The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Special Section, Updating Shakespeare Vol 7

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THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK 7: SPECIAL SECTION, UPDATING SHAKESPEARE

EDITORIAL BOARD Michael J.B. Allen UCLA, Editor, Renaissance Quarterly

Donald R. Kelley Rutgers University, Editor, Journal of the History of Ideas

Anne Barton Cambridge University

Barbara A. Mowat Folger Shakespeare Library

Philip Edwards Liverpool University

Gail Kern Paster Folger Shakespeare Library, Editor, Shakespeare Quarterly

Barbara Everett Somerville College, Oxford University Angus Fletcher Graduate School, CUNY Werner Habicht Würzburg, Shakespeare Jahrbuch G.K. Hunter Yale University S.F. Johnson Columbia University Emrys Jones Goldsmiths’ Professor, Oxford University

John M. Steadman Huntingdon Library Claus Uhlig Philipps-Universität, Marburg Eugene M. Waith Yale University Stanley Wells Editor, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon

The Shakespearean International Yearbook 7: Special section, Updating Shakespeare

General Editors

Graham Bradshaw and Tom Bishop Special Guest Editor

Tetsuo Kishi

© The editors and contributors, 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. The editors and contributors have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hants GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The Shakespearean international yearbook Vol. 7: Special section, Updating Shakespeare 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Criticism and interpretation – Periodicals I. Bradshaw, Graham II. Bishop, T.G. III. Kishi, Tetsuo, 1935– 822.3'3 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6277-8 ISSN 1465-5098 Printed on acid-free paper Typeset in Times New Roman by Manton Typesetters, Louth, Lincolnshire, UK. Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Part I: Special Section: Updating Shakespeare Edited by Tetsuo Kishi 1

Introduction: Updating Shakespeare Tetsuo Kishi

3

2

Dramaturgy: Beyond the Presentism/Historicism Dichotomy Ros King

6

3

Site-Specific Hamlets and Reconfigured Localities: Jiang’an, Singapore, Elsinore Alexander C.Y. Huang

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Family Ties over Romantic Love: Appropriations of Romeo and Juliet in Northeastern Brazil José Roberto O’Shea

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4

5

Tadashi Suzuki Directs King Lear – Again Tetsuo Kishi

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Part II: Poems 6

7

That’s Amores! Latin Love and Lovesickness in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis Lisa S. Starks

75

Semper Eadem: The Paradox of Constancie in Shakespeare’s Phoenix and the Turtle Kristen L. Olson

92

Part III: Narrative Designs 8

Tragedy in Retrospect: Hamlet’s Narrative Infrastructure Raphael Falco v

123

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The Rape of Marina Simon Palfrey

140

Part IV: Social Works 10

Prenuptial Rituals and Bonding in Shakespeare and Elsewhere Richard Levin

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Tolerance in Shakespeare: An Introduction B.J. Sokol

177

Part V: After Shakespeare 12

Idols in Hobbes, Shakespeare, and Gay Jonathan Lamb

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Politics of Theatre vs. Politics of (Non)State: Shakespeare in the Repertoire of Polish Nineteenth-century Theatres Marta Gibin´ska

219

“Useful and fancy articles”: Relics of the Nineteenth-century Stage Elizabeth Williamson

233

14

199

15 “What wretches feel”: Lear, Edgar, and Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho Andrew Fitzsimons

256

Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index

272 276 301

Figures

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 7.1

7.2

7.3 7.4

7.5

Gloucester reads the forged letter. Photo © Tadashi Suzuki and Shizuoka Performing Arts Center 64 Regan and Goneril discuss their father. Photo © Tadashi Suzuki and Shizuoka Performing Arts Center 65 Lear (left) and Fool, watched by Goneril (rear). Photo © Tadashi Suzuki and Shizuoka Performing Arts Center 67 King Lear fears madness. Photo © Tadashi Suzuki and Shizuoka Performing Arts Center 68 Gloucester attempts suicide. Photo © Tadashi Suzuki and Shizuoka Performing Arts Center 70 Frontispiece, Hymne. A tres-haute tres-puissante tres-vertuese et tres-magnanime princesse, Elizabeth royne d’Angleterre, France, et Irelande. Georges de la Motthe, c.1586. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS. Fr. e. 1, fol. 7r. Reproduced by kind permission 95 Phoenix jetton. John Rutlinger (attrib.), c.1586. The Numismatic Chronicle, Fifth Series, vol. III (London, 1923), Plate XIII. Current ownership unknown 96 Elizabeth I. Nicholas Hilliard, c.1575. National Portrait Gallery, London. Reproduced by kind permission 98 Elizabeth I, “The Rainbow Portrait.” Marcus Gheeraerts (attrib.), c.1600. Collection of the Marquess of Salisbury. Reproduced by courtesy of the Marquess of Salisbury 99 Eriksen’s representation of stanzaic structure in the “Anthem” section of The Phoenix and the Turtle. Roy T. Eriksen, “‘Un certo amoroso martire’: Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ and Giordano Bruno’s De gli eroici furori,” Spenser Studies 2 (1981): 193–215, 207, Fig. 3 108

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PART I SPECIAL SECTION

Updating Shakespeare Edited by Tetsuo Kishi

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1

Introduction: Updating Shakespeare

Tetsuo Kishi

It seems the well-known line from Ben Jonson’s tribute to Shakespeare, “He was not of an age, but for all time”, has acquired over the years far more complicated implications than Jonson could have anticipated. Shakespeare is still the most frequently produced playwright and probably the most widely read author in the world, but the act of appreciating his work has for a long time inevitably involved updating it, or “appropriating” it to use a familiar critical term. The four essays in this section of The Shakespearean International Yearbook discuss how Shakespeare’s work is appropriated in diverse cultural conditions. There might be naïve and uninitiated people who believe that there are and there have been “authentic” productions of Shakespeare and that they are what is done in England. Ros King’s essay shows most convincingly that this is far from the truth. The essay discusses several nineteenth-century productions of Shakespeare in England which aimed at “historical accuracy” by attempting “to reproduce the costumes and architecture of the period of the story rather than the playwright”. This of course was not a practice in Shakespeare’s own time. The essay also discusses a tendency to shift the time or the place (or both) of a given play so that we can detect parallels between the past and the present. King has some reservations about this practice, and the following remark of hers should be a warning to those simple-minded theatre artists as well as critics and audiences who are too eager to welcome the practice: Authentic reproduction of [Shakespeare’s] plays as theatre now does not … entail fidelity to the time and place of either the story or the first performance, but analysis of the tensions between the two. We need to develop a better understanding of what these works of theatre meant for their own time and audiences before we can adequately begin the task of translation to our own. Finding the modern equivalent to the events of the storyline is not necessarily helpful.

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Unfortunately shifting the time or the place of a Shakespearean play is often done without sufficiently careful attention to Shakespearean language. Every theatre artist should bear in mind King’s concluding remark: It is … not enough just to read Shakespeare historically. We also need to read with an eye and an ear to how the language functions, because only then will we be able to gather evidence for the way a particular mind, living in a particular community four hundred years ago used history to make present sense.

The other three essays examine how Shakespeare has been appropriated in non-English-speaking countries. One of the two Shakespearean productions Alexander C.Y. Huang’s essay is concerned with is that of Hamlet performed in a Confucian temple in China in 1942 when Chinese people were suffering from the Japanese invasion and the war which ensued. The essay shows how a particular social condition and a particular performance space full of associations to the Chinese audience determined the meaning of the play and the way it was received. Another production the essay discusses is a production of Hamlet or rather an adaptation of Hamlet which the Chinese-Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen was responsible for. It was performed by an international cast in Kronborg Castle in Denmark. Again the nature of the performance space determined, Huang says, the nature of the production. Both these cases show that the meaning and effect of a particular play are not necessarily inherent but depend on the condition of the performance as well as that of the audiences (and the readers). José Roberto O’Shea’s essay discusses two Brazilian adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, one as a narrative poem in an indigenous form and the other as a play. The authors of these adaptations clearly had in mind a likely response from Brazilian readers and audiences, and made Shakespeare’s work easier to appreciate and more accessible to them. They seem to be good examples of how Shakespeare’s work is appropriated vis-à-vis a particular cultural tradition and particular recipients. Ros King’s remarks that I quoted earlier would no doubt be relevant to this process. My own essay tries to analyse Tadashi Suzuki’s production of King Lear in detail and to show how meticulous the director is in his treatment of dramatic language. I would strongly suggest that readers have a look at The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi by Yasunari Takahashi and Ian Carruthers, the book mentioned in the essay, because it tells us how differently the same production was received in England and the United States. This leads to an interesting question: what kind of response will a production draw from the audiences who are not the audiences the production was originally targeted at?

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It would be unfortunate if attempts to update Shakespeare in a non-Englishspeaking country, whether it is China, Brazil or Japan, were regarded simply as something exotic and charming, because updating Shakespeare will remain a universal practice that is both necessary and inevitable. At the same time we should never forget that the work will always be a daunting challenge. Perhaps the four essays will function as reminders of this fact.

2 Dramaturgy: Beyond the Presentism/Historicism Dichotomy

Ros King

The question of whether and how far to update the classics of world theatre through the settings chosen for performance – seeing the present in the art of the past – has been a problem ever since the famous production of Hamlet ‘in plus fours’ in Birmingham in the 1920s. Up until the beginning of the nineteenth century, of course, all productions of Shakespeare had been in varying mixtures of contemporary clothes and, where appropriate, theatrical costumes, without anyone thinking too much about it. The problem is that the historicizing of Shakespearean performance has often, ironically, gone hand in hand with a belief in Shakespeare’s timelessness and a tendency to constitute him as a ‘bard’ of national identity. Recent historicizing readings, on the other hand, have deplored that idea, insisting that meaning is determined by cultural context, and rejecting the possibility of historical performance.1 This essay examines these discrepancies. Attempts at historical authenticity in the nineteenth century took many forms, of which William Poel’s experiments in Elizabethan staging, costuming and music are merely now the most famous. For most of the rest of the century, starting with Charles Kemble’s production of King John at Covent Garden in 1824, ‘historical accuracy’ referred to an attempt to reproduce the costumes and architecture of the period of the story rather than the playwright.2 But truth to the national ideal implied in bardicness required removing the ‘barbarisms’ of an earlier age, both in language and in play structure, in order to reinforce the morals, ethos and interests of the present.3 Charles Kean’s classical Greek setting for The Winter’s Tale at the Princess’s Theatre in 1856, for example, was partly a response to the new popular craze for the fortune-hunting and exotic aspects of archaeology. In letters written to his historical adviser, the architect and editor of The Builder, Geoffrey Godwin, he explained that the play was to be set ‘in the city of Pericles … when it had attained its greatest splendour in 6

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literature and art’.4 He is aware that he is playing with epochs and places in order to reduce to consistency Shakespeare’s own historical anachronisms – ‘Delphic oracle, Christian burial, an Emperor of Russia, and an Italian painter of the sixteenth century’ – and argues in his preface to the printed edition that it is ‘permissible’ to ‘have adopted a period when Syracuse, according to Thucydides, had, from a mere Doric colony, increased in magnificence to a position in no way inferior to that of Athens herself, when at the summit of her political prosperity’.5 Although he was later elected to the Society of Antiquaries for his services in popularizing archaeology, his voracious appetite for historical detail, sometimes lampooned by his contemporaries, seems to have been governed by a strong visual, decorative sense. He wrote to Godwin saying that he had seen an engraving of ‘The Tomb of Midas’ with ‘carving so peculiar and so beautiful that I should like to introduce it (that is the same pattern) on the walls of Polixenes’ Palace’. Following a suggestion made earlier by Thomas Hanmer, he had amended Bohemia to Bithynia, arguing that ‘the difference of name in no way affects the incidents or metre of the play’. The change not only gave him a legitimate seacoast, but enabled him ‘to represent the costume of the inhabitants of Asia Minor at a corresponding period associated so intimately with Greece’ and with the additional advantage of ‘close proximity to the Homeric kingdom of Troy’ (Winter’s Tale, Preface. vi).6 On another occasion, he worried: ‘The only possible objection I could have to the scene you [Godwin] so kindly propose is the doubt that such a thing as a ruined temple with habitations worked into it existed at Athens during the period we have selected. I think the interior of a servant’s, or rather say a mechanical’s abode would be more appropriate. Surely we could find something like it among the remains at Pompeii?’ The abodes of mechanicals could evidently be presumed to be less historically specific than those of their betters, for he was also at pains to warn the Grieve partnership who were producing the set designs that they should be careful not to introduce any hint of Roman architectural details into their vision of Athens. Kean’s insistence on the Athens of Pericles and her ‘political prosperity’, however, signals more than just archaeological curiosity or aesthetics. At the banquet celebrating his retirement from management of the Princess’s Theatre laid on by fellow Old Etonians (one of whom praised him as a scholar but ‘no bookworm’ being a ‘Second Captain of the boats’) the connection is made a little more explicit: ‘Gentlemen, in the days of ancient Greece, the theatre and the drama were the most effective instruments in forming the character of that remarkable people.’7 This, together with Kean’s claim to have produced ‘less an exhibition of pageantry appealing to the eye, than an illustration of history

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addressed to the understanding’ (Winter’s Tale, Preface, x) is particularly suggestive when we consider that the entire third act of his version of The Winter’s Tale comprises the trial of Hermione. The set for this scene was modelled on the great theatre at Syracuse, and was painted to look as if it were filled with people, supplementing the huge cast of real life extras on the stage. Kean is at pains to explain in the printed edition of the play that legal trials did indeed take place in theatre buildings in ancient Greece, but the effect in performance must have been to suggest both that the theatre was the crucible of civic society, and that the people had a legitimate interest in the activity of their rulers and the right to an opinion on injustice. The production choices thus invite a consideration of Athens as the birthplace of democracy. Shakespeare’s universal relevance, however, means that the real concern is the political development of those ‘remarkable people’ the English. Kean had attempted something similar on a previous occasion when he included in a production of King John the signing of Magna Carta, an event which does not occur in Shakespeare. Kean’s preface to the printed acting edition of that play explains that it was this ‘remarkable political event that renders the reign of John all important to the constitutional historian’, and he surmised that Shakespeare must have been prevented from showing it because of the conditions pertaining when he was writing.8 The conditions pertaining at Kean’s time of writing include the nervous response by the English establishment to the year of revolutions in Europe in 1848 and, at home, the long drawn out, incremental process of the reform of parliament and the extension of the franchise. Significantly, perhaps, the most exalted old Etonian at the Kean farewell banquet was William Gladstone, then a minister in Palmerston’s Conservative administration, but a lifelong supporter of reform. As Era reported, ‘the love of English people for the drama is second only to their love for liberty’ (August 1859).9 Before the abolition of the Patent theatre system by the Theatres Act of 1843, performances of serious Shakespeare in London were confined by statute to the two patent houses, Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Working-class venues got round the regulations through a mixture of song, spectacle and burlesque. William Cooke staged Richard III as an equestrian drama, inevitably giving a leading role to White Surrey, Richard’s horse, while Bower’s Saloon in the East End presented Hamlet with a troupe of performing dogs. The touching realism with which one faithful hound listened sympathetically to ‘To be, or not to be’ had to be seen to be believed. It is a strange mixture, both joining in with received culture and poking fun at it.10 At the same time, images of Shakespeare and scenes from his plays adorn the magnificent ceiling of Drapers Hall in the City of London and the prestigious civic buildings of Newcastle alike: new industrial money laying claim to an old artistic heritage.11 We have perhaps

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tended to dismiss such manifestations of Shakespeare as merely bourgeois, although it would be as well to remember Marx’s insistence that a bourgeois phase is a necessary prerequisite for revolution. There was a real struggle going on for the soul of Shakespeare, for he was seen as a force for education and for both personal social advancement and wider social reform. Indeed it still continues. The kind of arguments used now to urge the practical engagement with Shakespeare by school students can be found in the early issues of Drama (1916), published by the British Drama League, and the proceedings of the first attempt to form a Shakespeare Association (King’s College, London, 3 May 1917). It seems we have been going in circles. Literary critics should not underestimate the vestigial power of the nineteenth-century popular theatrical tradition, for the visual image lives long in the memory and gets passed down the generations as people (both actors and audience members) recount the outstanding performances they have seen. Despite the last thirty or forty years of radical Shakespeare productions, set on council estates or dressed in battle fatigues, those various nineteenth-century approaches to historical realism, now divorced from their social function, still constitute popular notions about ‘Shakespeare’. Their longevity is proved by the fact that it is these ideas that are still lampooned in popular culture – whether the Reduced Shakespeare Company smash hit or the amateur dramatics organized by the insufferably snobbish and bossy Linda Snell in the BBC radio soap The Archers.

