce its courtly audience finds it, but as all distinctions among literary modes collapse in the face of the deep imitations within A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it can recall not only the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet but also the transcendence of the hero of the play Bottom and Titania. “Such . . . is the power of fiction,” Boccaccio writes, “that it pleases the unlearned by its external appearance, and exercises the minds of the learned with its hidden truth; and thus both are edified and delighted with one and the same perusal.”54 Thus should the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, like the play of which it is a part, delight us all.

both man and animal, although various metonymic references to him wholly as an ass . . . invite us to consider him wholly beast” and Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 191: Bottom “is the only character in this play of nocturnal and lunatic changes who is literally metamorphosed.” Wholly an ass, literally metamorphosed: these conclusions are gainsaid by his always possessing language and a profound logic; when Titania tells him, “I love thee,” this man, wearing the (papier-mâché?) head of an ass, says, “Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that. And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays. . . .” (3.1.136–39). Nevertheless, I think that efforts to sort out to what exact degree the characters are divine, human, and bestial are contrary to the spirit of the play. 54. Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, tr. Charles G. Osgood (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1956), 51. (Genealogia, ch. 14, sec. 9).

2 Henry IV and Proleptic Mimesis THE PRIMARY SUBJECT OF THIS CHAPTER IS TWO SCENES FROM THE FIRST part of Henry IV: act 2, scene 4, in the Eastcheap tavern, where Prince Hal and Falstaff dramatically anticipate the prince’s interview with King Henry the following day, and act 3, scene 2, at court, the interview itself, fateful, long-awaited, between the estranged father and son. My concern will be with each of the scenes as both a foreshadowing and an imitation after the fact of the other; that 2.4 may foreshadow 3.2 and that 3.2 may imitate 2.4 is obvious, but since 2.4 becomes essentially different after one has read 3.2, the corollary is true, also: that the later scene foreshadows the earlier one, and the earlier one imitates the later. I regard as axiomatic Harry Berger’s claim that “the later terms [that is, elements of whatever sort within Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of history plays] are radically modified by their relation to the earlier terms, which are in turn modified by that modification.”1 The meaning of lines, speeches, characters, scenes is never fixed, not even for the theatergoer, whose memory of earlier speeches is inevitably triggered by later ones, which revise them, and especially for the reader, who pages backwards as well as forwards, who looks from bottom to top of page, who pauses, reflects, and then rereads; later moments always condition and reconfigure earlier ones. It is impossible, however, to compare two scenes meaningfully and ignore the play in which they occur; and in the case of two scenes in 1 Henry IV, it is necessary to pay some attention not only to that play but to at least parts of the three others that with it constitute Shakespeare’s major tetralogy of history plays. As Harry Berger writes, again, “To disconnect any play [of the four] from its tetralogical source is to impoverish the power of its drama and the resonance of its language.”2 In very broad terms, therefore, we should bear in mind, as Prince Hal looks forward in 2.4 to his talk 1. Harry Berger Jr., “On the Continuity of the Henriad: A Critique of Some Literary and Thematic Approaches” in Shakespeare Left and Right, ed. Ivo Kamps (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 226. Berger is extending the thesis of Derek A. Traversi, Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 2. 2. Berger, “On the Continuity of the Henriad,” 227.

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with the king, that that king was once the powerless Duke of Hereford being examined by his king (Richard II, 1.1), for one example, and that as the father Henry judges the son Hal in 3.2, so will Hal come to judge his surrogate father Falstaff (in 2 Henry IV, 5.5) and Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey (in Henry V, 2.2), for another. In practice, of course, one can never pay sufficient attention to the complete environment, no less than every word in the tetralogy in every conceivable combination with every other word, of any given element, but must be content with what appears most pertinent— while being aware of the inherent subjectivity of this procedure. Specifically, a review of Richard II seen from the perspective of 1 Henry IV can suggest that the dramatic interludes created by Hal and Falstaff in 2.4 of the latter play are forecast by the first crisis of the new king’s reign in the former. And since the Falstaff-Hal interludes of 2.4 are in some ways an unheroic version of the heroic encounter of father and son two scenes later, it will be illuminating to consider other parts of 1Henry IV in relations to their heroic antecedents.

The Beggar and the King Henry Bolingbroke’s seizure of Richard’s throne in Richard II is often understood as symbolically signaling the transition from the medieval to the modern age, from a moment when kings claimed to rule by divine authority alone and perhaps really believed, as Richard says, that “The breath of worldly men cannot depose / The deputy elected by the Lord” (3.2.56–57), to one when kings would rule by their own authority and could no longer bring their subjects into line with threats of divine reprisals—when Richard tries, after his deposition, so to threaten Northumberland, Northumberland replies, “My guilt be on my head, and there an end” (5.1.69).3 Symbolic values apart, the act of usurpation is clearly beneficial for Henry himself, who gets what he wants as he goes from not being a king to being one, from what virtually every character in Shakespeare who has a thought on the matter would agree is from a less to a more desirable state. But apart from historical transformations and what is good for Henry, his usurpation implicitly addresses and seeks to correct excesses and deficiencies of Richard’s rule. Henry’s revolution seeks, or should seek, political and social reform. Although in the deposition scene of act 4, scene 1, Northumberland never suc3. On this transition from the old to the new, see, for instance, E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (Harmondworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1944), 244–63, and Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 162.

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ceeds in making Richard read the list of “These accusations and these grievous crimes / Committed by your person and your followers / Against the state and profit of this land” (4.1.223–25), the nature of “these grievous crimes” is constantly reiterated throughout the play. Richard himself admits that “our coffers, with too great a court / And liberal largess, are grown somewhat light,” in consequence of which extravagance, “We are inforc’d to farm our royal realm” (1.4.43–45), an expedient that has left England, John of Gaunt will say, famously, “leas’d out . . . / Like to a tenement or pelting farm” (2.1.59–60). The need for funds, especially to finance his Irish campaign, drives Richard to exchange for the equivalent of ready cash the authority to tax royal lands, for short-term liquidity the certainty of long-term ruin. When Northumberland, Willoughby, and Ross start whispering to each other their dissatisfactions with Richard, they mention “grievous taxes,” fines imposed upon the nobility for “ancient quarrels,” and “daily new exactions . . . [such] As blanks, benevolences,” twin forms of extortion, and allege that “The King’s grown bankrupt,” that “Reproach and dissolution hangeth over him” (2.1.246, 248, 249–50, 257, 258). They charge, moreover, that “The King is not himself, but basely led / By flatterers” (241–42), and a scene later three of these flatterers, Bushy, Green, and Bagot, essentially agree in their responsibility for the English fiscal crisis. “[O]ur nearness to the King in love / Is near the hate of those love not the King,” Green says, and Bagot replies, “And that’s the wavering commons, for their love / Lies in their purses, and whoso empties them / By so much fills their hearts with deadly hate” (2.2.126–30). And a scene later still, justifying his return to England to the Duke of York—“If that my cousin king be King in England, / It must be granted I am Duke of Lancaster” (2.3.122–23)—Henry offers the parallel example of York’s son, Aumerle, and says that if Aumerle had “been thus trod down” (125) by Richard, as Henry has been, then he would have found a champion in Gaunt, Henry’s father, as Henry now seeks one in York, Aumerle’s father. Henry’s point is that Richard’s actions have been unjust and would have been so no matter against whom they were directed. If Henry’s acquisition of Richard’s throne is to mean anything to the English nobility and commons other than the substitution of one selfish and unprincipled authority for another, it must stand for a correction of wrongs—for an end to unsound fiscal policies, arbitrary taxation, perilous foreign adventurism, and the deliberate seeking of poor advice from poor advisers. It must stand for some reasonable idea of justice. W. H. Auden tells us that, “According to Shakespeare, the ideal Ruler must satisfy five conditions” including these: “1) He must know what is just and what is unjust. 2) He must himself be just. [and] 3) He must be strong enough to com-

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pel those who would like to be unjust to behave justly.”4 For Auden, Richard fails to satisfy these conditions (though he satisfies the fifth one of being “the legitimate ruler by whatever standard legitimacy is determined in the society to which he belongs”),5 but “Bolingbroke possesses many of the right qualities.”6 In the very short run—that is, for the rest of Richard II—such may appear to be the case; but even in this play, with his final statement of his intended “voyage to the Holy Land / To wash this blood from off my guilty hand” (5.6.49–50), Henry raises the specter of costly involvement in foreign affairs pursued for personal interests, cleansing of his own sins. Two plays later, when the dying Henry IV counsels his son “to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels” (2 Henry IV, 4.5.213–14), we read the quality of this advice back into the words spoken at the end of Richard II and infer that all along Henry’s purpose, or at least a large part of it, has been a strategy of diversion, of distracting his nobles from other possibilities, not of personal salvation. Richard’s Ireland, Henry IV’s Holy Land (which, of course, he never reaches), Henry V’s France: these missions are or would be expensive, in money and in lives. The most evidently successful of them, Henry V’s campaign in France, which at least historically promises the French throne to him or his heir upon the death of Charles VI,7 a concession by the French to what Henry calls “our just demands” (5.2.71), might also be seen as the cheapest of them, since eventually paid for by the French; however, the political basis of the war, the Salic law that justified Henry’s claim to the French throne, is advanced and argued by the Archbishop of Canterbury (1.2.33–95), whose own goal is the preservation of the Church’s wealth, “the better half of our possession . . . As much as would maintain, to the King’s honour, / Full fifteen earls and fifteen hundred knights, / Six thousand and two hundred good esquires, / And to relief of lazars and weak age, / Of indigent faint souls past corporal toil, / A hundred almshouses right well supplied” (1.1.8, 12–17). “Would maintain”: the Church is in fact not using its fortune for such maintenance, it appears, not even of the diseased, weak, and indigent, and so ultimately even Henry’s “just” war, like Richard’s obviously ruinous one, which it morally imitates, is a way of keeping the poor that way. In Richard II both Richard and Henry are known in part through their 4. W. H. Auden, “The Prince’s Dog,” in The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Vintage, 1968), 187. 5. Auden’s fourth condition is that “He must have the capacity both by nature and by art of making others loyal to his person.” 6. Auden, “The Prince’s Dog,” 188. 7. See “Troyes, treaty of” in A Dictionary of British History, ed. J. P. Kenyon (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), 344.

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closest associates and advisers, Bushy, Bagot, and Green, on the one hand, Ross, Willoughby, and especially Northumberland, on the other. Richard dies, and Henry prospers, and surely one reason is the quality, whether or not selfless, of the men about them. Or, once again, so it at first seems. Northumberland, Henry’s hatchet man in Richard II, does the necessary but sometimes unpopular things like arresting Carlisle for “capital treason” (4.1.151), presenting Richard with the articles of his grievous crimes (4.1.223 et seq), and separating the deposed king from his queen (5.1.51–54). But in this play Richard’s advisers, however feckless, prove loyal to the end, and brave—“More welcome is the stroke of death to me / Than Bolingbroke to England” (3.1.30–31), Bushy says to Henry, his last words. In the next play, Northumberland shows by his rebellion how little loyal he is to his king or to the high-minded principles he had enunciated in Richard II, his desire to “shake off our slavish yoke, / Imp our drooping country’s broken wing / Redeem from broking pawn the blemish’d crown, / Wipe off the dust that hides our sceptre’s gilt, / And make high majesty look like itself” (2.1.291–95); “most degenerate king!” Northumberland calls Richard in Richard II (2.1.262), and then listens with a straight face, in 1 Henry IV, as Hotspur calls this same man “Richard, that sweet lovely rose” (1.3.175). Nothing drives Northumberland but self-interest, which later will compel the withdrawal of his forces from the rebellion that culminates in the battle at Shrewsbury, because of illness (“he is grievous sick” [4.1.16]), he pretends at the time, a claim that Rumor, in 2 Henry IV gives the lie, labeling him but “crafty-sick” (Induction 37), or playing possum. The dignity with which Bushy and Green faced death looks better and better, more and more rare. “How many ages hence,” Cassius will ask, after the assassination of Caesar, “Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!” (Julius Caesar, 3.1.111–13). Richard dies and one Henry rules and then another; the court party of Bushy and Green passes from the scene, replaced by Northumberland, himself later replaced by Blunt and Westmorland, then Warwick and Surrey, then Gloucester, Bedford, and Exeter; part of the attention of the English monarch shifts from Ireland to the Holy Land and then to France; part of it focuses on ill-wishers at home, Bolingbroke and Northumberland, then Hotspur and Worcester, then Mowbray and Hastings, then Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey. The only representatives of common men in Richard II, the gardener and his man, grumble about the condition of the kingdom, “our sea-walled garden, the whole land, / . . . full of weeds, her fairest flowers chok’d up. . . .” (3.4.43–44), and the most memorable representative of the same estate in Henry V, Ancient Pistol, inherits only a future of deception and crime: “To England will I steal, and there I’ll steal; / And patches will I get unto these cudgelled scars, / And swear I got them in the Gallia wars” (5.1.86–88); between these

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men and these plays Falstaff is born, lives, and dies. Characters, incidents, and motives within the tetralogy recur in different dress, imitate versions of their earlier selves. Does anything really change? Or is each lofty scene a repetition, with different names and local coloration, of an earlier one, simply an acting over? (Shakespearean imitation sometimes allows a later, ironical illustration of an earlier, seemingly high-minded principle. Apparently, Pistol’s plan is to put patches on his “cudgelled scars,” that is, to put plasters or bandages on marks presumably created in street brawls, the cudgel not being a usual weapon of war, to claim the injuries are war wounds, and thereby to gain sympathy, and compensation, as a beggar. Earlier, in his Saint Crispin’s Day speech, King Henry had told Westmorland that in years to come a veteran of the great battle about to be fought might “strip his sleeve and show his scars, / And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day’” [4.3.47–48]. Such is exactly what Pistol will be doing.) Richard II begins with an insurrection against Richard and ends, almost, with another insurrection, that of Aumerle and his confreres against Henry, their abortive attempt “To kill the King at Oxford” (5.2.99). Although Henry’s rebellion in a sense authorizes that of Aumerle (and in the next play that of Hotspur, Northumberland, and Worcester), both because his initiative automatically begets imitators and because he has slain the last king to enjoy, theoretically, the sanction of God, thus making subsequent revolts less risky, the second rebellion does not repeat, and basically does not resemble, the first. The story of Aumerle, born in the final speeches of act 4, where he asks the Abbot of Westminster, “[I]s there no plot / To rid the realm of this pernicious blot?” (4.1.324–25), is told mainly in scenes 2 and 3 of act 5, and that story is a kind of literary imitation of the play’s main action—literary, fictional, unrealistic, parodic. If the main plot of Richard II is an imitation, serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, of an action that occurred (1398–1400) about two centuries before Shakespeare wrote his play (c. 1595), an imitation that usually does not seek to call attention to its fictional status, then the Aumerle plot is an imitation, complete, problematically serious, of small magnitude, of that main plot, and it presents itself as such. The second scene of act 5 begins with the Duke of York telling his duchess of the public humiliations of Richard, “dust and rubbish” thrown on his head (6), as “with much . . . contempt, men’s eyes / Did scowl on Richard” (27–28), and the corresponding triumph of Henry, “Upon [whose] visage” “young and old / Through casements darted their desiring eyes” (15, 13–14). The duke and duchess emphasize that the story is a story, his narrative of events he witnessed. “My lord,” the duchess says, “you told me you would tell the rest” of “the story” (1–2) that he had begun earlier and broken off because of his own sorrow, and he asks, “Where did I leave?” (4). Telling the story, York presents Richard in an elaborate

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theatrical simile: “As in a theatre the eyes of men, / After a well-grac’d actor leaves the stage, / Are idly bent on him that enters next, / Thinking his prattle to be tedious; / Even so, or with much more contempt, men’s eyes / Did scowl on Richard” (23–28). The effect of the simile, contrary to York’s intention, is to distance and objectify Richard, to remove him from the environment of York and his wife, and thus, if they are real, to make him fictional. York’s narrative is interrupted by the entrance of Aumerle, “my son, Aumerle” (41), the duchess says, not “our son,” interestingly, for in what follows, York will scarcely regard Aumerle as his son. After a few lines of small talk York discovers upon Aumerle’s person a letter detailing the conspiracy against Richard. “What seal is that that hangs without thy bosom?” York asks when he notices the letter (56). In using this device of discovery, Shakespeare is following his source in Holinshed’s Chronicles: [The] earle of Rutland [i.e., Aumerle, who in both Holinshed and Shakespeare has lost his dukedom and therefore his title] . . . as he sat at dinner, had his counterpane of the confederacie in his bosome. The father espieng it, would needs see what it was: and though the sonne humblie denied to shew it, the father being more earnest to see it, by force tooke it out of his bosome; and perceiving the contents thereof, in a great rage . . . he incontinentlie mounted on horssebacke to ride towards Windsore to the king, to declare unto him the malicious intent of his complices.8

Holinshed shows no suspicion of Aumerle’s clumsiness in allowing the letter to protrude from his bosom, but ten years later Shakespeare will interrogate Aumerle’s purposes, when in King Lear Edmund arranges to have his father espy a letter he is concealing on his person (1.2.26ff.). No other source for Edmund’s practice on Gloucester has been identified—“For the story of Gloucester and his sons, Shakespeare borrowed an episode from Sidney’s Arcadia,” but nothing in that episode prepares for act 1, scene 2 of the play9—and although one is properly wary of trying to read Shakespeare’s mind, it is tempting to suspect that he came to doubt, or doubted all along, that York’s discovery of the letter was contrary to Aumerle’s real purposes, conscious or otherwise. Denying the obvious—that is, the concrete fact of the letter—Aumerle and Edmund use almost the same language: to York’s demand to “see the writing,” Aumerle replies, “My lord, ’tis nothing” (57–58), and to his father’s question, “What paper were you 8. Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. 3, 412. 9. Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 201. For the episode in Sidney, see also Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. 7, 402–14. For the devices of deception in Sidney for which Shakespeare substitutes Edmund’s letter, see p. 409 and note 2.

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reading?” Edmund responds, “Nothing, my lord” (31–32).10 Whatever the degree of Aumerle’s original commitment to the conspiracy against Henry, he will use the letter as an occasion to assure Henry that, “I do repent me, read not my name there; / My heart is not confederate with my hand” (5.3.50–51), to ingratiate himself with the new king, to demonstrate his loyalty to him, much as Edmund uses the other letter to ingratiate himself with Gloucester, while pretending loyalty to Edgar. Aumerle tested the waters of the conspiracy, found them not to his liking, and sought comfort in his new monarch, never mind that those who had risen to his proposal “To rid the realm of this pernicious blot” are left with “Destruction . . . [to] dog them at the heels” (5.3.137). In Holinshed, after discovering the letter, the Duke of York rides “towards Windsore to the king,” but Aumerle gets there first and has already received Henry’s pardon when his father arrives; the king then turns his attention to the other conspirators, who are at Oxford. This business occupies three sentences of the Chronicles.11 Shakespeare, with not even a suggestion from any of his sources (Holinshed, Hall, Samuel Daniel, possibly The Mirror for Magistrates), magnifies this brief incident into the grand comic sequence of the play in which York denounces Aumerle, the duchess defends him, and York attacks her, this “foolish woman,” “Thou fond mad woman” (5.2.80, 95). Then the three head off to Windsor Castle, where King Henry and Harry Percy, the Hotspur of the next play, are discussing the delinquencies of the king’s “unthrifty son” (5.3.1), Prince Hal; the difficulties between this father and son thus provide an environment in which the struggle between the father York and the son Aumerle will be presented. This struggle erupts in earnest, as Aumerle arrives first to plead for “pardon ere I rise or speak” (5.3.31); then York arrives and from offstage, that is, not yet admitted to the king’s presence, warns Henry that “Thou has a traitor in thy presence there” (39) and then, admitted, pleads for the death of his son, “Mine honour lives when his dishonour dies” (69); and then the 10. Edmund’s “Nothing,” as R. A. Foakes points out, echoes “Cordelia’s response to her father at 1.1.87.” See King Lear in the Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997), 1.2.32n. And of course much attention has been paid to what Sigurd Burckhardt calls “The Quality of Nothing” in the play (the title of chapter 8 of his study Shakespearean Meanings [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968], 237–59). It is worth pointing out that Richard II is similarly concerned with the myriad possibilities of “nothing,” as word and as concept, perhaps especially in Richard’s complicated statement, “But whate’er I be, / Nor I, nor any man that but man is, / With nothing shall be pleas’d till he be eas’d / With being nothing” (5.5.38–41). Here, the first “nothing” means that man is never satisfied (nothing pleases him) and that he is satisfied by what is fundamentally worthless, or nothing. King Lear would understand this alliance of striving and cynicism. 11. Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. 3, 412–13.

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duchess, a “shrill-voic’d suppliant” (73), arrives and, even before she enters the room to plead for the life of her son, prompts Henry’s acute diagnosis of the occasion: “Our scene is alter’d from a serious thing, / And now changed to ‘The Beggar and the King’” (78–79). Henry mediates among the three: Aumerle, desperate to save his own life; York, desperate for a return to a stable monarchy, for an end to rebellions and attempted coups d’état, even if the price is the death of his son; and the duchess, desperate to save her son, “my transgressing boy” (95), with no interest in larger political considerations. Aumerle and his mother prevail. Henry’s perception that “Our scene is alter’d from a serious thing, / And now changed to” a reprise of the old ballad of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid has implications that are both larger and less entirely farcical than may at first be apparent. “Our scene,” to begin with, is not only the immediate engagement with Aumerle over the plot against the new king, it is also the action of the play since its beginning, in the sense that Cassius’s “lofty scene” can include his and Brutus’s ambition and the inadequacies of Caesar as well as the assassination. The alteration of this scene, therefore, is a breaking of the cycle of rebellions and bloodshed by the intercession of the duchess on behalf of Aumerle. Richard II is a play where, as is often remarked, women are even more powerless than their small numbers, few scenes, and few lines might suggest: to the Duchess of Gloucester’s question, “Where then, alas, may I complain myself?” about the death of her husband, her brother-in-law John of Gaunt replies, “To God, the widow’s champion and defense” (1.2.42–43), and to the queen’s request that Richard be sent into banishment with her, Northumberland replies, “That were some love, but little policy” (5.1.84). As a matter of fact, that scene between the Duchess of Gloucester and John of Gaunt is a foil to 5.3 and sets off the unexpected capability of the Duchess of York. In both scenes a woman is responding to the accomplished or threatened killing of a husband or a son, and in both, referring to the bearing or rearing functions of the female, the woman adopts a lexicon appropriate to a woman. Speaking of the mother of her late husband and also of Gaunt, the Duchess of Gloucester says, “that bed, that womb, / That mettle, that self mould that fashioned thee / Made him a man; and though thou livest and breathest, / Yet art thou slain in him” (1.2.22–24), and the Duchess of York says to King Henry, “And if I were thy nurse, thy tongue to teach, / ‘Pardon’ should be the first word of thy speech” (5.3.111–12).12 But whereas there can be no relief , restitution, or satisfaction for the Duchess of York, who may pray 12. Women, to be sure, have no monopoly on the word “womb” in Richard II. Gaunt calls England “this teeming womb of royal kings” and likens a grave to a “hollow womb” (2.1.51, 83), but it is Richard’s queen who senses that “Some unborn sorrow ripe in Fortune’s womb / Is coming towards me . . .” (2.2.10–11).

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“To God, the widow’s champion” but does not get so much as an audience with King Richard, the Duchess of York has no difficulty finding admission to Henry’s court, addressing him, being listened to and heeded: “Good aunt, stand up . . . ,” Henry says. “I pardon him, as God shall pardon me” (5.3.127, 129). This concession is a step toward reconciliation and also an interruption, not for long as it turns out, of the cycle of rebellion. Thus, “The Beggar and the King” allows the end of Richard II not to imitate its beginning.

Epic Imitation Shakespeare’s major historical tetralogy is commonly called his Henriad because, as Alvin Kernan explains, the four plays from Richard II through Henry V “constitute an epic . . . not . . . in the usual sense” but because “they do have remarkable coherence and they possess that quality which in our time we take to be the chief characteristic of epic: a large-scale heroic action, involving many men and many activities, tracing the movement of a nation or people through violent change from one condition to another.”13 Thus, the collective title, the Henriad, the story of Henry (the story, actually, of two Henrys), imitates the titles of the Iliad and the Aeneid, the stories of Ilium and Aeneas. Shakespeare’s imitation of these two ancient epics is, however, both deeper than mere titles and more precise than Kernan’s broad outlines suggest. Individual incidents in the plays strikingly recall, imitate, and revise incidents in the poems of Homer and Virgil. My concern here is with 1 Henry IV; before I discuss its internal imitations of itself, however, I wish to inspect in three episodes some of the play’s revisions of the two ancient poems: in “The King hath many marching in his coats,” what I shall call the imitation of Patroclus (Iliad 16); in Hal’s offer to “Try fortune with [Hotspur] in a single fight,” the imitation of Turnus (Aeneid 12); and in Hal’s “breaking through the foul and ugly mists / Of vapors that did seem to strangle him,” the imitation of Aeneas (Aeneid 1). No one doubts Shakespeare’s thorough knowledge of the Aeneid, hugely and obviously important to Hamlet, The Tempest, and other plays, but the playwright’s relation to the Iliad is trickier, especially the relation of all but the last plays to the later books of the poem. Ben Jonson’s famously limiting statement of Shakespeare’s abilities in the classical languages, “And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke,” could suggest that Homer would have been beyond Shakespeare’s grasp. Arthur Hall pub13. Alvin B. Kernan, “The Henriad: Shakespeare’s Major History Plays,” in Modern Shakespearean Criticism: Essays on Style, Dramaturgy, and the Major Plays, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970), 245.

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lished his translation of the first ten books of the Iliad in 1581, and George Chapman, his translation of books 1, 2, and 7–11 in 1598 (about a year or two, probably, after 1 Henry IV was written), of the first twelve books in 1609, and of the whole poem, its first complete Englishing, in 1611.14 Nevertheless, Shakespeare certainly knew people who knew Greek well, and Latin and French translations of Homer existed; the figure whom Dante three centuries earlier had called “l’altissimo poeta” (Inferno 4, 80) and “poeta sovrano” (4, 88) was simply available to anyone who cared, and one way or another, as Reuben Brower points out, Shakespeare, “hardly a reader without literary curiosity . . . acquired . . . knowledge of Homer.”15 But Shakespeare’s knowledge of earlier poets and poems, his sources, his reading, his ease with classical languages, is really not the point. The great moments in Homer and Virgil with which I am concerned here possess a strange kind of hold on the imagination that makes them resonate beyond particular literary instances, even the first such instances. One man fighting in the armor of another, being mistaken for him, and consequently losing his life strikes one as a tragic part of war, inevitable and permanent whether or not it is enshrined, for the first time or not, in Homer. In all battles identities are easily mistaken, purposes are repeatedly frustrated, and, deliberately or not, men surrender their lives for others: these circumstances converge in one man posing as another, being taken for him, dying for him, and then, his real identity discovered, disappointing or symbolically eluding his vanquisher. If, in his creation of the three episodes that here concern me, Shakespeare may be said to be an “imitator,” that word should not suggest that he is copying the ancients but rather that he is among those who, as Sir Philip Sidney describes them, “most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be, but range only reined with learned discretion into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.”16 The timelessness of a certain action on a battlefield makes it appropriate to representation as what may be and should be. So in a sense the point is that Shakespeare, Homer, and Virgil all give literary embodiment to some archetypes of human experience and imagination. At the same time, however, I do think that an auditor with a passing acquaintance with the classics would have perceived three episodes in 1 14. See Chapman’s Homer, vol. 1, The Iliad, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (Princeton: Princeton University Press [Bollingen Series 41], 1967), xi, and William J. Harris, The First Printed Translations into English of the Great Foreign Classics, (rept. New York: Burt Franklin, 1970 [first published in 1909]), 75. 15. Reuben A. Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 31. 16. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, 20.

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Henry IV as deliberate variations on materials from the classics. The perception that Shakespeare is doing what Homer or Virgil has also done would prompt a contrast of the two achievements, a measuring of one by the other, an evaluation of the new (Shakespeare) according to an understanding of the old (Homer or Virgil). The word Henriad, I have said, is formed by analogy with the titles of traditional epic poems, especially the Aeneid: the stories of Henry (father and especially son, King Henry IV and King Henry V) somehow imitate, in scope and grandeur, sincerely or ironically, the story of Aeneas. Epic poems are called also heroic poems because, first, they are told in heroic meter (so called since the Middle Ages)—in English this meter will be iambic pentameter (Milton describes the “measure” of Paradise Lost as “English Heroic Verse without Rime” and claims as antecedent to his practice “our best English Tragedies”)17—and second, because at their center is a hero, a man set apart from others by his excellences, whether practical, moral, intellectual, or aesthetic, or some combination of these. Describing the young King Henry V, apparently transformed by and after his father’s death, the archbishop of Canterbury nicely abstracts the hero: Consideration like an angel came And whipped th’offending Adam out of him, Leaving his body as a paradise T’envelop and contain celestial spirits. (Henry V, 1.1.28–31)

This section, on Epic Imitation, will implicitly compare the Henriad with the Iliad and the Aeneid, but it will explicitly compare Shakespeare’s heroes, King Henry IV and Prince Hal, with some heroes of Homer and Virgil, with Patroclus, Turnus, and Aeneas himself. The comparisons will reveal Shakespeare’s Henrys as bruised and diminished versions of their classical prototypes and cast some doubt on the authenticity of “celestial spirits” within them. 1. The Imitation of Patroclus After scenes of futile negotiations between Hotspur and Blunt (4.3) and the king and Worcester (5.1), and then a scene of hurried preparations among Hotspur, Worcester, and Vernon, the battle on the field at Shrewsbury commences in earnest in the third scene of act 5. Its first action is a confrontation between the rebellious Scottish chieftain Douglas and Sir Walter 17. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), 210.

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Blunt, not merely of the king’s party but in the battle costume of the king, that is, wearing over his armor a vest, or “sleeveless surcoat,” embroidered with the King’s coat of arms.18 In response to Blunt’s questions, Douglas reveals his own name and claims to “haunt thee in the battle thus / Because some tell me that thou art a king” (5.3.4–5). “They tell thee true,” Blunt says (6), and after reproving the man he believes to be King Henry for having allowed the “Lord of Stafford” to fight and die as “Thy likeness” (7, 8), Douglas kills Blunt, this second likeness of the king. Douglas is momentarily triumphant: “All’s done: all’s won; here breathless lies the King” (16), he tells Hotspur, who has just entered. Hotspur, because he knows what the king looks like, as Douglas does not, or because he removes the dead man’s helmet and looks at his face, shatters Douglas’s sense of triumph: “This, Douglas? No, I know this face full well, / A gallant knight he was, his name was Blunt, / Semblably furnish’d like the King himself” (19–21).19 The brave Douglas seems unable to understand why Blunt would have sacrificed himself so: “A fool go with thy soul, whither it goes! / A borrow’d title hast thou bought too dear. / Why didst thou tell me that thou wert a king?”—perhaps implying that his determination to kill his opponent would have been less had he known his real identity. Hotspur has the last word on the subject, “The King hath many marching in his coats” (22–25), in this scene. But ironically, in the next scene, when finally Douglas confronts the real king, he will say, “Another king! They grow like Hydra’s heads” and ask, “What art thou / That counterfeit’st the person of a king?” (5.4.24, 26–27). In book 16 of the Iliad, the Trojans having driven the Achaeans back to their ships, which they now threaten with fire, as Achilles, because of his anger at Agamemnon, continues his refusal to fight, Patroclus proposes to Achilles a stratagem whereby “‘perhaps I may bring deliverance to the Danaans. Let me . . . wear your armour [into battle]; the Trojans may thus mistake me for you and quit the field, so that the hard-pressed sons of the Achaeans may have breathing time. . . . We who are fresh might soon drive tired men back from our ships and tents to their own cities.’”20 In what Cedric Whitman calls “the most puzzling part of Achilles’ actions” because “Even those who forgive Achilles his rejection of the embassy [of Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix, in book 9] find it difficult to forgive him for 18. W. A. Wright, ed., Henry IV, Part 1 (London, 1897). Quoted by A. R. Humphreys, ed., The First Part of King Henry the Fourth (London: Methuen, 1960 [Arden 2]), 5.3.25 n. 19. If Hotspur emphasizes the pronoun in his praise of Blunt’s gallantry, “A gallant knight he was,” he can underline by implied contrast the circumspection of the king. 20. Homer, The Iliad, tr. (1898) Samuel Butler, rev. Malcolm M. Willcock (Washington Square Press, 1964), 241.