UPDATED SHAKESPEARE Talking about the 2006 revival of his 1982 updating of Verdi’s Rigoletto, Jonathan Miller states: It’s done routinely now but when you change a setting, you have to find an accurate correspondence to the modern world. I looked around carefully and found that the Mafia had the same power over the life and death of people around them as the 16th-century aristocracy. There was an exact social counterpart in the modern world. That’s why productions like Rigoletto … have been important in bringing these works back to modern audiences.12

The period in which Miller initially made this production choice, of course, had been marked by the succession of Godfather films. But what opera goers experience when they see a revival of the production years later is bound to be different; many will go to see this show not so much for its current cultural relevance, or even for love of the work, but because the production itself is a proclaimed classic of theatre history. The perceived parallel between renais-

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sance princes and the Mafia, however, is now in danger of becoming overworn; a recent TV documentary series on the Medici had little of substance to say except the repeated mantra that the family were ‘the godfathers of the Renaissance’. Similar oversimplification in David Farr’s production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the Lyric, Hammersmith, resulted in theatre critics’ weary remarks that they had seen this play in the costumes of twentiethcentury militarism before – many times. Michael Billington thought that this production ‘exposes the increasingly shopworn vocabulary of modern-dress Shakespeare’ and objected that the setting in one of the ex-Soviet republics is ‘shaky’ in that ‘they are at least attempting democracy, which would be an alien concept to Shakespeare’s characters’.13 He ends by expressing ‘a feeling that a really daring production would be one that explored the play’s roots in Elizabethan politics and allowed us to draw the modern parallels for ourselves’.14 There is, however, a flaw in both Miller’s and Billington’s positions – ironically the same flaw – which is that whether in 1982 or 2006, London audiences will have had little first hand experience of either the Mafia or the politics of Elizabeth’s reign and their theoretical knowledge of both will be coloured by, if not entirely culled from, the fictionalized productions of Hollywood and TV. By contrast an Elizabethan or early Jacobean audience would have been steeped in the idea that their political present was heir to both a Roman imperial and a British heroic past (with all the tensions that that entails) and they cannot have failed to see that Shakespeare’s complex and problematic treatment of such themes was different in kind from the straightforward, explicitly allegorical presentation they received in the state and city-sponsored pageants regularly staged in English streets. It was becoming clear at the end of Elizabeth’s reign (and made explicit by the way in which James presented himself on his accession and coronation medals, as well as in his speeches to Parliament) that the English monarchy had aspirations on the Roman imperial model.15 Andrew Hadfield suggests that ‘Given the innovative nature of Shakespeare’s history plays, it is possible that he was adapting English history for the stage in order to show that it was very like Roman history.’16 Shakespeare did not of course invent the process of drawing historical parallels or indeed of putting them into plays, but the method is potentially effective as political critique precisely because everyone knew that Elizabethan England was not actually Imperial Rome. Authentic reproduction of these plays as theatre now does not therefore entail fidelity to the time and place of either the story or the first performance, but analysis of the tensions between the two. We need to develop a better understanding of what these works of theatre meant for their own time and audiences before we can adequately begin the task of

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translation to our own. Finding the modern equivalent to the events of the storyline is not necessarily helpful. To continue with Rigoletto for a moment, since there are known facts about its earliest reception that are lacking for most plays of Shakespeare, the libretto for the opera was based on a play by Victor Hugo, Le Roi S’Amuse (1832) about the sexual predations of François I. Despite a recent relaxation in theatrical censorship, this play had been banned for a perceived derogatory allusion to Louis-Philippe. In the subsequent court case, Hugo denounced the power of the authorities to ‘confiscate freedom’, and in his preface to the printed version of the play he deplores the failure of the law: ‘To ask permission of power is to acknowledge it. Liberty and property are not things of the antechamber. A right is not to be treated as a favour. For a favour sue from the minister, but claim a right from the country.’17 The play’s performance history, as would have been apparent to Verdi, had given the work itself added political significance, which was further compounded by the initial reaction to the opera, since it was denounced for ‘immorality’ by the religious right. Those reactions seem to be more exactly akin to that which greeted the televising in 2005 of Jerry Springer the Opera18 than anything Miller’s production has evoked – although it has always been the case that art aimed at a mass audience has tended to excite more moral anxiety than that considered to be for an ‘elite’. (In Italy, of course, opera is more of a spectator sport than it has ever been in England.) Whether the cultural history of state repression represented in the early production history of Rigoletto is adequately captured by Miller’s production choice so that we can understand just what it was about this old story that so excited its nineteenth-century authors and so inflamed both French and Italian audiences remains a moot point.

INTERPRETATION, EXPLANATION, EXEGESIS Telling stories about the past in order to explain the present and perhaps even forestall the future is a common feature of both secular and religious cultures worldwide. Indeed one might, rashly, even go so far as to claim that it is an attribute of human nature. Since it also seems to be an intrinsic trait to want to make sense of what we see and hear, we will inevitably try to seek recognition in our own lives and experience of the stories we are told. The bank of stories in a culture helps constitute a collective as well as an individual self-consciousness. For this reason, stories are also a valuable political and social tool. The importance of chronicle histories for the Tudors is both about giving a sense

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of provenance, of rightfulness, to what was evidently a shaky hold on the crown, and constructing a sense of national identity almost before the nation state had been invented. The retelling of these stories in Shakespeare’s plays, however, achieved something potentially rather different. None of Shakespeare’s plays, of course, is set in his own time or place but the never-world he conjures up (even in his ‘history’ plays) is an admirable mechanism for dealing discursively with the present. Jacques Derrida has remarked that Shakespeare’s plays are ‘loaded with history’ but nevertheless have the ability to ‘offer themselves so well for reading in historical contexts very distant from their time and place of origin’. He adds ‘This has to do with the structure of a text, with what I will call, to cut corners, its iterability, which puts down roots in the unity of a context and immediately opens this non-saturable context onto a recontextualisation.’19 Cutting corners, of course, tends to result in circularity. I would rather say that Shakespeare’s plays are never just straightforward parallels or allegories of his society. They always contain, both within the wordplay and in the juxtaposition of scene and character, multiple, contradictory versions of the story and its theme. It is this dialectic structure that allows audience members to draw the parallels that seem good to them, whatever the received or dominant ideology may be telling them in other areas of their lives. And it is these engineered discrepancies that also make it capable of continual reinvention. The problem with the scholarship that has called itself ‘cultural materialism’ (and likewise its North American New Historicist counterpart) is that, ironically, it has paid insufficient attention to the material nature of writing, ignoring the differences between writing for the theatre and writing for other purposes and contexts, and failing to appreciate that language written for effective performance is likely to be structured for sound, rhythm and movement – sensuous qualities that can also convey sense. In relating a given play text to the ‘dominant ideology’ of state power, the messy, pragmatic social relations directly implicated in the writing process (between authors; between authors and actors, or authors and playhouse managers; between authors, actors and audiences; and between the factions at work in any power system) have likewise been neglected.20 Ironically, given the objections raised to the New Criticism, the minimal literary analysis now routinely deployed tends to be of a very oldschool variety, using selected quotation to ‘back up’ an argument tautologically and preventing identification of the patterns of repetition-with-difference that invite audiences to make comparison.21 Despite all the recent work on performance and theatre history, the continuing divisions between textual scholarship and bibliography, performance practice, performance history and literary criticism are preventing us from achieving the

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fullest readings of the literary artefacts, the manuscript and printed books, that represent ‘plays’. Analysis of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century drama needs to be much more dramaturgical, bringing a much wider range of skills and knowledge to bear in both criticism and performance. Dramaturgy is the ‘holistic analysis of the construction, performance and reception of a piece of theatre that is simultaneously historical, cultural, theatrical, linguistic, and performative’.22 This approach involves exploring the sounds and gestures that are written into the words as well as their meanings; asking how these have been and might be realized in colour, pace and tone; examining the scenic structure; and, yes, analysing the historical context, paying equally careful literary attention to the way documentary evidence is written and structured. Finally it involves analysing the interface between the material that informs the writing of a text and the reception and re-imagination of that text by successive generations. The first part of Henry IV, for instance, is acutely conscious of the construction of history in language. In this sixteenth-century play about fourteenth-century events, characters are forever telling each other their personal histories – whether it is Glyndwr boastfully recounting the fantastical events of his birth, or Henry wearily remembering how he got the crown, we hear these stories successively dressed to advantage, ridiculed, questioned and agonized over. Apart from the events we see, we also hear opinions, hear things we know to be untrue, and witness acts of fantasy played out for real and in designated instances of play-acting – as when Falstaff and Hal play two versions of an interview between Hal and his father. Rumour may enter as a character as the Prologue to Part 2 but it is endemic in the characterization and plotting of almost every scene in Part 1. Given the slow speed of both medieval and Tudor communications, of course, the irony is that events are already long past before they become known as news. Shakespeare repeatedly plays with this: Lord Mortimer of Scotland hath sent word That Douglas and the English rebels met The eleventh of this month at Shrewsbury (3.2.164–6)

This now historical battle, however, promises worse to come, for the rebels are still building their forces: A mighty and a fearful head they are, If promises be kept on every hand.

But the response even to this immediate and present fear is now also in the past; Westmoreland and Lancaster have already set forth, ‘For this advertise-

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ment is five days old.’ Harry must go ‘next Wednesday’ and Henry himself on Thursday. In twelve days time they will meet at Bridgenorth. The sense of urgency is made palpable by the mixing of past, present and future. The objection now increasingly made to Shakespeare productions littered with mobile phones and news cameras is that modern technology would surely have prevented these time lapses. It is true that with 24 hour rolling news we may have a sense of being inundated with events as they happen, although this is perhaps an illusion since what we actually get is the relentless retelling of the same event, mostly in the same words – depending on what has been singled out as the lead story for the day. Ironically, therefore, this medium too lives on speculation in order to flesh out the material and can be its own rumour mill; the ‘embedded’ journalists sending back almost instantaneously the sights and sounds of the Iraq war were not credited with telling us the truth. Controlled access to limited facts always leads to mystification. Thus more than ever, we need to try to understand global events by juxtaposing a variety of stories from multiple viewpoints and subjecting them to linguistic and cultural analysis. Literary criticism in the form of biblical exegesis was one of the great Western sixteenth-century contributions to civilization. On the grounds that the word of God had been mediated by man, reformers (both Catholic and Protestant) insisted on contextualization as a way of foregrounding the love and redemption of Christ’s ministry over the rigid retribution found in other parts of the Bible. But because those violent, xenophobic and uncharitable passages are there – and a similar mix of incompatible statements occurs in the Koran – unlovely fundamentalism, Christian and Islamic, is never far away. Islam has not undergone such extensive exegetical exploration, while a literal rather than a literary take on the Bible underpins current US government policy. In this context, the decision by a number of theatre companies in Britain in the summer of 2005, the Globe, the RSC and Chichester, to market seasons of plays under the ‘Gunpowder plot’ banner in anticipation of the four-hundredth anniversary of that event in November, and in response to the generalized threat of ‘global’ terrorism, was perhaps insufficiently thought through. It was certainly given unlooked-for significance on 7 July when a series of bombs was exploded on the London transport system. The theatre companies, however, are not alone. Visit the beautiful moated medieval manor house of Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire, now owned by the National Trust but between 1587 and 1591 a safe house for Jesuit missionaries, and the guides will expect you to be entirely sympathetic to the plight of those covert priests who hid in the sewer under the kitchen, or in the space behind the chimney, while pursuivants searched the house.23 This was a time, of course, when there were genuine threats of invasion and of the assassination

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of Elizabeth. At nearby Coughton Court, another National Trust property, you will be shown the charming sitting room where in 1605, according to tradition, Lady Digby and her Jesuit companions waited, hoping for the success of the Gunpowder conspiracy.24 How many of the tourists traipsing round those properties that summer would have been able to bring themselves to engage so sympathetically with the feelings of the London bombers? Caught on CCTV cameras just before they boarded the train to London, their apparent unconcern and normal demeanour led some commentators shortly after the event to suppose either that they had not been intending to blow themselves up or that there was something particularly inscrutable about Islam. But read Robert Southwell’s Epistle of Comfort, addressed to the imprisoned recusants of Elizabethan England and their sympathizers, in which he encourages them to embrace martyrdom, and you might gain a different perspective – depending on your religion. Southwell claims that Catholic martyrs will be rewarded in heaven ‘with all the beauty and comeliness that any worldly thing here hath’.25 This book is regularly extolled by its modern editors as ‘the most impressive Recusant contribution to the classic martyrological type of encouragement to martyrdom’.26 It too repeatedly finds endorsement for that future by recourse to the past, and quotes extensively from the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, written on his way to martyrdom in the Coliseum in Rome.27 But Southwell’s brand of freedom of conscience has a distinctly worldly tinge to it: When England was Catholic it had many glorious confessors. It is now for the honour and benefit of our country that it be also well stored with numbers of martyrs; and we have (God be thanked) such martyr-quellers now in authority, as mean (if they have their will) to make saints enough to furnish all our churches with treasure, when it shall please God to restore them to their true hearts. (247)

Using history to inform the present and vice versa, the romance, the excitement of the tale and the admirableness of putting conviction above safety might, and perhaps should, make us sympathize with all the individuals concerned on a human level. The willingness to instigate social breakdown, the certainty that they alone are right, and ultimately the blatant disregard for human life, should, by contrast, lead us to reject any justification for such actions. One of the peculiar features of play construction is that it has the capability to engage audiences in an ethical conundrum such as this because it can give voice to contrasting opinions, and (which is less often remarked) it can keep opposed characters and their concerns literally before our eyes even when they are silent. Not all plays succeed in realizing this capability. Criticism needs to be able to discriminate those that do.

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SIR THOMAS MORE One of the plays in the 2005 RSC season was Sir Thomas More. The play has always presented difficulties – both to the censor and to the critic. It consists of an episodic succession of events from More’s life, similar in construction to the chronicle histories on which it is based, or to the popular novels of the period such as Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury.28 That, coupled with its multiple authorship, evidenced by the notorious multiple handwritings in the manuscript, each in turn cancelling and substituting for the work of the others, has in the past made it easy to dismiss the play as bit of a ragbag. More than that, its principal author, Anthony Munday, is himself a very complex figure. A jobbing author in need of patronage (in itself enough to damn him in a school of criticism that required writers to be true to their art, first and last) he is a playwright who writes a diatribe against the stage and a protestant who describes the English Roman Life. What was he doing writing a play about a Catholic martyr? Thomas More, however, is no less of a problem. The hero of Nicholas Harpsfield’s hagiography, a sense of his sainthood largely prevails to this day – perhaps even in the imagination of those who have been quite glad of the freedom to divorce – as the man who stood up to Henry VIII as a martyr for his conscience. The saintliness is secularized in the play into the line ‘the best friend that the poor e’er had’ (TM, 5.1.43), while his religio-political conviction is made similarly, and vaguely, moral. We are never told what is in the ‘articles’ he refuses to sign (4.1.73–100), although we may presume it is the Oath of Supremacy marking Henry’s break with Rome. His pronouncements immediately before this incident are absolutely in line with Tudor emphasis on the importance of the monarch ruling through the Privy Council – a point, of course, on which autocratic monarchs need continual reminder. Commenting on the little Council table round which they sit, he states: O serious square, Upon this little board is daily scanned The health and preservation of the land. … Our toil and careful watching brings the king In league with slumbers, to which peace doth sing. (4.1.14–20)

It is More’s moral sense which was praised in a Pauls Cross sermon in 1584 by the Bishop of London, ‘a man for his zeale (saith the bishop) to be honored but for his religion to be abhorred’.29 More, the man, was likewise hailed in the RSC programme by the director of Amnesty as someone who would be a prime candidate for Amnesty’s intervention were he living today. Perhaps so, but the many people that More himself was responsible for burning as heretics

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– those, as he put it, of ‘the pestilent secte of Luther and Tyndale’ – tend to be forgotten.30 The central scene of the play, that written by Hand D, usually identified with Shakespeare, concerns the ‘Ill May Day’ riots of 1517. Critics have tended to follow the censor Edmund Tilney’s lead, expressed in his marginal instruction ‘leave out … ye insurrection wholly wt ye cause ther off ’, in identifying this scene as being the cause of the play’s problems. I suggest that the difficulty lies not so much in this scene as in the structure of the play as a whole. The play shows the disturbance entirely from the side of the rioters: poor, put-upon Londoners, subject to rape and theft in their own city by the foreigners living amongst them, who are stealing their women and their livelihoods. Update that by a few hundred years and you have a piece of National Front propaganda and an incitement to the kind of riot that has erupted in Bradford and Toxteth. How can we possibly present this event in modernish dress (as the RSC did) in today’s multicultural Britain without addressing that issue? But the complaint against the foreigners results in dangerous violence that no city at any time can tolerate. The riot must be quelled – although the rioters’ opinions are never denounced or refuted. More wins the peace not through more violence, but through rhetoric and sweet words– or, put another way, in spin, subterfuge and a promise that he does not know he can keep, or perhaps, even, that he knows he cannot keep. Those resonances are ubiquitous and ongoing, and can help us to understand that the mixed and contradictory rationale of the plot of Sir Thomas More is not so much the result of collaboration but of the confusion that inevitably arises when private belief becomes equated with politics in the public sphere. The play’s episodic plot, however, does not provide the discursive dialectic, such as provided by the multiple versions of the interview between Hal and his father in the Henry IV plays, which would allow this enormously significant problem to be critiqued. The best reason one can think of as to why Shakespeare may have been approached to provide a revision of the scene in which More calms the rioters is that he had already gained a reputation for writing plays that deal discursively and therefore relatively safely with acts of sedition. This is not the same as saying that he was known to write plays that toe the government line, but that his dramaturgy broaches difficult subjects through debate rather than partisan polemic. The politic language of More in the Hand D scene is very different in its effect from that used by the other authors for More elsewhere in the manuscript, which as the play goes on, concentrates increasingly on his selfdeprecating wit, and eschews any examination of the political situation. The revised scene omits the incident from the sources in which More saves Downes the sergeant at arms from the rabble. This incident was probably in-

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cluded in the original version since it is Downes who later arrests More, prompting More to recall: ‘Ah Downes, is’t thou? I once did save thy life, / When else by cruel riotous assault / Thou hadst been torn in pieces’ (4.4.133–5). Hand D’s excision of the violence may have been an attempt to forestall Tilney’s objections, but more interestingly, the use of language in this scene incorporates into the very body of the words the moral questions behind the subject matter of the play. Commentators, however, have tended to read the Hand D scene as an unequivocal endorsement of order and the establishment status quo. Presumably that is what the character of More intends, and he is notably successful since the rioters willingly lay down their arms and meekly trot off to various prisons. I question, though, whether everybody in an audience in 1593 (had they been allowed to see the play) would have heard it that way for there are other aspects of the Hand D version of the scene that would not have allowed them to do so. Hand D finishes his version with: Give up yourself to form, obey the magistrate, And there’s no doubt but mercy may be found If you so seek it. (2.3.157–9)

The number of conditionals in these few lines provides ample legal wriggleroom, and an audience can hear the spinning of a fatal bargain although the rioters remain deaf to it. In contrast, the next line in the manuscript in Hand M (Munday), marked for cancellation since it has been superseded, is much more definite: ‘No doubt his majesty will grant it you.’ The Ill May Day riot and the subsequent questioning of royal supremacy was too close to the kind of unrest that characterized London at the time the play of Sir Thomas More was written. This is a problem not just because it brought the play up against the censor, but because it allows no space for any very interesting response from the audience. They already know what they think about it. For historicizing to work there needs to be a certain amount of difference written into the structure to provoke reflection. It is therefore not enough just to read Shakespeare historically.31 We also need to read with an eye and an ear to how the language functions, because only then will we be able to gather evidence for the way a particular mind, living in a particular community four hundred years ago used history to make present sense.

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NOTES 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

See, for example, the entertaining suggestion made by John Drakakis (and others) that the reconstructed Globe Theatre could only be considered truly authentic were it to burn down. In the 1790s William Capon had designed sets for J.P. Kemble which drew generically on surviving historic buildings, but Planché’s designs for Charles Kemble’s King John in November 1824 were the first to try to recreate actual historical locations. Kemble produced this play twice that year. Reactions to the earlier, more conventional production were disappointing hence the attempt to try something different. See Richard Schoch, Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 71–6. Cf. Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992). All the MS letters quoted here are to be found bound into a presentation copy, given to Godwin, of the first edition of his acting edition of the play, Folger Library. Other Kean MSS in the Folger include his notes on Greek hymns, y.d.383 (42a), and ancient Greek costumes, y.d.383 (43a). The production was accompanied by a conjectural reconstruction of ancient Greek music, based on Burney’s Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients. Sadly this music is lost, although the set designs are preserved in the V&A, London. Preface to The Winter’s Tale (London, 1856), v–vi. The short scene in which Polixenes complains to Camillo that Florizel has been absent from the court – made even shorter in Kean’s version of the play – hardly seems to warrant such expense and indeed it may not have been realized since, unusually, the annotated published edition does not mention a historical source for this particular set. The occasion on 20 July 1859 was widely reported in the press. This version appeared in the Australian Mail, 29 July 1859. Kean and his wife Ellen had recently returned from a tour of Australia. Preface to Kean’s acting edition of King John, Selections from the plays of Shakespeare. As arranged for representation at the Princess’s Theatre … By Charles Kean, 2 vols (Bradbury & Evans: London, 1860). Cited in Schoch, 127. The tradition continued and Kean’s Winter’s Tale was mocked by William Brough’s burlesque Perdita; or the Royal milkmaid. Being the legend upon which Shakespeare is supposed to have founded his Winter’s Tale (London, 1856). Pictures of Falstaff and references to the Henry IV plays are particularly popular in this the homeland of the Percies, the dukes of Northumberland. English National Opera, Subscribers’ Guide February–April 2006, p. 8. This is a common misconception. It is true that the Greek-derived word ‘democracy’ was not used by the Elizabethans but they were conversant with the term ‘commonwealth’ and the Latin term res publica. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar explores the revolutionary situation which develops once the limited direct democracy of the Roman republic gives way to absolute monarchy. Michael Billington, Julius Caesar, The Guardian 9 September 2005. Billington has more time, however, for a joint Abbey Theatre Dublin and Lyric Theatre Belfast production of Hamlet (10 March 2005) which shows the Ghost on a video-screen and has

20

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 Hamlet, very much the ‘transgressive Irish intellectual’, scrutinizing Claudius’ speeches on his camcorder. Hamlet is ‘at war with southern suits and northern bigots while trying to work out his own rationale’. He concludes that it ‘may not be a Hamlet for all time’ but ‘brilliantly catches the tensions of contemporary Ireland’. Cf. Ros King, Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 80–82. Andrew Hadfield, ‘Shakespeare and republicanism: History and Cultural Materialism’, Textual Practice 17, no. 3 (2003): 469. Preface to Le Roi S’Amuse (trans. Camilla Crossland) http://lit19.com/misc/hgo/leroi-preface/index.html The second half of this opera is a vibrant critique of the reality TV show culture violently presented in the first half and stages the chatshow host’s deranged nightmare – the result of life-threatening illness – in which recent participants on the show are ludicrously recast as baby Jesus in a nappy and his unmarried mother. Audience knowledge of the implications of the biblical story act in counterpoint to this nightmare, as does both the Springer character’s realization of the horror he has unleashed, and the humour of him getting his come-uppance at the hands of a very dapper devil who is waiting to cart him off to hell. The religious organization Christian Voice, however, most of whose members of course had not seen the production, took the presentation of baby Jesus as literal and denounced the broadcasting of the show with vociferous and potentially violent protest, clamouring for a boycott of the BBC licence fee and a return to religious censorship. They then proposed a series of what they termed ‘witness vigils’ outside those theatres contemplating taking the stage show as part of a national tour. ‘“This strange institution called literature” an interview with Jacques Derrida’ trans. Nicholas Royle, in Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 63–4. This is perhaps odd since social relations are an important feature of Marx’s analysis. See Edward Pechter, ‘What’s Wrong with Literature?’, Textual Practice 17, no. 3 (2000): 505–26. Ros King, Cymbeline, 3. Owned by Henry Ferrers, the antiquary, it was let to the Vaux sisters. The priests included Fathers Garnet (the Jesuit Superior), Robert Southwell and John Gerard who describes in his autobiography the occasion in October 1591 when the house was searched. National Trust, Guide to Coughton Court. The house was owned by Sir Robert Throckmorton but at this time was let to Sir Everard Digby who was swiftly arrested and repeatedly interrogated (Calendar of State Papers, November 1605). Throckmorton’s younger daughters by a second marriage to Elizabeth Hussey, Muriel and Anne, had married Sir Thomas Tresham and Sir William Catesby respectively. Their sons Francis Tresham and Robert Catesby were both executed for their part in the Gunpowder plot. Robert Southwell, An Epistle of Comfort to the Reverend Priests, and to the Honourable, Worshipful, and Other of the Lay Sort, Restrained in Durance for the Catholic Faith, ed. Margaret Waugh (Chicago, 1966), 219. Helen C. White, English Devotional Literature (Prose) 1600–1640 (Madison:

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27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

21

University of Wisconsin Press, 1931), 249, cited in Scott R. Pilarz, Robert Southwell, and the Mission of Literature, 1561–1595: Writing Reconciliation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 58. ‘The Christians in North Africa in the time of Cyprian offered the nearest analogy to the position of Catholics in England in the last decades of the sixteenth century’, Waugh, in Southwell, Epistle xii. Like Holinshed’s Chronicles, this novel was in part published to celebrate the economic importance of the ‘honoured trade of English Clothiers’. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), vol 3, 939. See A dyaloge of syr Thomas More knyghte: [. . .] Wheryn be treatyd dyuers maters, as of the veneracyon [and] worshyp of ymagys [and] relyques, prayng to sayntis, [and] goynge on pylgrymage. Wyth many other thyngys touchyng the pestylent secte of Luther [and] Tyndale, by the tone bygone in Saxony, [and] by the tother laboryd to be brought in to England. Newly ouersene by the sayd syr Thomas More chauncellour of England. 1530. Much of book 4 is devoted to showing that the burning of heretics is ‘lawfull, necessary and well done’, fol. 142. As demanded either by Lisa Jardine in Reading Shakespeare Historically (London: Routledge, 1996) or David Scott Kastan in Shakespeare after Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