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letting Patroclus take his place on the battlefield,”21 Achilles agrees because he sees that Patroclus’s effort will contribute to his own glory. “‘Do, however, as I now bid you,’” Achilles tells his friend, “‘that you may win me great honour from all the Danaans, and that they may restore the girl [Briseis] to me again and give me rich gifts into the bargain.’” However, he does restrict Patroclus’s mission: “‘[D]o not for lust of battle [after driving the Trojans back from the ships] go on killing the Trojans nor lead the Achaeans on to Ilium, lest one of the ever-living gods from Olympus attack you—for Phoebus Apollo loves them well. . . .’” (242). Patroclus leads the Myrmidons against the Trojans, and his initial success is stunning: “when the Trojans saw the brave son of Menoetius [i.e., Patroclus, though the Trojans mistake him for Achilles] and his squire all gleaming in their armour, they were daunted and their battalions were thrown into confusion, for they thought the fleet son of Peleus must now have put aside his anger. . . .” (246). Indeed, in playing Achilles, in Cedric Whitman’s view, Patroclus “transcends himself” and embodies a part of Achilles.22 This selftranscendence leads Patroclus to forget himself and the limitations of his strength and his mission; after killing many Trojans, most notably Sarpedon among them, Patroclus pursues his enemy back to the gates of the city. He is driven, Homer tells us, by “the pride and foolishness of his heart,” and fatally so: “Had he but obeyed the bidding of the son of Peleus, he would have escaped death” (255). As it is, Patroclus angers Apollo, who dispatches Hector into the fray; then Apollo himself, “enshrouded in thick darkness . . . struck [Patroclus] from behind” and “beat the helmet from off his head” (259). His real identity now known to the Trojans, Patroclus is wounded by the Trojan Euphorbus and then killed by Hector, who “struck him in the lower part of the belly with a spear, driving the bronze point right through it. . . .” (259). Hector will then take his—that is, really, Achilles’s— armor and wear it until his own death. Mede–n agan, the oracle of Apollo at Delphi would caution, “Nothing in excess.” Patroclus’s advance to the gates of Troy is the excess that destroys him. Holinshed’s Chronicles supplies Shakespeare with historical authority for the disguises King Henry’s loyal followers assume. Holinshed puts Douglas’s struggle with the king and the killing of Sir Walter Blunt, which Shakespeare will divide into separate scenes, into a single sentence: This battell [at Shrewsbury] lasted three long houres, with indifferent fortune on both parts, till at length, the king crieng saint George victorie, brake the ar21. Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (New York: Norton, 1965), 196. 22. Ibid., 201.

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raie of his enimies, and adventured so farre, that (as some write) the earle Dowglas strake him downe, & at that instant slue Sir Walter Blunt, and three other, apparelled in the kings sute and clothing, saieng: I marvell to see so many kings thus suddenlie arise one in the necke of an other.

Similarly marveling in Shakespeare’s play, Douglas fights Henry, and although Douglas acknowledges that “thou bearest thee like a king” (5.4.35), after a few blows, “[. . . the King being in danger.] Re-enter PRINCE” (37 s.d.), who intervenes and saves his father’s life. Not so in Holinshed: “The king in deed was raised, & did that daie manie a noble feat of armes, for as it is written, he slue that daie with his owne hands six and thirtie persons of his enemies.”23 Holinshed’s Henry, able to dispatch 36 of the enemy, is obviously a far more capable warrior than Shakespeare’s, who kills no one at Shrewsbury and requires the intercession of Prince Hal to preserve his own life. Indeed, the failure of Shakespeare’s Henry to kill anyone, in the battle for the preservation of his throne, appears to disclose the playwright’s intent to diminish the luster of the figure in Holinshed. More pertinent than a comparison of the two kings, however, is a comparison of Homer’s Patroclus and Shakespeare’s Blunt, though it will work in similar fashion to reduce the heroic potential of Shakespeare’s war and that war’s victors. Neither Holinshed nor Shakespeare gives any reason for Blunt and the others “marching in [the king’s] coats,” though Shakespeare integrates that circumstance neatly into the motif of concealment, deception, and counterfeiting that Douglas reiterates when he accuses Henry of “counterfeit[ing] the person of a king.”24 Whatever the reason may be, the disguise places Blunt in great jeopardy: mistaken for the king, he is more, not less, desirable as an opponent, at least to a brave man like Douglas, whose own proven worth increases in direct proportion to the worth of his foes. That is why he can tell Blunt’s corpse, “A borrowed title hast thou bought too dear”: not appearing as the king, Blunt could have been ignored by his betters. Reflecting on warfare in the Middle Ages, John Keegan 23. Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. 4, 191. 24. Perhaps nothing in the play has been the subject of more commentary than this theme of counterfeiting and the language that supports it: as a poor ruler, Richard II was a kind of counterfeit, but as the legitimate heir to his grandfather’s throne, he was authentic. As a usurper, Henry IV is a counterfeit, but as a man of some good instincts, he is authentic. As a reckless prodigal, Hal seems to be a counterfeit prince, but as someone capable of redeeming both himself and his nation, he too is authentic—unlike the glory-seeking Hotspur, who proves finally another kind of counterfeit. It is not only kings but also fathers who can be measured according to their counterfeit or authentic identities, which allows for King Henry and Falstaff to be ranged variously along the spectrum, at the counterfeit end of which, according to Falstaff, are the dead—“for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man” [5.4.116–17]—and at the authentic end of which are the living, whatever they may have done to maintain that state.

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writes: “For killing to be gentlemanly,” on a medieval battlefield, “it must take place between gentlemen: the rules of duelling were, indeed, specific on that point, and the laws of chivalry, though less exigent and exclusive, were equally insistent that the only feats of arms worth the name were those conducted between men of gentle birth, either one to one or in nearly (ideally in exactly) matched numbers.”25 The corollary of this observation, in 1 Henry IV, seems to be, as we know from Douglas’s words to Blunt’s corpse, that a Scottish earl can disdain to duel with an English knight. The notion that the king, and therefore people mistaken for the king, could have frightened warriors away, could have demoralized the enemy, is in this play a mistaken hypothesis, though it is precisely the basis of Patroclus’s strength in book 16 of the Iliad. “As when a cloud goes up into heaven from Olympus, rising out of a clear sky when Zeus is brewing a gale—even with such panic-stricken rout did the Trojans now fly” (248) from Patroclus— but only because they think he is Achilles. Patroclus-as-Achilles confuses and terrifies the enemy; Blunt-as-Henry focuses and stimulates him. Blunt’s disguise, moreover, protects and preserves his king, and it is tempting to think that something like the desire for this protection was in Henry’s mind when he sent into battle “many marching in his coats.” It is the wish of officers in modern armies not to stand out from their troops, not to be visible as officers to snipers, that keeps gold braid and saluting off the battlefield; something of the same end would be achieved if everyone dressed as a general—as Henry has his followers do. For Achilles, by contrast, the anger at Agamemnon that keeps him from battle is mistaken by no one for a reluctance to engage personally in combat. His allowing Patroclus (whose idea it is in the first place) to fight as he is a concession, he says, that “may win me great honour from all the Danaans.” The Iliad and 1 Henry IV both consider the proposition that combat, even unto death, allows a man the possibility of self-actualization that he is otherwise denied. Fighting, he can be more fully himself, or a more desirable version of himself, than otherwise; this belief is the basis of the heroic ethic, or at least a substantial part of it. It is why cultures glorify warriors, why men who fight outrank men who work and men who pray. This ethic is universally acknowledged in the Iliad, notwithstanding the final subordination of personal achievement to all-leveling force;26 in 1 Henry IV, where others may be aware of its existence and appeal, it is the private and public conviction of Hotspur. In the Iliad, therefore, though the heroic ethic may cause the death of Patroclus, it also creates a better man for Hector to kill; 25. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking, 1976), 316. 26. See Simone Weil, “The Iliad, Poem of Might” in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: David McKay, 1977). Weil begins her essay: “The true hero, the real subject, the core of the Iliad, is might” (153).

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this is the moment of his transcending himself of which Cedric Whitman speaks. Indeed, it is probably part of the genius of Homer’s poem that it can make us see the agon of Patroclus as simultaneously the terrible waste of “a loving and compassionate fellow,” “Gentle Patroclus,”27 and the moment of his supreme being. Battle affords Sir Walter Blunt, Stafford, and the others who die for and as King Henry no such moment of rising above themselves. Henry’s stratagem keeps him alive; it does nothing for anyone else except make them more quickly dead. 2. The Imitation of Turnus So great is the waste of war—young lives ended, bodies mutilated, children left without fathers, wives widowed, mothers bereft of sons (“the widows’ tears, the orphans’ cries, / The dead men’s blood, the pining maidens’ groans,” Henry V, 2.4.106–7), women themselves victims of murder and rape (when “your pure maidens fall into the hand / Of hot and forcing violation,” Henry V, 3.3.20–21), the loss of homeland, crops despoiled, livestock slaughtered, wells poisoned, buildings turned to rubble, civilizations turned upside-down or destroyed—that it is hardly surprising that the human imagination should conceive of an alternative—of a way that the political goals of warfare may be achieved, for one side or the other, but without the loss and misery produced by fighting on a grand scale. Moreover, since the tangible purposes for which wars are fought—territory and other forms of material gain as opposed to honor and glory—are rarely appreciated by the great mass of men fighting, the soldiers, why not restrict fighting to those who will actually come to possess, or to lose, the disputed wealth? “War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale,” Clausewitz writes; it consists of “a countless number of duels.”28 If that is so, then why not reduce the scale of war and have a single duel between people whose personal fortunes will be immediately and directly affected by the outcome, between two princes or other leaders with something to gain or lose? This would be a philanthropic solution, one based on a desire to keep men alive. “Now,” Clausewitz writes, “philanthropists may easily imagine there is a skilful method of disarming and overcoming an enemy without causing great bloodshed, and that this is the proper tendency of the Art of War. However plausible this may appear, it is still an error which must be gotten rid of; for in such dangerous things as War, the errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst. As the use of physical power to the utmost extent by no means excludes the cooperation of the intelligence, 27. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition, 200, 198. 28. A Short Guide to Clausewitz on War, ed. Roger Ashley Leonard (New York: Capricorn, 1967), 41.

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it follows that he who uses force unsparingly, without reference to the bloodshed involved, must obtain a superiority if his adversary uses less vigour in its application.”29 To obtain a superiority, that is to win, one applies physical power to the utmost extent, one uses force unsparingly. This law of war obviously precludes anyone’s desire to limit bloodshed or minimize the number of participants. Nevertheless, the notion of solving international conflict by a duel, by one act of combat between two individuals, dangerously philanthropic or not, inevitably imposes itself on the imagination; and it is especially attractive in the creation of works of literature where the goals, desires, hopes, fears, strengths, weaknesses—all the facets of a human personality—of two men can be conveyed and those of all the members of two nations cannot, or not easily. A duel can both localize and dramatize the unmanageable numbers and abstractions that war comprises. Even where the duel does not solve the conflict, it represents it. So in popular war fiction like Irwin Shaw’s novel The Young Lions (1948), for instance, the killing by an American soldier of a German soldier who has just killed another American soldier, the first one’s buddy, all three of whom have been separately developed over hundreds of pages—that final killing personalizes and stands by synecdoche for the Allied victory over the Axis. The Achaeans win the Trojan War because they are willing to spend tens of thousands of their own lives killing tens of thousands of the enemy, leveling a civilization, securing the trade routes to Asia, and effecting the return of Helen to Menelaus. They do not win because Achilles kills Hector; if the ancient story is to be believed, Achilles is no longer alive at the war’s end, and credit for the Achaean victory belongs to lesser heroes like Odysseus. Paradoxically, however, the Iliad says that the Achaeans will win the war precisely because Achilles does kill Hector. The Iliad does not take the war to its end, but it makes the nature of that end and the reason for it perfectly clear: the greatest of the Achaeans, Achilles, has defeated the greatest of the Trojans, Hector, and he has done so, as every reader somehow knows from the beginning will happen, must happen, should happen, in combat between the two men alone. It would not do for another man to kill Hector, or for him to fall to an unknown adversary. Despite its enormous cast of characters, its relentless fighting and shedding of blood, its concerns with the anger of Achilles, the arrogance of Agamemnon, the fears of Andromache, the sorrow of Priam, the Iliad is as much about the combat of Achilles and Hector as about any other single thing. The historical Henry Percy, Shakespeare’s Hotspur, died at the Battle of Shrewsbury, at whose hand we probably do not know. Holinshed tells us 29. Ibid., 42.

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that “The other on his part incouraged by [King Henry’s] doings, fought valiantlie, and slue the lord Persie, called sir Henry Hotspurre,” where it is possible but by no means certain that the “other” refers to Prince Hal, who was mentioned about two hundred words earlier; it is more likely that “other” means simply another soldier.30 In his Chronicles (1580), John Stow writes, “Henry the Prince was wounded in the face with an arrow. In the meane season Hen. Percy, whilest he went before his men in the battel, preasing upon his enimies, was sodeinley slaine, which being knowne, the Kings enemies fled,” the agent of Hotspur’s death being unidentified.31 But Shakespeare will identify him as Prince Hal. Having one hero defeat the other makes sense of history and gives literary focus to human events. Prince Hal’s encountering Hotspur on the field of battle at Shrewsbury, in act 5, scene 4 of Shakespeare’s play, is an accident of war, a happy one for Hal as it turns out, and although it could never have been predicted, it does correspond to a desire that Hal had expressed to his father three scenes earlier when he made this proposal: For my part, I may speak it to my shame, I have a truant been to chivalry; And so I hear he [Hotspur] doth account me too; Yet this before my father’s majesty— I am content that he shall take the odds Of his great name and estimation, And will, to save the blood on either side, Try fortune with him in a single fight. (5.1.93–100)

The chief classical progenitor of Hal’s offer to fight Hotspur in a duel is the similar offer of Turnus to fight Aeneas, spoken to Latinus, at the beginning of the final book of the Aeneid. And both duels come to pass, against the stated wishes of King Henry and Latinus, mortal conflicts between the great warriors on opposing sides—that of Hal and Hotspur in act 5, scene 30. Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 4, p. 191. 31. Ibid., vol. 4, p. 191n. On the relation of Shakespeare’s sources to each other and to the use he made of them here, Peter Saccio writes, “Hotspur perished [at Shrewsbury], it is not known by whose hand. (Students of Shakespeare’s sources have rightly pointed out that an ambiguous sentence in Holinshed makes it possible to suppose that Hal killed Hotspur. Hall’s chronicle, however, which was Holinshed’s own source at this point and was possibly consulted by Shakespeare, does not convey this false suggestion, and surely Shakespeare, having arranged Hotspur’s age, the king’s anxieties about his son, and many passages of dialogue to bring Hal and Hotspur into competing contrast, could have invented the climactic duel of 1Henry IV without the aid of stray ambiguities.)” (Shakespeare’s English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977], 510).

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4, that of Turnus and Aeneas at the end of book 12, several hundred lines after the proposal to Latinus. Hector and Achilles fight also, and so for that matter do Hamlet and Laertes, but the distinctive point about Turnus and Hal is that they explicitly propose their duels—and although the proposals are rejected, the duels will happen anyway. In act 3, scene 2, his major confrontation with his father, Hal in some ways anticipates the proposal he will make in 5.1. In the earlier scene Hal says, For the time will come That I shall make this northern youth exchange His glorious deeds for my indignities. Percy is but my factor, good my lord, To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf, And I will call him to so strict account That he shall render every glory up, Yea, even the slightest worship of his time, Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart. (3.2.144–52)

Although Hal is claiming here that he will eventually take credit for the “glorious deeds” Hotspur is amassing, such credit could come from his army’s defeating Hotspur’s, not necessarily one man’s defeating the other. The words are a general prophecy for the future, moreover, a statement that everything is going to be well, not a specific promise that it will be done in a certain way. (As readers or auditors, we of course note what Hal says and take it as further evidence that a duel is promised to us as the climax of the play; ever since the nature of the two young men as foils to each other became clear—in King Henry’s comparison of them in the play’s opening scene—we have had expectations, based upon literary experiences of foreshadowing and climax, of such a duel.) And what Henry is hearing, what is registering on his consciousness, is surely not a battlefield tactic but a larger guarantee that his son will mend his ways. The prince has strayed, and now he promises to be princely, to do what is expected of him—as he had promised the audience in his soliloquy at the end of 1.2 (“So when this loose behavior I throw off, / And pay the debt I never promised . . .” [203–4]), as he will promise again in 5.1 (“I may speak it to my shame, / I have a truant been to chivalry”). And here, in 3.2, the battle, if battle there is to be, is far off, its name, place, date, conditions, stakes, even armies (for who could foresee that Northumberland and Glendower will withdraw from it?) all unknown. Hal’s rhetoric is accomplishing its purpose of persuading Henry of Hal’s reformation; there is no need for the king to correct or contradict his son. Book 11 of the Aeneid ends with the Italian cavalry defeated and humil-

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iated by the Trojans, with Turnus abandoning the ambush that might have destroyed Aeneas, and with the Trojans arriving before Latium and setting up camp for the night. The Rutulian king Turnus, it will be remembered, is the great adversary of Aeneas in the second half of the Aeneid; to Aeneas, Turnus will lose his chosen woman (Lavinia), his land (Italy), and his life. “In the evident symmetry of the poem’s design,” W. A. Camps writes, “the fate of Dido [in the first half of the Aeneid] is balanced by that of Turnus the rival. Both are books of the destiny of Rome and Juno’s opposition to it, and the Italian phase of his story ends in his death as the Carthaginian phase ends in hers.”32 It is all unspeakably sad, Virgil’s own alliance with history to destroy his best creations. The next book, 12, begins with Turnus enraged by the sight of “the Latins, failing, broken, / With Mars against them” (12.1–2 [1–2])33 and probably also by the memory of a slain comrade, the warrior maiden Camilla, and the knowledge of opportunity missed. He explodes to Latinus, “Turnus won’t keep them waiting; No reason for these cowards to renounce Their bargain. Start the holy ritual, father, Arrange the terms. I go to meet the Trojan; Let the Latins sit and watch it if they want to, And this right arm will send him down to Hell, The renegade from Asia. I alone Answer the argument that calls us cowards, I, with one single sword. Or we are beaten And he takes Lavinia home.” (12.12–21 [11–17])

In the war council of book 11, Turnus had told his comrades that he would be willing to fight a duel with Aeneas (486–99 [434–44]); it is now time for this duel. This earlier promise, which parallels Hal’s statement to his father in 3.2 of 1 Henry IV that “I will call [Hotspur] to so strict account / That he shall render every glory up,” is itself provoked by the taunting of Drances in the same war council: “Be bold, have confidence,—and face Aeneas! So Turnus have his royal bride, no matter 32. W. A. Camps, An Introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 35–36. 33. I quote The Aeneid of Virgil in the translation of Rolfe Humphries, edited by Brian Wilkie. This translation was originally published in 1951. Line numbers from the Latin text, placed in brackets after the line numbers in Humphries, are taken from the Loeb edition of Virgil, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and London: William Heinemann Ltd., rev. ed. 1934, rpt. 1960).

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If we, cheap souls, a herd unwept, unburied, Lie strewn across the field. O son of Mars, If son you really are, the challenger Is calling: dare you look him in the face?” (11.417–22 [370–75])

Bitter about all the men, the “cheap souls,” who will be sacrificed to feed Turnus’s ambition, Drances calls into question the other man’s courage. Will his behavior now show this son of Daunus to be, figuratively, the son of Mars? Turnus responds to the dare: “If I am summoned Alone to meet Aeneas, if I alone Am obstinate about your common welfare If such is your decision, my hands have never Found victory so shrinking or elusive That I should fear the risk. Bring on your Trojan!” (486–91 [434–38])

Often tried in arms, unlike Prince Hal, his reputation made and courage proven, Turnus nevertheless responds to Drances with anger at the suggestion that he might be unwilling to face Aeneas. These speeches in the war council, then, are the prelude to Turnus’s speech at the beginning of book 12. If Hal’s proposal to his father of a duel with Hotspur superficially resembles Turnus’s proposal to Latinus (whom he calls “father” in “Start the holy ritual, father, / Arrange the terms” [fer sacra, pater, et concipe foedus]) of a duel with Aeneas, a consideration of the materials from which the proposals arise shows the resemblance to be only superficial. Once dared by Drances, who had implied that Turnus would be a coward in the face of Aeneas, recalling his own outraged denial of that charge, and now in extremis with the Trojan army at the gate, Turnus will of course do anything to prevent the destruction of Latium and its inhabitants. By contrast, Hal, sharpening his earlier vague promises that the time would come when he would act, would be himself, would show Hotspur who is the better man, now offers to pay another “debt I never promised” and fight Hotspur. Not only unprepared for, the offer is not an expression of his character, as Turnus’s is, is not the way to his self-fulfillment, is little more than a spontaneous boast, and so of course Henry turns him down. As Latinus turns down the offer of Turnus, or tries to, so does Henry dismiss Hal’s offer, but in a single sentence: And, Prince of Wales, so dare we venture thee, Albeit considerations infinite Do make against it. (5.1.101–3)

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The considerations infinite, we suspect, can be reduced easily to one consideration finite: Hal might lose. Even if he were “the theme of honour’s tongue” and “riot and dishonor stain[ed] the brow” of Hotspur (1.1.80, 84), and not the other way round, Hal might lose. (After all, in the event the honorable Hotspur will lose to the dishonored Hal.) No responsible commander in chief will risk loss of that which might be achieved at great cost simply to avoid that cost, not if the desired end is worth achieving, as Clausewitz argues.34 Interestingly, it is Hotspur who most eloquently warns against the perils of putting all one’s eggs into a single basket. Learning that his father will not join in the battle (but not yet knowing of Glendower’s withdrawal), Hotspur tells Worcester, His [Northumberland’s] present want Seems more than we shall find it. Were it good To set the exact wealth of all our states All at one cast? to set so rich a main On the nice hazard of one doubtful hour? (4.1.44–48)

Not being in the battle, Northumberland will essentially be in reserve; whatever happens at Shrewsbury, the rebels will have another chance. To have the whole war depend upon a single battle, like having one’s fortune depend upon “one cast” of the dice, would be foolish, and even more foolish, Henry knows, to have a war depend upon a single duel between two men. And so he says no to Hal’s brave (sounding) words. Where Henry decides, Latinus reasons, pleads. Much earlier he had learned that “the portents / Of the high gods opposed” marriage of his daughter Lavinia to Turnus or any other Italian (7.54–55 [58]). The voice of his father, Faunus, spoke to him in a dream: “‘My son, / Seek not a Latin husband for the princess / . . . stranger sons are coming / To wed our children, to exalt our title / High as the stars . . .’” (92–96 [96–99]). When he met Aeneas, Latinus saw that this was the man, the stranger son: “‘Your king,’” he tells the Trojans, “‘ must be the man [the oracles] promise, / If I have any sense of divination. / He is the one I choose’” (283–85 [272–73]). But then, Turnus enraged, the Fury Allecto, set on by Juno, sowing the seeds of war among the Italians, Latinus could not make them honor his choice: “Lati34. E.g., “How shall we manage to combat that extremely subtle idea, which supposes it possible, through the use of a special artificial form, to effect by a small direct destruction of the enemy’s forces a much greater destruction indirectly, or by means of small but extremely well-directed blows to produce such paralysation of the enemy’s forces, such a command over the enemy’s will, that this mode of proceeding is to be viewed as a great shortening of the road? . . . [B]ut we assert that the direct destruction of the enemy’s forces is everywhere predominant. . . .” (Clausewitz, Clausewitz on War, 132–33).

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nus could not conquer / [The Italians’] blind determination. Things were going / As Juno willed” (607–9 [591]). Acceding to the demands of Turnus, Latinus “relinquished / The reins of power” (618–19 [600]), for which entirely involuntary action he will blame himself in book 12. Now, in book 12, Latinus renounces his earlier wavering—“It was not right for me to give my daughter / To any of her former native suitors, / And gods and men so prophesied” (12.32–34 [27–28]—and begs Turnus to “break off the conflict” (49 [39]). But “The king’s appeal / Moved Turnus not at all” (56–57 [45–46]); Queen Amata, too, now entreats him not to fight Aeneas, but he tells her, “‘Do not, O mother, follow me with tears / Or any such omens as I go to battle. / Turnus can not delay his death’” (91–93 [72–74]) and commands Idmon to deliver his challenge to Aeneas. Although in desiring to duel Aeneas, Turnus resembles Prince Hal, in intuiting that he marches inexorably toward his death, Turnus anticipates Hotspur (e.g., “Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily” [4.1.134]). Indeed, the reflection of Aeneas and Turnus in Hal and Hotspur is distinct but variable: Turnus suggests a duel, and so does Hal. But Turnus’s doing so happens in a moment of customary uncontrollable rage; that the character known as Hal and then as Henry V ever becomes angry and loses his selfcontrol, at least before the play Henry V, is far from certain.35 But like Turnus, Hotspur is often angry. Turnus fights Aeneas and loses; Hal fights Hotspur and wins. As K. W. Gransden shows, however, Virgil’s characters bear the same shifting relationships to the heroes of the Iliad, Aeneas at one moment recalling Hector, at another Achilles.36 Defeating Hotspur at Shrewsbury, Hal completes his own transformation from Turnus into Aeneas, a transformation hinted at since the beginning of the play, as we shall see below. However, whereas Aeneas, once challenged, eagerly anticipates his duel, his probable victory, and an end to strife, But if Victory grants us, As I expect, and may the gods confirm it, To win the battle, I will not have Italians Be subject to the Trojans; I crave no kingdom, Not for myself: let both, unbeaten nations, On equal terms enter eternal concord. (12.218–23 [187–91]) 35. In Henry V the king certainly seems angry when he responds to the Dauphin’s gift of tennis balls (1.2), before Harfleur (3.3), after the incident with Williams, Bates, and Court (4.1), when he gives orders to kill the French prisoners (4.6), and when he says he is: “I was not angry since I came to France / Until this instant” (4.7.54–55). Can he be bluffing at all these moments, simply pretending anger as a tactic to get what he wants? 36. K. W. Gransden, Virgil’s Iliad: An Essay on Epic Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), passim.

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Hal, once his father has turned down his stated desire to fight Hotspur, sets the idea aside. With Turnus’s sister Juturna once again causing the Italians to erupt into open warfare, the duel is not immediate; but it comes, and when it does, and with it the defeat of Turnus and the end of Virgil’s poem, we may assume that the larger goals articulated by Aeneas, of having “unbeaten nations, / On equal terms enter eternal concord” are realized. Although Hal’s defeat of Hotspur ends Shakespeare’s play, almost, more fighting remains; in his final speech King Henry directs his troops toward various theaters of operations, hopeful that then “Rebellion in this land shall lose his sway, / Meeting the check of such another day” (5.5.41–42). But confronting Hotspur at Shrewsbury, Hal has no lofty, national goals. Rather, he says, I am the Prince of Wales, and think not, Percy, To share with me in glory any more: Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere, Nor can one England brook a double reign Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales. (5.4.62–66)

After he has all but forgotten his stated desire to fight Hotspur alone, Hal gets what he wants—or what he wanted. Challenging Hotspur, Hal imitates Turnus; defeating Hotspur, Hal imitates Aeneas, but our perception of the imitations leaves us aware of the gulf between Aeneas’s victory, for (the future of) Rome, and Hal’s, for himself. 3. The Imitation of Aeneas No utterance of Prince Hal’s in 1 Henry IV is more celebrated than his soliloquy in act 1, scene 2 after Falstaff and Poins leave him alone in his apartment. Hal tells us then not only who he is, or will be, a proper prince, but what his method is, to veil himself from the world until the time is right, and why he so proceeds—because he has the time to do so, to play holidays for the time being, and because when he becomes himself he will be more impressive than if he had appeared as himself all along. Throughout this soliloquy Hal is concerned with his being looked at, seen, and with the effect that vision will have on the viewers. He will, he says, continue to “awhile uphold / The unyoked humour of [his companions’] idleness”: Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That when he please again to be himself, Being wanted he may be more wonder’d at

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By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapours that did seem to strangle him. (1.2.192–98)

The natural effect Hal describes—the alteration of a day as the sun breaks forth from behind clouds that had concealed it and is then perceived as the more attractive for having been concealed—recalls even as it reverses the process of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 33–34, where a good day, “a glorious morning,” deteriorates into a bad one, “The region cloud” coming to mask the sun. Katherine Duncan-Jones notes that “base clouds” in sonnet 34, line 3 (“To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way”), “suggests unworthy companions, like the ‘base contagious clouds’ surrounding Prince Hal in Eastcheap, 1H4 1.2.93.”37 Hal’s language is not merely descriptive of a natural effect but implies a particularly spiteful attitude toward his companions—that they are “base and contagious,” that they “smother,” that they are “foul and ugly mists / Of vapours.” How can Hal, feeling thus, abide his association with them? According to Hal, a bad day will hugely improve when, in imitation of the sun of the heavens, this son of the king defies everyone’s expectations and breaks “through the foul and ugly mists / Of vapours.” (The day will, of course, worsen commensurately for Falstaff, Poins, and Hal’s other companions, and it is interesting that these men share the perspective of the poet/speaker of Sonnets 33–34.) This prophecy is repeated a few lines later in the soliloquy when Hal claims that with his real self “shall I falsify men’s hopes” (a revealing bit of cynicism, this suggestion that people hope he will remain bad), And like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation glitt’ring o’er my fault, Shall show more goodly, and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. (206–10)

This figure abandons the earlier progression of the day but continues Hal’s fascination with being seen, with blinding, startling, or dazzling. These words “startling” and “dazzling” perhaps recapture something of the effect that wonder, in Hal’s promise to “be more wonder’d at,” possessed around the end of the sixteenth century. In Lyric Wonder, James Biester shows what powerful feelings once resided in the word wonder. Like the Latin admirabilis and the Greek deinos, wonder “register[s] especially strongly the sense of a response to something that is powerfully affective 37. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1997 [The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series]), 34.3n [p. 178].

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either positively or negatively, something that so repulses or attracts, or repulses and attracts, that it renders the soul incapable of normal operation. Deinos has an enormous and fascinating range of meanings, including fearful, terrible, terrifying, terrific, mighty, powerful, wonderful, marvelous, strange, able, and, notably, clever.”38 Wonder, too, has this range, or it did before it descended to mean mere curiosity (“I wonder what will happen”), and so did admire (from Latin admirari) before it descended to mean to regard with approval (“I admire his clothes”). So, famously, when Ferdinand calls the young woman with whom he finds himself suddenly in love “Admir’d Miranda!” (The Tempest, 3.1.37), he is in effect echoing her earlier perception of him as “A thing divine” (1.2.421), and affirming their membership in a mutual admiration society. He is claiming, as one might standing before a god, that his soul is incapable of normal operation. When Hal promises to be more wondered at, he is promising to gain a quality that distinguished his father and separated him from King Richard and, apparently, from his son as well. Or so King Henry believes. In their encounter of act 3, scene 2 Henry tells Hal that unlike the self Hal has so far shown him, “So common-hackney’d in the eyes of men, / So stale and cheap to vulgar company,” he himself, By being seldom seen, I could not stir But like a comet I was wonder’d at, That men would tell their children, “This is he!” Others would say, “Where, which is Bolingbroke?” (40–41)

(This question, “Where, which is Bolingbroke?” is a singularly ironic anticipation of the same question, unspoken by Douglas in 5.3, as he mistakes one soldier after another for the king. That King Henry is unrecognizable is an early source of wonder, a later one of self-preservation.) Then Henry compares his gift, or perhaps it is his strategy of exhibiting himself, with its absence in Richard: Thus did I keep my person fresh and new, My presence, like a robe pontifical, Ne’er seen but wonder’d at, and so my state, Seldom but sumptuous, show’d like a feast, And wan by rareness such solemnity. The skipping King, he ambled up and down, With shallow jesters, and rash bavin wits, 38. James Biester, Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 6.

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Soon kindled and soon burnt, carded his state, Mingled his royalty with cap’ring fools. . . . (55–63)

These words, James Biester writes, are part of “a long lecture on how illadvised [Hal’s] behavior is, how unlikely it is to gain him the kind of wonder majesty requires.” However, in some ways, because of the 1.2 soliloquy, Hal is way ahead of his father. “Throughout this speech the audience is aware, as Henry IV is not, that Hal knows the importance of wonder.”39 It is Hal’s intention, he tells us in his soliloquy, that “when this loose behavior I throw off, / And pay the debt I never promised,” people will be silenced, filled with wonder, amazed, astonished, stunned. Such power, to echo Bolingbroke in Richard II, is in the sight of kings. The locus classicus of the effect Hal desires is found in book 1 of the Aeneid, when Aeneas appears to Dido. Ilioneus has just described to Dido the travails of the Trojans, their loss of homeland, prolonged journey, and arrival in Carthage, and tried to assure her of their benevolent intentions toward her people. Hidden in a cloud, Aeneas and Achates hear these words and Dido’s reassurances to Ilioneus. Achates tells Aeneas that all seems well: And as he finished, The cloud around them broke, dissolved in air, Illumining Aeneas, like a god, Light radiant around his face and shoulders, And Venus gave him all the bloom of youth, Its glow, its liveliness, as the artist adds Luster to ivory, or sets in gold Silver or marble. (1.623–30 [586–93])

Aeneas identifies himself, thanks Dido for the reception she appears to be extending to the Trojans, and embraces some of his men. And Dido marvelled At his appearance, first, and all that trouble He had borne up under. . . . (649–51 [613–14])

Dido’s response is a full measure of the effect, caused by Venus, that produced it. Dido obstipuit (613; preterit of obstupesco, obstupescere): she is 39. Ibid., 72. 1 Henry IV functions as a kind of leitmotif in Biester’s’s book.

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stunned, becomes astounded, as an inanimate thing, her normal sensory mechanisms suspended. (Perhaps Robert Fitzgerald’s translation is stronger and more immediate: “Sidonian Dido / Stood in astonishment, first at the sight / Of such a captain, then at his misfortune. . . .”)40 Kenneth Quinn comments on this manifestation of Aeneas and Dido’s reaction: “It is the moment for Aeneas to reveal himself. Magically the cloud that had enveloped him and Achates evaporates, and Aeneas confronts Dido with all the splendour of a divine epiphany.”41 Becoming himself, bursting forth from a cloud, from the “mists / Of vapors” with which Venus had concealed him, Aeneas becomes a presence where there had been an absence, and he shows us, in Dido’s momentary speechlessness, what it really is to be “wondered at.” Virgil provides an epic model that is inimitable in realistic drama. Where Shakespeare does have gods or other supernatural beings present themselves to humans, he does so in a masque—Iris and Ceres to the court party in The Tempest—thus canceling any need for even the pretense of verisimilitude, or in a dream—Jupiter’s appearance to Posthumus in Cymbeline; or else he deliberately ignores the potential for magic and mystery, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Titania, awakened by Bottom’s singing, presumably just stands up and speaks to him. But these three plays, romantic comedy or romance, are at a very great remove from a history like 1 Henry IV. Prince Hal, the man who would be Aeneas, does not have a goddess for a mother; in Shakespeare, he effectively has no mother at all— interesting for a man who possesses both a real and a surrogate father.42 Neither does Hal show the romantic inclinations that might be expected in a young man. If in his movement from Falstaff’s tavern world to his father’s court world, he goes from private to public life, it should be noted that the private life is a kind of microcosm of public life, in which Hal’s principal goal is to impress, to win, a constituency (to prepare to “command all the good lads in Eastcheap” [2.4.14]), but not to gratify libidinal yearnings that must needs be hidden or suppressed later on.43 Of the sexual Hal who reportedly claimed in Richard II that “he would unto the stews, / And from the common’st creature pluck a glove, / And wear it as a favour” (5.3.16–18), there is no trace in 1 Henry IV, nor anywhere again until,

40. Virgil, The Aeneid, tr. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1983), 25. 41. Kenneth Quinn, Virgil’s Aeneid: A Critical Description (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 108. 42. The historical Henry married Hal’s mother, Mary de Bohun, in 1380; neither she nor Henry’s second wife, Joan of Navarre, whom he married in 1401, has any place in the major tetralogy. 43. On the nature of privacy in Falstaff’s world, see Mark Taylor, “Falstaff and the Origins of Private Life,” Shakespeare Yearbook 3 (1992): 63–85.

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barely, his bloodless wooing of Princess Katherine at the end of Henry V. Affairs of the heart do not loom large in 1 Henry IV, to be sure, but somehow they hover on its outskirts—in Hotspur’s love for Kate, in “the deadly spite that angers” Mortimer, his inability to converse with a “wife [who] can speak no English, [and] I no Welsh” (3.1.186–87); and in the odd affection shown by Falstaff and the married Hostess in the tavern; war, we might say, preempts love in the man’s world of this play, but a fuller world is hinted at. Hal, however, does not participate in it. When Aeneas astonishes, he astonishes a woman, prelude, of course, to one of the signal tragic love affairs in literature, in which for a time Aeneas and Dido become “Heedless of ruling, prisoners of passion” (4.192 [193–94]). When Hal expresses what can be understood as a desire to imitate Aeneas, all erotic possibilities are absent from the expression, and if we perceive the effort at imitation, we perceive also how diminished Aeneas’s range of feeling has become in Hal. What is true of Hal in relation to Aeneas is true of him in relation to Turnus, also, and of King Henry in relation to Patroclus; these truths, indeed, are the fruits of Shakespeare’s employment of imitations of Homer and Virgil as a critique of king and prince in 1 Henry IV. Patroclus goes into battle dressed as another man, thus showing extreme courage and a willingness to die as that other and for his people; Henry sends others into battle dressed as himself, thus showing a cunning capacity to sacrifice his followers to his own preservation. Turnus wishes to have everything turn upon a duel of two men, and eventually it does so; Hal claims to have the same wish, but the ardency of his desire is suspect, though he too gets what he says he wants. And this same Hal asserts as a principle of personal strategy the achievement of Aeneas, divinely aided, to burst forth from a cloud and astonish, but the principle that enlarges Aeneas restricts Hal. The world of Henry IV is smaller than that of classical epic, but the playwright, Shakespeare, perceives and then uses this earlier world to define the nature of his characters.

Proleptic Mimesis The long and complex fourth scene of act 2 of 1 Henry IV looks backward and forward in time, backward to the robbery of the travelers near Gad’s Hill two scenes earlier, then forward to Prince Hal’s fateful interview with his father two scenes later. Looking to the past, 2.4 offers competing interpretive narratives of exactly what happened in the confusion of a few hours ago; looking to the future, it seeks to anticipate, and perhaps by anticipation to determine, what will happen at court the next morning. On the play’s terms, both the robbery and the interview, once they have occurred, are ac-

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tual historical events, although it is possible to differentiate between their degrees of reality. Hal’s interview with his father has consequences not only for the rest of this play but, viewed historically, for English history henceforth. (Without it, Hal would not have gone into battle, the rebels would have won, Henry IV would have been dethroned. . . .) By contrast, the robbery of the travelers is less, it will turn out, than the kind of petty crime that can happen to anyone but that has no larger public consequences. No one is harmed in the robbery, and a little later the money is returned. It is as if it never happened; the crime becomes a piece of make-believe; so far as we can tell, it is just like the other crimes committed by Falstaff and his “squires of the night’s body,” the imitation of a reality. Thus the narratives of it in 2.4 are imitations of imitations—invented accounts, that is, of burlesques of real robberies. (Presented in literary art, they are actually imitations of imitations of imitations.) Still, unlike the battle of Shrewsbury, both the robbery and the interview have their sources primarily in Shakespeare’s imagination, although with some hints for the former provided by the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth; they are as real as anything else in the play, like the royal council of 1.1, the alliance of rebels in 3.1, and the death of Hotspur in 5.4, matters for which Shakespeare is variously indebted to Holinshed, Stow, Samuel Daniel, and the Mirror for Magistrates. Each is an action (“A thing done, a deed. . . . usually viewed as occupying some time in doing . . .”),44 and the representations of these actions in 2.4., therefore, are imitations of external reality, one after and one before the fact. And they are no less imitations for their apparent failures to correspond very closely to the realities imitated. In act 2, scene 2, Falstaff, Peto, Bardolph, and Gadshill set upon four travelers, rob them, and bind them. Then, masked, the prince and Poins, who have witnessed from hiding at least the final moments of this robbery, in which Falstaff had expected their participation, set upon and rob the robbers, all of whom run from them though Falstaff exchanges “a blow or two” (2.2.102 s.d.) first. As Hal and Poins are about to attack the others, Hal says, “now could thou and I rob the thieves, and go merrily to London, it would be argument for a week, laughter for a month, and a good jest for ever” (92–95), a variation on Poins’s reason for proposing the robbery in the first place: “The virtue of this jest will be the incomprehensible lies that this same fat rogue will tell us when we meet at supper . . . and in the reproof of this lives the jest” (1.2.182–85). When they all meet in the tavern two scenes later, Falstaff offers the incomprehensible lies that Poins had predicted: that he and his cohort fought “two rogues in buckram suits” (2.4.189–90), “Four rogues in buckram” (192–93), seven men with swords 44. OED, “Action,” definition I.3.

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(198–99), “nine in buckram” (210), and finally eleven men (216). “O monstrous!” Hal exclaims. “Eleven buckram men grown out of two!” (215–16)—an inconsistency, even an impossibility, that would be evident to any reasonably attentive auditor, whether or not he possessed ocular proof of the contrary. So although Falstaff’s imitation in 2.4 corresponds poorly to the events of 2.2 that it purports to represent, it seems unlikely that he expected it to be accepted as truth. After Hal and Poins expose yet another inconsistency—Falstaff’s claim that the men who robbed him wore “Kendal green” though he could not have known what they wore since “it was so dark, Hal, that thou couldst not see thy hand” (218–20)—Hal offers “a plain tale” (252) that corresponds well to what the audience actually saw: “Then did we two set on you four, and, with a word, out-faced you from your prize, and have it, yea, and can show it you here in the house” (252–55). However, at Poins’s invitation— “Come, let’s hear, Jack, what trick hast thou now?” (267)—Falstaff gets the last word, which implicitly grants the truth of what Hal has said (though without referring to details of Hal’s narrative) while justifying his own behavior: “the lion will not touch the true prince; instinct is a great matter. I was now a coward on instinct; I shall think the better of myself (and thee) during my life—I for a valiant lion, and thou for a true prince” (266–71). Hal had said that the whole incident would provide “a good jest for ever” (2.2.95), and surely this moral that Falstaff spins out will remain a large part of that jest, and its conclusion, which means that Falstaff is coauthor of the enduring imitation of the robbery of the travelers.45 Given the play’s large concerns with the relation of the authentic to the counterfeit—in the identity of the King of England, for instance, and the nature and intentions of the Prince of Wales46—it is unsurprising that the relative truth in narratives of events, and their meanings, also should be scrutinized. Hotspur speaks of the former king as “Richard, that sweet lovely rose” (1.3.175); Henry calls him “The skipping King, [who] ambled up and down” (3.2.60); to test these judgments, though perhaps both are correct, one must review all the evidence about that king in Richard II. So who, in 2.4 of 1 Henry IV, better describes the events of 2.2, Hal or Falstaff? Hal’s account in 2.4.250–61 corresponds well to what we saw two scenes earlier, but Falstaff’s, since it is about instincts, motives, what is inside him, is unprovable, untestable even, beyond the judgment right or wrong, correct or incorrect, authentic or counterfeit. It is part of the “jest” 45. This Henry is much concerned with the construction of enduring myths. As king, he will predict, of the battle of Agincourt, that “This story shall the good man teach his son, / And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by / From this day to the ending of the world / But we in it shall be remembered . . .” (Henry V, 4.3.56–59). 46. See note 24 above.

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that both Hal and Poins sought, indeed the final part, not the “reproof” Poins had promised, but the jest’s meaning. Falstaff concludes his speech on the lion and the true prince by proposing they perform “a play extempore” (275–76). Hal agrees and suggests that “the argument shall be thy running away” (277–78). “Ah, no more of that, Hal, and thou lovest me!” (279), replies Falstaff, who gets what he wants when the proceedings are interrupted by the Hostess’s entrance to announce “a nobleman of the court at door [who] would speak with [the prince]” (283–84). When Falstaff (in a sly imitation of Hal, or perhaps a usurpation of his role) goes to speak to the nobleman, Bardolph and Peto fill the prince in on some details of the robbery’s aftermath, but except for the prince’s choric repetitions of the word “instinct” (296, 314, 351), the argument of Falstaff’s running away is forgotten, or left to morally hypersensitive critics of the play.47 Falstaff returns from the nobleman of the court with information about the real world’s intrusion on life in the tavern: “There’s villainous news abroad: here was Sir John Bracy from your father,” he tells the prince. “You must to the court in the morning” (329–31). He reveals parts of the villainous news: “That same mad fellow of the north, Percy, and he of Wales”—soon identified by Poins as Owen Glendower—“and his son-inlaw Mortimer, and old Northumberland, and that sprightly Scot of Scots, Douglas” (331–32, 337–39)—all are . . . “there” is all Falstaff says (352), without saying where “there” is or for what purpose these rebels are assembled. Maybe place and purpose are known well enough to require no explanation, though both would be part of the villainous news. Another part of this news, perhaps from Falstaff’s perspective the most villainous, is what it means for Prince Hal—that the time for “playing holidays” is over—and therefore for Falstaff himself—that the man he loves, the spiritual center of his life, is being removed, and that he will be left, physically and emotionally, in another unspecified, unknown “there.”48 This development is the circumstance Falstaff has dreaded always, as he revealed to us in the very first words he ever spoke, “Now, Hal, what time of day is it, 47. Like, famously, Dr. Johnson: Falstaff “is a thief, and a glutton, a coward, and a boaster, always ready to cheat the weak, and prey upon the poor; to terrify the timorous and insult the defenceless. At once obsequious and malignant, he satirises in their absence those whom he lives by flattering.” Selections from Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson with Jean M. O’Meara (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 188. 48. What Iago says of Bianca and her devotion to Cassio is true mutatis mutandis of Falstaff and his devotion to Hal, that “tis the strumpet’s plague / To beguile many and be beguiled by one” (Othello, 4.1.97–98). It is no longer necessary, I hope, to demonstrate that selfless love (as well as selfish love) for Hal is Falstaff’s predominant drive, and that in Henry V the Hostess speaks truly when she says of Falstaff, “The King has killed his heart” (2.1.87). See the appendix on Falstaff in Thomas McFarland, Shakespeare’s Pastoral Comedy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 177–211.

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lad?” (1.2.1), a muted expression of fear of the future, and in the obsession he displays throughout the play’s second scene with what is to be: “Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty” (23–25), “[S]hall there be gallows standing in England when thou art king? (57–58), and “Do not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief” (59–60). If Falstaff has nightmares, the king’s summoning his son must be at their center. The next morning’s encounter of father and son, king and prince, not anybody’s running away, becomes the subject of two plays extempore that Hal and Falstaff then perform. It is Falstaff who proposes this subject, when he says, “If thou love me, practice an answer” to what will be demanded of him in the morning, and Hal assigns Falstaff a role in the drama, “Do thou stand for my father, and examine me upon the particulars of my life” (370–73). The choice of this subject needs no justification beyond its availability; Falstaff, after all, had proposed that they be merry and “have a play extempore” before Bracy had arrived at the tavern. Dramatic interludes, as I shall refer to these brief sequences,49 are part of the holidays Hal has not quite yet renounced. As Grace Tiffany writes, “[B]oth interactions are performative, played in front of audiences of cheering cronies in good-humored contests for best theatrical effect.”50 They are plays, more or less formal theatrical imitations with plots, assigned roles, beginnings and ends, and so forth, and are manifestations of play, of the ludic spirit that Falstaff 49. My terminology here perhaps requires an explanation. To call these sequences “plays” is to risk confusion with the play 1 Henry IV; to call them “plays-within-the-play” is awkward, especially as there are two of them; to call them “playlets” or “mini-plays” seems to me too undignified for something, finally, of profound significance The term “interlude,” which I choose, sometimes refers specifically to some short plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that can be seen to represent a step in the evolution of the English drama from older morality plays to early Elizabethan realistic comedies. However, “The term has always been ambiguous and generally has been used as a catchall or generic term for a great variety of secular and nonsecular, short and long, comic and serious plays.” (S[uzanne]. R. W[estfall]., “Interlude,” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 613.) Another standard reference book points out that the term “interlude” was sometimes used for “a play brief enough to be presented in the interval of a dramatic performance, entertainment, or feast . . . or it may mean a play or dialogue between two persons.” (A Handbook to Literature, ed. C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon, 6th ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1992], 250.) The sequences in 1 Henry IV are dialogues between two persons, and they may well interrupt the company’s feast. Moreover, lude (
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embodies, to which the Hostess enthusiastically responds, “O Jesu, this is excellent sport, i’ faith” (386). Her implicit view of these interludes as special, a thing apart, allies them with Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet. King Henry’s summons of his son to him conveniently furnishes a particular subject, but in lieu of that summons, another subject would have been found. On the other hand, it is difficult to dismiss the notion that Falstaff, by speculating about the future, through the vehicle of these interludes, hopes to control it. In his discussion of Henry IV as saturnalian revel, C. L. Barber remarks that “by turning on Falstaff as a scapegoat, as the villagers turned on their Mardi Gras, the prince can free himself from the sins, the ‘bad luck,’ of Richard’s reign and of his father’s reign, to become a king in whom chivalry and a sense of divine ordination are restored.”51 This effort by Hal is visible only if one is aware of the underlying ritual; it is not a conscious act, a deliberate choice. Falstaff’s interludes are similar devices not merely for ascertaining the future, but for shaping it, for erasing any bad luck that might otherwise be there. It is proverbial that by imagining the worst possibility the future can hold, we cancel that possibility; and also, paradoxically, that by imagining the best possibility, we allow for its realization. The interludes, like the ancient Sortes Virgilianiæ, in which a passage in a literary text is picked by chance and then interpreted as an oracular observation, are used to know the future, except that enactment is substituted for reading; but as the decipherment of the Sortes is never independent of what one wants the future to be, so the interludes are not neutral, are not divorced from Falstaff’s desire that the king leave him alone, that he not disturb the status quo. After Falstaff had suggested that Hal “practice an answer” for the next day’s interview, Hal had invited him to “stand for my father, and examine me upon the particulars of my life.” In the first of the interludes, therefore, Falstaff is cast as the king while Hal remains himself. In a sense, then, since Hal’s apparent identity has not changed, only Falstaff assumes a role; but in another sense, since Falstaff has all along been a symbolic father to Hal—more truly, since his proximity to Hal has made us wonder how fully he has acknowledged the tasks and obligations of fatherhood52—Falstaff, too, is perhaps playing himself, or wishing he were doing so. As King, in 51. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Cleveland and New York: Meridian, 1963), 207. 52. In “Of the Institution and Education of Children” (I, 25) Montaigne strikes a peculiarly modern note in describing the responsibilities of parents: “[T]he greatest difficultie, and importing all humane knowledge, seemeth to be in this point, where the nurture and institution [i.e., education] of young children is in question.” The Essayes of Montaigne, tr. John Florio [1603] (New York: Modern Library, 1933), 110.

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any event, Falstaff takes as his subject—his “argument”—Falstaff. In the first of his two speeches, parodying Lyly’s Euphues (“For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears” [396–98]),53 Falstaff anatomizes Hal’s behavior (“Shall the son of England prove a thief and take purses?” [405–6]) and reproves him for “the company thou keepest” (409–10), yet notes that “there is a virtuous man whom I have often noted in thy company, but I know not his name” (413–14). In his only speech in this interlude, Hal asks, “What manner of man, and it like Your Majesty?” (415), to which “the king” responds with a description of Falstaff, or Falstaff responds with a description of himself, “A goodly portly man, i’ faith, and a corpulent” (416), a sudden recollection that “his name is Falstaff” (419–20), the admonition to “him keep with, the rest [of his companions] banish” (424), and a request for information: “And tell me now, thou naughty varlet, tell me, where hast thou been this month?” (424–26). Falstaff’s advertisement for himself is too much for Hal, who interrupts the interlude and proposes another, in which their roles will be reversed: “Dost thou speak like a king? Do thou stand for me, and I’ll play my father” (427–28). In this first interlude of thirty-two lines Falstaff has not examined Hal “upon the particulars of my life” beyond specifying a few of them, despite the agreement that such would be the purpose of the exchange; he has, instead, substituted himself for Hal as an object of scrutiny, then posited his own virtue, and finally advised Hal to continue his association with this companion. But the subject is less the behavior of Hal than it is the worth of Falstaff. If that worth is demonstrable, then Hal’s behavior will not alter, and the absence of any alteration, rather the continuation of what seems long to have existed, is what Falstaff wants. To the extent that Falstaff has been a father, he would continue as a father. As an anticipation of act 3, scene 2, Falstaff is creating an image of himself as a valuable companion to the prince that he hopes the king will endorse. Immediately, that is, Falstaff wants Hal to believe in him, but in what will come the next day, he wants Henry to believe in him. When Hal challenges Falstaff’ s interpretation of his kingly role and proposes that they exchange parts, Falstaff exclaims, “Depose me?” (429)—a pointed reminder of how members of the royal family become kings. Like father, like son: as Henry IV became king by deposing Richard II, so does 53. Cf., for example, “‘For as [women] be hard to be won without trial of great faith, so are they hard to be lost without great cause of fickleness. It is long before the cold water seethe, yet being once hot, it is long before it be cooled, it is long before salt come to his saltness, but being once seasoned, it never loseth his savour.’” John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, in Elizabethan Fiction, ed. Robert Ashley and Edwin M. Moseley (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1953), 125.

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this son of Henry in the first interlude become king in the second by deposing his father (approximately what Henry will perceive as Hal’s intention in 2 Henry IV after Hal has taken and donned the sleeping king’s crown: “Dost thou so hunger for mine empty chair / That thou wilt needs invest thee with my honours / Before thy hour be ripe?” [4.5.94–96]). As the two interludes are what I am calling proleptic imitations of Hal’s showdown with his father, so is the second of them an imitation of the first— each a dialogue between the King of England and the Prince of Wales—as, simultaneously, the advancement of Hal from prince in the first to king in the second imitates, again proleptically, his real such advancement at the end of 2 Henry IV. Whereas, for instance, the first interlude leaves open the possibility that there will be a place for Falstaff in the life of King Henry V, the second forecloses that possibility, just as the new king will reject Falstaff at the end of the next play. So Hal’s deposing Falstaff (as king) in act 2 of 1 Henry IV looks forward to his deposing him (as Falstaff) in act 5 of 2 Henry IV. The second interlude, with forty-one lines, is slightly longer than the first, and contains eleven speeches instead of three, but it, too, examines particulars of the life of Falstaff, not of Hal. In the long speech (439–53) beginning, “Swearest thou, ungracious boy? Henceforth ne’er look on me,” and in the sentence (457–58) that follows Falstaff’s response to this speech, “King Henry” describes Falstaff, “a devil [that] haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man,” to “Hal” in thoroughly scurrilous terms (“that boltinghutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies”), some of which (“devil,” “reverend vice,” “grey Iniquity,” “villainous . . . in all things,” “old white-bearded Satan”) have been seized upon by critics eager to allegorize Falstaff as one kind of incarnation of wickedness or another. And one term in this harangue, “villainous abominable misleader of youth,” has been seen, more promisingly, as allying Falstaff with Socrates, who in Plato’s Apology (24b–c) defends himself from the same charge.54 After Hal, as the king, concludes his opening indictment, “[W]herein worthy but in nothing?” (453), Falstaff, as Hal, replies, “I would Your Grace would take me with you: whom means Your Grace?” (454–55). The pretended bafflement at the identity of the object of Hal’s remarks echoes Hal’s similar pretense in the first interlude, “What manner of man, and it like Your Majesty?” Both of these questions must have stimulated hilarity among the company listening in the inn, and especially the second: for if 54. For the first, see E. E. Stoll, “Falstaff” in Shakespeare Studies (1927) and Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943). For the second, see McFarland, Shakespeare’s Pastoral Comedy, 180–84. Tiffany, in “Shakespeare’s Dionysian Prince,” also notes the Socratic parallels but concludes that they are ironic and Falstaff is a sophist. I disagree.

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the audience to the interludes knew that Falstaff had to mean himself by the “virtuous man whom I have often noted in thy company,” and were therefore amused that Hal did not see that meaning, or pretended not to, how much more evident is Falstaff’s presence in “that trunk of humors, that bolting-hutch of beastliness,” and how much funnier, therefore, Falstaff’s failure to recognize himself. Laughter can be stimulated by a sense of disproportion, here between what should be evident to everybody and what is in fact evident to Falstaff—or what he claims is evident. And so the line brings down the house, as, when Hal has identified “Falstaff, that old whitebearded Satan,” does Falstaff’s “My lord, the man I know,” an understatement because obviously he knows the man extremely well since, in “real life,” he is the man.55 This merriment must increase through the first sentences of Falstaff’s apologia pro vita sua that follows (“If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked!”); one wonders whether and when some of the audience in the inn are able to hear the mounting desperation in Falstaff’s long final sentence, from “No, my good lord, banish Peto” to “banish plump Jack, and banish all the world” (468, 473–74). The sentence is complicated, for it never ceases being funny (in, for instance, the solemn but dramatic progression, auxesis in classical rhetoric, of “for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant being as he is old Jack Falstaff”) while at the same time it dawns upon audience, in the tavern and in the theater, and reader that this man is fighting for his life. The second interlude is a proleptic imitation of the next day’s interview, but breaking through this imitation is the genuine, nontheatrical desperation of Falstaff, as he fears, rightly, that he will be abandoned. “[B]anish plump Jack,” he says, “and banish all the world,” and the king, that is the prince, replies, “I do, I will”: I do banish plump Jack, I will banish all the world he represents, all his world. Looking forward to the next day, the response tells us that there will be no room for Falstaff in the world of King Henry, which Hal is about to join. In “of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children” (II, 8) Montaigne describes the moment when Gallic sons first appeared to their fathers: “Amongst other particular customes, which our ancient Gaules had, (as Cæsar affirmeth) this was one, that children never came before their fa55. Compare Rosalind’s report on her meeting with her father while she was disguised as Ganymede: “I met the Duke yesterday and had much question with him. He asked me of what parentage I was. I told him of as good as he. . . .” (As You Like It, 3.4.33–35). See also the disguised King Henry’s defense to Williams, before the fact, of how he would behave if captured at Agincourt: “I myself heard the King say he would not be ransomed” (Henry V, 4.1.188–89). Shakespeare seems to enjoy having characters who pretend not to be themselves make trenchant comments on themselves—all for their own sly enjoyment.

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thers, nor were in any publike assembly seene in their company, but when they began to beare armes; as if they would infer, that then was the time, fathers should admit them to their acquaintance and familiarity.”56 Florio’s “particular customs” (coustumes particulieres) means peculiar or singular customs, not merely specific ones; and whatever Montaigne might have thought of ancient Gallic practice, it is imitated in the royal family of 1 Henry IV, where Hal first appears to his father (who had known of him in Richard II only through the report of others) only when he is ready to bear arms. The encounter of father and son in act 3, scene 2 mediates between its proleptic imitations in the interludes of act 2 and the Battle of Shrewsbury in act 5, when the fruits of Prince Hal’s allegiance become visible, when his long promised reformation glitters over his fault. The most spectacular difference between the interludes and the real thing is that Falstaff, the persistent subject of the former, is present in the latter only insofar as he is a trace in the consciousness of the reader or auditor; in the explicit dialogue of king and prince he is as absent as if he had never existed. The scene begins with the king’s dismissing his attendants: Lords, give us leave; the Prince of Wales and I Must have some private conference: but be near at hand, For we shall presently have need of you. (3.2.1–3)

That their conference will be private in the sense Henry intends itself differentiates it from the earlier interludes, which, although a manifestation of private life in contradistinction to the public world of courts, diplomacy, and warfare, were nevertheless performed before, and in part for the benefit of, an audience of the Hostess, Poins, Peto, Bardolph, and some others. By contrast, King Henry will talk to his son before no one; this lack of an audience emphasizes the serious, consequential, nonludic character of the exchange, and although Henry cannot know so, it also furthers Hal’s intention to become wondered at—like Aeneas bursting forth from a cloud— as he could not do if he were generally known to be responding to the reprimands of his father. Henry does not talk about Falstaff or Hal’s other companions, though he refers to them collectively as “rude society” (14), “vulgar company” (41), and “vile participation” (87) for which Hal has shown “inordinate and low desires” (12). He does talk about Richard and himself to advance the thesis that familiarity breeds contempt: Richard “being daily swallow’d by men’s eyes, / They surfeited with honey, and began / To loathe the taste of 56. Montaigne, The Essayes of Montaigne, 350. Caesar’s observation will be found in The Gallic Wars, 6, 18.

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sweetness, whereof a little / More than a little is by much too much” (70–73), whereas Henry “did . . . keep my person fresh and new, / My presence, like a robe pontifical, / Ne’er seen but wonder’d at, and so my state, / Seldom, but sumptuous, show’d like a feast, / And wan by rareness such solemnity” (55–59). And Henry talks especially about Hotspur in the way that fathers, from time immemorial, have used a good boy as a weapon to scourge a bad or negligent son. But few sons have been asked to measure their failings against one whose high deeds, Whose hot incursions and great name in arms, Holds from all soldiers chief majority And military title capital Through all the kingdoms that acknowledge Christ. (107–11)

Hotspur contains no flaws that weaken this image presented by the King, none at least that are known to Hal, and Hal possesses no demonstrable virtues that would allow him to set himself beside Hotspur and thus make less stark the contrast his father has presented. All he can do is offer to take from Hotspur what Hotspur has accumulated, and this great achievement Hal promises his father: I will redeem all this on Percy’s head, And in the closing of some glorious day Be bold to tell you that I am your son . . .

and For the time will come That I shall make this northern youth exchange His glorious deeds for my indignities. Percy is but my factor, good my lord, To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf, And I will call him to so strict account That he shall render every glory up, Yea, even the slightest worship of his time, Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart. (132–34,144–52)

This wholly admirable Hal-that-is-to-be corresponds to “sweet Jack Falstaff . . . valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant being as he is old Jack Falstaff” of the second interlude, each figure the creation of his own rhetoric. King Henry, however, is convinced; he believes because the language is brilliant, persuasive, stirring, and because, as a father, he wants to believe

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that the son Hal is describing to him is his real son. But rather than state this newfound conviction in private, personal, or familial terms, Henry proclaims its huge political meaning: A hundred thousand rebels die in this— Thou shalt have charge and sovereign trust herein. (160–61)

Hal has said that he will make Hotspur “render every glory up,” to him, “Yea, even the slightest worship of his time.” This settlement he has promised “in the name of God,” and he has sworn further that “I will die a hundred thousand deaths / Ere break the smallest parcel of this vow” (153, 158–59). King Henry conflates the reckoning guaranteed to Hotspur with Hal’s surety of his own hundred thousand deaths and comes up with the prediction of a hundred thousand rebel deaths. The field at Shrewsbury will produce much carnage, including not only most of Falstaff’s ragtag company (“[T]here’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life” [5.3.36–38]), but also, we can be sure, Hotspur and other rebels—men, that is, who deliberately chose the party of Northumberland, Worcester, and Hotspur over that of the king. We may doubt that there were one thousand of these. The men who would die fighting for the rebels were men with no stake in the conflict who happened to live where the rebels were strong, as in the north of England, as indeed Falstaff’s men died following rather than opposing him because they were Londoners, not because they thoughtfully espoused the royalist cause. Henry’s exuberance over Hal’s promised reform happily expresses the waste of his own citizens. The interludes of 2.4 proleptically imitate the encounter of father and son of 3.2, but the imitation proves not even approximate, the language, emphases, and conclusion of the latter proving hugely different from those of the former. The interludes are plays, illusions, not real events; the encounter (which we easily forget is in a play) is the real thing, is for keeps, a part of history. Controlled by Falstaff, the interludes of the earlier scene are imitations of the action that follows, as tragedy is the imitation of an action, and in the failure of that which is imitated to conform to that which imitates it lies the seed of Falstaff’s own tragedy.

3 Hamlet and Defective Mimesis Hamlet. Give it an understanding but no tongue. (1.2.250) Polonius. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice. (1.3.68) ⬚ Ghost. Brief let me be. (1.5.59) Polonius. I will be brief. (2.2.92) ⬚ Rosencrantz. [Y]ou have the voice of the King himself. . . . (3.2.343–44) Hamlet. He has my dying voice. (5.2.363)

Did Hamlet Read Marlowe (or Is He Only Kydding)?