3 Site-Specific Hamlets and Reconfigured Localities: Jiang’an, Singapore, Elsinore

Alexander C.Y. Huang

From Western perspectives, non-anglophone, especially Asian, Shakespearean performances often appear ‘remarkably localized’,1 ‘contemporized’,2 and ‘richer in sounds, music, and presentational support’.3 What roles do ‘localization’ and the ‘local’ play in Shakespearean appropriation? Why do some adaptations appear remarkably localized? Central to the debate about the nature of appropriation is not just cultural difference but the dynamic interactions between fictional and cultural localities. The concept of locality will be the focus of my discussion, because in the theatrical transculturation, Shakespeare’s currency is developed through a combination of sights (visions of Shakespeare on and off stage) and sites (allegorical and physical locations of the production). The locality of performance is an integral part of the question about the nature of Shakespeare’s afterlife. At stake is the interplay between the locality where Shakespearean authenticity is derived and the locality where global differences emerge. What happens when Shakespearean adaptations capitalize on, and indeed rely upon, not just historical frictions but reconfigured localities within and beyond Shakespeare’s plays (for example, the setting of Hamlet vs. the authentically fake site, Kronborg, in Denmark)? How do twentieth- and twenty-first-century theatre artists adapt Hamlet’s localities to enhance the perceived value of the performance and its venue? What do these aesthetic maneuvers tell us about Shakespearean appropriation? Within the Shakespearean International Yearbook’s comparative context, this chapter examines the presence of Shakespeare in world cultures and its ambiguous relations to cultural boundaries in two site-specific Hamlets: a Hamlet directed by Jiao Juyin and staged in a Confucian temple in Jiang’an in wartime China (1942) and the Singaporean troupe Theatre Works’Search: 22

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Hamlet, directed by Ong Keng Sen and staged at the Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, Denmark (2002).4 Both cases show that Hamlet has been appropriated, by different figures at different Asian cultural moments, for patriotic, anti-patriotic, and globalizing agendas. Rich and diverse in dramaturgical concerns, these two productions also showcase how Shakespearean localities, performance venue, and the cultural location of the performance interact with one another. Jiao’s jingoistic Hamlet took advantage of the unique architectural space and metaphorical dimension of a temple that had been converted into a makeshift performance venue. In contrast, Ong’s Search: Hamlet experimented with a multinational cast and intercultural theatre, yet the play clung obstinately to the notion of site-specific performance. While Jiao’s production glossed over the disjunction between the play’s locality (pre-modern Denmark) and its performance venue (a Confucian temple in wartime China), Ong’s production, commissioned by the Hamlet Sommer Festival, highlighted the connections between its sites of origin – Asia, Europe, America – and its performance venue, Kronborg, in order to create an anti-essentialist discourse. Concentrating on selected aspects of these performances, especially the contestations of locality-derived authority and authenticity, this chapter establishes how these two national or transnational appropriations negotiated and translated the currency of locality through the site of performance (a Confucian Temple in Jiang’an, China, and Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, Denmark), the perceived sites of origin of the performance idioms (ancient China, Singapore, or Europe), as well as the allegorical sites and settings of Hamlet that erase or accentuate, as the case may be, the presence of ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Europe’, and ‘Asia’. In each of these cases, primacy was given to the performance venue and the ‘local habitation’ of the play. These elements were configured to participate actively in the meaning-making processes.

DEFINING LOCALITY He was not of an age, but for all time! Ben Jonson (1623)5 How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown! Julius Caesar (3.1.111–13)6

As one of the earliest poetic tributes to literary universalism, Ben Jonson’s eulogy in the preface to Shakespeare’s First Folio configured the survival and popularization of Shakespeare’s texts in temporal terms, highlighting the role

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of immediacy and the tension between past and present, which also prophetically foresaw the dominance of New Historicism in Renaissance studies. Shakespeare’s own insight into the matter illuminates another key aspect of performance: spatiality and locality. He has his Cassius, who resides in a version of Rome on the Elizabethan stage, look beyond the horizon and consider other localities and their possible relationships to the action in the Capitol and the death of Caesar. While it is commonly held that theatre works are defined and confined by their temporal and spatial configurations, studies of Shakespeare’s afterlife have focused on how ‘the past and the present might be put into meaningful dialogue with one another’7 and on the tension between Shakespeare’s historical specificity and the performer’s (or reader’s) contemporaneity, as has been aptly summed up, respectively, by James Bulman and Jean Howard: Traditional assumptions about universality and continuity in the performance history of Shakespeare’s plays are themselves cultural constructs. Since objectivity is not in any pure form a possibility, let us acknowledge that fact and acknowledge as well that any move into history is an intervention, an attempt to reach from the present moment into the past to rescue both from meaningless banality.8

It is indeed important to recognize the temporal configurations of Shakespearean performance and of our understanding of Shakespeare, but it is equally useful to consider, in dramaturgical terms, the interactions between the localities embedded within Shakespearean plays and their permutations in the theatrical space. The concept of locality has recently come to the forefront of the studies of intercultural theatre and Shakespearean appropriation. In his aptly titled essay, ‘On Location’, Robert Shaughnessy highlights the role of performance space in contemporary productions at Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare’s Globe. He argues that the spectatorship and audience–performance interaction are configured by the meanings of the performance spaces and by the ways in which performers and audiences negotiate these meanings.9 In Local Shakespeares, Martin Orkin defines ‘local’ as what is ‘epistemologically current’ within each reader’s culture.10 In her introduction to World-wide Shakespeares, published in the same year with the same focus on local Shakespearean appropriations, Sonia Massai, taking cues from Ferdinand de Saussure and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, suggests that all signifying processes, including Shakespearean performance, ‘depends on giving airy nothings “a local habitation and a name”’.11 This is the case because the global is ‘the product of specific, historically and culturally determined localities’.12 Indeed, global and local are correlative terms. The recent turn from ‘global Shakespeare’

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to ‘local Shakespeare’ reflects recognition of the dialectics of complex negotiation between value systems that are far from binary and antithetical. Barbara Hodgdon maintains that many local readings of Shakespeare call for ‘a more precise measurement of the continuities and discontinuities among … local performance conventions’ and the ‘reciprocal impact’ of appropriation.13 She appropriates the realtor’s mantra, ‘location, location, location’, to underscore the need to redraw Shakespeare’s ‘cultural coordinates’.14 However, the wide range of localities that contributed to Shakespeare’s afterlife is not to be confused with the retrograde notion of universality, or of certain literary works’ perceived ability to transcend history. Dennis Kennedy hinted at the importance of locality when he pointed out a paradox associated with literary universalism: ‘often what we believe to have comprehensive attraction turns out to be more local or more time-bound than we think’.15 While local Shakespeares have always been part of the global Shakespeare industry, the increasingly frequent deployment of locality as a critical category has shifted the terms of ongoing debates about the nature of Shakespearean texts – both in print and in performance – from their historicity to their spatiality. Or, to put it another way, it adds physical and allegorical localities to the equation, insisting on both the temporal and spatial dimensions of Shakespeare’s afterlife. The implication of the term ‘local Shakespeare’ has evolved from a binary, if not derogative, proprietary opposition to Shakespeare’s perceived universal values to a celebration of the repossession of difference in a globalizing world. Local appropriations and readings of Shakespeare are no longer perceived as straightforward mimicry of originals of a higher order, a ‘sign of a double articulation’ in Homi Bhabha’s term,16 but as key sites that produce local banks of knowledge that, in turn, reshape the Shakespearean epistemology.17 In the context of live theatre, ‘site-specific’ as a category might seem redundant. After all, local specificities are part of many live performances. John Russell Brown, among other theatre scholars, has maintained that ‘live actors’ and ‘live audiences’ are always ‘site-specific’.18 The dynamics of a production differ from one evening to another, even with the same cast at the same venue. In his article, ‘Shakespeare and the Global Spectator’, Dennis Kennedy highlights one key difference between theatre and film: ‘Giant entertainment conglomerates … create products that operate economically the way Coca-Cola does, through mass reproduction and distribution of a valuable master or original. … Theatre, on the other hand, remains a unique economic event in every performance, indigenous, place-bound, and … based on the repetitive labor of actors and technicians.’19 In addition to the economically determined site-specificity of theatre, the intricate interactions between actors and audiences are transient and cannot be replicated. While these features of theatre are true most

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of the time and have gone uncontested, a new internationalism began to make theatre resemble the mass production of film and television. Since the midtwentieth century there have been more and more productions that are locally conceived but globally marketed, that tour widely and are far from site-specific. In fact, much of their viability hinges upon their ‘transportability’ and global accessibility. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s touring performances are some of the most prominent examples. Some Asian productions of Shakespeare are also designed with a wide range of global audiences in mind, including Yukio Ninagawa’s and Suzuki Tadashi’s transnational adaptations, though the directors themselves and their critics hold different views on this. In contrast to productions that tour to multiple locations, the site-specific Hamlets discussed in this chapter, spanning the years between 1942 and 2002, are defined by their local specificities that will be lost on a different audience in a different performance venue or context. When Shakespearean localities collide or merge with the localities of the performance, new stories are created to meet the challenge or to exploit the perceived connections and disjunctions. Site-specific appropriations contrast with more readily transferable performances that tour from city to city and with Hollywood Shakespearean appropriations. Shakespearean scholars located within the Western European and North American localities that Martin Orkin calls ‘the Shakespeare metropolis’20 have, for the past decade, come to appreciate the value of nonEnglish Shakespearean appropriations and the reciprocity of the act of cross-cultural appropriation. Stanley Wells maintains that Shakespeare’s impact in non-anglophone cultures is a ‘two-way process, blessing those who give as well as those who receive’.21 This chapter problematizes the unique blessings and curses in some site-specific readings of Hamlet that provide a glimpse into a different aspect of local ‘international’ Shakespeare. The dynamics between the geographical location and cultural location of a performance complicate the locality of the play being performed. A production of Hamlet, for example, can be set in ancient China but staged in Kronborg Castle in Denmark. While certain meanings of the production will be produced by the performance style and adapted story, other meanings must be produced by the clash of these two localities. Theatrical performances stage at once the fictional, cultural, and actual sites embedded within and beyond the plays themselves. Further, directorial choices would have to be made in relation to the play’s and the performance’s localities, suppressing or highlighting the differences as the case may be.

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HAMLET IN A CONFUCIAN TEMPLE While Ong challenged established readings of Hamlet, some Chinese theatre artists readily connected Hamlet’s situation with local exigencies and the connotations of the local venue. A case in point is a Hamlet performance set in pre-modern Denmark and staged in a Confucian temple in wartime China. The production married the foreign setting to local theatrical and allegorical spaces in a dialectical process that testified to the reciprocal impact on both the target and source cultures. The most urgent questions to be answered include: why theatre during the war, and why Hamlet? In wartime China, as in many other countries, the Shakespearean canon was an obvious choice to avoid censorship by the Nationalist government. Theatre’s function as a site for social education as well as theatre’s potential for propaganda were seen as compelling reasons to stage public performances during the war. Performances provided entertaining relief, raised funds for military operations, and boosted the audience’s morale. Since Shakespeare’s plays were first translated and performed in China in the late nineteenth century, adaptations have oscillated between the two poles of exoticization and localization, between emphasizing distance, or proximity between the Shakespearean and Chinese localities. Towards the end of the 1930s, many theatre artists opted for topical presentations and social relevance in their work, as they were torn between a number of wars, including the civil war between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party, the Second World War (1939–45), and the Anti-Japanese War (1937–45). Helping to educate vigilant and patriotic citizens – despite financial limitations – became the dominant mission of both local and adapted plays and performances. The locality of the Chinese audience was given primacy, and many site-specific Shakespearean appropriations emerged. Further, after two decades of improvisational appropriation, since the 1930s Shakespeare’s plays had fast become part of the Chinese repertoire to train huaju actors; hence their popularity in drama academies and conservatories. The founding Principal of the National Drama School, Yu Shangyuan (1897– 1970), included Shakespeare in the repertoire of the new school and theatre he founded, for he believed that ‘Shakespeare is the most important playwright in the history of drama, and we [Chinese theatre artists] cannot ignore him’.22 Yu obviously followed his Anglo-European contemporaries in eulogizing Shakespeare. He maintained that the reason to stage Shakespeare in China was that ‘performance of Shakespeare has been an important criterion to measure success for theatres worldwide and not just in England’, and that ‘the most celebrated and achieved actors of our age [outside China] achieved fame

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through their performances of Shakespearean characters’ (Drama Review Section, Central Daily News, 1937). One of the degree requirements at the National Drama School [Guoli Xiju Zhuanke Xuexiao] was a Shakespearean production. Each graduating class was required to stage a Shakespearean play. During wartime, the requirement, stipulated by Yu, was not enforced every year, but the first, second, fifth, and the fourteenth graduating classes did perform Shakespearean plays at graduation, including The Merchant of Venice (1937), Othello (1938), and the 1942 Hamlet being discussed in this section.23 Yu himself also co-directed with Yan Zhewu a production of The Merchant of Venice on 25 April 1948, celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday. In addition to the prestige of performance associated with Shakespeare’s stature, the ability to stage and attend plays during a time of war was itself perceived as a victorious gesture. What was made propagandistic was not always only the allegorical dimension of the play but the act of staging the play itself. Jiao’s Hamlet was staged in 1942, five years after the fall of Nanjing under the Japanese invasion. Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi, 1887–1975) and his Nationalist government moved the capital to Chongqing in Sichuan province in southwestern China. This triggered a nation-wide migration following the government’s footsteps. Elites, bankers, scholars, artists, and members of other social classes who could afford to move all relocated to Chongqing, as did schools and universities. The realities of the new locality – backward economic conditions and frequent Japanese aerial attacks – further lowered the morale of these refugees who were uprooted from their home towns that were now in the Japanese occupation zone. Live theatre became a symbol of cultural life, and the presence of cultural life helped to maintain the dignity of the Chinese refugees. Yu, among his contemporaries, was invested in the symbolic value of wartime theatre. At the revival of the Jiang’an Hamlet in Chongqing, Yu wanted the performance to achieve two goals: [1.] The social significance of Hamlet [to us] is Hamlet’s progressive and revolutionary [geming jinqu] spirit, which is what the Chinese people need during the Anti-Japanese War. … Prince Hamlet resisted the destiny arranged by Fate, countered feudal oppressions, and sought liberation from an environment filled with licentious and corrupt individuals. [2.] Those countries that produce the most high quality Shakespearean productions are the countries with the highest cultural prestige. … Performing Shakespeare is a crucial step for our country to catch up and to join the countries with world-class cultural achievements.24

What exactly is this desirable spirit? How does Yu’s pro-colonialist interpretation relate to the pre-1940s Chinese critical tradition of a ‘Confucian Hamlet’?25 As the first Shakespearean play to be translated into Chinese in its entirety, Hamlet holds a special place in Chinese visions of Shakespeare. There have