CLAUDIUS, THE KING OF DENMARK, BROTHER TO THE FORMER KING ON whose throne he sits, whose crown he wears; married to that king’s wife, served faithfully by that king’s old councillor, attended and amused by that king’s courtiers, father to that king’s son (“my cousin Hamlet, and my son—”) if that son would but let him: this king imitates another king, and convincingly to most, perhaps, but not to Hamlet: “My father’s brother— but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules” (1.2.152–53). Claudius has done all possible to become his brother, and has failed. The Ghost, visible image of that former king, “a figure like your father / Armed at point exactly, cap-à-pie, / Appears before [Marcellus and Bernardo]. . . . And I with them the third night kept the watch, / Where . . . The apparition comes. I knew your father; / These hands are not more like” (199–201, 208–09, 211–12): this Ghost imitates his former self, and Horatio, the skeptic (“Tush, tush, ’twill not appear”), is convinced; but the first Clown, the Gravedigger, who will appear but not for four acts, would know better: 107

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“One that was a woman, sir; but rest her soul, she’s dead,” as he says of Ophelia, is a woman no more (5.1.134–35), and the same must be true of one who was a man, even one who was a king. The Ghost has done all possible to remain his former self, and has failed. Not Claudius, not the Ghost, but King Hamlet only was King Hamlet, and those who will accept no imitations, Prince Hamlet and the Clown, strangely imitate each other in this refusal to settle for something else. Many people in Hamlet try to look like others, or cannot help doing so, or are mistaken for others willy-nilly. “Thanks, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern,” Claudius says to the two students he has just enlisted in his fact-finding enterprise, and then Gertrude says, “Thanks, Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz,” perhaps suggesting that her husband had their names reversed. Virtually indistinguishable from each other, therefore each a copy of the other, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as an inseparable pair (“old knife and fork”) are quite indistinguishable also from another pair charged with another mission, Voltemand and Cornelius. Go there, to old Norway, to the uncle of Fortinbras, Claudius tells Voltemand and Cornelius, and do something; come here, he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, home from Wittenberg, and do something else. Introduced into the play at the beginning of the second scene of act 2, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern depart shortly (line 39), only to be replaced by those whom they replaced, the returning Voltemand and Cornelius (line 58). The court of Denmark abhors a vacuum, and when one set of courtiers departs, another set must arrive. It is the play Cymbeline, however, that most, and most puzzlingly, abounds in pairs: the two brothers of Posthumus Leonatus, two gentlemen, two lords, two beggars, two jailers, two villains, the two sons of King Cymbeline who think themselves the two sons of another man, the two suitors to Imogen.1 The pair is thus a basic structural feature of the play, and each manifestation of that feature is an imitation of each other. The members of each pair are either superficially and therefore insignificantly alike, or they are superficially distinct—and therefore profoundly alike. In the brief third scene, for example, two lords converse with Cloten, and although one tells Cloten what he wishes to hear, tales of his own prowess, 1. Sicilius, the father of Posthumus, “had (besides this gentleman in question [Posthumus himself]) / Two other sons, who in the wars o’ th’ time / Died with their swords in hand” (1.1.34–36). Two gentlemen open act 1. Two lords converse with Cloten in the third scene of this act. Lost in Wales, Imogen says, “Two beggars told me / I could not miss my way” (3.6.8–9). Two jailers guard Posthumus at the beginning of 5.4. Belarius tells Polydore and Cadwal, “My fault being nothing (as I have told you oft) / But that two villains, whose false oaths prevail’d / Before my perfect honour, swore to Cymbeline / I was confederate with the Romans” (3.3.65–68). The two sons of Cymbeline even have two identities: Guiderius is Polydore, and Arviragus is Cadwal. And, of course, Posthumus and Cloten are the two suitors to Imogen.

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while the other makes ironical comments in asides, they probably share the same clear-eyed view of this contemptible roaring boy, and each could easily take the other’s part. Between the two suitors of Imogen, Posthumus and Cloten, however, the dynamic is more complicated. The former, “a creature such / As, to seek through the regions of the earth / For one his like, there would be something failing / In him that should compare,” and beloved of Imogen, and the latter “a thing / Too bad for bad report,” and detested by her (1.1.19–22, 16–17)—these two would seem as wide apart as love from lies, and so when Posthumus seeks to harm Imogen as grievously as Cloten would, we might say that he has come to imitate a very bad model: that thing too bad for bad report. Posthumus writes Pisanio, “[L]et thine own hands take away her life” (3.4.26–27), and Cloten desires with “the very garment of Posthumus . . . upon my back” to “ravish her” but “first kill him, and in her eyes” (3.5.136, 138–39). Cloten’s donning the clothes of Posthumus underlines the similarity of the two men who at first seem so different. Posthumus’s desire to wreak vengeance on Imogen makes him a proponent of the homicidal philosophy of Cloten, thus his unlikely imitator. Significant pairs in Hamlet, besides those mentioned above, include pairs of kings, pairs of queens, and pairs of king and queen: Old Hamlet and Old Fortinbras, Old Hamlet and Claudius, Old Hamlet and Gertrude, Claudius and Gertrude, the Player King and the Player Queen, Old Hamlet and the Player King, Claudius and the Player King, Gertrude and the Player Queen, with the two players being obviously, in many senses (some of which will be explored), modeled on the “real” royal couples, both past and present. Pairs include two plays, Hamlet and The Murder of Gonzago, and within Hamlet, The Murder of Gonzago proper and the dumb show that precedes it. Pairs include two extremely visible sons of dear fathers murdered, Hamlet and Laertes, and two rather less visible but similarly afflicted young men, Fortinbras and Pyrrhus. They include two members of the Danish court who are paired primarily by their undeviating loyalty to their monarch, Polonius and Osric, and two men as far from the center of power as these two are near it, the two Clowns, Gravedigger and his companion. They include two women, one, Gertrude, of sexual appetites so pronounced that she cheated on an earlier husband, and the other, Ophelia, of apparent modesty and innocence until her insane and obscene ravings of act 4, scene 5—ravings that make her at least verbally an imitation of the other woman, Gertrude, the queen who incorporates into her one self the wives of two kings. And finally, for all that Hamlet is sui generis, he too is provisionally paired with his best, his only friend, Horatio, the internalized if not wholly accurate image of self whom he wears “In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart” (3.2.74), an image that is perhaps reciprocated: the dying prince tells his friend, “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, / Absent thee from

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felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story” (5.2.353–56).2 Similarity with a difference, resemblance and opposition, the thing and its image, original and imitation, model and copy—the formula is invoked constantly: when Marcellus asks Horatio, about the Ghost, “Is it not like the King?” (1.1.61), when Hamlet tells the players to “hold . . . the mirror up to nature” (3.2.23), when he tells his mother that he will “set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you” (3.4.18–19), when he tells her to “Look here upon this picture, and on this, / The counterfeit presentiment of two brothers” (53–54), two pictures in his purse or framed in her chamber or in a locket on her bosom,3 when earlier in the same scene he takes Polonius for Claudius and stabs him through the arras. Hardly has Hamlet seen the Ghost—their private audience is yet to occur—than Hamlet adopts him as a model that others might be forced to imitate. “Unhand me, gentlemen,” Hamlet says when his friends try to restrain him from following the beckoning Ghost, “By heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me” (1.4.84–85). The prominence of this mimetic paradigm throughout the play invites us to see actual and potential imitations, achieved and failed ones, almost everywhere, including The Murder of Gonzago as a failed version of the dumb show preceding it, the main objects of investigation in this chapter. One of the first is evident in the Ghost’s directive that Hamlet “Revenge his 2. In To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), James L. Calderwood offers several other significant linkings of characters and circumstances. He notes, for instance, that “The insurrection that would send Laertes to the Danish throne is the mutinous corollary of the secret usurpation by which Claudius achieved his own kingship” (77). Later, Calderwood interrogates the curious fact that a play in which a major character is named Claudius should refer to a go-between named Claudio (“King. From Hamlet! Who brought [these letters]? Messenger. Sailors, my lord, they say. I saw them not. They were given me by Claudio.” [4.7.37–39]). “[W]hy,” he asks, “is the name ‘Claudio’ so like ‘Claudius’ as to imply a connection between the two? . . . [W]hat can the menial Claudio share with the King of Denmark? If we observe that the only thing Claudio possesses, besides his troublesome name, is his functional role in a communicative process, then we might realize that Claudius also plays in communicative process. Of course he is the recipient of Hamlet’s letter. But, more than that, he is also its last messenger. For the ultimate recipient of Hamlet’s letter is the audience in the Globe theater, and the function of Claudius at this point in the play is to convey the letter to that audience by reading it aloud” (119). 3. For a comprehensive discussion of these pictures and where they might have come from, see Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London and New York: Methuen, 1982 [The Arden Shakespeare (The New Arden)]), “Longer Note” to 3.4.53, pp. 516–19. Jenkins cites “A tradition ‘for Hamlet . . . to produce from his pocket two pictures . . . not much bigger than coins or medallions.’” But why would Hamlet want to carry with him a picture of Claudius? Has there been time since the coronation for Danish coins bearing the image of Claudius to have been minted, and if so, could Hamlet simply produce two coins?

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foul and most unnatural murder” (1.5.26). In making this unequivocal demand, as Harold Bloom points out, “The Ghost expects Hamlet to be a version of himself, even as young Fortinbras is a reprint of old Fortinbras.”4 Were Hamlet easily to obey the Ghost’s injunction, he would become also a reprint of young Fortinbras and an anticipation of the murderous Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, and of Laertes. There would be four sons who understood the univocal meaning for them of a dead father, not only three. However, Fortinbras, Pyrrhus, and Laertes are not only a kind of son, they are also a particular kind of dramatic character, a simpleminded revenger, who belongs in a particular kind of play, a revenge tragedy. It is a truism of the criticism of Hamlet, long established, that Prince Hamlet resists the Ghost’s effort to cast him as the conventional hero of an old-fashioned play, a revenger in a revenge tragedy, like Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy.5 “Whatever else it is,” Marjorie Garber remarks, “the Hamlet Ghost is an animation of the earlier theatrical genre known as revenge tragedy, come to summon protagonist and play to a genre already beginning to fade.”6 In refusing just to go and kill Claudius—if that is what the Ghost commands, if that is what Hamlet understands the Ghost to command—Hamlet is asserting his own historical reality against the fictionality of revengers and of the behavioral and literary modes into which the Ghost would insert him.7 (He is also, of course, transforming the vehicle—the play Hamlet—that displays him.) I’m not someone in a book, Hamlet is implicitly saying, or those who are in books are not uncritically to be followed. With the publication in book form of Elizabethan plays, the characters in these plays become available as literary as well as dramatic models.8 4. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 387. 5. One study that extensively considers Hamlet in relation to other revenge tragedies is Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 2d ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971). Prosser argues that to the Elizabethan audience, as to most of us, revenge is emotionally appealing but morally wrong. Hamlet’s dilemma is therefore most engaging of our sympathies—it makes him the hero, the rebel—but it is not to be resolved by his killing Claudius. 6. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as uncanny causality (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 172. 7. See Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964), 160: “While maintaining [its] reference to the Elizabethan theatre, Hamlet also deals in a way that is both more serious and more complex than that exemplified by the earlier comedies with the idea of illusion, the presence of play elements in life. The tragedy is riddled with theatrical language, with various uses of the ‘play the part’ idiom, and with words like ‘act,’ ‘perform,’ ‘prologue,’ ‘shape,’ ‘applaud’ and ‘show’ which are either overtly theatrical, or else hover on the edge of a dramatic meaning.” 8. The first or “bad” quarto of Hamlet itself, for instance, appeared in 1603, and the second quarto the following year. From those dates on, at least in theory, popular criticism of the play could be based as much on printed texts as on performances.

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Therefore it behooves any reader to distinguish carefully between what is real and what is fictional among these models, or in Renaissance terminology, between history and poetry. Hamlet is a reader—“Enter Hamlet reading on a book”9—and although it is probably pointless to try to determine exactly what he, as a resident of medieval Denmark, ca. 1200, might have read, the task becomes slightly less problematical if, with Ophelia, we regard him as a courtier, soldier, and scholar, one in a Renaissance court at the time the play was written, about a century and a half after the introduction of printing into Europe. As a courtier, Hamlet might have read Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier and any of the many courtesy books that imitate it, like Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster.10 As a soldier (not that most soldiers read widely in military theory), he could have read William Bourne’s Inventions or Devises. Very Necessary for All Generalles and Captaines, or Leaders of Men, as well by Sea as by Land (1578) or William Garrard and Robert Hitchcock’s The Arte of Warre. Beeing the onely Rare Booke of Myllitarie Profession (1591).11 And as a scholar, at Wittenberg, he would presumably have had access to the entire curriculum in the universities of northern Europe in the late Renaissance. But more to my point, he might have read Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, the archetype of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy, published in quarto in 1592, and immediately “no less monumentally popular with the reading public than it was on stage,”12 and Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage, published in 1594, one of the sources of the speeches about Pyrrhus in Hamlet, 2.2.13 These conjectures (“could,” “would,” “might”) are hyperbole; of course, we cannot know what Hamlet reads and has read, though serious attempts have been made to identify the book he reads “on” when he enters the stage in 2.2.167 as Juvenal’s tenth Satire, Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly, and Stefano Guazzo’s Civil Conversation.14 But my point, especially with the

9. 2.2.167. The stage direction is present in this form in the First Folio, but not in the quartos. 10. The availability of Il libro del cortegiano is worth noting. According to Peter Burke, between its initial publication in 1528 and 1600, there were at least 116 editions of the book—in Italian, Latin, English, French, German, and Spanish. The Fortunes of the Courtier (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), appendix 1. 11. London, 1578, and London, 1591, respectively. On these and other sixteenth-century military treatises, see James A. Freeman, Milton and the Martial Muse: Paradise Lost and European Traditions of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), passim. 12. C. F. Tucker Brooke and Nathaniel Burton Paradise, eds., English Drama, 1580–1642 (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1933), 98. 13. The relevant passage of Dido Queen of Carthage is 2.1.223–64. The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Irving Ribner (New York: Odyssey Press, 1963). 14. See Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, “Longer Note” to 2.2.196, p. 467.

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plays of Kyd and Marlowe, published nearly a decade before the composition of Hamlet, is that in resisting the Ghost’s command that he become a revenger, Hamlet is not only responding to the circumstances that surround his own life (“Life is a revenge tragedy from which I am trying to awaken”) but also reading critically literary, that is written, documents, and in doing so he is differentiating between the poetic and fanciful, on the one hand, and the historical and real, on the other. This differentiation is beyond the capacity of Hamlet’s almost equally celebrated contemporary, Don Quixote.15 Don Quixote imitates preexisting models, and the models he chooses are found in books. He “devoted his leisure . . . to reading books of chivalry—and with such ardor and avidity that he almost entirely abandoned the chase and even the management of his property. . . . His imagination was stuffed with all he read in his books about enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies and all sorts of impossible nonsense. It became so firmly planted in his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read about was true, that to him no history in the world was better substantiated.”16 Don Quixote’s mistake is not in following books—were he not to do so, he or his history might offer a radical critique and rejection of all recorded experience—but in choosing the wrong books and in following them the wrong way. The books, tales of knights errant, are make-believes, and although make-believes possess their own truths (if they are understood, allegorically, to figure forth, not to represent), offer their own lessons, and properly invite kinds of imitations, the truths, lessons, and prudent sorts of imitations are not what the Don perceives. Whatever else the hero of Cervantes’s novel may be, E. C. Riley writes, “he is, quite simply, a man who cannot distinguish between life and literary fiction. . . .”17 A vast gulf of literary history separates “books about enchantments” like the Amadis of Gaul and the Palmerín of England from Elizabethan revenge tragedies like The Spanish Tragedy, but my concern is not with the differences between these books but with differences between the responses to them of the Don and Hamlet, or between the availability of these books to these two men. In an important essay—“Hamlet and Don Quixote: The Two Eternal Human Types”—Ivan Turgenev contrasts the man who possesses faith in something outside himself with the man who possesses no 15. Most authorities date Hamlet no earlier than 1599 and no later than 1601. See the New Arden edition, ed. Jenkins, 1–13, and Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3–5. The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605. 16. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, tr. John Ormsby, rev. Joseph R. Jones and Kenneth Douglas (New York and London: Norton, 1981), part 1, chapter 1, pp. 25–27. 17. E. C. Riley, Cervantes’ Theory of the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 35.

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such faith.18 Don Quixote, Turgenev writes, represents “faith in something eternal, immutable; faith in the truth, in short, existing outside of the individual, which cannot easily be attained by him, but which is attainable only by constant devotion and the power of self-abnegation.”19 What exists outside the Don, the ideal that he follows, is enshrined in the books he reads; if this ideal ever really existed, it exists no longer, and he is the only one, in belief and in action, who still asserts its presence. Hamlet, by contrast, represents “egotism and therefore incredulity. . . . [H]e finds nothing in the whole universe to which he can cling with all his heart. He is a skeptic, and always pothers about himself; he is ever busy, not with his duty, but with his condition. Doubting everything, Hamlet, or course, spares not himself; his mind is too much developed to be satisfied with what he finds within himself.”20 Therefore Hamlet perceives and follows no ideal, not one in a book he can read or in the book he lives. In Don Quixote the Don is the only one who still believes; in Hamlet the prince is the only one who no longer believes. All these considerations bear mightily upon the possibility of perceiving and imitating models. The Ghost, himself an incomplete or failed imitation of the once-living King Hamlet, asks young Hamlet to imitate figures who are in one sense contemporary with him, and in another sense merely fictional entities. The second sense complicates and infects the first. To the extent, that is, that Hamlet is aware of the literariness of Fortinbras (for instance; but Pyrrhus is more purely literary, a character Hamlet remembers from “an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning” [2.2.440–41]), of his resemblance to revengers on stage or in books, then the historical or “real” Fortinbras is invalidated as a model because, paradoxically, he is not real. But it is not only revengers who inhabit this literary dimension, ghosts do, too. Hamlet may be said to join ourselves, as well as Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo, in never having seen one before. Ghosts inhabit made-up realms, like Hades where Odysseus meets Anticleia, Achilles, and the others in book 11 of the Odyssey, a fictional place in a fictional poem. How much of the real identity of his former self does the Ghost retain, anyway, and how much required obedience to the wishes of a father invests his instructions to Hamlet? How applicable is the commandment to “Honor thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12) to Hamlet’s situation since a ghost is not a father? 18. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, “Hamlet and Don Quixote: The Two Eternal Human Types” in Shakespeare in Europe, ed. Oswald LeWinter (Cleveland and New York: World/Meridian, 1963), 171–89. Reprinted from Current Literature (London) 42 (January 1907): 290–93, 349–52. Trans. David A. Modell. Turgenev delivered this lecture in 1860. 19. Ibid., 173, 20. Ibid., 175,

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Indeed, the language of the Ghost indicates as much. He identifies himself to Hamlet, “I am thy father’s spirit” (but not “thy father”), and he describes the circumstances of his death in personal terms: “Sleeping within my orchard, / My custom always of the afternoon” (1.5.9,59–60). Between these speeches, however, telling Hamlet what he must do, the Ghost distances himself both from the victim of Claudius’s alleged crime and from authority for its punishment: “If thou didst ever thy dear father love—. . . Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (23, 25): not “If thou didst love me, revenge my murder.” At this crucial moment the first-person pronoun becomes the third-person pronoun, and the Ghost is speaking more fully of another than even of the “I” he once was. The models available for our imitation can come from books or from “real life,” and for Hamlet both of these are deficient to an extreme degree. It is true, however, that as much as Hamlet strives to resist the Ghost’s efforts to place him in a revenge tragedy, such positioning is not entirely alien to his way of thinking. Right before The Murder of Gonzago, for instance, he says to Ophelia, “For look you how cheerfully my mother looks and my father died within’s two hours” (3.2.128–29). Although Ophelia immediately corrects him, “Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord,” Hamlet has a point: that four months of real time might equal two hours of stage time, and if they are all in a play, then his father might indeed have died two hours ago. It may appear paradoxical that Hamlet should work so hard to escape confinement within revenge tragedy and then in his own words—“my father died within’s two hours,” which may be offhand and trivial or, alternatively, may be studied and purposeful, thus a test of Ophelia (as Hamlet’s remarks so often test his interlocutors)—consciously invoke, if not create, just such an environment. But exactly this paradox characterizes Hamlet, and it is my intent here to try to define and understand it. Hamlet is his own man in his own play, and yet everywhere we are reminded of Shakespeare’s contemporaries Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, so much so that I ask, not entirely in jest, whether Hamlet may have read these playwrights. In fact, he is amazingly attuned not only to literary texts, but to the words of the people about him and to his own words, another sort of text, all of which, as we shall now see, he endlessly repeats, recapitulates, reconfigures, and imitates. This analysis will lead into a further investigation of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, The Murder of Gonzago, and of Gonzago’s own play-within-a-play—more accurately, its play-before-a-play— the dumb show, which as we shall see Gonzago most imperfectly imitates. And finally all of these investigations will return us to Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, defectively imitated by the two interludes, and its hero and to its and his own imperfections and incompleteness as the dizzying rush of events, “Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, / Of accidental judgments,

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casual slaughters, / Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’t cause,” give way at last to the silence of rest or the rest of silence, but not to neat resolutions. Here I shall contend that the fractured designs of the play’s characters, hinted at by the partial imitations, become most visible—but not therefore whole. First, however, we will look at the prince as political prognosticator, who bewilders and bedevils his friends.

Did Hamlet Read HAMLET? In his celebrated last words Hamlet says to his best friend, O, I die, Horatio. The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit. I cannot live to hear the news from England, But I do prophesy th’ election lights On Fortinbras. He has my dying voice. So tell him, with th’ occurrents more and less Which have solicited—the rest is silence. (5.2.359–65)

Much in this speech is extraordinary.21 First, Hamlet has been poisoned, and the strength of the toxin within him, he likens to the victory of a fowl— of one cock over another in a cockfight, many commentators agree22— surely a bizarre representation of the effects of poison in the human body. Second, his simple declaration of his “prophecy” that “th’ election lights on Fortinbras” in fact veils his rather bitter knowledge that the presence of Fortinbras alone will assure his election—i.e., that the election will be a charade—and as such that it will imitate the election of some months earlier where, during Hamlet’s continued absence in Wittenberg and consequent inability to influence the course of events in Denmark, Claudius “Popp’d in between th’election and my hopes” (5.2.65). But just as one election will imitate another, so do Hamlet’s words in this speech imitate— adjust, correct, or ratify, but always echo—words he has heard or spoken earlier in the play. So this prophecy recalls the entrance of Polonius during Hamlet’s first meeting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, when Hamlet says, “I will prophesy he comes to tell me of the players” (2.2.387–88). Polonius of course does just that. This first prophecy reflects Hamlet’s knowledge of Polonius’s proclivity for telling people what they already 21. See Mark Taylor, “‘The rest is silence,’ or Is It? Hamlet’s Last Words,” The Upstart Crow 17 (1997): 78–87. 22. Harold Jenkins’s gloss on o’ercrows: “triumphs over (like a victorious cock).” Hamlet (The Arden Shakespeare), 5.2.358n.

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know; the second shows his knowledge of the questionable election machinery employed by the Danes. Both are sardonic. Both “I . . . prophesy”s are paraphrases for “Everyone knows”es. Then Hamlet says, “He has my dying voice,” words that echo a question Rosencrantz asked him two acts earlier. In response to the general prying of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as they try to follow the king’s instructions “to gather” from Hamlet “So much as from occasion you may glean” (2.2.15–16), and to the specific question “[W]hat is your cause of distemper?” Hamlet answers, “Sir, I lack advancement,” to which Rosencrantz replies, “How can that be when you have the voice of the King himself for your succession in Denmark?” (3.2.339–40, 342–45). Now, as he dies, in all but his last breath, Hamlet recalls and modifies these words: as the voice of Claudius had promised him the throne of Denmark, at least if Rosencrantz is to be believed, so does his own voice authorize transfer of that throne to Fortinbras. Are we to understand that for the approximately thirty lines between the death of Claudius23 and his own death, Hamlet is, de facto and de jure (because of the promise of Claudius), the king of Denmark, and that his single official act in that capacity is to name Fortinbras his successor? But whether or not he accords Fortinbras “my dying voice,” Hamlet knows well that Fortinbras will seize the Danish throne by a device such as invoking “some rights of memory in this kingdom, / Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me” (396–97), and his giving this voice to Fortinbras is as pointless as his prophecy about the election. But the speech ironically recapitulates parts of the history of the state, words Hamlet has said, and words that he has heard. Hamlet, indeed, is singularly attentive to the words of others and of himself. He remembers what others say and folds their lexical choices and inflections into his own speech, he anticipates what they might say, and he remembers what he says himself and shows a remarkable capacity to repeat his speeches, if he desires, verbatim or in approximation; all of these verbal facilities are forms of imitation. Hamlet’s final remarks call attention to his “dying voice,” and that is but one voice among many: a dying voice is distinct, for instance, from a living voice, or a hopeful voice, or a deafening voice; and a dying voice that sounds like Rosencrantz’s designation of the voice of Claudius is somehow not even the voice of Hamlet at all, or not entirely so, or distinctively so. After the Ghost’s departure at the end of act 1, Hamlet plans, for whatever reason, “To put an antic disposition on” (1.5.180), and he makes his

23. The exact moment of Claudius’s death is usually thought to occur between Hamlet’s “Follow my mother” and Laertes’ “He is justly served” (5.2.334). At that point in the Folio occurs the stage direction “King Dyes.”

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companions swear never to let on that they know he may be merely pretending madness. Swear, he says, “at such time seeing me,” that you “never shall,” With arms encumber’d thus, or this head-shake, Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase, As “Well, we know,” or “We could and if we would,” Or “If we list to speak,” or “There be, and if they might,” Or such ambiguous giving out, to note That you know aught of me—this do swear. . . . (181–87)

And urged also by the Ghost, they do swear not to use the verbal language and body language that, in his proscriptions, Hamlet has essentially taught them. Hamlet, who will spend much of his play studying the words and gestures of others, especially Claudius (“O good Horatio. . . . Didst perceive? . . . Upon the talk of the poisoning?”),24 searching for ambiguous givings out that are not intended, here shows himself a master of the technique of accidentally-on-purpose tipping one’s hand. In act 1, scene 5 neither Horatio nor Marcellus has actually used and completed one of Hamlet’s cryptic phrases, by saying for example, “We could, and if we would, tell you why Hamlet is acting this way,” but Hamlet anticipates that either might, and by anticipating the future, changes it. His device is a small negative instance of the proleptic mimesis we investigated in 1 Henry IV. Sometimes, however, Hamlet imitates what has just occurred, and so fully does he make the model his own that it is easy to misread both his implicit criticism of the model and his emotional distance from his own statement. In the graveyard in act 5, for instance, most readers will agree that there is something wrong with the grief Laertes displays for his dead sister, that his tears, gestures, belligerence, and extravagant declarations all undermine the projection of authentic feelings of loss, rather than reinforcing them. Just before he leaps into Ophelia’s grave, he exclaims, “O treble woe / Fall ten times treble on that cursed head / Whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense / Depriv’d thee of” (5.1.244–47). A “treble woe” multiplied by “ten times treble” becomes ninety doses of the original woe. As a natural component of hyperbole, large numbers are not of course to be taken literally, 24. 3.2.288–89, 291. Hamlet does not always draw the right conclusions from body language. Seeing Claudius at prayer in the next scene, for example, Hamlet assumes (or says he does) that Claudius is in a state of grace and, killed at this moment, would go to heaven. But, at least according to Claudius, Hamlet is wrong; a man in the posture of speaking to God is not necessarily being listened to: “[B]ut 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 . . .” (3.3.51–54).

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but Laertes’ numerical precision invites us to do so, and the product we arrive at is laughable.25 Then, after Laertes and Hamlet have both leapt into Ophelia’s grave, grappled there, and been separated, Hamlet says, I lov’d Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers Could not with all their quantity of love Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?

and again (Laertes having invoked the sacred mountains Pelion and Olympus), And if thou prate of mountains, let them throw Millions of acres on us, till our ground, Singeing his pate against the burning zone, Make Ossa like a wart. (269–71,280–83)

Hamlet is verbally sparring with Laertes, matching hyperbole with hyperbole, but he is also mocking, by aping them, Laertes’ choice of these absurd figures (numbers and also figures of speech) in the first place. Hamlet, that is, is not only saying that his forty thousand brothers and millions of acres outdo Laertes’ mere ninety woes, he is also pointing to the unauthenticity of all such statements. The point of his assumed insincerity is the demonstration of Laertes’ insincerity. What is missing in the discourse of both men, of course, is any real tribute to the value of Ophelia. The fundamental focus of most displays of grief may be the survivors rather than the departed, anyway; certain it is that Ophelia is important to her brother and her boyfriend as a site for their contestings more than for her herself, whatever that would mean. They trample on her dead body as they wrestle, as men figuratively trampled on her body when she lived, and their other histrionic ravings show the same disregard. Ophelia is immediately and entirely forgotten. “Be buried quick with her, and so will I,” Hamlet says to Laertes (5.1.279), and she is not referred to again, not in the twenty lines that remain in this scene, nor in the next scene, the last in the play, which is temporally continuous with it. At the beginning of 5.2 Hamlet turns his attention to two others of the presumed dead, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose treachery and punishment he describes to Horatio. Hamlet “unseal[ed] / Their grand commission,” found there instructions for his own dispatch—“no leisure bated, / No, not to stay the grinding of the axe, / My head should be struck off”—and set about as25. Compare Don Pedro’s allegation that Hero and “a ruffian at her chamber window” have “Confess’d the vile encounters they have had / A thousand times in secret” (Much Ado about Nothing, 4.1.90, 92–93).

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suring it would be they, not he, who would be executed (17–18, 23–25). “Being thus benetted round with villainies—,” he says, and again the life he lives takes the shape of a stage drama: “Or I could make a prologue to my brains, / They had begun the play.” Then, I sat me down, Devised a new commission, wrote it fair— I once did hold it, as our statists do, A baseness to write fair, and labor’d much How to forget that learning, but, sir, now It did me yeoman’s service. (29–36)

Hamlet’s letter is part of a script that, followed, will take Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths; thus writing it “fair” is the production of a fair copy for the actors, the English authorities, to read and be guided by; the words thus continue the theatrical metaphor begun by “prologue” and “play.” However, although commentators generally regard writing fair as a matter of penmanship,26 Hamlet may also be speaking of stylistic elegance. He imitated handwriting and rhetoric, avoiding both unsightly or illegible characters and his customary plain speaking.27 “Wilt thou know / Th’ effect of what I wrote?” he asks Horatio, and then gives him just that—the effect, the gist, not a transcript: An earnest conjuration from the King, As England was his faithful tributary, As love between them like the palm might flourish, As peace should still her wheaten garland wear And stand a comma ’tween their amities, And many such-like “as”es of great charge, That on the view and knowing of these contents, Without debatement further more or less, He should these bearers put to sudden death, Not shriving-time allowed. (36–37, 38–47) 26. E.g., David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed. (New York: Longman, 1997), “fair in a clear hand” (5.2.32n) and Jenkins, Arden Hamlet, “fair in a clerkly hand” (5.2.32n). 27. There is something odd in this whole procedure. Hamlet tells us that he had once learned, presumably in school, to write fair, but holding it “as our statists do, / A baseness to write fair, and [had] labor’d much / How to forget that learning.” Now, however, the old knowledge stands him in good stead, because by writing fair, he can produce a document that appears to come from the king. So although Claudius has fair handwriting, statists, or statesmen, labor to write badly. It is strange that usually sycophantic courtiers, that is, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, would neglect this easy chance to ape their king. See Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), especially chapter 3, “Copies: Institutions of the Hand.”

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These words are Hamlet’s natural utterance to Horatio, a précis of his forged letter, and yet it is astounding for its rhetorical technique, as an imitation of that which it describes. The word “flourish” echoes an earlier word in the play that Hamlet could not have heard, in Polonius’s famous claim that “brevity is the soul of wit, / And tediousness the outward limbs and flourishes” (2.2.90–91); though surely not tedious, Hamlet’s statement offers a series of rhetorical flourishes. Among these are the beginnings of lines 39–41, “As England . . . ,” “As love . . . ,” “As peace . . . ,” an instance of “Anaphora, or the Figure of Report,” as Puttenham defines it, “when we make one word begin, and as they are wont to say, lead the daunce to many verses in sute,” the same word, that is, beginning several consecutive members.28 The whole statement, moreover, is a carefully constructed period, notable in this as many instances for its “‘suspended syntax’ . . . since the syntactical pattern, and so the sense, is not completed, is ‘suspended,’ until the end. The effect of the periodic sentence is often to throw the interest forward, create a mild suspense.”29 And of course that which is suspended—that for which we wait as we hear comforting words like “faithful,” “love,” “palm,” “peace,” and “amities”—is the command to put two men “to sudden death.” Although the reversal in tone created by the words “sudden death” is very great, the whole effect is even more complicated because Hamlet’s description of love between England and Denmark severely misrepresents relations between the two countries in the background of the play, the former’s military and political domination by the latter, more accurately represented by Claudius’s perception that the English “cicatrice,” or scar, still “looks red and raw / After the Danish sword” (4.3.63–64).30 So the beginning of Hamlet’s letter, as he will paraphrase it to Horatio, displays the menacing unctuousness often characteristic of Claudius, and unsettles us by its contrast with the soothing words of amity. Still, the overall effect of eight lines (“An earnest conjuration . . . more or less”) is negated, erased, by the single one following, “put to sudden death.” Whatever Hamlet’s forged letter would have looked like if in fact it existed, it is hard to imagine it could have surpassed this, his offhand imitation of it, as a rhetorical masterpiece. In a play about people who act what they are not, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are remarkably poor actors, inadequate dissimulators. As

28. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, book 3, chapter 19, p. 208. 29. Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 113. 30. The historical background to Claudius’s remark includes the repeated Danish raids on the English coast beginning as early as A.D. 865 and especially after 980, the siege of London in 994, the massacre of Danish settlers in England on Saint Brice’s Day in 1002, Aethelred’s huge payments of silver to the Danes in 1007 and 1012, and the coronation of the Danish Cnut, or Canute, as the English king in January 1017.

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friends and as secret agents, they fail. Trading on their history as Hamlet’s schoolmates at Wittenberg, indeed probably Hamlet’s companions before then since Claudius reminds them that they are “of so young days brought up with him, / And sith so neighbor’d to his youth and haviour” (2.2.11–12), but now enlisted in Claudius’s design “To draw [Hamlet] on to pleasures, and to gather, / So much as from occasion you may glean, / Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus” (15–17), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern inadvertently reveal their real selves and purposes to Hamlet almost at the moment they meet. He tells them, “You were sent for, and there is a kind of confession in your looks, which your modesties have not craft enough to colour” (280–82). Their craft is sufficient, however, to color forever their identities as Hamlet’s friends, and to have them, later, judged and presumably executed for the betrayal. Once they admit to their poor effort at duplicity—“My lord, we were sent for,” Guildenstern says (294)—we conclude that they were very poorly cast, also, as Claudius’s agents. It is ironic, as a matter of fact, that we probably see the friendship, for the betrayal of which they die, as genuine and not (in their own view) much compromised by their agreeing to work for Claudius, and their brief career as spies as so ineffective that it does not serve to define them. The two mighty opposites Hamlet claims they fell between are certainly more accomplished actors. Having determined what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are and are not, Hamlet now tells them why they were sent for and, by this occasion, what he himself is or at least is seen to be. His speech, from “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth” to “[A]nd yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?” (297–310), is as celebrated as almost any other passage in the play, not only for what it may say about Hamlet’s identity and his awareness of it, but also as an irreplaceable document in Renaissance thought, as a central statement of the sixteenth-century humanist credo, asserting the essentialist nobility of man’s reason, the infinity of his faculties, and so forth.31 For these assertions and for more general rhetorical flourishes (“this goodly frame . . . this most excellent canopy . . . this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire”), many readers have committed the speech to memory. Hamlet appears to have done so himself. “Man delights not me,” Hamlet says at the end, “—nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so,” which shows that while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and we) have been attending to Hamlet’s enchanting words, he has been attending to them, his schoolmates, that although he has already discerned their duplicity, he has continued to watch for their reactions as he speaks. Then, when Rosencrantz 31. I am perfectly aware that such sentiments are not much in fashion these days. On the other hand, if one wishes to understand how Hamlet is a man of about 1600, one might try to imagine this speech being uttered in 1500 or 1700.

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says, “My lord, there was no such stuff in my thoughts,” Hamlet asks, “Why did you laugh, then, when I said man delights not me?” He—Hamlet, not the actor playing Hamlet—knows the words by heart and can replay them instantly when circumstances demand. Or, we might say, the words are so good that Hamlet is quick to imitate them. The speech appears as a set piece available to ourselves and to him as well. As with Hamlet’s recapitulation to Horatio of the contents of his forged letter to England, his “What a piece of work is a man!” speech (as it is usually designated) displays Hamlet standing at a distance from his own utterance, using it for some purpose other than the authentic expression of his self. His words imitate what is present to be imitated: his words.

Did Hamlet Read THE MURDER OF GONZAGO? The Murder of Gonzago is the imitation of an action that is serious and of a certain magnitude; whether it is also complete depends upon the viewer’s perspective and commitments. It is serious because it is concerned with serious things, with vows, betrayal, and death; it is of an unusual magnitude because these things are contested by and among royalty, people of an unusual magnitude; and it is complete in the way that, with the killing of the king, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus is complete, although those with an appetite for justice or a knowledge of the full myth might believe that completeness must wait upon the punishment of the killers of the king of Mycenae, or upon a divine judgment of Orestes, the executioner of the killers of that king. There is a sense, pace Aristotle, in which no Greek tragedy is ever complete, however many may be dead and mutilated, because what has appeared on the proske–nion to the spectators is always only part of the story. Seeking to clarify Aristotle, Lodovico Castelvetro writes, “It should be borne in mind that there are two kinds of tragedy. In some the action is complete in itself and independent of any action preceding or succeeding it. . . . In others the action needs another to complete it.”32 When Lucianus pours his poison into Gonzago’s ear, we assume that Gonzago is as dead as Agamemnon, surprised in his bath; but whereas Clytemnestra has a moment afterwards to gloat and thereby to display her belief that the business is finished—“You and I have power now,” she tells Aegisthus at the end of Aeschylus’s play, “We will set the house in order once for all”33—Ham32. Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry. An abridged translation of Lodovico Castelvetro’s Poetica d’Aristotle Vulgarizzata et Sposa. With introduction and notes by Andrew Bongiorno, 240. 33. Aeschylus, The Oresteia, tr. Robert Fagles (New York: Bantam, 1977), Agamemnon, 1707 (p. 185).

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let’s explanation of Lucianus’s action as he “Powres the Poyson in his eares”34 and then Claudius’s rising prevent any reaction by Lucianus to what he has done, interrupts the play, and leaves it doubly incomplete for Hamlet—because interrupted and because it is only his own action, he believes, that can bring about the completeness of things. His house is far from set in order. Of what action is The Murder of Gonzago an imitation? Calling a tragedy the imitation of an action, Aristotle seems to mean that proper tragedy mimes the acts and deeds that people are capable of performing, their acting and doing, as opposed merely to their thoughts and conditions, which are insufficient both as the stuff of tragedy and the purpose of life. “A tragedy is a mime–sis not of people but of their actions and life. Both success and ill success are success and ill success in action—in other words the end and aim of human life is doing something, not just being a certain sort of person; and though we consider people’s characters in deciding what sort of persons they are, we call them successful or unsuccessful only with reference to their actions.”35 For Aristotle, moreover, these actions are defining: it is action that determines character, not the other way round. “But is it true,” Gerald Else asks, “that men acting, and only they, pretty much always develop clearly defined characters? Yes, the fundamental principle of Aristotle’s theory of character development is that we become what we do, that our acts harden into character.”36 In The Murder of Gonzago, I think Aristotle would say, Lucianus is a wicked man because he poisons the king; he does not poison the king because he is a wicked man. Though the Greek tragedies that lead Aristotle to his descriptive pronouncements, notably Oedipus Tyrannus and Iphigenia in Tauris, the two plays most mentioned in the Poetics, all have sources in earlier Greek material, they are not called imitations because they imitate that material, nor, if the story of Oedipus could be shown to be “real,” that is historical, would Sophocles’ play be the imitation of an action, in Aristotle’s sense, because Oedipus had once really done those things. That a tragedy is an imitation of an action, for Aristotle, is unrelated to that action’s preexistence, either as history or literature. The Murder of Gonzago is a complicated matter, first of all because it is not only a tragedy but a tragedy-within-a-tragedy, which places it at one further remove from our own experience than the tragedy of Hamlet. Nevertheless, in it things happen: a king and queen enter; they talk and gesture; she leaves, and he lies down to sleep; another man enters; he pours poison 34. The stage direction in the First Folio. 35. Aristotle, Poetics, in Classical Literary Criticism, 1450a, p. 59. 36. Gerald F. Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 70. The emphasis is in the original.

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into the sleeping king’s ear. This much is the imitation of action in Aristotle’s sense. However, this tragedy-within-a-tragedy bears a striking resemblance to two anterior narratives—imitates actions in a sense that appears not to have interested Aristotle—which are themselves problematically related. As stage play or as written text, The Murder of Gonzago imitates recent events in Denmark, the fact and indeed the manner of the murder of a king by a near relative;37 and as a performance in the court of King Claudius it also imitates—perhaps “actualizes” is a better word, or “animates,” brings to life—the script, or promptbook, of a play of the same name. In this sense, every performance of every play imitates its script— or perhaps a platonic idea of a perfect performance projected, or recorded, by that script. The Murder of Gonzago, that is, imitates both history (what happened in Denmark) and poetry (what happens in the promptbook), even if, to our eyes, that particular bit of poetry seems uncannily to imitate that particular bit of history. The exact relationship of the history and the poetry that are imitated in The Murder of Gonzago is puzzling and demands some attention.38 But whatever it may be, let us note that the confusion of these two narrative modes replicates the same confusion of the same modes in the models that Hamlet proposes for imitation and faults himself for his inability to follow. The events staged at court in act 3 of Hamlet—the imitation of an action put on ostensibly for the entertainment of Claudius and some others—may imitate what happened or what never happened; similarly, Fortinbras and Laertes may demonstrate the proper course of action to follow when a father is murdered, or they may have descended to the level of stage revengers, translated themselves into caricatures of human beings. This replication of detail is important. From the beginning of Hamlet, Fortinbras seeks to regain what his father lost. This project may be admirable, an assumption by the son of the duties and responsibilities of his

37. However Hamlet’s claim that “Gonzago is the Duke’s name” (3.2.241) is to be understood—as a transliteration of material from the source, the historical murder of a duke in Urbino in 1538, by an in-law named Luigi Gonzago; as a slip of Shakespeare’s pen; or as a red herring that Hamlet mysteriously introduces into his device—it is clear that the murdered figure in the play-within-the-play, like King Hamlet, is a king. “This is one Lucianus, nephew to the King,” Hamlet says in both Q2 and F. See the New Arden Hamlet, ed. Jenkins, 3.2.233–34 Long Note (pp. 507–8). 38. Recent criticism of Hamlet seems little interested in what is at very least the remarkable coincidence whereby Danish history and a play in the players’ repertory strongly resemble each other. Two generations ago, however, as he explains in his “epistle dedicatory,” J. Dover Wilson was led by the efforts of W. W. Greg (in an article in the October 1917 issue of The Modern Language Review) to make sense of the coincidence to write What Happens in Hamlet, first published in 1935, a book that for many years thereafter seemed to offer the last word on its subject.

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father. If it is admirable, then it is serviceable as a model that Hamlet would be well advised to imitate. On the other hand, the project may be despicable, a mask for the mere ambition of the son, a course of naked aggression aided by “lawless resolutes” (1.1.101), which implicitly dishonors the father, who is retroactively denied the capacity to enter into a binding contract with the king of Denmark. If this is the case (as it probably is), then Hamlet should avoid following its example; moreover, because Fortinbras is continuous with a line of fictional revengers, then what he poses would reduce the historical authenticity of anyone copying it. Similarly, from one perspective The Murder of Gonzago imitates what happened not long ago in Denmark; as Hamlet says, “I’ll have these players / Play something like the murder of my father / Before mine uncle” (2.2.596–98). “[G]uilty creatures sitting at [such] a play,” we might suppose, as Hamlet says has in fact happened, “Have, by the very cunning of the scene, / Been struck so to the soul that presently / They have proclaimed their malefactions” (591–94), and Claudius, if another such guilty creature, might in the same circumstances proclaim his malefactions. But contrariwise, The Murder of Gonzago is simply a play in the players’ repertory, a vehicle for fiction, that is, or at most “the image of a murder done in Vienna” (3.2.226), but not in Elsinore, and there is no reason that Claudius should recognize himself in it and respond accordingly. To determine whether his uncle is guilty of murder and, if so, what his own actions should therefore be, Hamlet seeks precedent in the past of his nation and in the behavior of others, and both of these historical authorities threaten continually to collapse into fiction. Between assigning the players the task of reviving an old play, The Murder of Gonzago (2.2.540) and telling us why he has done so (590ff.), Hamlet declaims the first thirty-odd lines of his “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” soliloquy, the speech in which he first accuses himself of procrastination, of not having acted against his uncle because of cowardice: “it cannot be / But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall / To make oppression bitter, or ere this / I should ha’ fatted all the region kites / With this slave’s offal” (578–82). For all the intensity and apparent conviction of such language, there are oddities in the soliloquy that undercut the seriousness of its self-reproach. Although we customarily refer to it, as I have just done, as the “O what a rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy, observing the convention of designating a speech by its first line, in fact the first thing Hamlet says when left by himself is the four preceding words. Hamlet bids farewell to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “Ay, so, God buy to you,” and then announces, “Now I am alone” (549). These words reveal great self-consciousness. “I was with people and spoke one way,” we perhaps work out the implications of what he is saying. “They left. Now I am alone and can speak another way. It is time for a soliloquy.” Soliloquies for Hamlet, certainly this one, do not happen just

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because the conventions of the Elizabethan stage allow a man, when alone, to speak aloud and tell us what he is thinking.39 Rather, Hamlet, like a professional student of theater history, is aware of conventions as conventions, recognizes them when they occur, and exploits them accordingly. So although he may go on to reveal his inmost self, to inform us of his history, he may instead be taking refuge in the persona of a player—not that of a revenger, perhaps, but still a substitute for the self whom he pretends to reveal, whom we seek. The immediate stimulus to the thoughts expressed in this soliloquy is, of course, Hamlet’s encounter with the players and especially the First Player’s recitation, at Hamlet’s bidding, of a part of “Aeneas’ tale to Dido . . . especially when he speaks of Priam’s slaughter” (447–49). With “senseless Ilium” collapsing about them, according to the First Player, “Pyrrhus at Priam drives, in rage strikes wide; / But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword / Th’unnerved father falls”; for a moment, his sword above “the milky head / Of reverend Priam, . . . as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood, / And, like a neutral to his will and matter, / Did nothing”; then “after Pyrrhus’ pause, / Aroused vengeance sets him new awork” and with extraordinary violence “Pyrrhus’ bleeding sword / Now falls on Priam”; Hecuba enters (rather at Hamlet’s behest), and “When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport / In mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs, / The instant burst of clamor that she made, / Unless things mortal move them not at all, / Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven, / And passion in the gods” (475, 473–75, 479–83, 488–89, 492–93, 514–19). This outpouring of grief is the climax of the scene, its end, but also, it seems, its point, at least for Hamlet, who had demanded that the Player “come to Hecuba” (502).40 What has the Player recited? What has Hamlet heard? A young Greek has killed the king of Troy, to which action the king’s wife has reacted with appropriate horror. Where the story is told elsewhere, however, we are not allowed to forget the Greek’s reason for what he has done: the war that has stretched on for ten years, the chance now to bring it to an end, all the horrors and killing of those years, and especially one killing, that of Achilles, the father of Pyrrhus. More than anything else, we assume, that death has

39. Compare, for example, Hieronimo’s soliloquy, “O eyes! No eyes, but fountains fraught with tears,” that opens act 3, scene 2 of The Spanish Tragedy, where he shows no awareness of the particular opportunity he has been given to be by himself and speak. 40. For an extended discussion of this speech see Harry Levin, “An Explication of the Player’s Speech” in The Question of Hamlet (New York: Viking-Compass, 1961), 138–64. Levin notes that “where the speech proceeds from the slayer to the slain, and from the royal victim to the queenly mourner, the soliloquy [i.e., “O, what a rogue and peasant slave”] moves from that suggestive figure to another king and finally toward another villain,” 156.

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transformed Pyrrhus into the scourge he has become. This motive for Pyrrhus is never identified in quite so many words in Virgil, but during Pyrrhus’s slaughter his father’s ghost hovers over him—“Pyrrhus comes on, aggressive as his father”—and Priam will compare the son unfavorably with the father: “‘You claim to be Achilles’ son. You liar! / Achilles had some reverence, respected / A suppliant’s right and trust . . .’”41 Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage displays a similar awareness of the son’s father. “‘Achilles’ son, remember what I was, / Father of fifty sons, but they are slain,’” Aeneas quotes the words of Priam to Pyrrhus, and a moment later, according to Aeneas, Priam “would have grappled with Achilles’ son,” but his incapacity prevented him.42 But in Hamlet, Achilles is not mentioned, either by name or some phrase such as “the father of Pyrrhus,” and the other name of Pyrrhus, Neoptolemus, generally better known and thus a surer link with the father, is not used, though present in both Virgil and Marlowe.43 So, although the presence of Pyrrhus in Hamlet is emphatically justified, in every reader’s understanding, by his sharing with Fortinbras, Laertes, and Hamlet the distinction of having a father violently killed, and with the first two of those three, an immediate perception of what that circumstance demands of him, there is no direct reference to his father. In this environment, formed by our expectations, Hamlet’s soliloquy is very strange. He has listened as the First Player tells of Pyrrhus, transformed into a one-man killing machine, running amok in the royal palace of Troy and killing Priam, an event that causes enormous grief, also recounted by the Player, in Hecuba when she enters. Everything in the scene, and indeed in the play to this moment, suggests that Hamlet might extrapolate from Pyrrhus’s situation to his own and conclude from what he has witnessed that a son should avenge his father, no matter what sorrow it causes others, no matter how wasteful his methods might be. In short, Hamlet might take Pyrrhus’s action as a model to imitate. But he does not; in fact, he makes no mention of Pyrrhus in the speech, nor of Priam. He mentions Hecuba, but only as a vehicle for revealing the expertise of the Player, his convincing representation of her in the absence of any personal motives. Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann’d,

41. Virgil, The Aeneid of Virgil, 2.515 [491], 564–66 [540–41]. The line numbers in square brackets refer to the Latin text, which is quoted from Virgil, Works. 42. Dido, Queen of Carthage, 2.1.233–34,251. Quoted from Marlowe, The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe. 43. E.g., in Aeneid, 2.574 [549], and Ibid., 2.1.239.

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Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her, That he should weep for her? (551–60)

Nothing in the play more shows Hamlet’s singularity than the lesson he draws from the Player’s performance: that he, Hamlet, stands corrected, not by the contrast of his inaction with Pyrrhus’s action, but by the contrast of his placidity, his impassivity—he is “I, / A dull and muddy-mettled rascal” (567–68)—with the Player’s histrionics. He says, not that he should have done something, but that he should have shown something—properly, that he should have uttered something, presented something to be heard, “And can say nothing” (570). There is much irony in this self-criticism because as he is making it, almost surely Hamlet himself is “drown[ing] the stage with tears, / And cleave[ing] the general ear with horrid speech” (562–63), doing exactly that which he flays himself for not doing, a variation on the rhetorical figure of paralepsis in which the speaker pretends not to be doing that which he is doing (“I won’t sink to calling my opponent a blackguard”).44 It is perhaps noteworthy, also, that although the Player is a player, an actor trained to pretend to be someone else, his presentation of Hecuba (as of Pyrrhus and Priam) is narrative, not dramatic: he waxes eloquent about Hecuba, not as Hecuba. And yet this performance is what Hamlet receives as reproach. Hamlet then moves, still in this soliloquy, from a consideration of himself as coward, denying and then affirming the proposition, saying that “I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall” or before now “I should ha’ fatted all the region kites / With this slave’s offal” (579, 581–82), an apparent reference to Claudius, who is not, however, named or directly referred to for another sixteen lines (“this slave’s offal,” 582, “Before mine uncle,” 598), to further self-recrimination “That I, the son of a dear father murder’d, / Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, / Must like a whore unpack my heart with words / And fall a-cursing, like a very drab, / A scullion” (585–89), although what, a moment earlier, he had admired the Player for doing was using words in so masterly a fashion. Then Hamlet tells us of

44. Puttenham writes, “It is also many times vsed for a good pollicie in pleading or perswasion to make wise as if we set but light of the matter, and that therefore we do passe it ouer slightly when in deede we do then intend most effectually and despightfully if it be inuectiue to remember it: it is also when we will not seeme to know a thing, and yet we know it well inough. . . .” The Arte of English Poesie, book 3, chapter 19, p. 239.

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his purpose in commanding for the next night a performance of The Murder of Gonzago, to “catch the conscience of the King,” 607), and thereby invites us to infer that the “speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which I would set down and insert in’t” (541–42) will somehow trigger the king’s revelation of his guilt.

Did Hamlet Write THE MURDER OF GONZAGO? The murder of King Hamlet, to the extent that it is a historical event (the play’s characters so regard it), took place some short time before the action of the play Hamlet begins. What we, audience and readers, know about it, we know chiefly through its two putative representations, or imitations, within the play: the Ghost’s account in act 1, scene 5 and The Murder of Gonzago in act 3, scene 2. Although these two episodes in some ways compete with respect to the veracity of what they claim to represent, they possess far from equivalent evidential status: the first is a revelation to Hamlet, and tells him what he knows; the second is in effect a revelation by Hamlet, and (though also testing what Claudius knows) shows what he, Hamlet, knows—or what he thinks he knows, or what he says he thinks he knows. That there is something intrinsically theatrical, even “stagey,” about a Ghost’s declaiming in the darkness before a terrified man, and then beneath the ground to that man and his amazed comrades, is shown by the scene’s resemblance to the later play-within-the-play. Both segments contain principals, the Ghost and then the Player King, the Player Queen, and Lucianus, who differ from the ordinary folk about them, soldiers and members of the Danish court, by being supernatural or merely “fictional” characters in a play. These characters, moreover, are out of reach of the ordinary folk, either by being incorporeal (following 1.1.144 the soldiers strike at the Ghost but can make no contact) or by occupying the theoretically inviolable space of the stage (the king can ask Hamlet, but not the players themselves, “What do you call the play?” [3.2.234]). And both presumptive accounts begin with visible anticipations, preludes, preambles, or as the second is called, dumb shows. The Ghost’s silent appearance to Horatio and the soldiers in the first scene is to the dumb show that precedes The Murder of Gonzago as Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost in 1.5 is to The Murder of Gonzago; or the appearance in 1.1 is to the encounter of 1.5 as the dumb show of 3.2 is to The Murder of Gonzago. In the first scene the Ghost is twice a silent presence on the stage, from line 42 to line 55 and again from line 129 to line 146. During these two brief moments, he is continually exhorted to surrender his secrets, to explain why he has come, to “speak”: “By heaven, I charge thee, speak. . . . Speak, speak, I charge thee, speak.” (52, 54), Horatio says the first time, and the second: “Speak to me. . . .

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Speak to me. . . . O, speak. . . . Speak of it, stay and speak.” (132, 135, 138, 142), but, again, “‘Tis gone” (147). The word “speak” occurs fifteen times in this scene, of some sixty-three in the play, establishing the urgency of giving reports when reports are possible, the capacity that is possessed by the living and lost by the dead except in this rare instance where one of the dead returns and can speak if he will. But he will not, not to Horatio and the others. Then Horatio has an inspired idea: Let us impart what we have seen tonight Unto young Hamlet; for upon my life This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him. (174–76)

Similarly, although we cannot know it at the time, the king, the queen, and the Poisoner will be “dumb to us” when they first appear, in the dumb show following 3.2.138. The word “dumb” occurs five times in speeches in Hamlet and a sixth in the stage directions relating the dumb show; twice it is coupled with “speak,” both times by Horatio, above, and speaking to Hamlet in 1.2: [T]hrice he walk’d By their oppress’d and fear-surprised eyes Within his truncheon’s length, whilst they, distill’d Almost to jelly with the act of fear, Stand dumb and speak not to him. (202–6)

The first time it is the Ghost who is dumb, to the soldiers, but who will speak, to Hamlet; the second time it is the soldiers who are dumb with fear, made so by the Ghost, and left unable to speak to him. Muteness is both selective and infectious. But Horatio is right the first time: the Ghost will indeed speak to Hamlet. And by the Ghost’s speaking to him, Hamlet is shown to be an exceptional man. Horatio does not say why he believes that “This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him,” whether because he thinks it likely that the spirit of a dead father will speak to his son or because he knows his friend to be an extraordinary person to whom alone extraordinary things, like messages from beyond the grave, will happen. The Ghost’s appearance gainsays Hamlet’s designation in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy of death as “The undiscover’d country from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.79–80), and perhaps suggests the rare capacity of this spirit to go where none has gone before, that is, to return.45 Second to this capacity is 45. For centuries much has been made of the apparent oddity of Hamlet’s statement that no one returns from death since he knows of one who has done so. In the New Arden Ham-

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that of being chosen to hear the message that the spirit has come, from wherever, to deliver. And therefore much of the point of the Ghost’s dumb show of 1.1, along with establishing the environment of alarm, urgency, fear, and mystery that is inestimably important to this play, is a display, through his friend’s belief in it, of the exceptionality of Prince Hamlet even before we meet him. Thus we wait, of course, to discover Hamlet and to hear Horatio’s report to him. And we wait, also, until act 1, scene 5 to learn that Horatio’s intuition is correct, that the Ghost will speak to Hamlet. At this point we learn a very little of regicide and fratricide, of what happened in Denmark “two months . . .—nay, not so much, not two” months earlier (1.2.138). The Ghost tells Hamlet of the miseries of his present state—actually, in another paralepsis, he tells him much by pretending not to tell him at all: “But that I am forbid / To tell the secrets of my prison-house, / I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul . . .” (13–16); he bitterly characterizes Claudius, “that incestuous, that adulterate beast,” and Gertrude, “my most seeming-virtuous queen” (42, 46); and he insists upon his son’s obligations, “Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest” (82–83). But of the actual murderous moment itself, the Ghost says only this: Sleeping within my orchard, My custom always of the afternoon, Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, And in the porches of my ear did pour The leperous distilment, whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood. (59–70)

Only this one sentence tells what Claudius did to King Hamlet—more accurately, what the Ghost wishes for young Hamlet to know of what was done—and most of it, lines 66–70, tells of the action of the poison in the body, not the action of the assassin on the king. Old Hamlet was taking his let, 491–92, Harold Jenkins reviews much of this commentary and then asserts, “The truth surely is that we must not, and we do not (as Hamlet himself does not), connect the Ghost at all with this general reflection” (491). But the very writers whom Jenkins dismisses in fact do make such a connection.

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customary siesta in his orchard, he says, “thy uncle stole” up to him, poured poison into his ear, and, as the Ghost summarizes the consequences of this act, “Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand / Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatch’d, / Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, / Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d, / No reck’ning made, but sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head” (74–79). Characteristically, this egocentric Ghost again is less interested in the action of “a brother’s hand” and of the brother—which hand? what sort of vessel contained the poison? did Claudius stoop or kneel?—than in his own condition. Did King Hamlet actually see Claudius, or is the knowledge that Claudius murdered him some privileged communication he received beyond the grave? If he did see him, what sort of perception could he have had between sleep and the action of the poison, “swift as quicksilver,” curdling his blood? Was it sufficient for positive identification?46 Still, the Ghost would have us believe and would have young Hamlet believe, and young Hamlet would have himself believe, that this “juice of cursed hebenon in a vial” poured “in the porches of my ear” was the center of the royal assassination, the moment that created both a corpse and a new king. As such, this moment shares its essence, or its meaning, with a similar moment in an old play titled The Murder of Gonzago, with the performance of a version of that play supposedly revised by the addition of “a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines” (2.2.541), and mediating between the old play and its revision, another dumb show, this one exactly so called. This is the entire text of the dumb show, its spelling but not its capitalization and punctuation modernized and otherwise exactly as it appears in the First Folio:47 Oboes play. The dumb show enters. Enter a King and Queen, very lovingly; the Queen embracing him. She kneels, and makes show of Protestation unto him. He takes her up, and declines his head upon her neck. Lays him down upon a Bank of Flowers. She seeing him asleep, leaves him. Anon comes in a Fellow, takes off his

46. In Gertrude and Claudius (New York: Knopf, 2000), his prequel to Shakespeare’s play, John Updike assays answers to some of these questions. The poison, for instance, is contained in “a stoppered slender vial of Venetian glass . . . [s]ealed by crimson wax” (155). This novel delights me precisely because it answers so many of the (unanswerable) questions I have long asked myself, privately, about the history behind Hamlet, for instance (of more importance than the vial that held the poison): What service did Polonius render Claudius that makes the new king so ingratiating (“The head is not more native to the heart . . . Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father”) to the old councillor? 47. Quoted from Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies [i.e., the First Folio of 1623], a facsimile edition prepared by Helge Kökeritz, with an introduction by Charles Tyler Prouty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954) [p.757].

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Crown, kisses it, and pours poison in the Kings ears, and Exits. The Queen returns, finds the King dead, and makes passionate Action. The Poisoner, with some two or three Mutes comes in again, seeming to lament with her. The dead body is carried away: The Poisoner Woos the Queen with Gifts, she seems loath and unwilling awhile, but in the end, accepts his love. Exeunt.

The very presence of the dumb show in the play Hamlet, and even more its function, what it is meant to accomplish there, have always been critical mysteries. Since Prince Hamlet, speaking to the players at the beginning of 3.2, inveighs against “inexplicable dumb shows” (12), its performance might seem to represent disobedience to his directions for the evening’s entertainment, although this particular dumb show is anything but inexplicable and therefore, on these terms, might be allowable. But that creates another problem: the show, indeed, is so very explicable—so easily understood in relation to King Hamlet’s murder, if we accept the Ghost’s word that, sleeping, he was killed with poison poured into his ear—that it threatens to tip Claudius off to Hamlet’s device to “catch the conscience of the King” before it, the device, the more extensive Murder of Gonzago, has had a chance to do its work. In the New Arden Hamlet, Harold Jenkins reviews much of the relevant commentary and argues, plausibly, for the dumb show’s importance to the spectator’s understanding of larger matters: “[I]ts first function is to reveal the plot of the inset play in advance, so that the audience, freed from having to concentrate on what this play is about, may attend to the reactions of the stage-audience to it.”48 Apart from questions of whether or not Claudius actually sees the dumb show, of why, if he does, he does not react to it, and of why, also if he does, he is still able to be surprised by The Murder of Gonzago and reveal his guilt before it, if he does so,49 the dumb show is of great interest in rela48. The New Arden Hamlet, 501. Jenkins’s discussion of the dumb show is a “long note” to 3.2.133 on pp. 501–5 of his edition. See also Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. Philip Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3.2.120 SD n.: “Claudius’ silence [before the dumb show] has been explained on the grounds that he was not watching it, or that the Ghost’s story of a poisoning through the ear was a fabrication. But an impassive, or nearly impassive, Claudius is theatrically very effective, providing an enigma for Hamlet and Horatio, as well as for the audience.” 49. “[H]ow is it,” Harold Jenkins asks, “that the King, whose conscience is so well caught when he sees his crime reenacted in the play, remains unmoved by the dumb show?’ (New Arden Hamlet, 501–2). I have always doubted the assumption Jenkins so confidently asserts, that Claudius’s conscience is caught in Hamlet’s stratagem. After Claudius’s exit, Hamlet twice asks Horatio for confirmation that the plan worked, and Horatio refuses it: “Hamlet. O good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound. Didst perceive? Horatio. Very well, my lord. Hamlet. Upon the talk of the poisoning? Horatio. I did very well note him” (3.2.284—88). Horatio’s responses are far too lukewarm and equivocal to show that Shakespeare meant to have the issue entirely resolved in Hamlet’s mind.

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tion to the play-within-the-play that will follow. The dumb show is generally regarded as a kind of preview of The Murder of Gonzago, a wordless shadowing forth of the more important play to follow; the dumb show is less capable of producing meaning, of appearing to comprehend life fully, in precisely the same way that silent films are thought to be less capable than talkies. There have been, however, productions of Hamlet in which The Murder of Gonzago is entirely cut and the dumb show retained, in part perhaps to emphasize the contrast of the interlude with the play proper, wordlessness against words.50 Additionally, the action of the dumb show is fuller than that of The Murder of Gonzago, though many lines shorter, since the latter is broken off after Lucianus pours his poison into the Player King’s ear. Claudius’s rising at this point forestalls any staged evidence of the king’s dying—Hamlet must explain that “‘A poisons him i’th’ garden for his estate” (263)—as well as the queen’s complicated response to this deed. If tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, as Aristotle claims, then of the two imitations of actions within 3.2 of Hamlet, only the former, the dumb show, can be a tragedy because only it is complete. It is complete because in it the king is shown to be dead, but that is not all. The first moments of the dumb show have the king and queen embracing, her kneeling and making show of protestation (of her love for him), their embracing again (he “declines his head upon her neck”), his lying down and falling asleep, and her leaving. So far it differs not much from the version to follow. The Player Queen’s insistence, for example, that “In second husband let me be accurst; / None wed the second but who killed the first” (181–82), is an illustration of her “Protestation,” the more ironical in its relation to the resolution of the dumb show. Now, in the dumb show, “comes in a Fellow, takes off his Crown, kisses it, pours poison in the King’s ears, and Exits.” Nothing in The Murder of Gonzago hypothesizes the murderer’s motivation in the way that, here, it is shown by his kissing, and therefore loving and desiring, the crown. The effect recalls an earlier moment in the drama of Shakespeare, in the second part of Henry IV, when Prince Hal lovingly apostrophizes the crown of his sleeping father, who he believes is dead: “My due from thee [Father] is this imperial crown, / Which, as immediate from thy place and blood, / Derives itself to me” (4.5.40–42). Even more than legitimate heirs do, usurpers must love the crowns they will murder for, and when, a scene later in Hamlet, in a so50. For example, Hamlet at Elsinore (Dir. Philip Saville. With Christopher Plummer, Robert Shaw, Alex Clunes, June Tobin, and Jo Maxwell. A BBC Television/Danmarks Radio Production, 1964) presents the dumb show only. See Bernice W. Kliman, Hamlet: Film, Television, and Audio Performance (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), 164.