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been numerous Chinese adaptations and spin-offs of Hamlet including a parody entitled Shamlet.26 Theatre artists and literary critics in mainland China have concentrated on selected themes in Hamlet that resonate with traditional Chinese literary culture and with Confucianism such as usurpation, authority, filial piety, legitimacy of rulership and power, as well as revenge.27 As Lu Gu-sun observed, ‘to some of the early Chinese readers and critics of Hamlet the … theme of the play was … conveniently in compliance with the Confucian ethical code demanding filial piety … and constant chastity, and with Buddhist tenets of karma’.28 For example, Tian Han (1898–1968), widely regarded as the ‘father of modern Chinese drama’ and the first translator of Hamlet into Chinese (1922), associated Hamlet’s melancholy and ‘patriotic’ anxiety (‘The time is out of joint: O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!’ 1.5.188–9) with On Encountering Sorrow [Lisao] by the Confucian poet Qu Yuan (c.339–c.278 BC) in his postscript to his translation.29 Similar to Englishlanguage Shakespeare scholarship and editions in the 1960s, Chinese scholarship emphasized moral criticism, though the Chinese preoccupation with morality lasted nearly an entire century. In this context, the locality of this wartime performance was already loaded with decidedly local connotations for a play like Hamlet. Yu remarked that even though it is a tragedy, its wartime production was actually an uplifting experience, because the spirit was ‘exactly what the Chinese people needed to resist the Japanese invasion’.30 This attitude reminds us of another prominent wartime Shakespearean appropriation from the same period, Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944). Compared to Olivier’s jingoistic and nationalist film, which was dedicated to the ‘commandos and airborne troops of Great Britain’, the choice of a hesitating Hamlet motivated by personal causes – instead of, say, a traditionally patriotic Shakespearean hero – may seem quite odd at a time when China, like Olivier’s England, was at war. While Olivier’s Henry V has been theorized as an example of what Walter Benjamin called ‘the aestheticization of politics’,31 Jiao’s Hamlet is an exercise in what Benjamin theorized as the politicization of art.32 This is most evident in the director’s statements. It is necessary to unpack the meanings of the performance venue before delving into details of the performance itself. This production was first staged in the temple in the small town of Jiang’an rather than in Chongqing, because the school was located in Jiang’an. The Confucian temple was chosen as the site of performance not because that particular temple was attractive or more culturally significant than other temples or venues, but because the temple, like many village temples in rural China, functioned as a convenient and traditional gathering space in the town. Further, it was financially unfeasible to construct a theatre during the all-out war of resistance. The architectural structure and

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allegorical space of the Confucian temple provided a ready site for such a performance and was used as a makeshift performance space. In other words, the choice of performance venue inherited the accidents and frictions of history. In historical hindsight, the temple bears the marks of wartime exigencies and limitations, though not all of these marks were intended at the time of production. While temples and teahouses, among other informal performance spaces outside playhouses, were regularly used for public performances in China up to this time, the courtyards and the central halls of Confucian temples were used almost exclusively for dedicatory ritual performance. Further, Confucian temples are found in a great number of towns and cities. Temples serve as sites for collective memories and gathering places, but the Confucian temple has been regarded as a sacred site for Chinese intellectuals. Therefore, Jiao’s Hamlet became a major public event not only because of its innovative stage design but also because it was an unconventional performance space for a Western-style spoken drama performance. This is the historical context of Hamuleite [Hamlet], staged by the National Drama School in Jiang’an in rural Sichuan for general audiences during the Sino-Japanese War in 1942.33 Accompanied by live music commissioned by the director, the production ran for three performances in Jiang’an but left a lasting impression on the audiences, many of whom came from nearby rural areas to experience their first huaju [Western-style spoken drama] experience. Directed by Jiao Juyin (1905–75), a French-trained Chinese director who would become one of the major figures in theatre,34 the performance was based on a popular translation, with cuts, rather than a sinicized adaptation. Scripted and not improvised as many early twentieth-century Chinese performances had been, this production was one of the earliest complete performances of Hamlet in the huaju format.35 The drama-school initiated performance of Hamlet thus attracted both intellectuals and villagers. This site-specific performance led to its revival later that year in a formal indoor theatrical space (not in a temple) in Chongqing, the biggest city in the province. The production was revived as part of the Ministry of Education’s ‘[wartime] social education’ week campaign [Shehui jiaoyu kuoda xuanchuan zhou] in Chongqing, the provincial capital of Sichuan and the temporary capital of China during the war.36 The ‘social education’ in this context was a wartime patriotic campaign. The choice to perform Hamlet, a work thought to represent anglophone cultures (including that of China’s ally America), would certainly encourage support of China’s Western allies. However, extant historical documents show that the director and promoters of this production were more interested in Hamlet’s symbolic capital and the perceived prestige and significance of being able to stage Shakespeare

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under challenging wartime material conditions. They, and their audience, did not seem to be invested in Hamlet’s cultural connection with China’s Western allies during the war, though the production, in the context of Yu’s drama school, had a pronounced purpose to boost the morale and confidence of the Chinese. Much of the vitality of this production lies in its ingenious use of the temple as an allegorical space under poor material conditions including frequent power outages. The production was staged on the balcony in front of the shrine of Confucius in a Confucian temple, with seated audiences in the courtyard looking up to the balcony at the end of a stone staircase. The temple had two wings and a hall at the centre. The stage design took advantage of the pre-existing structure of the temple, covering the red pillars with black cloth. Jiao also added a few more pillars. The depth of the stage was some 60 meters. Four 24-feet curtains on each side, hanging down between the pillars, decorated the stage. The large variety of curtain action, concealing or revealing a combination of pillars and scene depth, was well received, as the twists and turns and haunted atmosphere represented ‘the sinful and perilous Danish court’.37 For example, Polonius gave his blessing and his advice to Laertes, ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender [be]’ (1.3.57–81), as he followed Laertes back and forth around different pillars, moving toward the back of the hall, which, for lack of lighting, was dark. Similar movements around the pillars were used for Polonius’ other speeches. The arrangement highlighted Polonius’ ill-received lengthy speeches and the unseen twists and turns of court politics. The performance area thus acquired the depth of a proscenium stage. The ghost entered from the deep and dark end of the path lined with the pillars and curtains. The minimalist stage design – two chairs, a bed, and a table – worked well with the dim open space in creating a sense of mysteriousness. The most striking instance when the localities of Hamlet and the performance venue are brought to confront each other is seen in the emotionally charged nunnery scene. Posed against the backdrop of the exigencies of this particular location, Hamlet’s question, ‘to be or not to be’ (3.1.55), acquired personal and political urgencies for wartime Chinese audiences who rushed to air-raid shelters on a daily basis, dodging Japanese aerial attacks. Attending theatre in the temple, much like time spent in air-raid shelters with neighbors and families, became a communal experience that provided temporary relief through entertainment and at the same time a sober moment of reflection in the hustles of war. The remote world of Denmark, Fortinbras’ resounding footsteps, and the Hamletian ontological question crossed the vast historical and cultural distance to form a ‘patriotic’ play. As Li Ruru observed, the performance in Jiang’an ‘linked Hamlet and his situation in Denmark with Chinese intellectuals and their environment’.38 Performed against the backdrop of a

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Confucian temple, the ‘foreignness’ of Hamlet and his outlandish yet oddly familiar story, for the Chinese audiences, became an apt expression of wartime anxieties. Wen Xiying, playing Hamlet, was infuriated by the fact that Ophelia was sent by Polonius and that Polonius might be present. The scene culminated in Hamlet’s passionate outburst and retreat into the backstage (3.1.142–9). He exited slowly toward the end of the hall, with the gradual drawing of the curtains following the rhythm of his heavy footsteps. There was a 2-foot gap left between the curtains, and audience members peeped through the gap onto the lonely Hamlet moving in the dim 60-meter corridor.39 At the end of the corridor was the shrine of Confucius, which was not part of the set but was not removed for this performance. The local audience knew full well of the location of the shrine of Confucius, which intruded into the performance. The temple now existed simultaneously on different temporal and spatial dimensions in the fictional and real worlds, complicated by the desire to produce an ‘authentic’ Hamlet in an authentic Confucian temple. Buried in his thoughts, Hamlet appeared to be heading toward the shrine – something that exists outside of the Danish setting and outside the stage set – as if he now was seeking advice from the Chinese sage. It is not clear whether or how he found an answer, but the director and his audience have eagerly provided a number of inspiring but sometimes conflicting answers to the question of wartime theatre. The Anti-Japanese War (launched on 7 July 1937) prompted Jiao to look for moral messages in Hamlet. In an essay written on 12 December 1942, before the revival of the production in Chongqing, Jiao directly related Hamlet’s problems to the Chinese situation, highlighting the lessons to be learned from Hamlet’s procrastination. He pointed out that in this context the aesthetics of the performance can only be secondary: The character of Hamlet … [contains] a lesson for us who are living in the period of the Anti-Japanese War, an irony to undetermined people, and a stimulus to those who do not have faith in our ultimate victory. The Danish prince has seen clearly what he needs to do when confronted by political and familial crises; however, he hesitates and does not put his thought into action. [This] … will lead to … failure and destruction. Therefore, we learn from the tragedy of Hamlet that the victory of the Anti-Japanese War hinges upon immediate and synchronized actions by all the [Chinese] people. This is why we introduce Hamlet to the Chongqing audience. The success of [the troupe’s] performing skills is secondary.40

This interpretation creates a negative picture of a hesitating Hamlet. However, Jiao seemed to contradict himself when he tried to explain Hamlet’s hesitation away. Recognizing the procrastination as the most important characteristic of Hamlet, Jiao argued that Hamlet hesitated because of his ‘love for truth’, not

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because of cowardice.41 Yet, desperate to draw connections between the localities of Hamlet and his production, Jiao brushed aside Hamlet’s ‘love for truth’ and asked his audience to heed the moral of the performance: procrastination and inaction pave the road to failure. How could Hamlet be at once a Confucian hero, with exemplary ‘spirit’ fit for a time of war, and a negative example of procrastination, teaching the Chinese audience a good lesson for war? Much ink has been spilt in the history of Chinese Shakespearean criticism over the character of Hamlet. While much has been said about the shared qualities between Hamlet and a typical Confucian gentleman, Jiao’s production was the first documented performance to take place in a Confucian temple. Up to the 1940s, before the Communist Party took over China and replaced Confucianism with Marxist-Leninism, most interpretations of Hamlet aligned Hamlet with historical and quasi-historical political figures who take it as their responsibility to set aright ‘the time out of joint’ (1.5.188). Their frustration at not being able to communicate or realize their moral and political ideals led to their melancholic state.42 Less closely analyzed by Chinese critics were Hamlet’s negative qualities, as evidenced by his attitude towards Gertrude in the chamber scene or his treatment of Ophelia. Unlike English-language criticism of the same period, mainland Chinese criticism did not give equal attention to the problem of Hamlet’s procrastination. When it was mentioned at all, Hamlet’s insistence on seeking truth was used to explain away the inconsistency, as Jiao did. Performed against the backdrop of a Confucian temple and a tradition of ‘Confucian Hamlets’, Jiao’s production might have downplayed Hamlet’s procrastination were it not for the demands of wartime theatre. While Hamlet’s sense of duty to the state was emphasized in the performance, the ending was not altered, because the performance was based on a translation.43 The obvious contradiction in a truth-seeking noble Confucian Hamlet’s untimely death and the victory of the Machiavellian Fortinbras prompted Jiao to extrapolate a moral lesson from Hamlet’s negative example.44

SEARCHING FOR HAMLET IN DENMARK Over half a century after Jiao’s production, Hamlet continues to inspire Asian theatre artists in different ways. The interaction between Hamlet’s locality and the meanings of the performance venue was configured by history’s accidents in Jiao’s production in the Confucian temple. With the rapid development of cultural tourism and theatrical interculturalism, for better or for worse, twentyfirst century artists capitalize on not just historical frictions but reconfigured

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localities surrounding Shakespeare’s plays and the performance venues in order to enhance the value of the site-specific production. A recent example is the Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen’s play inspired by Hamlet, staged at the Hamlet Sommer Festival in Elsinore in 2002.45 Separated by six decades, Jiao’s Hamlet and Ong’s Search: Hamlet provide illuminating contrast in terms of their engagement with locality and performative authority. While Jiao’s Hamlet was characterized by the omnipresence of Hamlet, Ong created a Hamlet-inspired performance in which the title character is missing. Search: Hamlet was sponsored by a number of private, government, and (trans)national funding agencies including the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF), the Danish Centre for Culture and Development (DCCD/CKU), Singapore National Arts Council, Embassy of Japan, Embassy of Indonesia, and the Danish Theatre and Music Council. Search: Hamlet is the last piece of Ong’s Shakespeare trilogy, preceded by a pan-Asian Lear (1997) and an avantgarde Desdemona (2000), both of which were equally well supported by a myriad of transnational funding agencies, including the Japan Foundation Asia Center (JFAC). Established in 1972, the Japan Foundation promotes overseas Japanese-language education. In 1995, the Asia Center was formed as a subsidiary organization to promote ‘the co-existence of different ethnic groups’ and ‘the harmonization of traditional and contemporary culture’. The JFAC has an intra-Asian focus, believing that in order to tackle various social ills brought forth by the rapid development and accumulation of wealth in Asia, ‘efforts must be made to promote balanced mutual exchange … through exposure to the best of Asian arts and cultures … and to encourage a more comprehensive grasp of Asian languages, histories, and societies’.46 Ong’s Lear, funded by the JFAC, thus took an intra-Asian approach to intercultural performance and to Shakespeare’s text. This intra-regional focus can also be seen, with revisions, in some of his other works. Ong’s parents immigrated to multi-ethnic Singapore from southern China, and Ong speaks English, Mandarin Chinese, and a southern Chinese dialect.47 Ong’s unique multicultural background and Singapore’s cultural policy to encourage border-crossing works contributed to his inclination to fuse multiple performance traditions to create new spectacles. Ong, the founder and director of TheatreWorks, Ltd in Singapore, received his training at the Tisch School of New York University. As a result, he is versed in postcolonial and postmodern theories. According to Ong in an interview, he wanted to gain further insight into Asian performing traditions and intercultural possibilities, and that was why he chose to study at NYU, one of the few institutions that would provide such an opportunity.48 This intra-Asian focus distinguishes Ong from most East Asian intercultural directors with experiences studying in America or

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Europe, who seek to wed Western styles to local traditions. Curating and directing in New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Australia, Denmark, among other places in 2002 alone, with only four weeks at home in Singapore, Ong is very aware of all intercultural processes and cultural transmission. Ong’s work has been described as ‘highly self-conscious, deeply Asian, and undeniably marketable with its high gloss – even glib – post-modernism’.49 However, Ong has maintained that marketability should not take over art, because ‘it is important to expand the meaning of “Asian” rather than to limit it’. He cautioned that: We have to be careful not to stereotype what is meant by ‘Asian’ – that it has to be traditional or that it has to be filled with history. These definitions of Asian would immediately exclude you [referring to his interviewer] and I [sic] in the sense that we are Englishspeaking and completely contemporary.50

Over ten years ago, in 1996, Ong began planning his Shakespearean trilogy surrounding three themes of the individual and family (King Lear), the individual and race (Othello), and the individual and politics (Julius Caesar). Ong was attracted to the conflict among multiple identities in King Lear since he had read the tragedy as a teen when his sister was studying the play at school. Therefore, King Lear was the first play to appear in Ong’s trilogy. However, for financial reasons and artistic considerations, Ong was unable to execute the plan to adapt all three plays. The invitation from Hamlet Sommer replaced Julius Caesar with Hamlet as the last piece in Ong’s trilogy. Search: Hamlet’s mode of fusing disparate cultural locations represented by actors’ bodies and performance styles can be traced back to the first play in Ong’s trilogy, the multilingual pan-Asian Lear. Ong’s Lear singles out the theme of miscommunication in King Lear. The production features four languages (Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Indonesian), six nationalities, and a variety of Asian performing styles (Peking opera, Noh, and Penkac Silat, among others). Needless to say, the adaptation does not follow Shakespeare’s script. Like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister who searches for a national identity through the performance of Hamlet, Ong puts his actors in search of a new Asian identity through this multilingual production. The audience had to rely on the English subtitles to follow Ong’s play, but this pan-Asian Lear played to full houses in Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Singapore, other parts of Asia, and Europe. Ong’s Lear can be considered a milestone in Asian theatre and in Shakespeare performance, because it uses multiple Asian languages and performing styles to physically embody a key theme (identity formation) in King Lear, which would have been unthinkable until just a while ago. Ong also addresses the issue of globalization through the amalgamated performance vocabulary.