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liloquy, Claudius finally confesses his crime and reviews “those effects for which I did the murder: / My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen” (3.3.54–55), we hear him putting words to the action of the “Fellow” who had kissed the crown. Lucianus, by contrast, never mentions the crown. What remains in the dumb show corresponds to nothing in The Murder of Gonzago. We cannot know if the latter would have shown these details had it not been interrupted, but as it is the dumb show is our only source for them. The murderer leaves, and then “The Queen returns, finds the King dead, and makes passionate Action.” Whether or not he authorized the dumb show and is pleased by the fact of its performance, Hamlet must find the queen’s passionate action satisfying, for her “gestures expressive of deep sorrow”51 are an imitation of that part of the Player’s recitation in 2.2 that Hamlet seemed then most to appreciate, the “Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect” (555) that conveyed the sorrow of—Hecuba. Hamlet is a play of lost fathers and husbands and of the sorrow these losses provoke—or fail to provoke. One man, Laertes, loses his father during the course of the play; a second, Hamlet himself, lost a father a month or two before the play begins; a third, Fortinbras, lost a father as many as thirty years earlier;52 and a fourth, Pyrrhus, an imagined character we might say, has lost his father right before the imagined action, the killing of Priam, that displays him. Four women, all queens, lose husbands, if one includes Hecuba: she, Gertrude, the queen in the dumb show, and the queen in The Murder of Gonzago. Gertrude’s show of grief over the loss of her first husband, if any, is in the past when Hamlet begins, and abbreviated action prevents any display by the queen in The Murder of Gonzago. That leaves Hecuba, of whose “instant burst of clamor” the Player told us, and the dumb show’s queen, whose passionate action shows grief that is no less for being without sound. This display raises the question of the dumb show’s provenance. When Hamlet asked the players, “Can you play The Murder of Gonzago?” was he referring to an old play in their repertory that was conventionally initiated by a dumb show, whether or not he wanted it so initiated on this occasion? Or is the dumb show the players’ improvisation, on this occasion only, that faithfully indicates what would follow, had it not been interrupted? That is, would the Player Queen have reacted to the Player King’s corpse as the queen in the dumb show does to her king’s corpse, with extreme show of emotion, had she had a chance, but with words? Is it conceivable that the players added the “passionate action” of 51. The gloss of G. R. Hibbard, Hamlet (The Oxford Shakespeare), 3.2.126.9n. 52. It is the Gravedigger, who claims that he came to his present occupation on “that day that our last King Hamlet o’ercame Fortinbras” and then that he has been “sexton here, man and boy, for thirty years” (5.1.142–43, 161), who provides the evidence (by no means universally accepted) that young Fortinbras lost his father thirty years earlier.

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the dumb show on their own authority after Hamlet had shown such interest in the grief of Hecuba? And in this realm of almost boundless conjecture, there is yet another possibility. Formerly intense interest in identifying “the speech of some dozen or sixteen lines” (2.2.541) that Hamlet asked the players to insert into The Murder of Gonzago has subsided; with some asperity Harold Jenkins comments, “The voluminous attempts to locate the speech in the Gonzago play are only a degree less absurd than speculations about how the players came to have this play at all.”53 Maybe so, but then why do Hamlet and Shakespeare invite any reasonably sensitive reader to look for the lines? It is a possibility I have never seen stated, however, that the dozen or sixteen lines are not present at all because Claudius’s rising interrupts the play of Gonzago before the lines could be spoken. Thus, what Hamlet wished to add is unrelated to making an old play relevant to a later situation, at least with respect to the guilt of Claudius or an identification of him with Lucianus; what he wished to do, rather, was have the Player Queen’s response to the sight of her dead husband imitate that of Hecuba to the mutilated Priam, and by implication show Gertrude how a faithful, loving wife reacts to a dear husband murdered. The dozen or sixteen lines would have been spoken for the benefit of Gertrude, not Claudius,54 but as so often (like killing Claudius by stabbing through the curtain in Gertrude’s chamber in 3.4), Hamlet’s purpose is frustrated, and he fails in what he tries to do. After the queen’s passionate action, in the dumb show, the Poisoner returns with some companions, who carry away the dead body. Then the Poisoner, who had already seemed “to lament” with her, “Woos the Queen with Gifts, she seems loath and unwilling awhile, but in the end, accepts his love.” Once again Shakespeare is miming, and mining, his earlier material, Richard’s courtship of Lady Anne in 1.2 of Richard III, notwithstanding his part in the murder of her husband, Prince Edward, in 3 Henry VI (5.5). In Richard’s scene with Anne, she entertains no doubts that it was he who killed her husband; the challenge to Richard is to show her that the deed was worthy because stimulated by her and performed for her. “Your beauty was the cause of that effect,” he tells her of the killing, 53. The New Arden Hamlet, 2.2.535–36 Long Note (pp. 481–82). Jenkins does, however, consider the particular claims of 3.3.183–208 and 249–54 to be the inserted speech. 54. In Hamlet and Narcissus (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), John Russell dismisses the possibility that Hamlet requires further proof of Claudius’s guilt after the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy. The entire purpose of The Murder of Gonzago becomes, then, the response of Gertrude: “To execute [the tasks imposed on him by the Ghost] successfully, to cleanse the royal bed of incest, Hamlet need only gain the cooperation of one of the incriminated parties, Gertrude. To achieve this goal Hamlet mobilizes the provocative skill of the players” (124).

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shakespeare’s imitations Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep To undertake the death of all the world, So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom. (125–28)

And when she says, “It is a quarrel just and reasonable, / To be reveng’d on him that kill’d my husband,” justifying her desire for revenge against Richard, he says, He that bereft thee, lady, of thy husband, Did it to help thee to a better husband. (140–43)

Richard’s logic, or his rhetoric, or the force of his personality, carries the day, so much so that after Anne’s exit, Richard is amazed by his success: “What, I . . .” to do all this, Having God, her conscience, and these bars [i.e., her hatred] against me— And I, no friends to back my suit at all But the plain devil and dissembling looks— And yet to win her, all the world to nothing! Ha! Hath she forgot already that brave prince, Edward, her lord, whom I, some three months since, Stabb’d in my angry mood at Tewkesbury? (235, 239–46)

It is by no means certain in the dumb show in Hamlet that the Poisoner is condoling with a widow aware that it is he who killed her husband. The inappropriateness of courtship under the circumstances, her dead husband having just been removed from the stage, is surely sufficient by itself to make her seem “loath and unwilling awhile.” And yet that the Poisoner had his “two or three Mutes” at the ready to remove the body points to his complicity and suggests an imitation of Richard III. If that is so, then the dumb show is a truer imitation of that early play than it is of the historical circumstances behind this one, Hamlet, for Gertrude’s extreme surprise at Hamlet’s allegation that she did “kill a king and marry with his brother”— “As kill a king?” she says, astonished (3.4.29–30)—appears to absolve her of participation in Claudius’s treachery. In its “purpose . . . of catching the conscience of the king,” Alvin Kernan observes, the play-within-the-play “succeeds brilliantly, if momentarily; although ironically, given Hamlet’s condemnation of inexplicable dumb shows, it is the mime rather than the main play that has the greatest

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effect.”55 This remark is puzzling, for Kernan never shows what the effect of the dumb show is or just how it is achieved, and Shakespeare’s text reveals no explicit effect of the dumb show on Claudius, who does not speak between line 97–98 (“These words are not mine”), almost forty lines before the dumb show begins, and line 234 (“Have you heard the argument?”), some eighty lines after the “main play” has begun. On the other hand, setting aside the matter of the king’s reaction, Kernan is correct to focus on the dumb show as having, one way or another, a greater effect than the more celebrated production that follows. Although The Murder of Gonzago allows the Player Queen to express an ideal of constancy—“Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife, / If, once a widow, ever I be a wife!” (224–25)—that is not observable in the conduct of Gertrude, it denies her any response to her husband’s murder; in the dumb show, by contrast, although the queen’s “show of protestation” is at best ambiguous (is she insisting upon love, fidelity, or constancy?), she is allowed an extremely complicated response to her husband’s murder: enormous grief, resistance to the murderer, and then acquiescence to him. Oddly, this response justifies what the Player King will say to his wife: “This world is not for aye, nor ’tis not strange / That even our loves should with our fortunes change” (202–3). There is nothing cynical in the Player King’s expression of this proverbial wisdom, nor, in Richard III, in Lady Anne’s application of it to her own circumstances. Nor need there be anything cynical about the queen’s final accommodations in the dumb show, nor therefore about Gertrude’s to her second husband. The Murder of Gonzago is an incomplete imitation of the dumb show that precedes it. We might like to have the rest of this play, and therefore get to see Lucianus’s wooing of the Player Queen, but we do not. The dumb show itself is an imitation of an old play in the players’ repertory, or of the recent history of the Danish royal family, or of both, with either or both filtered through the sensibility of young Hamlet and altered by his imagination. Some part of the dumb show, that is, may correspond as physical action to the dozen or sixteen lines of dialogue he added to The Murder of Gonzago, which then were or were not spoken. Insofar as the last business of the dumb show—the queen’s acceptance of the love of the Poisoner— is the creation of Hamlet, that creation demonstrates an extraordinary understanding of his mother, or desire to understand her, of her progress from one man to another as the conditions of her life change. Although in the final scene of act 3 Hamlet toys with the idea of his mother’s complicity in

55. Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 200.

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her husband’s murder, as in the second scene of act 1 he shows amazement at the “frailty” that allowed her to be swiftly “married with my uncle” (151), here, in the dumb show, to the extent credit for it may be given to Hamlet, he shows real sympathy with the necessities and choices his mother faced. In the last speech of the play Fortinbras salutes the fallen Prince of Denmark. “Let four captains / Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage,” he says in a pseudo-simile,56 masking identity (for Hamlet is a soldier) as mere resemblance: For he was likely, had he been put on, To have prov’ most royal; and for his passage, The soldiers’ music and the rite of war Speak loudly for him. (5.2.402–7)

“Had he been put on”—if Hamlet had lived to become king—he would have shown himself worthy of the advancement, would have proved most royal. Who does not wish to think so? But since he is never put on, we can never be certain. The conclusion of that which does not conclude cannot be described with much certainty. Fortinbras’s attention to this interruption of the design of a royal life, at the play’s end, calls attention to the interruptedness of lives and plans, throughout the play. Hamlet is in a sense about interruption and consequent incompleteness—of young lives, of romance, of marriage, of political stability, and, at the center of the play, the image of the other broken patterns, The Murder of Gonzago. Incompleteness is inherent in tragedy, where there will be an unpredictable, disruptive, and finally fatal intervention of force x or circumstance y into someone’s rational, reasonable, and laudable design. Pondering Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, S. H. Butcher worked out his own, which begins, “Tragedy, in its pure idea, shows us a mortal will engaged in an unequal struggle with destiny. . . .”57 One reason the struggle is always unequal is that destiny is always unknowable and irrational and thus possesses a limitless capacity to interrupt. How was The Murder of Gonzago meant to end—with what sense of rapprochement between the Player Queen and Lucianus, or of her resistance to him? In his essay “Of the inconstancie of our actions,” Montaigne observes, parenthetically, that “Empedocles noted this deformity to be among the 56. The defining instance of the pseudo-simile is perhaps Launce’s statement about his disagreeable dog, Crab: “He is a stone, a very pebble stone, and has no more pity in him than a dog” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.3.9–11). 57. S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts, 4th ed. (New York, 1951), 311–12. Quoted in Oscar Mandel, A Definition of Tragedy (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 21.

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Agrigentines, that they gave themselves so over unto delights, as if they should die tomorrow next, and built as if they should never die.”58 The first action is finite and implies a tragic view of life; the second is infinite and implies a comic view. The Agrigentines held both views simultaneously, a comprehensive grasp Hamlet gains when he tells Horatio, “The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes?” (5.2.221–23). One must be prepared to die, Hamlet learns; one must be prepared equally not to die. But Hamlet is a tragedy in which men and women die, prepared or not, their lives and plans incomplete, the full shape of their lives unknown, as the end of The Murder of Gonzago is unknown except insofar as it is figured by the dumb show, as the end of Danish history, whose earlier moments these plays-within-the-play seek to imitate, is unknown.

58. Montaigne, The Essayes of Montaigne, book 2, chapter 1, trans. John Florio (1603; New York: Modern Library, 1933), 294.

4 The Tempest and Imitatio Depravata The Dark Backward and Abysm of Time

THE ACTION OF THE TEMPEST IS COMPRESSED INTO A SINGLE AFTERNOON, “The time ’twixt six and now,” Prospero tells us, “now” being already after noon or “Past the mid season . . . At least two glasses” (1.2.239–40). It is often claimed, therefore, that the play satisfies Aristotle’s alleged demand for unity of time and thus should be especially congenial to the critical temper of the Renaissance, when Aristotle’s judgments were often regarded as law.1 Tragedy, Lodovico Castelvetro writes in 1571 (forty years before Shakespeare wrote his play), “must be set in a place no larger than the stage on which the actors perform and in a period of time no longer than that which is filled by their performance. . . . [This period] cannot be longer than one revolution of the sun, or twelve hours, for people cannot go without food, drink, and sleep and without relieving their bowels and their bladders and attending to other bodily needs for longer than twelve hours. Nor can they be deceived into believing that the action extends over a number of days and nights when they can tell by the testimony of their senses that they have been sitting in the theatre only a few hours.”2 Two hundred years later, in the Preface (1765) to his edition of Shakespeare’s plays, Dr. Johnson expresses very different ideas about what an audience may be made to suppose. “The criticks,” he writes, “hold it impossible, that an action of months or years can be possibly believed to pass in three hours; or that the spectator can suppose himself to sit in the theatre, while ambassadors go and return between distant kings, while armies are levied and towns besieged,” and while other matters supposedly too large for the stage transpire. Johnson goes on to dismiss the need for unity of place: “The objec1. Correcting the assumption of Renaissance and modern scholars that by “unity of time,” or “one revolution of the sun,” in the Poetics (chapters 24, 26), Aristotle means “the duration of the dramatic action, the period of time that is supposed to elapse during the play,” Gerald F. Else argues that “the duration Aristotle has in mind is the real duration of the play. . . .” See Aristotle’s Poetics, 208 et seq. 2. Castelvetro, Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry, 243–44.

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tion arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes that when the play opens the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine more. . . . The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.” As for place, so implicitly for time: if we can pretend that London is Alexandria, then there should be no difficulty in pretending that the characters before us live two thousand years earlier, or in skipping about several days or months or years at a time in that long-ago age.3 Although Johnson’s corrections of the earnest and literal-minded excesses of those like Castelvetro are convincing, the fact remains that The Tempest occupies three or four hours of an afternoon on a small island. Its time is as concentrated as that of the Oedipus Tyrannus, and like Sophocles’ play, The Tempest invokes, draws upon, is continually mindful of, seeks to resolve, and makes sense only in terms of several very complex earlier moments in the lives of its characters. However, to make any sense at all, The Tempest, unlike Oedipus, must itself give us an immense amount of information, most of it furnished by Prospero in act 1, scene 2 and the court party in act 2, scene 1, about the past. Shakespeare’s play demands extensive exposition; that of Sophocles, because it taps into a common store of mythic information, does not. No London theatergoer could be expected to know the background to The Tempest in the way that an Athenian audience, watching the Oedipus Tyrannus in ca. 427 B.C., knew more about Thebes in the generations before Oedipus arrived there than Oedipus does himself. Indeed, what the theatergoer does not know about the earlier years of Prospero and the others is one of the important implications of the play’s lacking a concrete, specific source in the way of most of Shakespeare’s plays. “[T]here is no known text with a narrative line that compellingly matches the plot constructed by Shakespeare” in The Tempest (and also in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Labor’s Lost), as one recent commentator writes.4 In theory—by and large, I think, only in theory—early spectators to Henry V or The Winter’s Tale could be aided in their understanding of the actions unfolding before them, could be educated to establish a kind of dialogue with these actions, by recollections of Holinshed’s Chronicles or Robert Greene’s Pandosto, though it is hard to imagine a spectator possessed by these works in the way the audience of Sophocles was possessed by the story of Thebes. Nevertheless, the audience to Henry V and The Winter’s Tale has at least hypothetical access to 3. Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, 23–24. 4. Hamilton, Virgil and The Tempest, 3.

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historical or literary-historical information that simply does not exist behind The Tempest, for all Shakespeare’s use of contemporary travel writings and ancient literature, especially the Metamorphoses of Ovid and the Aeneid of Virgil. And so this information must be pulled in. Giving some of it to Miranda, Prospero says, “Hear a little further, / And then I’ll bring thee to the present business / Which now’s upon’s; without the which this story / Were most impertinent” (1.2.135–38). And conversely: without “this story” the “present business” would be not merely impertinent but incomprehensible. “[W]hat’s past is prologue” (2.1.254), Antonio tells Sebastian in a very different context; without consideration of its prologue, deep in the past, the play that is The Tempest would make little sense. One might speak of the play’s “prehistory,” but since The Tempest takes place in a timeless present, its conflicts and harmonies as fresh and ongoing as each new reading, each new performance, I shall use the simpler word “history” for everything that takes place, or took place, in the time— imagined by us but remembered by the play’s characters—before the frightened master of a ship exclaims, “Boatswain!” (1.1.1). The very earliest of these moments in the history of The Tempest began with the expulsion from “Argier,” or Algiers, of the “damn’d witch Sycorax” (1.2.263), her removal to an island in the Mediterranean, where she confined in “a cloven pine” (277) the island’s single inhabitant, Ariel, had a son, Caliban, and died, probably all in that order. In this tree Ariel “Imprison’d . . . didst painfully remain / A dozen years” (278–79) until Prospero, some time after coming there, freed him. Since Prospero himself has now, that is, by the time the play begins, been on the island a dozen years (“Twelve year since, Miranda, twelve year since, / Thy father was the Duke of Milan” [53–54], he tells his daughter, referring to the last moments in Milan), then Sycorax came to it a dozen years earlier still, twenty-four years ago now, if Prospero freed Ariel immediately on his arrival—but we don’t know that he did. It seems a virtual certainty, however, to continue this meditation on chronology, that Sycorax’s expulsion from Algiers preceded the next major event in the play’s history, the coup d’état in Milan that culminated in Prospero’s expulsion from his dukedom. In these two events, or series of events, Prospero’s life strikingly imitates that of Sycorax: expulsion from the homeland (in North Africa in her case, in Italy in his), travel across the sea, arrival at the same island, establishment of dominance there, and, sooner or later, the imposition of bondage upon earlier inhabitants. However, if we are to believe Prospero’s account to Miranda—and it must be acknowledged that the account is always self-serving, is not balanced by, and is hardly even allowed to be qualified by, any other account, and is very far from disinterested—the reasons for the two expulsions differ. 5 Syco5. Cf. The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,

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rax was sent away from Algiers “For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible / To enter human hearing” (264–65), a punishment, Prospero invites Ariel (and us) to agree, she deserved, though no one ever says what constitutes the mischief and sorceries. Prospero, by contrast, far from committing mischiefs manifold, was a devoted student of “the liberal Arts / Without a parallel; those being all my study, / The government I cast upon my brother, / And to my state grew stranger, being transported / And rapt in secret studies” (73–77). To find time for these bookish pursuits Prospero gave to his brother “The manage of my state” (70), and although it might seem fair for one governing in deed to govern also in name, Prospero assures his daughter that his brother was “perfidious” (68), her uncle “false” (77), that Prospero’s merely “being so retir’d, / O’er-priz’d all popular rate, in my false brother / Awak’d an evil nature” (91–93). It is a difficult and convoluted explanation, as if Prospero fears that excessive clarity might lead Miranda too much to sympathize with Antonio’s perspective and behavior. Exactly what “O’erprized all popular rate,” was valuable beyond the general reckoning, the nature of his secluded tasks or the very fact of his seclusion? In any event, Antonio, being “lorded” (97) or raised to power by Prospero’s “trust” (93) in him, “Made such a sinner of his memory, / To credit his own lie, he did believe / He was indeed the Duke” (101–3). One night thereafter “did Antonio open / The gates of Milan” (129–30) to Alonso, the King of Naples, a confederate of Antonio and to Prospero “an enemy . . . inveterate” (121–22). Agents led by “A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo” (161), removed Prospero and Miranda from the palace, placed them in “A rotten carcass of a butt, not rigged, / Nor tackle, sail, nor mast” (146–47), and pushed them out to sea, where because of food, fresh water, “Rich garments, linens, stuffs, and necessaries” (164), not to mention Prospero’s books, all provided by the noble Gonzalo, they survived. In short, according to this disquisition, Sycorax deserved what happened to her—merely received some sort of equitable recompense for past transgressions—and Prospero did not deserve what happened to him. Prospero would think so. In fact—and this analysis is not an attempt to justify Antonio’s behavior—Prospero’s mismanagement, or better, his nonmanagement, of Milan, is exceedingly vulnerable to criticism. The Aeneid, intertextually of such great prominence in The Tempest that the play is described by one commentator as no less than a “deeply embedded, metaphorical transvaluation” of Virgil’s poem,6 offers one criterion for judging Prospero. In the Aeneid, according to Gary Schmidgall, “ethical motivation revolves 1987), 25: the play’s “realities throughout are largely the products of Prospero’s imagination, or of the imaginative recreation of his memory.” 6. Barbara J. Bono, Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 220.

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on the great axis of pietas and furor,” categories that distinguish, respectively, “between actions that foster and those that subvert civilization.”7 “Furor,” he writes, “is represented by the forces that threaten to destroy the polis,” and these include, if not Dido’s love for Aeneas itself, then the consequences of that love, chief of which, politically, is neglect of Carthage. After Dido is smitten by Aeneas, “The towers [of Carthage] no longer rise, the youth are slack / In drill for arms, the cranes and derricks rusting, / Walls halt halfway to heaven,”8 and after the great storm, sexual consummation, and “marriage / For her,” what Dido calls “marriage” [coniugium vocat],9 matters are even worse. To Dido’s continuing neglect of Carthage, Aeneas adds neglect of the idea of Rome: “And now the couple wanton out the winter, / Heedless of ruling [regnorum immemores], prisoners of passion.”10 Political responsibility is an imperative of governors; dereliction of this responsibility, which threatens the polis, is reprehensible, in The Tempest no less than in the Aeneid. We may sympathize with Prospero’s preference for the private over the public, but we should not share his implicit attitude that his expression of this attitude was broadly acceptable. Antonio is a very wicked man, but Prospero, who should have known better, empowered him and allowed, if not encouraged, his wickedness. In exile, then, like Sycorax before them, Prospero and Miranda come to the island. In the world of The Tempest there are places for exiles to go, but not empty places, so upon arrival, they must establish conditions to make their habitude acceptable. It is remarkable how similar are the histories of Sycorax and Prospero. In their native lands both practiced magic, though Prospero would have us believe there is a qualitative or moral difference between her “sorceries” and his “secret studies” (which led, he admits late in the play, to the questionable practice of reviving the dead: “graves at my command / Have wak’d their sleepers, op’d, and let ’em forth / By my so potent Art” [5.1.48–50]), perhaps between black and white magic—and so there may be, but in the absence of corroborating evidence it is hard not to hear in Prospero’s censure of “The foul witch Sycorax” a note of professional jealousy; certain it is that Ariel doesn’t like being subordinated to either of them, although having promised Ariel his eventual freedom, Prospero may have the edge in his affections. Both Sycorax and Prospero belonged to societies that closed ranks against them—that of Milan led by 7. Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 165. 8. Virgil, The Aeneid of Virgil, tr. Humphries, 4, 87–89. 9. The Aeneid of Virgil, tr. Humphries, 4, 164–65. For the Latin text, see Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, tr. Fairclough, 4, 171. 10. The Aeneid of Virgil, tr. Humphries, 4, 191–92. For the Latin text, tr. Fairclough, 4, 194.

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an envious brother to unseat its legitimate ruler, and perhaps that of Algiers to do the same thing, though Prospero seems to imply that Sycorax’s magic made her a feared outsider in her homeland. Even if that is so and the inhabitants of Algiers did the right thing, Prospero’s own state proved a most unstable entity, a place where legal forms cannot sustain themselves unguided by wise and benevolent human control, a place where delegated rule whets the appetite of the deputy, where the ruler’s inattention costs him his job and nearly his life. And yet by contrast to the primitive island where everyone ends up and, from a European point of view, to the barbarous North Africa, Milan must be the pinnacle of civilization, the place of the most desirable and profitable associations, a Renaissance court replete with Duke, courtiers, fine ladies, maids of honor (Miranda remembers “Four or five women once that tended me” [47]), and highly specialized servants (probably including jesters and butlers, for instance, to rival those of Naples, like Trinculo and Stephano) and of course all the materials, like books, necessary for cultivation of the mind. Moreover, as it is easy to sentimentalize the spectacle of the ousted duke and his little daughter “not / Out three years old” (39–40) tempest tossed in their “rotten carcass of a butt,” so should one remember that Sycorax was pregnant when she came to the island: “This blue-ey’d hag was hither brought with child, / And here was left by the sailors” (269–70); the word “hag” so dehumanizes Sycorax, and allies her with the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, those “secret, black, and midnight hags” (4.1.48), that it is easy to forget that she is about to be a mother. (What with puerperal fever and other perils of childbirth, it was not easy to be a mother in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, hence all those widowers in Shakespeare, like Polonius, Brabantio, King Lear, and of course Prospero; and in Shakespeare’s last two romances, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, it is not easy even to be an expectant mother: the pregnant Hermione is hied off to prison in the earlier play, at 2.1.126, and the pregnant Sycorax is exiled to a barren island in the later one.) When Ariel resisted “her earthy and abhorr’d commands, / Refusing her grand hests” (273–74), revolted as Prospero seems to be by the thought, maybe Sycorax simply wanted some assistance delivering her child—a not unreasonable request of another female, which is what Ariel may be. As Stephen Orgel points out, Ariel was played as a female exclusively for some two centuries. Jeanne Roberts observes that “the male pronoun,” as a designation of Ariel, “occurs only in the stage directions. . . .”11 But unlike Ariel and the witches in Macbeth, Sycorax’s sex is clear. The circumstances of Prospero’s and Sycorax’s lives that lead to their island exiles are thus remarkably similar, the two events paired, each a kind 11. The Tempest, ed. Orgel, 77, and Jeanne Addison Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 112.

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of dramatic imitation of the other, even if, as Prospero would have us believe, he is good and was treated unjustly, and Sycorax was bad and treated justly. The two remaining events in the history of the play are similarly reciprocal, mutually mimetic in character; they concern the coming of age of two young women, one of whom becomes politically, dynastically useful to her father, while the other attracts the gaze and stimulates the hormones of a man. Both women are the females in triangles containing also their fathers and the designated husband of one, the would-be lover of the other. As Sycorax is foil to Prospero, so Claribel is foil to Miranda, and the King of Tunis to Caliban, and resemblances among these several interactions, or imitations, are arresting. Claribel’s principal foil, I submit, is Miranda, but the similarity of aspects of her life to those of the life of Sycorax are also worth remarking. Claribel ends where, or near where, Sycorax begins, that is, in North Africa, traveling there, to Tunis, by ship from Naples as Sycorax left there, Algiers, by ship for the island of her exile. We assume that Sycorax left her home unwillingly, since the word Prospero uses for her departure is “banish’d” (1.2.266); we know that Claribel left unwillingly: “the fair soul herself,” Sebastian smirkingly reminds Alonso, “Weighed between loathness” to marry the King of Tunis “and obedience” to her father “at / Which end o’th’ beam should bow” (2.1.131–33). It bowed toward her father’s wishes; the considered alternative, the full expression of her “loathness,” the lines seem to suggest, would have been suicide. The two women whom we know only in the play’s past, then, are both exiles, forced from their communities by the will and power of others. Nor is their arrival at their final destinations left to chance, or to “Providence divine” (1.2.159), in the manner of Prospero and Miranda, “Bor[ne] . . . some leagues to sea” (145), and left there to drift. Sometimes this romance convention of leaving the abandoned ones to chance or Providence works out satisfactorily in the long run, as it does for Prospero and Miranda here and for the infant Perdita, left on the coast of Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale, but sometimes not. In the seventh tale of day two of Boccaccio’s Decameron the young pagan woman Alatiel, the bride-to-be in another marriage arranged by father and husband, is dispatched to her betrothed in the Algarve in a ship with her attendants and a crew of sailors; bad weather and the cowardice of the crew prevent her reaching her destination until four years have elapsed and nine men have thousands of times enjoyed her sexual favors. Alatiel has not randomly drifted about the sea, but her fate could be read nevertheless as insufficient attention to her disposal by her father.12 Not so Alonso, who will not risk 12. See Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, tr. G. H. McWilliam, 2d ed. (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1995). See also Mark Taylor, “The Fortunes of Alatiel: A Reading of Decameron 2.7,” Forum Italicum, forthcoming.

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his plans or Claribel’s virginity and therefore personally carries her off to Tunis, as in different circumstances Sycorax is “brought” to the island “by th’ sailors” (1.2.269–70). Nothing in a woman’s future that can be controlled by man is left to chance. There is no other daughter in a play of Shakespeare’s who is so obedient to her father, notwithstanding her own wishes to the contrary, as Claribel. A distant second, Ophelia does as her father would have her do (“I shall obey, my lord,” Hamlet 1.3.136), scarcely showing awareness of any alternative (“I do not know, my lord, what I should think,” 104); then when he is dead, and can no longer change his mind and bless her romance with Hamlet, she goes mad and commits suicide. But until that time she is a character of great prominence in the play. Claribel, by contrast, is so entirely her father’s creature, except for her fleeting expression of “loathness,” that she is erased and effaced from her own play: she does not even appear in The Tempest. Still, since Claribel has gone, in the immediate past of the play, from not being wife to the King of Tunis to being his wife, since he has in some sense “won” her (by winning her father), their marriage presents itself as an extreme variation—extreme, indeed, to the point of grotesquerie—on the wooing-winning-wedding paradigm in Shakespeare. Many Shakespearean marriages have nothing to do with dynastic aspirations, that of Hermia and Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, but many do, and these “political marriages,” as Ann Jennalie Cook writes, “range from cynical alliances of convenience to full-blown courtship with declarations of mutual love.”13 None other is more cynical than the marriage of Tunis and Claribel, from which, so far as we know, any kind of courtship was entirely absent; there is no evidence that husband and wife had even met before Claribel was delivered to Tunis. The word “courtship,” technically, suggests a form of behavior, practiced in courts, preliminary to a man’s acquisition of a wife; the senses of the word seem to evolve from general “Behavior or action befitting a court” (OED definition 1, which cites Love’s Labor’s Lost, “Trim gallants, full of Courtship and of state” [5.2.363]) through the forms appropriate to persons, “Practice of the arts of a courtier; courtcraft; diplomacy, flattery, etc.” (OED definition 4) to the specific business of addressing a prospective wife, “The action or process of paying court to a woman with a view to marriage” (OED definition 6, which cites The Merchant of Venice, “Be merry, and imploy your chiefest thoughts / To courtship and such faire ostents of loue” [2.8.43–44]). That courtship, perhaps as early as the word exists in this sense, is practiced not only in courts, does not mean that it ceases to be an adjunct proper to courts

13. Ann Jennalie Cook, Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 241.

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and to those who inhabit them. Ruled by a king and not a mere duke, Naples contains the higher of the two courts in the past (and in the future) of The Tempest, but it is a court where by fiat of the king a woman may be married into exile with no attention whatever to courtship. Alonso, in other words, undermines the civilized and civilizing forms of the world he rules, or he subordinates them to his larger political needs. If courtship counts for so little in the negotiations between Naples and Tunis, what can be expected of Caliban in his first efforts to secure a mate? Harry Berger, who accepts Caliban far more at Prospero’s valuation than I do—though with some important demurrals (“Why do we respond to qualities in Caliban which Prospero ignores, and why are we made to feel that the magician is more vindictive than he needs to be?”)—asserts that Caliban is “a first-generation human being, [whose] desire apprehends limited forms of beauty—money, wine, woman, and song; [and whose] impulses to love and worship are moved by brave and fine appearances when they are not moved by mere alcohol and lust.”14 How difficult it must be for a “first-generation human being” to differentiate between lust and love, how much more difficult to know how to seek the requital of love (or for that matter of lust) when those who should and perhaps do know—like the kings of Naples and Tunis—choose not to practice their knowledge! In the history of The Tempest, was Caliban’s pursuit of one woman any less respectful of her than that of the King of Tunis was of another? Since, in the play itself, Ferdinand’s pursuit of Miranda will so clearly be done the right way—the proper forms of courtship and courtiership practiced by a courtier even when far from court, which both win a woman and satisfy her father—is Caliban’s any further from it than Tunis’s? In De rerum natura, Lucretius hypothesizes about the mating practices of early people, if perhaps not quite the first generation of human beings: “And Venus joined the bodies of lovers in the woods,” he writes; “for either the woman was attracted by mutual desire, or caught by the man’s violent force and vehement lust, or by a bribe—acorns and arbute-berries or choice pears” (5.962–65).15 The several possibilities are interesting: the man’s general sexual interest is assumed, and if the woman responds to it, then their bodies are joined; or the man’s sexual interest is of such high degree that he will take what he wants, making the woman’s perspective immaterial; or the man pays for what he wants—but whether his gifts are symbolic tokens of what is later called courtship (like the “bracelets of thy hair, rings, gauds, conceits, / Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats” with which, 14. Harry Berger Jr., Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance FictionMaking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 150–51, 157. 15. Lucretius, De rerum natura, tr. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith. 2d ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and London: William Heinemann, 1982).

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according to Egeus, Lysander has won Hermia [A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1.33–34]), which therefore win her affection, or whether they are the currency with which a whore is paid, which therefore win only her body, is uncertain.16 For these earliest people, in any event, there were no external considerations, like the construction and maintaining of dynasties. Caliban’s “technique” with women we will never know; Prospero accuses him of “seek[ing] to violate / The honour of my child” (1.2.349–50)—the second possibility in Lucretius, and maybe he did, but it seems unlikely that Prospero would be any more inclined than Brabantio to accept any kind of alliance between an outsider and his daughter, however well both outsiders, Caliban and Othello, are entertained before a sexual or marital bonding becomes an issue. If Miranda had been “attracted by mutual desire,” as she will be when she sees Ferdinand, it is unlikely she would admit to it to her father. If Caliban offered her a bribe, he would probably not admit to that, and if he didn’t offer her one—well, when Prospero was teaching him “how / To name the bigger light, and how the less” (337–38), he was not teaching him also how to attract or court a woman. Caliban’s devices may well have been crude, but there is really no evidence they are any more insulting to Miranda, any less respectful of her wishes, than the King of Tunis’s devices were to Claribel. And if Tunis did not know any better, surely Alonso did; he might have said to his prospective son-in-law, as Lord Capulet says to his prospective son-in-law, “But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart, / My will to her consent is but a part” (Romeo and Juliet 1.2.16–17). But he didn’t. Alonso, enemy inveterate to Prospero, gives his daughter to a North African; Prospero preserves, or protects, his daughter from a North African. A considerable beneficiary of Alonso’s gift, it is probable, even though not precisely stated in the play, is he himself: with Claribel married to Africa, Alonso’s influence is extended into that part of the world, or, alternatively,

16. The ambiguity of this passage might well serve those feminists who claim that, since the dependent status of the human female often denies her genuine freedom of choice, sexuality in romance or marriage will in such instances be a form of slavery or prostitution. For instance, Susan Brownmiller writes, “Women [in ancient times] were wholly owned subsidiaries and not independent beings. Rape could not be envisioned [by men] as a matter of female consent or refusal; nor could a definition acceptable to males be based on a malefemale understanding of a female’s right to her bodily integrity. Rape entered the law through the back door, as it were, as a property crime of man against man. Woman, of course, was viewed as the property.” (Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape [New York: Bantam, 1976], 8.) The notion, therefore, that a woman can enter freely and of her own desire into sexual relations becomes meaningless. Compare Andrea Dworkin: “Slavery is in the exploitation itself, any kind of forced labor that is done because people who are stronger want it done, including forced sex labor by women simply in response to male desire. . . ,” Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 17.

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the security of Naples is strengthened: Alonso’s quid pro quo is that Tunis now possesses, in Claribel, all of Europe that he desires. In preserving Miranda from Caliban, “this thing of darkness” whom Prospero, finally, will “Acknowledge mine” (5.1.275–76), Prospero is suppressing his own worst self, is both disavowing and disallowing his own attraction to the young female—now, suddenly, a woman—with whom he has lived nearly alone for twelve years. As Stephen Orgel writes about the strange assimilation of Caliban’s impulses to Prospero: “Caliban, like Sycorax, does in fact embody a whole range of qualities that we see in Prospero, but that he consistently denies in himself: rage, passion, vindictiveness; perhaps deepest and most disruptive, sexuality. . . . Caliban’s, however, is not the only dangerous sexuality to be feared in the play. Prospero’s repeated warnings to Ferdinand against pre-marital sex are not prompted by anything we see of Ferdinand’s behaviour. Caliban, in this context, is any man who takes an interest in Miranda, even the suitor of Prospero’s choice.”17 Daughters Claribel and Miranda are powerless in the face of their fathers’ fierce wills; and this powerlessness makes the gift Prospero withholds an imitation of the gift Alonso has bestowed. Sycorax, I have argued, is the model Prospero unconsciously imitates in coming to the island from afar and, once there, in enslaving the native population. Claribel is the model Miranda imitates, also unaware she does so, each young Italian woman the object of desire (political or sexual) of a North African male. Caliban, in this respect the imitator of the King of Tunis, becomes the model Ferdinand imitates, the crude advances of the former becoming, for the latter, a display of personal worth in tasks “nobly undergone” for “The mistress which I serve [who] quickens what’s dead, / And makes my labours pleasures” (3.1.3, 6–7). All of the original models are in what I call the play’s history, and so are the imitators except for Ferdinand, who first sees Miranda, loves her, and wins her (and her father), all before our eyes. In the play’s present, also, are its two designedly murderous conspiracies, of Antonio and Sebastian against Alonso, and of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo against Prospero. (Both of these plots imitate the insurrection of Antonio, aided by Alonso, against Prospero twelve years earlier.) I name them in the order in which they are born, Antonio’s “What might, / Worthy Sebastian?—O, what might?—” (2.1.205–6) preceding by a full act Caliban’s proposal to Stephano to yield Prospero to “thee asleep, / Where thou mayst knock a nail into his head” (3.2.62–63). The latter thus appears to imitate, by parody, the former. But one can easily enough invert the order of imitation and propose, not that Caliban’s plot lessens the gravity of Antonio’s, but that Antonio’s discloses the true ugliness of Caliban’s, even as it refines the machinations of a putative savage, a drunken butler, 17. The Tempest, ed. Orgel, 28.

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and a court jester. Caliban as the alien, both African and New World Other, misunderstood by Europeans for the Europeans’ own advantage, has been a major focus of criticism of The Tempest for a generation now, and I shall touch upon it in what follows. My larger concern, however, will be Antonio, a European entirely too well understood by Europeans, like Prospero (and Shakespeare). The disposition of Caliban represents the moral failure that will come about from the collision of cultures; the very existence of Antonio represents the perhaps greater moral failure always at the heart of civilization.

The Hour’s Now Come We turn now from the play’s history to its present, from then to now. At the beginning of The Tempest, a ship, bearing home to Naples Alonso, the King of Naples, Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan, and various of their relatives, councillors, and associates from Tunis, where the king’s only daughter, Claribel, has just been married to another king, is buffeted by a storm of such severity that the party abandon their vessel and make their way, individually or in small groups, to a Mediterranean island. On this island, unbeknownst to the ship’s party, live Prospero, the right Duke of Milan, whose power was taken from him by his usurping brother in a coup d’état twelve years earlier, his daughter Miranda, now fourteen or fifteen years old, and very different beings named Ariel and Caliban, who were on the island when Prospero and Miranda arrived and who now unwillingly serve Prospero. In the first scene of the play we witness a ferocious storm, the apparent foundering of the ship, and the preparation of its inhabitants to abandon it; and then in the next scene, we learn that we have been tricked: the storm has been a massive illusion staged by Ariel at the command of Prospero, and the ship has only seemed to sink and in fact will be ready to resume its journey to Italy when Prospero has completed his design. For, we also learn, Prospero has recognized in the happenstance that has brought the ship within his aura an opportunity to settle scores of a dozen years earlier, to set right the political arrangements of Milan, and with his daughter and those initially aboard the ship, to return to Italy. These first few minutes of the play’s action have many implications, among them: that the apparent operations of nature can in fact be supernatural matters; that the apparently random can in fact be under human direction; and that the greatest of cataclysms can be not so, that change may be constant but its direction, what is changing and how, may be uncertain. The ship’s foundering, or seeming to do so, is the play’s first instance of Virgilian furor unleashed, and as Antonio and Gonzalo interfere with the Boatswain’s best efforts to keep them all afloat—as they “mar our labour,” in the Boatswain’s words,

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and “assist the storm” (1.1.13, 14)—they recapitulate the perverse willfulness that brought Prospero down in Milan, an imitation deepened by the tacit invocation of the ancient topos of the ship of state. At the beginning of the Oedipus Tyrannus, for example, a priest tells Oedipus, “King, you yourself have seen our city reeling like a wreck already; it can scarcely lift its prow out of the depths, out of the bloody surf.”18 But the mischief of Antonio and Gonzalo at the beginning of The Tempest ironically promises the restoration of an order suspended years ago, the return to Milan of its rightful captain. Setting everything right takes Prospero only a few hours. During this time three main actions, the strands of the play’s plot, are born, evolve, and come, or fail to come, to fruition. First, Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples, and Miranda meet and fall in love; Prospero tests Ferdinand’s commitment to his daughter, finds it sufficient, and blesses their union. This successful courtship extends and complements the romantic, sexual, and marital materials involving Miranda, Caliban, Claribel, and the King of Tunis in the play’s history. Second, Antonio and Sebastian, Alonso’s brother, believing that Ferdinand has perished in the shipwreck and that, in Tunis, Claribel is forever lost to Europe, believing, that is, that Alonso has no heirs to his throne, plot to kill him, which will make Sebastian king of Naples. Unseen, Prospero knows of this homicidal conspiracy and through the agency of Ariel prevents it. Meanwhile, third, Trinculo and the drunken Stephano, respectively, jester and butler in the royal party, meet the disgruntled Caliban and plan, at his suggestion, to kill Prospero and seize control of the island. This plan also fails, again because of the watchfulness and magic of Prospero. These two actions are thematically related to the earlier political upheavals in Algiers and Milan, discussed above, resulting in the expulsions of Sycorax and Prospero. As in the relation of those two complexes of events to each other, so in the relation of these two strands of the play’s present tense murderous conspiracies to them: repetition with a difference. Described thus, the strands of the Tempest’s plot all show designs superimposed upon designs. Miranda and Ferdinand fall in love because of their own impulses, because of what they are (in her case a virgin, as he stipulates), but it is Prospero who must test and then certify the adequacy of their feelings toward each other, the capacity of these feelings to insure a lifetime of married happiness. Antonio and Sebastian, in one conspiracy, and Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano, in the other, all freely conceive strategies of political revolution and the tactics by which these revolutions shall be achieved; but the strategies are doomed from the outset by 18. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, tr. David Grene, in Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, vol. 1, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), lines 22–24.

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Prospero’s knowledge of them, knowledge of which the conspirators can have no knowledge. The dramatic contrast between the Miranda-Ferdinand plot and the two conspiracies is clear. The first, blessed by Prospero, motivated by love, aims toward and achieves union and harmony; its reward will be “quiet days, fair issue, and long life” (4.1.24). The other two, successfully opposed by Prospero, motivated by hatred, envy, and ambition, directed by “three men of sin” (as Ariel labels Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio, 3.3.53), aim toward division and discord. Less clear is the precise relation to each other of the two conspiracies. They are parallel plots, like the machinations of Goneril and Regan, on the one hand, and of Edmund, on the other, in King Lear, each unaware but insistently mimetic of the other. Each purposes a murder, the death of Alonso, the death of Prospero. Years ago, of course, Alonso was complicit with Antonio in his action against Prospero. “The King of Naples, being an enemy / To me inveterate,” Prospero tells his daughter, “hearkens my brother’s suit . . . [to] presently extirpate me and mine / Out of the dukedom, and confer fair Milan, / With all the honours, on my brother” (1.2.121–22, 125–27). How ironical, then, that the two rulers, king of Naples and king of an unnamed island, become twin targets of assassination, and that the latter is salvation of the former (as well as of himself), whose victim he had been earlier. Of the play’s nine scenes, parts of three (2.1, 3.3, 5.1) are concerned with the hatching, frustration, and judging of the Antonio plot, and parts of four (2.2, 3.2, 4.1, 5.1) with similar developments in the Caliban plot. (I name each plot after the man who proposes murder.) How, and to what end, do the plots comment upon each other? Caliban, and therefore the Caliban plot, has received far more critical attention, especially in recent years, than Antonio and the Antonio plot. “Modern critics and adapters have perceived that the mystery of the play centers upon him,” Caliban, Jeanne Roberts writes.19 This perception is perfectly understandable given the perspective and the perhaps inevitable postcolonial preoccupations of many modern critics, who are determined to historicize the play, to isolate and interrogate its anticipations of colonialism and imperialism, its allegorical representation of the Old World’s subjugation of the New, and of England’s suppression of Ireland, and its display of marginalized people.20 19. Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild, 113. 20. See Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), esp. chapter 4, “The New World Savage as Stranger; or, ‘’Tis new to thee,’” 199–253; Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990, passim. [The title essay was first published in 1976.]; 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

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These are by no means unworthy purposes, although it does seem to me that the play is often made to serve a preexisting polemic rather than naturally giving rise to one. “Today,” Marie Boroff has written recently, “I see preconceived agendas assuming, with or without warrant, that the [literary] work is understood. The work is then interrogated to determine the extent to which its author was complicit in political or gender-based oppression.”21 Whatever Caliban is, he is not a European, and in his own view of himself, at least, he is oppressed by Europeans; he is constructed, it now appears, to win the sympathy of decent people everywhere. A frequent conclusion, sometimes indeed a premise, of some investigations is that Shakespeare personally advocates the proto-imperialist stance and attitudes that he merely displays; this view seems to me mistaken. For instance, Thomas Cartelli writes, “For character [he has Prospero mainly in mind] and author alike, The Tempest supplies a pedigreed precedent for a politics of imperial domination premised on the objectified intractability of the native element.”22 I find Caliban far from intractable, both in his earlier relations with Prospero and his later ones with Stephano and Trinculo. Whatever his degree of malleability, however, a focus on him, or on him and Prospero, to the exclusion of other matters will deflect attention from the huge importance of Antonio in the lives and affairs of the play’s other characters. Such a focus assumes that “the work is understood,” as Boroff puts it, whereas I would say that only a small part of it is being inspected. As Graham Bradshaw writes of the great critical attention paid to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Caliban in The Tempest, it is both “natural because these characters are at the center—or rather, at the epicenter—of their respective plays” and “disquieting” because of “the failure to engage with Shakespeare’s complex design,” a failure that can produce “partisan or authoritarian readings, in which the conflicts these plays explore are treated as problems with a solution.”23 Sinfield (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 48–71; Richard Halpern, “‘The Picture of Nobody’: White Cannibalism in The Tempest,” in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, 262–92; Thomas Cartelli, “Prospero in Africa: The Tempest as Colonial Text and Pretext,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 99–115; and Martin Orkin, “Whose Things of Darkness? Reading/Representing The Tempest in South Africa after April 1994,” in Shakespeare and National Culture, ed. John K. Joughin (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 142–69. 21. Marie Boroff, untitled contribution to “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: MLA Members Speak” feature in PMLA 115, 7 (2000): 1993. 22. Cartelli, “Prospero in Africa,” 106. 23. Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 144.

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Caliban’s plot, as deadly as it almost is, begins and ends in the several hours of a single day, whereas Antonio’s, an effort to consolidate his power over much of Italy, is another act in a series begun many years earlier, even before he deposed Prospero, with his first stirrings of discontent when Prospero’s “neglecting worldly ends . . . in my false brother / Awak’d an evil nature” (1.2.89, 92–93). If Caliban’s plot demonstrates the too familiar failure of different peoples to get along, to accommodate each other, to forge a single community, then Antonio’s shows the inability, also too familiar, of a single society to stabilize potentially divisive elements within it. In contrast to the island community of The Tempest and the real places in the history of its characters (Milan, Naples, Algiers, and Tunis), all teeming with human vices and ill will, stands the idealized commonwealth presented by Gonzalo. This commonwealth is a product of Gonzalo’s imagination, perhaps in conjunction with a somewhat inaccurately recalled reading of Montaigne or of Ovid, or both. Gonzalo claims that in his commonwealth, contrary to usual practices, no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure, No sovereignty. . . . All things in common Nature should produce Without sweat or endeavour. . . . (2.1.150–58, 161–62)

Shakespeare’s source, whether or not it should be regarded as Gonzalo’s also (whether, that is, this man who at a crucial moment provided Prospero with books is a reader himself), is famously Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essay “Of the Caniballes” (Essayes, book 1, chapter 30) in which a traveler recently returned from the New World describes to the narrator “a nation . . . that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches or of povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kinred, but common, no apparell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle” (I italicize those words of Florio that Shakespeare duplicates).24 Gonzalo 24. Montaigne, The Essayes of Montaigne, 164.

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concludes his vision by declaring that it would “excel the Golden Age” (171), implicit acknowledgment of the authority of Ovid behind himself and Montaigne. In the Golden Age, Ovid declares in the Metamorphoses, “There was no feare of punishment, there was no threatning lawe / In brazen tables nayled up, to keepe the folke in awe” (1.105–6);25 and as in Shakespeare and Montaigne, there are also no agriculture, labor, private property, features of anything other than trust, faith, good will. However, whereas Gonzalo’s Golden Age concludes with his account of it, and Montaigne’s is confined to a region of the distant New World, Ovid’s is eclipsed in time, giving way to the succession of ages of silver and bronze and finally iron: “Of yron is the last / In no part good and tractable as former ages past” (143–44), this last Iron Age continuing, becoming the permanent condition of the world. Gonzalo’s vision is of course severely flawed by internal, logical contradictions: although he wants to posit an egalitarian community, with no governors (“no name of magistrate”), or need for them, in fact he would personally preside over it. “Had I plantation of this isle . . . And were the King on’t,” he begins, “I would by contraries [that is, by procedures contrary to usual practice] / Execute all things; . . . no kind of traffic / Would I admit.” The produce of nature alone would suffice “To feed my innocent people,” he declares (my emphases), and “I would with such perfection govern, sir, / T’ excel the Golden Age” (145, 147, 149–50, 166, 168–69). These inconsistencies may follow, in part, from Gonzalo’s own condition; as Jonathan Bate remarks, “Gonzalo gets into a tangle in his speech . . . precisely because of the incompatibility between the Golden Age ideal of no law, no property, no need to till the land, and his own Iron Age mentality which thinks in terms of the right to plant, of sovereignty and rule.”26 John Milton’s later difficulties in imagining Adam and Eve before the Fall are here writ small. Gonzalo does not seem to notice these contradictions between simultaneous absence and presence of a king, but Antonio and Sebastian do and mock him for it. “The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning,” Antonio says; then Sebastian exclaims, “‘Save His Majesty!” and Antonio adds, “Long live Gonzalo!” (159–60, 171). In fact, Antonio and Sebastian give Gonzalo the lie twice over: verbally, by pointing to the errors in his logic, and existentially, by their very being, for so long as they live, an egalitarian community will be impossible; either they will be ruled or they will rule. It is not only the Iron Age mindset of Gonzalo that makes impossible the consistent illusion of a Golden Age; it is also the two men standing next to him.

25. Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, tr. Golding. 26. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 256.

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A Savage and Deformed Slave The Iron Age mentality Jonathan Bate finds in Gonzalo is the more pronounced in Antonio (and in Sebastian, but since Antonio is the more malevolent of the two, I want to focus on him alone). He is a near fratricide, a creation of the Iron Age of Ovid when “seldome time doth rest [i.e., allow], / Betweene borne brothers such accord and love as ought to bee” (1.164–65). He is preeminent among “Men [who now] live by ravine [i.e., preying or plundering] and by stelth” (162). In the Iron Age, which is the Age of Antonio, “Fayth and Truth were faine / And honest shame to hide their heades: for whom crept stoutly in, / Craft, Treason, Violence, Envie, Pride and wicked Lust to win” (146–48). We may perhaps absolve Antonio of wicked lust, but craft (guile, falsity, perfidy), treason (to the duke and the state), violence (attempted murder), envy (of his brother), and pride (belief in himself alone)—these are all the components of his being. Or Antonio may be understood as a man not in Ovid’s Iron Age but in another scheme of the development of civilization that proleptically critiques that of Ovid. For Lucretius, over half a century before Ovid, human history progresses, slowly but distinctly, from very rough beginnings to something we might almost call civilization. Next, when [early people] had got themselves huts and skins and fire, and woman mated with man moved into one [home, and the laws of wedlock] became known, and they saw offspring born of them, then first the human race began to grow soft. For the fire saw to it that their shivering bodies were less able to endure cold under the canopy of heaven, and Venus sapped their strength, and children easily broke their parents’ proud spirit by coaxings. Then also neighbours began to join friendship amongst themselves in their eagerness to do no hurt and suffer no violence, and asked protection for their children and womankind, signifying by voice and gesture with stammering tongue that it was right for all to pity the weak. Nevertheless concord could not altogether be produced, but a good part, indeed the most, kept the covenant unblemished, or else the race of mankind would have been even then wholly destroyed, nor would birth and begetting have been able to prolong their posterity to the present day. (De rerum natura, 5.1011–27; emphasis added)

Far from lessening, as with the degradation accompanying descent from a Golden to an Iron Age, concord actually increases over generations, but it does not become absolute: “Nevertheless concord could not altogether be produced,” for there will always be Antonios, but even so “a good part, indeed the most, kept the covenant unblemished, or else the race of mankind would have been even then wholly destroyed.” Even then, or even now: the race of mankind stays alive, not because of the universal harmony of a Golden Age, but because its Antonios are a minority, finally held in check by those who keep the covenant, relatively speaking, unblemished.

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Separated by three acts, two speeches of Prospero’s specify the fundamental character, or essence, or, as he calls it, “nature” of Antonio and Caliban. Prospero’s “neglecting worldly ends,” his “being . . . retir’d,” he tells Miranda, “in my false brother / Awak’d an evil nature” (1.2.89, 91, 92–93). Later, in a brief soliloquy, he calls Caliban “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick” (4.1.188–89). It is worth noting that the word nature occurs five other times in the play: twice meaning the physical universe (2.1.162, 165); once meaning the opposite of the supernatural (“And there is in this business more than nature / Was ever conduct of,” 5.1.243–44); once meaning filial sympathy (“You, brother mine, that entertain’d ambition, / Expell’d remorse and nature,” Prospero says to Antonio, 5.1.75–76); and once meaning disposition (“My father’s of a better nature, sir, / Than he appears by speech,” Miranda says to Ferdinand, 1.2.498–99). The last two of these five occurrences hint at what is inside someone, but the qualities of fellow feeling and good humor are less fundamental to what one is than an evil nature or a nature on which nurture can never stick. Prospero’s diagnosis of Caliban, which I think is incorrect, has been much remarked, and I shall return to it, but the implications of his statement about Antonio, well borne out by Antonio’s behavior, are far more significant, as they are also, surely, somewhat more neglected. If Antonio is possessed of an evil nature that could, under certain circumstances, awake, then upon his nature, whatever may be true of Caliban’s, nurture can never stick, or has never stuck, not enough of it, at any rate, to make a difference. The nurture that, according to Prospero’s allegation, failed to stick upon Caliban is the product of Prospero’s “pains, / Humanely taken” (4.1.189–90), which presumably include some of the comforts Caliban notes when he recalls their early days together: When thou cam’st first, Thou strok’st me and made much of me; wouldst give me Water with berries in ’t, and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night. And then I lov’d thee. . . . (1.2.334–38)

Affection physically demonstrated, praise, delightful nourishment, the rudiments of education (perhaps of Christian education, too, since Caliban’s words echo the account in Genesis 1.16 of some of God’s activities on the fourth day: “And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night”): these are the components of the nurture offered Caliban, of Prospero’s pains humanely taken. But what small things—decent and desirable but still small—next to the nurture that must have been offered to Antonio, if he received that to which, almost cer-

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tainly, he was entitled by law and custom. Asserting the legal basis of his own (withheld) privileges, Orlando tells Oliver, in another play of divided brothers, “The courtesy of nations allows you my better, in that you are the first-born, but the same tradition takes not away my blood” (As You Like It, 1.1.44–47). Renaissance humanists from Castiglione and Erasmus through Sir Thomas Elyot to Milton would agree that Antonio, as a highborn nobleman even if a younger brother, is exceptionally well placed to benefit from education; and the benefits of education, they also agree, include the inculcating of personal virtue and a sense of public obligation. Caliban’s very humanity, long before Rousseau’s ideas about the noble savage, and therefore what can be imposed upon it may be problematical to the Europeans in The Tempest; not so that of Antonio. “I will have this our Courtier therefore to bee a gentleman borne and of a good house,” Ludovico da Canossa says early in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528; English translation 1561). “For it is a great deale lesse dispraise for him that is not borne a gentleman to faile in the actes of vertue, then for a gentleman. If he swerve from the steps of his ancestors, hee staineth the name of his familie.”27 And Milton writes, “I call therefore a compleate and generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publike of peace and war,” where “generous” (from Latin generosus) means “appropriate to one of noble birth or spirit.”28 We know nothing of the achievement of Antonio’s (and Prospero’s) forebears, but it is certain that he has no apprehensions about staining the family name. Placing Antonio’s moral condition in the context of Renaissance ideas about education and character formation does not seem to me idle or unjustifiable speculation about a boyhood long vanished (or which, in fact, never existed). Moreover, Miranda does at one point advert to those early days. Wondering how her good father could have such a wicked brother, she tells Prospero, “I should sin / To think but nobly of my grandmother: / Good wombs have borne bad sons” (1.2.118–20). In antiquity, and again in the Renaissance, the purposes of education were not obscure. In the Laws, Plato’s Athenian citizen defines education as “that schooling from boyhood in goodness which inspires the recipient with passionate and ardent desire to become a perfect citizen, knowing both how to wield and how to submit to perfect rule.”29 In the passage quoted above, Milton differentiates between private and public offices but includes both as parts of a complete education. Elsewhere in Of Education (1644) 27. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. Sir Thomas Hoby (1561; New York: Dutton, n.d.), 31–32. 28. John Milton, Of Education in Complete Prose Works, vol. 2, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 377–79. The editor discusses “generous” on p. 387n. 29. Plato, Laws, tr. A. E. Taylor, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 1, 643e, p. 1243.

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he emphasizes the need to “win [students] early to the love of vertue and true labour”; his program “may lead and draw [these students] in willing obedience, enflam’d with the study of learning, and the admiration of vertue; stirr’d up with high hopes of living to be brave men, and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages.”30 The student learns to love virtue, and when circumstances demand, he enacts that virtue in public service, for as Aristotle noted, justifying his emphasis on plot among the elements of tragedy, “The end and aim of human life is doing something, not just being a certain sort of person.”31 Moreover, that public service may redound everlastingly to the credit of its performer. Such statements about the value of education are commonplaces of the Renaissance. In the late fifteenth century Antonio de Ferraris, known as Il Galateo, writes, The greatest and most powerful molder in human affairs is education, and the first foods seized by tender minds are determinative for the course of their lives. Those who have been involved with the wicked starting in their earliest years (at the time of life when they could bend in either direction), who have both admired and imitated the character of the most wretched and wicked people and passed through a trivial and venal life following the will of another—how are they able to know what philosophers know? The latter, from an early age, embrace the most upright and just people and set them up as models for their own lives. . . .32

In The Boke named the Governour (1531 et seq), Sir Thomas Elyot prescribes for the student who “dothe come to .xvii. yeres of age . . . some warkes of philosophie: specially that parte that may enforme him unto vertuous maners: whiche parte of philosophie is called morall.” Elyot, like Milton, is very explicit about the purpose of education: “And here I make an ende of the lernynge and studie, wherby noble men may attayne to be worthy to have autoritie in a publike weale.”33 In a study of morality and pedagogy in the Renaissance, Edward Erdman writes, “Within the classroom, the Renaissance teacher exercised a most powerful control over what authors his pupils read, at what age they were introduced to the various classical and Christian authors, and what meaning they understood from

30. Milton, Complete Prose Works, 2, 383, 384–85. 31. Aristotle, Poetics, 1450a, 59. 32. Antonio de Ferraris (Il Galateo), “On the Distinction and Nobility of the Human Race” (c. 1494), in Knowledge, Goodness, and Power: The Debate over Nobility among Quattrocento Italian Humanists, ed., tr., and with an introduction by Albert Rabil Jr. (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1991), 327–28. 33. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke named the Governour, ed. Donald W. Rude (New York and London: Garland, 1992), 53, 54.

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the texts. All the material which the master presented to his pupils was intended to impart lessons in ethics and morality.”34 To summarize, then, people of best families are worthiest of education; a part of this education is always to be moral philosophy, which makes its students good; and this goodness can always be translated into action that serves the state. The Tempest says nothing about the education of Antonio, but it says much about the education of Prospero (long “dedicated / To . . . the bettering of my mind” [1.2.89–90]), and of Caliban, a failed enterprise in the view of Prospero and of whoever declares that “any print of goodness [Caliban] wilt not take” (1.2.354)—Miranda in the First Folio, Prospero in the view of Theobald and a minority of other editors. A theme of the play is demonstrably education and its value, which thus implicitly invites us to consider other characters, not merely in terms of their virtue or lack of it, but in terms of the probable training that made them, or left them, the way they are.35 Debates persist over the relative value of nature and nurture in the formation of a human being; it is clear from Castiglione, Elyot, Milton, and others that educational theorists of the Renaissance, though never denying or minimizing the importance of nature, placed great value upon nurture. As a matter of fact, we should probably read Prospero’s condemnation of Caliban as “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick” as the astonished recognition of a fact singular in his ob34. Edward Erdman, “Imitation, Pedagogy, and Ethical Indoctrination,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 23 (1993): 2. In this helpful essay, Erdman does, however, make one odd statement: “Renaissance and Classical philosophers did not concern themselves with questions of right and wrong; rather they concentrated on questions of virtue, happiness, and justice” (2n1). This very fine distinction between right and wrong and virtue is surely incorrect. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates says, “[A] man who is worth anything . . . has only one thing to consider in performing any action—that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one” (28b; tr. Hugh Tredennick in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 14). See also Nancy L. Christiansen, “Rhetoric as Character Fashioning: The Implications of Delivery’s ‘Places’ in the British Renaissance Paideia,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 15 (1997), 297–334. 35. To infer certain things about the education of the aristocrat Antonio, in the absence of specific evidence, seems to me not so very different from making similar assumptions about the education of the son of the good Stratford burgher John Shakespeare, in the absence of equivalent documentation. All Shakespeare’s biographers, and more specialized students like T. W. Baldwin, assume Shakespeare’s thorough grammar school education. Park Honan, his most recent biographer, writes, “As a deputy bailiff, [John Shakespeare] was unlikely to have sent William to any school but the borough one, the only school for miles around. This was the King’s New School on Church Street—scriveners refer to it as the ‘free scole’or ‘Kynges ffree Schoole.’Its registers are missing, but Nicholas Rowe writes in 1709 that ‘Mr. John Shakespear’ was a ‘considerable Dealer in Wool’ who bred William ‘for some time at a Free-School’—and, though he was not always reliable, we have no reason to discredit Rowe’s words in this instance” (Shakespeare: A Life [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998]), 43.