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The king not only speaks Japanese, but acts in the stately style of the traditional Noh theatre. The power thirsty elder daughter, who kills him and the sister, speaks Mandarin, and not just colloquial Mandarin but the high-pitched Peking opera chanting. The younger sister speaks in Thai, though she seldom speaks. The assassins sent by the elder daughter speak Indonesia and cross the stage in the style of Penkac Silat martial art. Different languages and different performing styles also symbolize the conflict between parent and child. The Old Man (a loose equivalent to Shakespeare’s Lear), played by Naohiko Umewaka, walks in the style of Noh and speaks a stately Japanese, while the elder daughter speaks Chinese and performs in Peking opera style. The diversity of and discrepancy between languages and performance styles physicalize on stage the confrontation between localities and generations. Ong points out that ‘in this production of Lear, [I have] attempted to search for a new world, a new Asia. This new Asia will continue to have a dialogue with the old, with traditions, with history’. He emphasizes that ‘harmony is not what [I] seek but discord. We can no longer hold onto simple visions of the outside world and the “other”’.51 The play negotiates roots, identity, and tradition. Search: Hamlet shares some similar features with Lear, but it also marks a new beginning in Ong’s intercultural engagements. On the one hand, keenly aware of the homogenizing effect of transnational patrons and intercultural borrowings, Ong attempted an alternative approach to theatrical cosmopolitanism: a presentational style that displayed cultures yet recognized the beauty of difference. Search: Hamlet sought for a style that did not stereotypically align each culture with its perceived ‘traditional’ form of expression, the key to the perceived successes and alleged failures of Ong’s controversial pan-Asian multilingual Lear. While the performance space of Search: Hamlet is filled with Danish historical specificities and fictional Shakespearean references, the premise of the performance is far from site-specific. The viability of this production hinges on the interaction between site-specific presentations and an undefined titular character. On the other hand, Search: Hamlet continued the themes of identity formation and identity crises that Ong explored in Lear and Desdemona. His attempt to reveal and solve a series of identity crises posed by the plays (Hamlet and Search: Hamlet) and by the international cast led to even more malleable boundaries between different sites of identity formation. Some characters were played by performers of the opposite sex. Gertrude was played by Pichet Kluchun, a cross-dressed classical Thai dancer, the Ghost by Carlotta Ikeda, a Japanese-French dancer, Laertes by Aida Redza from Malaysia, and Polonius by Ann Crosset, a Danish-American actress. With race-blind casting, Ong hoped to avoid ‘a simple substitution of an Asian face for a European face’.52

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The scenes are arranged into five ‘books’ following the style of a Noh play. The first half of the performance began in different spaces in the castle and moved gradually into the courtyard. Audience members are invited to participate in interstitial tours. During the first part of Search: Hamlet, one can choose one and only one of the simultaneous guided tours through the basement or different rooms of the castle, walking past costumes and other actors in preparation. The second half of the play is a tour-de-force of the five ‘books’ including a prologue and an epilogue: Book of the Ghost, Book of the Warrior (Laertes), Book of the Young Girl (Ophelia), Book of the Mad Woman (Gertrude), and Book of the Demon (Claudius). A short film made by the Chinese filmmaker Wu Wenguang was shown during the interval, which reminded the audience of the homemade movie in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) that replaces the play-within-a-play, and provided a self-reflexive moment. Pulling this diverse group of characters and actors together is a Noh-style storyteller played by Charlotte Engelkes from Sweden. The performance was billed as an indoor and open-air ‘dance-theatre event, a free interpretation of Shakespeare’s play’ in Ong’s words.53 It is a performance about Hamlet in which Hamlet is missing yet omnipresent because of his absence. Hamlet does not have a face or a body. The arrangement invited the audience to posit the possibility that anyone can be Hamlet. Ong’s conceptual questions of ‘Who is Hamlet in our time?’ ‘Can everyone be Hamlet?’ and ‘Is Hamlet an everyman?’ can be perceived as universal, relevant to contemporary audiences from all cultures, and not site-specific. They beg the questions of why Kronborg and why Hamlet. When invited to participate in the 2002 Hamlet Sommer Festival by Peter Langdal and Henrik Hartmann (theatre directors of the Betty Nansen Teatret), Ong insisted that he would only accept the invitation if he could stage a ‘sitespecific version [of Hamlet] at Kronborg, in its different rooms’. As a celebrated intercultural director, Ong has gone through a number of different phases, from creating ‘New Asian’ identities through a multilingual performance with a pan-Asian cast to battling his Western audiences’ tendency to box him and label him as an ‘Asian’ intercultural artist providing an ‘ethnic night out’.54 He named several reasons to stage the site-specific Hamlet. He argued that Search: Hamlet was not about cultural categories but about ‘personal idiosyncrasies’ and ‘personal eccentricities’ in relation to the particular site of Kronborg.55 The casting and flexible combination of improvised scenes and scripted choreographed dances in different parts of the castle demonstrated that each individual performer and actor would have a different experience and relation to the site and the production as a whole. Ong pointed out that while Kronborg might be foreign to some Asian artists unaccustomed to performing in such a space, the

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castle is not alien to Ann Crosset, an American performer who has lived in Denmark for many years. What passes as local is not defined by race, ethnicity, or cultural heritage but rather by lived experiences. All of the reasons Ong named demonstrate his awareness of the perils of rash eulogies of interculturalism that can be easily associated with his stature (a staple of ‘progressive’ yet quintessential Asia) and Elsinore (the locus of fantasies of origin for Hamlet). There have been reasons for concern about the ethical implications of Ong’s intercultural projects. Critics were not optimistic about the visions of interculturalism found in Ong’s pan-Asian Lear,56 but Ong – at odds with his ‘own hybridity as a Chinese-Singaporean’ who speaks Chinese with his parents but ‘conceptualizes his productions in English’57 – is constantly on the move. He has not been restricted to a specific vision – or a specific locality – in any work. Search: Hamlet evidences some of the new directions he is exploring. He named this new approach ‘site-specific’ production. Ong rightly pointed out that ‘locating [Search: Hamlet] at Kronborg would raise all sorts of cultural issues such as cultural authenticity and possession’. He went on to argue that this positionality would enable his audience to rethink a set of questions, such as ‘should globalization develop specificities to take into account different localities, different contexts, different individual circumstances?’58 Ong was less interested in mingling different iconic cultural symbols (as he did in Lear) than in locating the meaning of Hamlet (in our age) and the specificities of his Hamlet custom-made for Kronborg. He stated in an interview: Audiences in Tokyo, Berlin, New York, Singapore and Denmark are not the same. You cannot produce one work and tour it to five cities with an identical production. The fact that we are site specific at Kronborg forces us to tailor it to Denmark, which I think is very important in this floating space of international performance. Kronborg is an important root to make us specific.59

What remains unanswered is whether Kronborg is seen by Ong and his audience as a site of collective memories of flirting with historical authenticity. Do the Hamlet-Sommer-internationalism and the Hamlet-myth of Kronborg make the castle a convenient yet enticing point of reference and a point of origin? The programme of Search: Hamlet qualifies, in Danish and in English, that: Shakespeare … never visited Kronborg, or Denmark for that matter, but several of his friends did, and besides the story about the Danish prince was widely known throughout Europe.60

The programme also elaborates the motives for the collaborative project that are decidedly local. Langdal and Hartmann of Betty Nansen Teatret, one of the key organizers, write straightforwardly:

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The project [Search: Hamlet] is born out of a political question: why do 75% of the Danish population vote for 3 major parties, whose goal is to send the 2% that are of non-European heritage out of Denmark? What makes us so afraid of foreigners that we do not want them to be in our country? We want to use our theatre space to find the answer to this question.61

Search: Hamlet is an intercultural exercise in formulating an ontological answer (‘every one is Hamlet’, as shown by Wu’s short film, to which I’ll return) to the political question above. The presence of the cultural locations of ‘Denmark’, ‘Asia’, and ‘China’ in the performance is accidental as evidenced by the epilogue. The Storyteller comments that ‘[she is] not yet playing Hamlet’, and that ‘[she doesn’t] know where he is’ or ‘why everybody is looking for him’. She concludes that she is ‘not looking / But [she is] definitely existing’.62 Following the Danish theatre tradition of commemorating a renowned performer, the Storyteller danced with a spotlight, a ‘living space’ in Ong’s words, that came to represent Hamlet.63 Ong was concerned about the inadequacy of any performer to play Hamlet in such a multicultural production. He decided to design the performance to revolve around Hamlet’s stories but to eliminate the role of Hamlet. However, the absent Hamlet was still represented by a spotlight in a style appropriated from the Danish tradition to honor a dead performer. As such, Hamlet became ‘a living space’ suggesting rather than confirming ‘a concrete situation’.64 Consistent with this configuration of cultural locations through actors’ bodies (or the absence thereof), Wu’s film Search: Hamlet in China also brings different localities into one theatrical presentation. Shown during the intermission, Wu’s film about hunting for Hamlet in contemporary China provided interesting meta-narratives. The film drives home the message that being gay and being Chinese at the same time can be disastrous, especially in Beijing, the perceived core of Chinese political authoritarian culture. Ong indicated that he intended to use the Wu film to turn the table: In [Hamlet], Hamlet organises a touring company of actors [to perform] … in order to make the king reveal himself … hopefully [Wu’s film] reveals certain things to the audience about themselves. Maybe how open they are. Just like Hamlet held a mirror up to Claudius, Wenguang is holding the mirror up to us, the audience.65

That mirror showed the audiences not only the prospect for one to become an outsider in a globalized world (by putting on display a Chinese gay man’s journey in Beijing), but also residual images of a cultural site (China), as did the presence of other Asian performers. Their presence made their bodies into sites of cultural memories on display. Yet Ong considered the film to be allegorical, a mid-point in the signifying process, not a display of cultural difference:

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THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 The film brings to fore the whole question of to be or not to be a gay man in a culture [China] where it is illegal to be gay. And you also begin to realise that perhaps one part of Hamlet’s tension was that he could never be right.66

Ultimately, sexuality is not the most important theme of this film that concentrates on defamiliarization of cultural space (Beijing) through the perspective of an outsider (a gay man) who is cast as a loose equivalent to Hamlet, an outsider in the castle. Wu’s film appeared to be a documentary, with street shots and scenes shot on an underground train in China. We hear a gay man speak about humiliations and an old Chinese woman commented, ‘I don’t know much about Hamlet, but everyone should have an offspring.’ Ong hoped the audience would see Hamlet’s problem, not just China’s social ills. Whether this selfconscious rootedness could cure the ills of under-theorized eulogies of interculturalism remains problematic, but it is clear that Search: Hamlet has articulated a vision of locality-inflected cosmopolitanism through reconfigured localities, the multinational cast, and productive fusion of European and Asian performing traditions.

CONCLUSION: THE LOGIC OF ‘AUTHENTIC’ VENUES In both Jiao’s and Ong’s Hamlets, the fictional inhabits the actual site of production. In turn, the performance site and its cultural location reconfigure the fictional. The situatedness of Jiao’s production exemplifies a rooted configuration of localities in nationalistic terms, while Ong’s work produces difference and fertile novelty to comment on the ethics of cosmopolitanism. Search: Hamlet articulates forms of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, to borrow Domna C. Stanton’s term from a different context.67 Though one may wonder whether the multiple local origins in Search: Hamlet, like the site of Kronborg itself, were used as a platform for international attention, it is clear that Ong prioritizes the need to deny cultural authenticity derivative of any single cultural location being represented in the performance. Jiao, by contrast, insisted on performative authority derived from cultural authenticity. His Hamlet was informed by the exigencies of his locality. Despite these aesthetic differences, these two Hamlets share similar visions – self-conscious or not – of conjunctions and disjunctions of Hamlet’s world and the worlds of the audiences, yet they demonstrate different approaches and motives. There are four differences. First, although both directors were invested in the unique performance spaces, a castle and a temple, their approaches to the display of local specificities differ. In Jiao’s Hamlet, politics and moral arguments superseded artistic concerns. Jiao’s Hamlet openly encouraged its audiences to extrapolate political

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messages from the play, performed in a Confucian temple, the locus of local politics. Ong intentionally kept the particularities of each locality (his ‘Singapore’, each actor’s ‘Asia’ or ‘Europe’) under-defined, which was a different approach from his pan-Asian Lear, a multilingual display of defined theatrical forms and cultures. Search: Hamlet, a self-consciously site-specific presentation, set out in search of ideals that its creators hoped to achieve through the site (Kronborg) and the malleable localities of the players from throughout the world. Jiao, on the other hand, had been very clear about the promises and limitations of the Confucian temple as a performance space, and he did not hesitate to display the local specificities: Confucian values, wartime exigencies, and the convergence of the physical and allegorical spaces in the temple. Second, the omnipresence of Hamlet and Confucius in Jiao’s production contrasts with the absence of and search for Hamlet in Ong’s version. While Ong made conscious choices to design a site-specific Hamlet, Jiao had little choice but to make the best use of the meager resources available to him during the war, including the Confucian temple, one of the most prevalent architectural spaces to be found in towns small and large; hence a natural site for a wartime theatrical event when proper theatre spaces are difficult to find. Therefore, the Confucian moral contexts became present in this particular production first by accident but were subsequently consciously deployed by the director and critics. Third, as Martin Esslin famously argued, all drama is ‘a political event’, either asserting or undermining the codes of conduct of the society.68 Ong’s and Jiao’s Hamlets are ultimately products of politics, but the two directors broached the subject differently. Jiao openly announced that art takes a second seat to politics in his wartime Hamlet, while Ong sent messages through his statements in the programme and interviews that Search: Hamlet was in search of many things, including humanism, a desirable form of globalization, and a new art form. A fourth aspect to be considered is international tours. The meanings of Jiao’s wartime Hamlet are intimately connected to its original performance venue, a temple, and will be lost on audiences in a different place. While Jiao did not intentionally design the performance to be site specific, Ong insists on the significance of designing site-specific productions that cannot and will not be toured to other locations in the hope that this will resist certain undesirable effects of globalization. These examples show that Shakespearean appropriation can be inspired and complicated by the tensions between (self-)syndicated ‘authentic’ sites for the presence of Shakespeare and for the presence of cultural otherness.

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‘Shakespeare’ is manufactured and consumed at the junctures where these localities meet. These projects not only appropriated Shakespeare’s texts but also the various sites of representation. This returns us to the dialectical relationship between locality and authority. The concept of locality encompasses a number of related ideas, including the setting of a drama, the city and venue of a performance, the cultural coordinates of the audience, and all the meanings derived from these physical and allegorical sites. A great deal of creative energy has been directed toward the instance when the locality from which perceived authenticity is derived (such as ‘Hamlet’s castle’) and the locality of performance converge. Festivals and artists work hard to bring their patrons an authentic Shakespearean experience in venues openly known as fictional. These sites cannot properly be said to exist. Some of these sites serve as the backdrop of Shakespeare’s plays, and tourists flock to experience the illusion for themselves. The locations then dress themselves up to meet and generate the demands of cultural tourism, dressing themselves up as something they are not, as evidenced by the following statement by Hamlet Sommer at Kronborg Castle. The statement explores Hamlet’s Danish connection (the following quotation preserves the oddity of the original text): 400 years ago Shakespeare wrote the drama about Hamlet, which takes place at Kronborg Castle and has proved to be internationally very durable. … Saxo Grammaticus, tells the legend about Amled, a Prince of Jutland, in his ‘Danish Chronicles’ that were written just before year 1200. Since 1816 there have been many performances of Hamlet at Kronborg Castle, with great actors like Laurence Olivier, Vivian Leigh, John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh, Jacob Jacobi. … A Hamlet-cult commenced and established the local link to Elsinore, which flourishes to this very day.69

The Danish ‘Hamlet’s castle’ operates on similar principles found in the promotion of cultural tourism to Harry Potter’s England, the Tokyo Daikanyama neighborhood of Lost in Translation, the New Zealand of Lord of the Rings, or the Da Vinci Code’s Europe (Louvre, Église Saint-Sulpice, Rosslyn Chapel, and more). Manufactured and consumed in cycles of fictionalization, these locations now exist simultaneously on different temporal and spatial dimensions in the fictional and real worlds. It is important to note that authenticity in and by itself may not always be the claim to fame of these sites, as evidenced by Disneyland’s ‘blatantly inauthentic attractions’ that attract many tourists.70 Rather, it is often the site’s ability to ‘point to a sedimented history and … a connected otherness … that reach[es] … to the land of the dead’ that fascinates and solicits repeated visits.71 A large part of this phenomenon is driven by the forces of market economy,72 but it is important to recognize the intricate interplay between self-syndicated

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‘authentic’ venues (for the presence of Shakespeare or his characters) and theatrical spaces where ‘Shakespeare’ is produced and consumed. Two examples that readily come to mind are Stratford-upon-Avon and the Globe Theatre, both representing historically authentic venues baptized by a Shakespearean presence that fuels what Hodgdon has called ‘fantasies of origin’.73 The worldwide Shakespeare industry has constructed venues competing for this authenticity, including locations with ‘authentic’ local flavors that contrast with the foreignness of Shakespeare, and self-syndicated authentic sites for imported spectacles such as the Tokyo Globe.74 Theatre artists’ and audiences’ preoccupation with ‘authentic’ venues are twofold, as shown by the two Hamlets analyzed in this chapter. On the one hand, there have been a number of highly symbolic, victorious ‘returns’ of productions to the locations where the plays are set, such as Macbeth to Scotland (Shanghai Kunju Theatre’s Story of Bloody Hands [Xieshou Ji] in 1987)75 and Hamlet to Denmark (Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet in 1948 and Shi Yukun’s Peking opera The Revenge of the Prince in 2005). While the virtues of these performances may well lie with their artistic innovations, the currency of ‘authentic’ localities frequently takes a more prominent role in marketing campaigns and, increasingly, in critical appraisals by audiences and artists. On the other hand, there have been some performances that were staged in non-traditional venues (such as Jiao’s Hamlet). In some cases, the choice of a non-traditional venue was intentional, with well thought-out dramaturgical plans to incorporate the idiosyncrasies of the site to add ‘authentic’ local flavors to the Shakespearean play. For example, a Chinese-language Much Ado About Nothing with a capitalist twist was staged under the Proletarian Heroes’ Monument in the Huangpu Park against the modern skyline of the Bund and the Oriental Pearl Tower in 1995.76 In other cases, the choice was accidental, imposed by historical exigencies or material conditions. For example, Jiao Juyin’s 1942 Hamlet, staged in a Confucian temple for lack of formal theatrical space during wartime, gained accidental additional purchase on Hamlet’s perceived nobleness with Confucian twists. Through their reconfigurations of different localities, Jiao’s, Ong’s, and Shi’s site-specific Hamlets generate meanings for both the locale where Hamlet was staged and the play itself. These site-specific productions are as much readings of Shakespeare’s symbolic capital as re-readings of globally articulated localities. The historical and imagined boundaries between each of these sites constitute the ‘venue’ from which ‘Shakespeare’ and its Others begin their presencing.77

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NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

John Gillies, “Shakespeare Localized: An Australian Looks at Asian Practice,” in Shakespeare Global/Local: The Hong Kong Imaginary in Transcultural Production, ed. Kwok-kan Tam, Andrew Parkin, and Terry Siu-han Yip (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2002), 101. Dennis Kennedy, “Introduction: Shakespeare without his language,” in Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6. John Russell Brown, “Foreign Shakespeare and English-speaking Audiences,” in Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 32; John Russell Brown, New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia (London: Routledge, 1999), 130. I follow the East Asian convention and put family name first, followed by given names. Ben Jonson, “To The Memory Of My Beloved, The Author, Mr William Shakespeare, And What He Hath Left Us,” in Mr. VVilliam Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies (London: Printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount, 1623), n.p. William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997). All references to Shakespeare’s text are from this edition unless otherwise noted. Stevie Simkin, Early Modern Tragedy and the Cinema of Violence (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 3. James Bulman, “Introduction,” in Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, ed. James Bulman (London: Routledge, 1996), 3–4; Jean Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” in Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, ed. Arthur F. Kinney and Don S. Collins (Amherst, MA: Massachusetts University Press, 1987), 33. Robert Shaughnessy, “On Location,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 79, 99. Martin Orkin, Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power (New York: Routledge, 2005), 2. Sonia Massai, World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (London: Routledge, 2005), 3. Ibid., 9. Barbara Hodgdon, “Stratford’s Empire of Shakespeare; or, Fantasies of Origin, Authorship, and Authenticity: The Museum and the Souvenir,” in The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations, ed. Barbara Hodgdon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 159. Ibid. Dennis Kennedy, “Shakespeare worldwide,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 252. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (London: Arnold, 1989), 235. Orkin, Local Shakespeares, 1–4.

SITE-SPECIFIC HAMLETS 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

45

John Russell Brown, “Theatrical Pillage in Asia: Redirecting the Intercultural Traffic,” New Theatre Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1998): 12. Dennis Kennedy, “Shakespeare and the Global Spectator,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch, vol. 131 (Bochum: Verlag Ferdinand Kamp, 1995), 50. Orkin, Local Shakespeares, 1. Stanley Wells, “Foreword” to Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, ed. A. Luis Poujante and Ton Hoenselaars (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 7. Yu Shangyuan, Yu Shangyuan xiju lunwen ji [Collective essays on drama by Yu Shangyuan] (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 1986), 28. Cao Shujun and Sun Fuliang, Shakespeare on the Chinese Stage [Shashibiya zai Zhongguo wutai shang] (Ha’erbin: Ha’erbin chubanshe, 1989), 99. Ibid., 105. There were also sporadic non-Confucian engagements with Hamlet that challenge the tradition of Confucian criticism of Chinese and Western literary works. Lao She (1899–1966), for example, was so affected by Hamlet that David Der-wei Wang identified a ‘Hamlet syndrome’ in Lao She’s works inspired by Hamlet’s problems, especially procrastination. These characters and works include Tian Liede in the short story New Hamlet [Xin Hanmuliede] (1936), Ma Wei in the novel The Two Mas [Er Ma] (1929), and the anti-Japanese drama, Homecoming [Guiqulaixi] (1942). Tian Liede even declares, ‘I am Shakespeare’s Hamlet; we share the same first name [Liede and ‘Let’ in Hamlet].’ See Lao She, “New Hamlet [Xin Hanmuliede],” in Clams and Seaweeds [Hezao ji] (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1936), 157, reprinted in Complete Collections of Lao She’s Fictions [Lao She xiaoshuo quanji], ed. Shu Ji and Shu Yi, 11 vols (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2004), vol. 10, 443–59; David Der-wei Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 126. Alexander C.Y. Huang, “Shamlet: Shakespeare as a Palimpsest,” in Shakespeare Without English: The Reception of Shakespeare in Non-anglophone Countries, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Chee Seng Lim (Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2006), 211–21. Xiao Yang Zhang, Shakespeare in China: A Comparative Study of Two Traditions and Cultures (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 210–35. Lu Gu-sun, “Hamlet Across Space and Time,” Shakespeare Survey 36 (1988): 56. Cao and Sun, 49. Quoted in Tian Benxiang. Zhongguo xiandai bijiao xiju shi [A Comparative History of Modern Chinese Drama] (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1993), 453. Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 51. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 235. Hamuleite [Hamlet] was performed from 2–7 June 1942 with the following cast: Wen Xiying as Hamlet, Chen Jingxian as Claudius, Peng Houjun as Gertrude, and Luo Shui as Ophelia. Jiao Juyin, born as Jiao Chengzhi on 11 December 1905, in Tianjin, is one of the most influential directors in modern China. He worked closely with Cao Yu, Ouyang Shanzun, and Zhao Qiyang to create the aesthetic style of Beijing People’s Art Theatre. In addition to adaptations, Jiao is recognized for his productions of canonical modern

46

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 Chinese plays such as Lao She’s Teahouse [Chaguan], which was revived by the Beijing People’s Art Theatre as part of the centennial celebration of Jiao’s birthday in 2005. The script was translated by Liang Shiqiu. The revival of the production was given a slightly different title, Danmai wangzi Hamuleite [Danish Prince Hamlet]. It was staged at the Huangjiayakou Experimental Theatre in Chongqing on 17 November 1942, and in the Guotai Theatre [Guotai Da Xiyuan] in the same city from 9–19 December 1942. Cao and Sun, 104. Ruru Li, Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), 34. Jiang Tao, “Directing Shakespeare on the Chinese stage [Lun Zhongguo shaju wutai shang de daoyan yishu].” Drama [Xiju] 3 (1996): 106. Jiao, Juyin. “About Hamlet [Guanyu Hamuleite],” vol. 2, Collected Works of Jiao Juyin [Jiao Juyin wenji] (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1988), 167–8. Jiang, “Directing Shakespeare”, 107. For a summary of Chinese visions of Hamlet, see Zhang, Shakespeare in China, 213–16. Ibid., 216. It is of interest to note that a few months before Hamlet was staged in Guotai Theatre in Chongqing, a Chinese play bearing strong resemblance to Hamlet was staged there. The five-act Chinese historical play Qu Yuan by Guo Moruo (1892–1978), one of the most widely recognized historians and writers, was staged by the Chinese Dramatic Art Society [Zhonghua Juyi She] and directed by Chen Liting in the same theatre in April 1942. The titular character Qu Yuan is a historical figure who has become an icon of the melancholic Confucian politician wronged by his emperor. Many of Guo’s contemporaries pointed out the similarities – in terms of characterizations of Hamlet and Qu Yuan and dramatic techniques – between Guo and Shakespeare. The production premiered at Kronborg Castle, Elsinore, Denmark, 16–23 August 2002. It ran for another three nights (22–24 September 2002) at the Betty Nansen Theatre in Edison, Copenhagen, Denmark. Japan Foundation Asia Center, The Japan Foundation Asia Center: Towards Mutual Understanding in Asia in the Twenty-First Century (Tokyo: n.d.), 2. Ethnic Chinese comprise 76.2 per cent of Singapore’s population, and Malays and Indians 13.8 per cent and 8.3 per cent respectively. The four official languages are English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, and Tamil. Ong, Keng Sen, “A Talk with Director Ong Keng Sen [interview with Mok Wai Yin],” Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral – A Meditation [stage bill] (TheatreWorks, Victoria Theatre, Singapore 1995). Elizabeth A. Kalden, “All the World’s a Stage Now,” Straits Times (1998): 2; quoted by C.J.W.-L. Wee in “Staging the Asian Modern: Cultural Fragments, the Singaporean Eunuch, and the Asian Lear,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Summer 2004): 781. Ong, “A Talk with Director Ong Keng Sen.” Ong Keng Sen, “Lear: Linking Night and Day,” Lear [stage bill] (Tokyo: The Japan Foundation Asia Center, 1997), 5. Ong, Search: Hamlet, Programme Notes (Elsinore, Denmark: Hamlet Sommer 2002), 18.

SITE-SPECIFIC HAMLETS 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

73. 74.

75.