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servation. The other natures he has encountered are ones (he thinks) upon which nurture does stick. But if Prospero believes that, he has paid little attention to his brother, or he has failed to ask how Antonio’s evil nature happened to be there, long dormant, finally to be awaked. Seen thus, Antonio represents a monumental failure of European education and of the ideal of human formation it tacitly enshrines. One of the best, certainly, and perhaps of the brightest, he is single-minded in pursuit of goals that will benefit only himself. In Backgrounds of Shakespeare’s Thought, John Hankins anatomizes human evil: According to Aristotle, there are three evil states of the human mind: incontinence, malice, and bestiality. The incontinent man’s evil appetites overcome his will to do good; the malicious man’s will is itself perverted to evil purposes, though his reason perceives the difference between right and wrong; the bestial man has no sense of right and wrong and therefore sees no difference between good and evil. His state is less guilty but more hopeless than those of incontinence and malice, since he cannot be improved.36

For Hankins, Antonio and Sebastian are types of the malicious and therefore possibly regenerate man. They “are also [along with Caliban, the bestial man for Hankins] would-be murderers, but at the end they are able to recognize the evil of their schemes . . .” (179) and therefore potentially to amend them. Hankins asserts Antonio’s recognition of his evil, but he does not argue it; I see no evidence that it exists. In all of act 5, where he is caught out, chastised, and forgiven, he has but a single brief speech. Sebastian asks whether money can buy Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo, and Antonio replies, “Very like; one of them / Is a plain fish, and, no doubt, marketable” (5.1.265–66), presumably a characterization of his perception of Caliban. Any perception of himself or assessment of his activities and drives over twelve years he does not express. There is in him no evidence I can see of a “sense of right and wrong,” of an understanding of the “difference between good and evil.” If this reading of his character is correct, it follows from it that the best education money can buy, as we might now put it, was all for nought. So unapologetic in their pursuit of absolute power are Richard of Bordeaux, Henry Bolingbroke, Claudius, Macbeth, and Octavius Caesar, among others in Shakespeare possessed of aspiring minds, that we rarely pause to ask why they want that which they seek, for what purpose they desire to rule, just what is the allure of “the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king” (Richard II, 3.2.160–61). Is it not obvious that everyone wants to rule a kingdom, an empire, a duchy? Antonio, at any rate, de36. Hankins, Backgrounds of Shakespeare’s Thought, 177.

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scribes the allure of power. “I remember,” Sebastian says, “You did supplant your brother Prospero” (2.1.271–72), and Antonio tells him why: True: And look how well my garments sit upon me; Much feater than before: my brother’s servants Were then my fellows; now they are my men. (272–75)

Trivial purposes prompt unspeakable acts: in urban America today teenagers kill each other for leather bomber jackets.37 Antonio would understand their motives although perhaps his own earlier, meaner garments were dictated by sumptuary laws, not economics (although sumptuary laws were themselves ultimately a product of economics). Now, in an age when “[i]t was vital for courtiers to be well dressed in the latest style,”38 he looks better, a more attractive adornment of a court, and best of all, it is his own court he adorns. All men either serve or are served; he has moved from the first to the second category. The range of the word “servants” is worth noting: how low-level, how necessarily servile are its implications here? It may be that Prospero reduced Antonio to very low estate, but since he would later give him the power of command, that is very unlikely. It is more likely that Prospero’s “servants” served as courtiers served, and that, among them, Antonio’s position was less exalted than no one’s, save his brother’s. The OED traces to 1570 the word “servant” as applied “to any state official, as expressing his relationship to the Sovereign “ (def. 2e of “servant” as a substantive); the word contains the best connotations of the term “civil servant.” This position Antonio could not abide. So to wear fine clothes and be alone at the top he would do anything, and to confer the same blessings upon Sebastian, he would again do anything. The education of a Renaissance courtier did not imbue Antonio with noble purpose. Antonio paid a high price to become duke of Milan, having promised the “King of Naples / To give him annual tribute, do him homage, / Subject his 37. In Antonio’s Milan, on America’s mean streets, and in the Europe of the Hundred Years’ War, of which Shakespeare’s Henry V is one episode, life is similarly devalued. Reviewing Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years War: Volume 2, Trial by Fire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), Eric Christiansen writes, “At the top [during the years between 1339 and 1453], kings of England and France and Castille locked horns over claims ranging from possession of one tenth of the French kingdom to the whole of it. At the bottom, teenage thugs beat the brains out of villagers for the sake of a mule and a change of clothes” (“A Fine Life,” New York Review of Books 47, 19 (30 November 2000), 42. Antonio would doubtless like to think of himself as among those at the top, but how well he understands those at the bottom. 38. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641, abridged ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 208.

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coronet to his crown”—make the duke’s smaller crown subordinate to the king’s larger one—”and bend / The dukedom, yet unbow’d . . . / To most ignoble stooping,” as Prospero tells Miranda (1.2.112–16). Whether replacing Alonso with Sebastian, the desired outcome of Antonio’s newest murderous scheme, would be good for Naples must remain an open question, the outcome never achieved, but it would indisputably be very good for Milan. Warming to Antonio’s proposal of regicide, Sebastian says, Thy case, dear friend, Shall be my precedent. As thou got’st Milan, I’ll come to Naples. Draw thy sword: one stroke Shall free thee from the tribute which thou payest; And I the King shall love thee. (2.1.291–95)

The proposed coup, then, will restore to Milan the independence and freedom from tribute it had enjoyed formerly, under Prospero. One could admire Antonio’s perverse public-spiritedness except that it is not he but Sebastian who proposes ending the tribute. If Antonio has this political advantage in mind when he makes his ambiguous overture to Sebastian— “What might, / Worthy Sebastian?—O, what might?—No more” (2.1.205–6) —he says nothing about it, and there is never an indication that anything other than meddling in foreign statecraft, a general predisposition to homicide, and mischief for its own sake prompt him. Antonio enjoys destroying things, and anyone near him, finally, will be destroyed—or contaminated. Sebastian seems to have played no part in the intrigue in Milan twelve years ago; now it is his turn. Coleridge noted similarities between Antonio’s (successful) temptation of Sebastian and “the scene [1.5?] between Macbeth and his lady,” although in fact the scene in The Tempest more closely resembles Macbeth’s early interrogation of himself and his motives.39 Antonio says to Sebastian, [T]h’ occasion speaks thee; and My strong imagination sees a crown Dropping upon thy head, (2.1.208–10)

39. “The scene of the intended assassination of Alonzo and Gonzalo is an exact counterpart of the scene between Macbeth and his lady, only pitched in a lower key throughout, as designed to be frustrated and concealed, and exhibiting the same profound management in the manner of familiarizing a mind, not immediately recipient, to the suggestion of guilt, by associating the proposed crime with something ludicrous or out of place,—something not habitually matter of reverence.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism , ed. T. M. Raysor (New York: Dutton, 1960), vol. 1, 121–22.

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and again, to Sebastian’s declaration that he owns “no hope” that Ferdinand survived the shipwreck: O, out of that “no hope” What great hope have you! No hope that way is Another way so high a hope, that even Ambition cannot pierce a wink beyond, But doubt discovery there. (240–44)

Prominent words in these speeches, “imagination” and “ambition” similarly designate Macbeth’s special excellences, both his gift and his curse. He says, “Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings” (1.3.137–38) and “I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition . . .” (1.7.25–27). Macbeth is both his best self and his worst, a man both aware of the value of civilization and humanity, and driven irresistibly to shatter them. Sebastian and Antonio are each one-half of this complex, though Macbeth’s positive vision becomes in Sebastian mere lethargy, “standing water,” “Hereditary sloth” (222, 224). The figure of Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, it is often remarked, is a kind of Othello in no need of an Iago; the pressures Iago brings to bear in the earlier play are entirely internalized in Leontes. Analogously, Macbeth (who is of course much more than merely a Sebastian) includes a kind of outline of Sebastian in no need of Antonio. But since the real Sebastian, of The Tempest, does need Antonio to become infected, that Antonio is an infection becomes evident. Antonio’s irremediably “evil nature” is a fact of the man, not a label attached by a jealous brother.

Caliban Imitated The Tempest is a hall of mirrors in which incidents, characters, and words display images of each other, the present continually reflecting both the present and the past. The images, like those in mirrors in amusement parks that exaggerate or reduce height and breadth and grotesquely twist facial features without concealing or disguising identities, are inexact but unmistakable copies, imitations not replications, where, in general, the more closely a appears to resemble b on superficial examination, the less it will do so under more careful scrutiny, and vice versa. Thus, as we have noted, Sycorax, with child, is exiled from Algiers and taken to an island, where she subjugates Ariel; and Prospero, with a child, is exiled from Milan and drifts to the same island, where he subjugates Caliban. Sycorax is taken from her North African home and banished to an island; Claribel is taken from her home in Naples and banished to North Africa. Claribel,

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having come of age, is given by a determined father, against her will, to a North African; Miranda, also having come of age, is kept by a determined father, her own wishes not being entirely clear, from a North African. The King of Tunis disregards the regular forms of courtship, of which he may or may not be ignorant, in acquiring a mate; Caliban disregards these same forms, of which he is almost certainly ignorant, in seeking a mate. Caliban is Miranda’s first (and forbidden) suitor, Ferdinand her second (and acceptable) one. (Stephano, who has never even seen her, would be her third: “Monster, I will kill this man [Prospero]: his daughter and I will be king and queen . . .” [3.2.109–10].) Antonio’s initiative against Prospero in Milan is aped by his shipboard interference with the Boatswain and then again by the conspiracy against Alonso, earlier his collaborator, now almost his victim. Not only incidents, but the words of the play, too, are similarly self-reflexive. On first meeting, Miranda and Ferdinand are convinced of each other’s divinity: she calls him “A thing divine” (1.2.421), and he calls her “the goddess / On whom these airs attend” (424–25). Such recognition is appropriate for genuine lovers (“Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?”), but how odd such words sound when Caliban uses them for Stephano: “a brave god” and “my god” (2.2.116, 147). Ferdinand is amazed to hear Miranda speak his language: “My language! heavens!” (1.2.431), he exclaims, and Stephano is amazed by the same circumstance in Caliban: “Where the devil should he learn our language?” (2.2.65–66), he asks. Although the oaths of the two men, “Heavens” and “the devil,” rather pointedly oppose each other and invite our positive judgment of the first incident and negative judgment of the second, that opposition is muted by the repetition of surprise. If the language of Miranda and Caliban occasions astonishment in the Europeans, the very sight of these Europeans occasions no less wonder, expressed in parallel fashion, in Miranda and Caliban, her “O brave new world / That has such people in ’t” and his “O Setebos, these be brave spirits indeed!” (5.1.183–84, 261). Again, part of Antonio’s original reason for overthrowing his brother, as we have noted, was his desire for better clothes—”And look how well my garments sit upon me; / Much feater than before” (2.1.273–74)—but it will be the impressive ducal garments of Prospero that Caliban notes (proudly?) at the end: “How fine my master is!” (5.1.262). Prospero, from whose perspective most of the play is witnessed, is probably, though not certainly, an old man, and if he is, the play’s imitations suggest that to such a one nothing is any longer new, everything echoes something he has seen or done, somewhere he has been. Indeed, Prospero says as much himself when, responding to Miranda’s exclamation of wonder when the court party is revealed to her—”O brave new world, / That has such people in ’t!”—he says, “’Tis new to thee” (5.1.183–84), a declaration that nothing is any longer new to him. Still, what may seem to Pros-

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pero a remembrance of things past once he has seen it—Antonio conspiring to bring down another head of state: here we go again—is not of his creation, and therefore the extraordinary parallel of the Caliban plot against Prospero to the Antonio plot against Alonso is no more of his making than of his imagining. As a way of reviving an audience fatigued by listening, the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a rhetorical treatise from the first century B.C., once attributed to Cicero, suggests the introduction of “something that may provoke laughter—a fable, a plausible fiction, a caricature, an ironical inversion of the meaning of a word,” and several other possible devices.40 “Caricature” translates imitatione depravata, or in the nominative case imitatio depravata. The Caliban plot would seem to be a caricature of the Antonio plot, or better, a depraved imitation of it, an imitation “ma[d]e crooked . . . , pervert[ed], distort[ed], disfigure[d],” even as the Antonio plot itself is such a perversion and disfiguring of the desired norms of European statecraft.41 It is, indeed, hard to say which of the two plots parodies, or clarifies by exaggeration, the other. Antonio’s plot arises first, and it never provokes laughter, as Caliban’s does in spite of his purposes— nowhere more than in the second scene of act 3 where the invisible Ariel puts words into the mouth of Trinculo, who is then beaten for his insolence. Antonio appearing before Caliban in the play, his conspiracy being first enunciated, tragedy tending to precede farce (as Romeo and Juliet probably precedes Pyramus and Thisbe), Caliban and his plot imitate Antonio and his, and the imitation clarifies and illuminates what is imitated, Antonio; it displays him, eschewing or ignorant of virtue, man savage and (in the environment of character-forming education) deformed. On the other hand, Caliban’s plot disturbs Prospero as nothing else in the play: suddenly recollecting it, he says, “I had forgot that foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban and his confederates / Against my life” (4.1.139–41), an aside not qualified, like apparently angry words to Ferdinand, for instance, in order to impress or frighten an auditor. Momentarily forgotten, then, it is this plot that is serious and could have lasting consequences, and Antonio’s, over which Prospero always maintains control, imitates it, though the imitation is hardly funny. To the extent, moreover, that Caliban is a “salvage” man or a primitive, a man who “has not enjoyed the benefits of civilization, as Antonio has,” in Anthony Hecht’s judgment, benefits including preeminently moral education, Antonio’s plot imitates Caliban’s in the sense that what is primitive is original, comes first, and what is civilized is the copy, if they are similar, and comes second.42 So all that the 40. Ad C. Herennium de Ratione Dicendi [Rhetorica ad Herennium], 18–19. 41. Cassell’s Latin Dictionary (New York: Macmillan, 1959). 42. Anthony Hecht, On the Laws of the Poetic Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995 [Bollingen Series 35: 41], 80.

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benefits of a rearing in a Renaissance court have been able to produce in Antonio is an imitation of the natural state of Caliban, and a depraved imitation at that. As Caliban sees it, the only difference between himself and Prospero is the latter’s books and the mysterious power they give him; their elimination is therefore the key, the necessary first step, in the elimination of Prospero.43 He tells Stephano: Remember First to possess his books; for without them He’s but a sot, as I am. . . . (3.2.91–93)

The books Prospero loved, the “volumes that / I prize above my dukedom” (1.2.167–68), made him the all-powerful magus that he is, but books, more generally, are a synecdoche for civilization and all its benefits, in short for life in the court. It is thus ironical that books or at least access to them also differentiate Caliban from Antonio. Learning the language of Prospero and Antonio, Caliban says, “[M]y profit on ’t / Is, I know how to curse” (1.2.365–66), whereas Antonio’s profit could have been, but surely was not, a true moral superiority. Words in Caliban’s very last speech, finally, “I’ll be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace” (5.1.295–96), not merely undermine Prospero’s assertion that Caliban is “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick,” they also suggest a capacity both for intellectual and moral improvement (being wise) and the pardon or approval of others (seeking for grace), conditions for community, that were never within the grasp or vision of Antonio.

43. See Mark Taylor, “Prospero’s Books and Stephano’s Bottle: Colonial Experience in The Tempest,” CLIO 22 (1993): 101–13, where I argue that the illiterate Caliban mistakes the container for its contents—the book as physical object for the wisdom inside it.

Epilogue THE OVERRIDING PURPOSE OF SHAKESPEARE’S IMITATIONS HAS BEEN A demonstration that scenes in four plays by Shakespeare may be understood as imitations of other scenes in the same plays, and that the apprehension and investigation of these imitations allows a fuller understanding of them, of that which is imitated, and, then, of the plays themselves. Thus Pyramus and Thisbe instructs the reader of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the love entanglements among Helena, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander and between Bottom and Titania, and more generally in the nature of love. The dramatic interludes in the Eastcheap tavern, in act 2, scene 4 of 1 Henry IV, condition a judgment of Prince Hal’s interview with his father two scenes later, an interview proleptically imitated by the earlier scene. The Murder of Gonzago, the play-within-the-play in Hamlet, complexly imitates events in the recent history of Denmark as, simultaneously if improbably, it animates the script of an old play, a fiction; but it also follows and incompletely imitates an earlier version of itself, the dumb show of the third act. And finally the farcical plot of Caliban and his bumbling confreres in The Tempest imitates the tragic design of Antonio and Sebastian, and the former invites the reader to see the latter as the display of depraved humanity that it really is. Along the way Shakespeare’s Imitations has paid much attention to other texts—by Shakespeare himself, like Romeo and Juliet and Richard III; by Christopher Marlowe; and by several ancient writers, Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, and Ovid. These works, too, are imitated, and Shakespeare’s imitations within a particular play of materials outside of that play further illuminate the achievement of the internal imitations. Shakespeare’s Imitations, however, is mainly an exercise in close reading, and I hope that my readers will find that, in this close scrutiny of several scenes in four very popular plays, selected and combined for a somewhat specialized purpose, I have succeeded in revealing a new and compelling configuration of some most familiar scenes and details. It was never my purpose to discuss all or even many of Shakespeare’s plays, but if my approach to the plays I do discuss is persuasive, then parts of it are perhaps more broadly applicable. 171

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Here are three brief examples of ways my method or approach might be employed elsewhere. In As You Like It, Duke Senior is driven from his court into exile in the Forest of Arden. Although he claims, in the forest, to have found a “life more sweet / Than that of painted pomp,” which is what he had enjoyed in the court, he also goes about unsystematically transforming the forest into a court. How does this court of his creation imitate the court he left behind, and what does the new one tell us about the old one? Does the duke’s administration of what Norbert Elias calls “the civilizing process” threaten, if not checked by return to the court, to polish the simple shepherd Corin into another sophisticated Touchstone, and thus suggest a tendency of imitation itself to become transformed into translation? Sixteen years separate the two halves of The Winter’s Tale, the last two acts from the first three, time sufficient for Leontes to have dwelled long upon his sins. And he has done so, to his evident improvement. But when we meet Polixenes, in act 4 in his kingdom of Bohemia, he shows himself as reluctant to allow Camillo to depart his company as Leontes had been, in act 1, to let Polixenes leave Sicilia. The later Polixenes is a clear imitation of the early Leontes, and the later scene (4.2) of the earlier one (1.2). What do these imitations tell us about their models? How do they suggest that although Leontes may have improved—in act 5, Cleomenes tells him, “Sir, you have done enough, and have performed / A saintlike sorrow”— the doubt and destructiveness he showed earlier remain constant and ineradicable parts of men? Act 3, scene 6 of King Lear, in the quarto version of 1608 though not in the Folio of 1623, presents the trial in absentia of Goneril and Regan, a trial convened by the mad king, with the nearly naked Edgar as a “robed man of justice” and the Fool as Edgar’s “yoke-fellow of equity.” How powerless these three men are, how separated from the institutions of society, how unable to impose the justice they can barely articulate, how inadequate as a judicial enterprise. And yet when, in the very next scene, we witness another trial, of Gloucester by Cornwall, who says, “[W]e may not pass upon his life / Without the form of justice,” we recognize that here, in the presence of people immediately capable of implementing their decisions, is where justice is truly transgressed, and in the earlier scene, of which this is a cruel parody, among those who had nothing else, a sense of real justice, of equity, continued to exist. In imitation of the earlier scene, that is, the later one teaches us how to read it. So I may hope that in my investigation of several of Shakespeare’s internal imitations of himself in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1 Henry IV, Hamlet, and The Tempest, my readers will find stimulus to further such investigations in other plays.

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Index Aeschylus, Oresteia, 123 Amadis of Gaul, 113 anadiplosis, 21 anaphora, 121 Apollo, Oracle of, at Delphi, 79 Apuleius, Lucius: The Golden Ass, 63–64 Aristotle, 35, 140, 164; On Rhetoric, 39–40; Poetics, 22–24, 124, 162 Ascham, Roger, 112 As You Like It, 49, 103n. 55, 161, 172 Auden, W. H., 68–69 Auerbach, Erich, 33n. 37 Augustus Caesar (Gaius Octavius), 26 auxesis, 103 Baldwin, T. W., 58, 163n. 35 Barber, C. L., 100 Barkan, Leonard, 40, 47n. 20, 64 Bate, Jonathan, 25n. 16, 34–35, 41n. 10, 46–47, 56, 158–59 Bentley, Gerald Eades, 58n. 42 Berger, Harry, Jr., 66, 150 Bevington, David, 12, 120n. 26 Bible: 1 Corinthians, 63; Exodus, 111; Genesis, 11, 160 Biester, James, 91–93 Bloom, Harold, 111 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 24; Genealogia deorum gentilium, 65; Decameron, 45, 148 Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, 64n. 53 Bohun, Mary de, 94n. 42 Bono, Barbara J., 145n. 6 Borges, Jorge Luis, 51n. 30 Boroff, Marie, 156 Bourne, William, 112 Bradshaw, Graham, 156 Brooks, Harold, 11, 57n. 40 Brower, Reuben A., 76

Brown, Paul, 155n. 20 Brownmiller, Susan, 151n. 16 Bullough, Geoffrey, 41nn. 12 and 13 Burbage, Richard, 51 Burckhardt, Sigurd, 73n. 10 Burke, Peter, 112n. 10 Butcher, S. H., 140 Butler, Samuel, 78n. 20 Byron, George Gordon, Lord: Don Juan, 52 Caesar, Julius, 103–04 Calderwood, James, 110n. 2 Campbell, Joseph, 54n. 35 Camps, W. A., 86 Caplan, Harry, 40 Cartelli, Thomas, 156 Castelvetro, Lodovico: On the Art of Poetry, 23–24, 33n. 37, 123, 142 Castiglione, Baldassare: The Book of the Courtier, 112, 161, 163 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 113–14 Chamberlain’s Men, 57n. 41 change, 34–40. See also translation Chapman, George, 35n. 1, 76 Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales, 45 childbirth, 36, 39, 147, 167 Christiansen, Eric, 165n. 37 Christiansen, Nancy L., 163n. 34 Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero): [Cicero] ad. C. Herennium, 40n. 8, 169 Clausewitz, Karl von, 82–83, 88 Clunes, Alex, 135n. 50 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 62n. 47, 166 comedy, 29–31, 49–50, 52 Condell, Henry, 51n. 30 Cook, Ann Jennalie, 149 counterfeiting, 28, 80n. 34, 97

181

182

index

courts, Renaissance, 169–70 Cymbeline, 94, 108–9 Daniel, Samuel, 73, 96 Danish-English background to Hamlet, 121n. 30 Dante Alighieri: Inferno, 76 Dasenbrock, Reed Way, 25n. 16 Davidson, Donald, 39n. 7 Devereux, Robert. See Essex dithyramb, 29 Dumb Show (in Hamlet), 130–39 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 91 Dworkin, Andrea, 151n. 16 echo, 15, 21, 27 education in the Renaissance, 160–64 Edwards, Philip, 134n. 48 Elias, Norbert, 172 Ellis, John M., 18n. 4 Else, Gerald F., 124, 142n. 1 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 161–63 Ennius (Quintus Ennius), 26–27 epanalepsis, 21 epic imitation, 75–77 epic poetry, 29, 75 epyllion, 30n. 32 Erasmus, Desiderius, 112, 161 Erdman, Edward, 162–63, 163n. 34 essentialism, 122 Essex, Robert Devereux, 2d Earl of, 35n. 1 Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris, 124 Fairclough, H. Rushton, 86n. 33 Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, 96 farce, 31, 33, 50–52 Ferraris, Antonio de. See Galateo, Il Fiedler, Leslie A., 155n. 20 Fitzgerald, Robert, 94 Florio, John, 157 Foakes, R. A., 73n. 10 Folio of Shakespeare’s Plays, The First (1623), 30, 36n. 4, 51n. 30, 52n. 31, 133–34 See also entries under Hamlet and Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Freeman, James A., 112n. 11 furor, 146, 153 Galateo, Il (Antonio de Ferraris), 162 Garber, Marjorie, 37, 111

Garrard, William, 112 Girard, René, 60 Globe Theater, 59n. 44 Goldberg, Jonathan, 120n. 27 Golding, Arthur: Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 42 Gransden, K. W., 89 Greenblatt, Stephen, 41n. 13, 155n. 20 Greene, Robert: Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance, 30; Pandosto, 143 Greene, Thomas M., 23, 25n. 16 Greg, W. W., 125n. 38 Guazzo, Stefano, 112 Gurr, Andrew, 41n. 13 Hall, Arthur, 75–76 Hall, Edward, 73 Halpern, Richard, 156n. 20 Hamilton, Donna, 25n. 16, 143n. 4 Hamlet, 11, 20–22, 30–32, 57, 62n. 46, 75, 100, 107–41, 149, 171–72; First Quarto text of, 111n. 8; First Folio text of, 51n. 30, 117n. 23, 124n. 34, 133–34 Handbook to Literature, A, 99n. 49 Hankins, John, 53, 164 Harris, William J., 76n. 14 Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare, The, 55n. 37 Hawkes, Terence, 51n. 30 Hazlitt, William, 49n. 24 Hecht, Anthony, 169 Heminge, John, 51n. 30 Henry IV, King, 94n. 42 Henry IV, Part 1, 11, 30–32, 35n. 3, 66–106, 135, 171–72 Henry IV, Part 2, 35n. 3, 67, 70, 102, 134 Henry V, 17–19, 35n. 3, 42n. 14, 67, 70–71, 77, 89, 95, 97n. 45, 103n. 55, 143 Henry VI, Part 2, 35n. 3 Henry VIII, 59n. 44 Hibbard, G. R., 136n. 51 history plays, 30 Hitchcock, Robert, 112 Holinshed, Raphael, 72, 73, 79–80, 83–84, 96, 143 Hollander, John, 27 Homer: Iliad, 39, 75–83, 89, 171; Odyssey, 30n. 33, 114

index Honan, Park, 163n. 35 Humphries, Rolfe, 86n. 33 hypallage, 48, 63 imitatio depravata, 169–70 imitation, 15–33, 35–40, 65–71, 110–14, 123–25, 138–44, 167–69, passim instability, textual, 61–62, 136–37, 139 interiority, 16 interlude, 99n. 49 Jenkins, Harold, 110n. 3, 116n. 22, 120n. 26, 125n. 37, 131n. 45, 134, 137 Joan of Navarre, 94n. 42 Johnson, Samuel, 98n. 47, 142–43 Jonson, Ben, 75 Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake, 54–55 Julius Caesar, 21, 70, 74 Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvena–lis), 112 Kasten, David Scott, 11 Kay, Dennis, 31n. 34, 41n. 13 Keegan, John, 80–81 Kemp, Will, 57 Kennedy, George A., 39n. 7 Kermode, Frank, 49n. 24, 64 Kernan, Alvin, 75, 138–39 King Lear, 15–16, 49, 72, 73n. 10, 155, 172 Kliman, Bernice, 135n. 50 Kott, Jan, 64 Kyd, Thomas, 115; The Spanish Tragedy, 111–12, 127n. 39 Lanham, Richard A., 121n. 29 Levin, Harry, 127n. 40 Love’s Labor’s Lost, 35, 41, 143, 149 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Ca–rus), 171; De rerum natura, 150–51, 159, 171 Lyly, John, 43n. 16, 101 Macbeth, 49, 147, 166–67 magic, 144–46 Mandel, Oscar, 140n. 57 Marlowe, Christopher, 43n. 16, 107, 115, 171; The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, 112, 128 Marx, Karl, 50 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 16n. 1

183

Maxwell, Jo, 135n. 50 McFarland, Thomas, 98n. 48, 102n. 54 meaning of literary texts, 20–22 Merchant of Venice, The, 149, 156 metaphor, 38–40 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 11, 20, 30–32, 34–65, 94, 99n. 49, 100, 143, 149, 151, 171–72; First Quarto text of, 52n. 31; First Folio text of, 36n. 4 Milton, John, 77, 158, 163; Of Education, 161–62 mime–sis, 23. See also imitation Mirror for Magistrates, A, 73, 96 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, “Of the Institution and Education of Children,” 100n. 52; “Of the Affection of Fathers to their Children,” 103–4; “Of the Inconstancie of our Actions,” 140–41; “Of the Caniballes,” 157–58 Montrose, Louis Adrian, 65n. 53 Much Ado about Nothing, 16, 56, 119n. 25 Muir, Kenneth, 72n. 9 Murder of Gonzago, The. In Hamlet, 32, 57, 100, 109–10, 115, 124–27, 130–41, 171 Murry, J. Middleton, 39n. 7 Nabokov, Vladimir, 51n. 30 Nowottny, Winifred, 38n. 6 Orgel, Stephen, 144n. 5, 147, 152 Orkin, Martin, 156n. 20 Orwell, George, 48n. 24 Othello, 19, 98n. 48, 151, 167 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 25–26, 35n. 2, 157, 159, 171; Ars amatoria, 64; Metamorphoses, 26, 31, 41–48, 48n. 22, 144, 158 pairs (of characters), 107–111 Palmerín of England, 113 paralepsis, 129, 132 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 24–27; Coronation Oration, 26; Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum familiarium libri), 24–25; Rime sparse, 25–26; Africa, 26–27 pietas, 146 Plato, Apology, 102, 163n. 34; Cratylus,

184

index

Plato (continued) 22–24; Laws, 161; Republic, 23n. 10, 24, 27–28, 29–30, 30n. 32 play, playing, 32, 46, 60, 96–100, 106 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, The New, 20n. 6, 51n. 29, 99n. 49 proleptic mimesis, 95–106 Prosser, Eleanor, 111n. 5 Proudfoot, Richard, 11 pseudo-simile, 140 Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie, 48, 121, 129 Pyramus and Thisbe. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 31, 32, 34–35, 40–42, 45–48, 50–58, 60–63, 65, 99n. 49, 100, 169, 171; In Ovid, Metamorphoses, 31, 34–35 Quinn, Kenneth, 94 rape, 151n. 16 Rape of Lucrece, The, 30n. 32 reading, 51n. 30, 111–14 repetition, 15, 21–22, 154 revenge tragedy, 111–12, 114–15, 125–26 Ribner, Irving, 67n. 3 Richard II, 11, 16–18, 67–75, 93, 94, 97, 164 Richard III, 137–38, 171 Righter, Anne, 111n. 7 Riley, E. C., 113 Roberts, Jeanne Addison, 147n. 11, 155 Robinson, Henry Morton, 54n. 35 romance (dramatic mode of), 31 romantic comedy, 30 Romeo and Juliet, 31, 40, 41n. 11, 41, 48–55, 151, 169, 171 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 161 Rowe, Nicholas, 163n. 35 Russell, John, 137n. 54 Saccio, Peter, 84n. 31 Sacks, Sheldon, 39n. 7 Salga–do, Ga–mini, 49n. 24 Schmidgall, Gary, 145–46 Scipio Africanus, 26–27 sexuality, 37, 148–52 Shakespeare, John, 163n. 35.

Shakespeare, William. 18–19, 30, 72, 75–76, 153, 156, 163n. 35 See also titles of individual works Shaw, Irwin, 83 Shaw, Robert, 135n. 50 Sidney, Sir Philip: An Apology for Poetry, 28–29, 76; Arcadia, 72; Astrophil and Stella, 62n. 46 simile, 38–40. See also pseudo-simile Snyder, Susan, 49–50, 53 Sonnets (of William Shakespeare), “No longer mourn for me when I am dead” (71), 30n. 32; “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” (18), 30n. 32; “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame” (129), 21n. 7; “They that have power to hurt and will do none” (94), 30n. 32; “Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day” (34), 91 Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus, 124, 143, 154 Sortes Virgilianiae, 100 Spenser, Edmund, 43n. 16 Stoll, E. E., 102 Stone, Lawrence, 165n. 38 Stow, John, 84, 96 Sumption, Jonathan, 165n. 37 Tacitus, Cornelius: The Annals of Cornelius Tacitus. The Description of Germanie, 17–19 Taylor, Gary, 11 Taylor, Mark, 19n. 5, 94n. 43, 116n. 21, 148n. 12, 170n. 43 Tempest, The, 11, 30, 32–33, 41, 75, 92, 94, 142–70, 171–72 Thompson, Ann, 11 Tiffany, Grace, 99n. 50 Tillyard, E. M. W., 67n. 3 Timon of Athens, 55n. 37 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio): Bacchus and Ariadne, 28 Tobin, June, 135n. 50 tragedy, 23, 29, 49–50, 106 tragedy and farce, 48–57 transformation. See translation translation, 19–20, 34–40 Traversi, Derek A., 66n. 1 Troyes, Treaty of (1420), 69n. 7 Turgenev, Ivan, 113–14

index Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 55–56, 60n. 45 Updike, John, 133n. 46 usurpation 67–71, 98 Venus and Adonis, 30 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 171; Aeneid, 26–27, 75–77, 84–90, 93–95, 128, 144, 145–46

185

war, 76–84, 87–88 Weil, Simone, 81n. 26 Wells, Stanley, 11, 31n. 35 Westfall, Suzanne R., 99n. 49 Whitman, Cedric H., 78–79, 82 will, human, 53–57 Wilson, John Dover, 102n. 54, 125n. 38 Winter’s Tale, The, 143, 147, 148, 167, 172 Wordsworth, William, 63n. 47 Wright, W. A., 78n. 18