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Ibid. Ong, “Encounters,” The Drama Review 45, no. 3 (2001): 132. Alette Scavenius, “Search for Hamlet: An Interview with the Director,” Search: Hamlet (2002), 45. Rustom Bharucha, “Consumed in Singapore: The Intercultural Spectacle of Lear,” Theater 31, no.1 (2000): 122–4; Wee, “Staging the Asian Modern,” 782. Kalden, “All the World’s a Stage,” 2. Ong, Search: Hamlet (2002), 18. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 6. Ong, Search: Hamlet. Programme Notes. Kronborg castle edition, 2003, 8. Ong, Search: Hamlet (2002), 20. Ibid. Ibid., 46. Ibid. See her “Presidential Address 2005: On Rooted Cosmopolitanism,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 627–40. Martin Esslin, An Anatomy of Drama (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 29. Hamlet Sommer official website (http://www.hamletsommer.dk/), August 2006. Erik Cohen, “Tourism at Play,” Religion 15 (1985): 292; quoted in Dennis Kennedy, “Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism,” Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Performance, ed. Edward J. Esche (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 19. Kennedy, “Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism,” 10–11. Susan Bennett, “Shakespeare on Vacation,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 507. Hodgdon, “Stratford’s Empire,” 191–240. Koji Takao, “The Tokyo Globe in the Context of Shakespeare in Japan,” in Shakespeare Global/Local: The Hong Kong Imaginary in Transcultural Production, ed. Tam et al. (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2002), 146–50. The Story of Bloody Hands, Shanghai Kunju Theatre Company, adapted from Macbeth by Zheng Shifeng, directed by Li Jiayao, Shen Bin, and Zhang Mingrong; artistic director, Huang Zuolin, premiered in Shanghai in 1986. While some directors consciously moved away from the opportunity to gain purchase of locality-derived authenticity and resisted rootless tours of their productions, the Chinese reception of the international tours of this kunju Macbeth (Scotland) and the Shanghai Peking Opera Company’s 2005 Hamlet (Kronborg Castle, Denmark) demonstrated anxieties about the authenticity of performance venues. This explains the pride associated with ‘Chinese-made’ Shakespeare touring the characters’ ‘homeland,’ Macbeth’s Scotland and Hamlet’s Denmark. While these adaptations were believed to have gained additional values through the ‘authentic’ performance venues, none of them were site-specific; they were performed in China before the international tour with the same cast and staging. Li Jiayao, the director of the kunju adaptation of Macbeth, referred to the performance in Scotland as the highest achievement of kunju opera in its four centuries of history and as the highlight of his acting and directing career (Li, interview with author, 2005). The names of the characters and locations within Macbeth have

48

76.

77.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 been sinicized and relocated to a fictional feudal kingdom in ancient China. The requirements of Chinese operatic theatre further restricted the presence of Shakespearean lines. Even though this could hardly pass as a ‘Scottish’ play, the theatre company and their Chinese critics still took great pride in the performances in Scotland. Wushi shengfei [Looking for Trouble], a Western-style spoken drama adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, was directed by Yu Luosheng, translated by Zhu Shenghao, and produced by Shanghai People’s Art Theatre Company, in Huangpu Park in Shanghai, 16–19 November 1995. The open-air production had a cast of over sixty people. To paraphrase Heidegger: ‘A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.’ Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 152.

4 Family Ties over Romantic Love: Appropriations of Romeo and Juliet in Northeastern Brazil

José Roberto O’Shea

Let me begin with a caveat: the focus of this reflection is appropriation from page onto page, and from page onto stage. That is, I am not addressing appropriation from page onto the big screen. I am concerned about what the process of appropriation entails, that is, taking, transforming, mediating, subverting, adding, subtracting, translating. The importance of the concept of appropriation has become unquestionable in Cultural Studies. The authors of The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism gloss “appropriation” as referring “to the taking of something, often without permission, for use exclusively by one’s self ”. Invoking Bourdieu and Passeron, the entry also establishes that in the context of Cultural Studies the practice “designates an act whereby a form of cultural capital is taken over and turned against its original possessor”.1 And addressing the concept in the “Introduction” to The Intercultural Performance Reader, Patrice Pavis reminds us that appropriation “reduces everything to the perspective of the target culture, which is in the dominant position and turns the dominant culture to its own ends”,2 even though the notion of a reduction seems less cogent than that of a critical dialogue and exchange between the cultures involved in the appropriation dynamics. Appropriation, of course, has not gone unnoticed in Shakespeare Studies. In the Introduction to Shakespeare and Appropriation, for instance, Christy Desmet postulates that the “word ‘appropriation’ implies an exchange, either the theft of something valuable … or a gift, the allocation of resources for a worthy cause”.3 In varying degrees, such implications apply to the use made of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet by two Brazilian artists – João Martins de Ataíde (1880–1959) and Ariano Suassuna (1927– ) – early and late in the twentieth century. Respectively, a popular poet-singer and a playwright (besides 49

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being a poet, an essayist, and novelist), Ataíde and Suassuna rewrote Romeo and Juliet in Brazilian Portuguese, reconciling the old tale of the ill-fated young lovers from Verona with the demands of the appropriators’ local communities and placing the story within the tradition and the strict revenge codes of the Brazilian Northeast, as often romanced in Literatura de Cordel.4 The appropriators’ concerns about presenting a stark conflict between good and evil and denouncing the hero’s dishonourable capitulation in the face of family obligations and loyalty have made the one invent and the other repeat an important interpolation in which a blatantly evil Capulêto has Montequio, his wife, and Romeu (then a child) arrested and chained in a cold dungeon. In the powerful sequence, Capulêto then proceeds with an arguably unexplained revenge, brutally killing Romeu’s mother before his very eyes.5 The enormity of the crime committed by Capulêto is compounded by the crucial importance of allegiance to one’s mother in the culture of Brazil’s backlands.

I.

CORDEL

The chapbooks still written and read in the Northeast of Brazil grew out of the medieval European ballad and broadside tradition. Two famous Brazilian folklorists, Luis da Câmara Cascudo and Manuel Diéges Júnior, discuss extensively the origin of our Literatura de Cordel, Cascudo in various essays and books, especially Vaqueiros e Cantadores and Cinco Livros do Povo, and Diéges Júnior, mainly in the essay “Ciclos Temáticos na Literatura de Cordel”.6 Both scholars demonstrate the connections between the chapbooks sold in street markets as of the seventeenth century and the so-called folhas volantes or folhas soltas,7 in Portugal. In Spain, this type of popular literature was known as pliegos or hojas.8 The latter term is also current in Argentina, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru. In France, the phenomenon was known as littèrature de colportage,9 mostly geared toward a rural readership, whereas in the cities the canard10 prevailed. In England, similar booklets were often known as “cocks” or “catchpennies”, whenever dealing with romance and fiction, and “broadsides”, loose sheets usually relating historical facts. Hence, although the Brazilian Literatura de Cordel seems to have come directly from Portugal and Spain, its sources go back to other countries, such as Germany, France, and England, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In all cases – folhas volantes, folhas soltas, pliegos, hojas, littèrature de colportage, canard, cocks, catchpennies, or broadsides – such publications entail traditional narratives, topicality, circumstantial facts and were aimed at the general public, precisely like the Brazilian chapbook literature.

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Initially available throughout the colony, these tales became particularly popular in the backlands, where other sources of information and entertainment were scarce.11 Later, towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the advent of small presses and production by local authors, cordel literature established itself in the Northeast and became one of the peculiarities of local culture. As regards the history of cordel literature in the Northeast of Brazil, Átila de Almeida considers 1830 the starting point of this type of popular oral poetry. Around 1830 were born Uglino de Sabugi – the earliest cantador12 on record – and his brother Nicandro, both sons of Agostinho Nunes da Costa, the “father” of Brazilian popular oral poetry. Born at Serra do Teixeira, in the state of Paraíba, between 1840 and 1850, the poets Germano da Lagoa, Romano de Mãe D´Água, and Silvino Piruá were contemporaries of Uglino and Nicandro. Along with Manoel Caetano and Manoel Cabeleira, these are the earliest known Brazilian cantadores. In the 1880s were born Firmino Teixeira do Amaral, Francisco das Chagas Batista, Antônio Batista Guedes, and the author who is my concern here: João Martins de Ataíde. Editorial activity of cordel starts with Leandro Gomes de Barros, Chagas Batista, and Piaruá, around 1900.13 Gradually, cordel becomes increasingly practiced and consumed and, as Almeida has demonstrated, by 1920, records point to 2,500 popular poets in operation in the states of Pernambuco, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte, and Ceará. The social background of an agricultural society marked by drought and poverty elicited the context for this kind of inexpensive, rugged, popular entertainment. Nevertheless, around 1945, cordel starts to experience a phase of decadence, as a consequence of inescapable social transformations, such as the radio, the movies, the industrialization of Brazil, and internal migration of the Northeastern population especially due to the construction of Brasília (the new capital), factors that altered the mentality of the backlands northeastern population, as we have seen, the great producer and consumer of popular oral poetry.

II. ATAÍDE’S ROMANCE DE ROMEU E JULIÊTA As with so many cordel stories, there is no indication of the first date of publication of Romance de Romeu e Juliêta. However, the chapbooks were often published by private presses and, since Ataíde sold his press in 1949, his folheto must date back somewhat. Aimara Resende submits that “around 1909” the chapbook appeared in the Northeast of Brazil.14 Written in sextilhas, sevensyllable, six-line stanzas, rhyming abcbdb, typical of improvised verse, the tale includes four introductory stanzas (a Prologue?), promising the story of

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Romeu’s “brief existence”, the “most touching tale” the poet has ever written, a story known in “almost every nation / in theatre and in film”. And the poet warns that it will take more than “five or six years”15 for the reader to forget the suffering of Juliêta. Besides rewriting the play in demotic Brazilian Portuguese, the cordel poet appropriates himself of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet by cutting and squeezing the play’s five acts into just under a thousand lines. The cast, which includes some two-dozen speaking parts in Shakespeare, is reduced to a half-dozen (the Nurse, Lady Capulet, Prince Escalus, and Benvolio are eliminated). And there are further surface deviations, as regards, for instance, the masked ball turned into a birthday party for Juliet, details of Tybalt’s death, Romeo’s two-month imprisonment, and the belated timing of the marriage of the “star-cross’d lovers”. However, if deviations are superficial, one dissimilarity between Shakespeare’s play and Ataíde’s chapbook is as conspicuous as it is important. The crucial difference between the two versions of the tale is that the chapbook provides Romeu with compounded and long-established motivation to act against the Capulêtos. Here, we learn that at the age of 2 Romeu witnessed a platoon sent by Capulêto – whose family are described as a “tyrant breed / who hated the Montequios, / an honest and humane family” – to arrest Montequio and lock him up, hands tied, in a “gloomy dungeon”.16 Then, Lady Montequio, bearing Romeu in her arms, is brought into the jail by three hangmen. We are told that Capulêto comes in, reminding Montequio that he, Capulêto, had vowed vengeance for a crime Montequio had committed (we are never told what such crime was), and that he stabs Lady Montequio in front of her husband and child,17 with such force that the dagger severs her rosary, as Slater points out, “a blasphemous … action in the folheto reader’s eyes”.18 Dying, the mother points at Romeu and tells her husband: “Remember our son”. We are then told that Capulêto hands the dagger to Montequio, saying: “this iron is yours / when your son grows up, / give it to him as a present”; subsequently, Capulêto has Lady Montequio’s body dragged through the streets of Verona and finally thrown into the sea.19 Sixteen years later, a gray-haired Montequio demands that Romeu avenges his mother’s murder, using the doomed dagger Capulêto had given him as a “gift”. Dutifully, Romeu swears by the sword that he will kill Capulêto with that same “iron”.20 Accompanied by Mercutio, Romeu seeks the accursed duke, on whose lands the two young friends arrive on the duke’s daughter’s birthday. Then, for a moment, the events approximate Shakespeare’s rendering of the tale. Describing the fateful encounter between Romeu and Juliêta, she, of course, dancing, Ataíde sings of Romeu’s “enchantment” by the beauty of the young woman,

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who “resembled / a fairy or a princess”. But, as Juliêta offers Romeu a violet, and as he kisses and keeps the flower, he immediately “no longer thinks of the vow / he had made to his old father”, and a moment later, in the garden, he confesses his love for the “princess”, tells her the story of his mother’s murder, and announces he has forsaken the mission to kill Juliêta’s father, at which point Ataíde comments: “love is a drop of water / that falls in our soul / and quenches the thirst of vengeance”.21 Insightfully, Candace Slater has pointed out the power of the analogy between love and a drop of water in the droughtstricken Brazilian Northeast.22 Slater also points out that as a “self-proclaimed spokesman for the community” the author of a folheto is prone to illustrate time-honoured religious and moral values through his stories.23 To be sure, affirming the strict code of vengeance that still prevails in the backlands of the Brazilian Northeast according to which the family (or the group) is more important than the individual, Ataíde states in the closing stanzas that the reader now has ample knowledge not only of the circumstances surrounding the death of Montequio’s wife but also of Romeu’s “miserable / cowardice”, in allowing himself to be deluded by a “sprig of violets”. The proposition is that “even if Juliêta were a goddess”, Romeu “should have hated her”, and the implacable conclusion is that because he was “false to his father”, Romeu was punished, “marrying the daughter / of his fatal enemy”. After all, given the ethos of the Brazilian Northeastern family feuds, “where old hatred exists, / there can be no friendship”.24 And in the poem’s final stanza, in its typical moralizing, the cordel poet, writing in the first person, declares that he hates cowardice, and that he has written Romeu’s story, but he dislikes the tale.

III.

SUASSUNA’S A HISTÓRIA DE AMOR DE ROMEU E JULIETA

At the end of the twentieth century, the celebrated Brazilian author Ariano Suassuna also made an attempt at Romeo and Juliet, even if disingenuously refusing to acknowledge Shakespeare in the subtitle of his rendering of the story – Imitação Brasileira de Matteo Bandello.25 No doubt, as regards the relationship between theatre and popular culture in Brazil, the work of Suassuna is fundamental. Suassuna repeatedly affirms his intention to produce erudite works based on and deploying elements of popular culture. He is quite aware of the fact that the “great tradition of Western theatre – Greek tragedy, Latin comedy, medieval mysteries, commedia dell’arte, Iberian baroque autos … Elizabethan Theatre, classic French Theatre, German Romantic Theatre – was altogether more connected with the spectacular than the literary tradition”.26

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However, for Suassuna, perhaps due to the influence of nineteenth-century Naturalism, European theatre neglected its origins and trailed a bourgeois path that was private and falsely realistic. Therefore, spectacular elements, such as masks, chorus, dance, music, and uncanny events vanished, and the colourful costumes became grey or black, meeting the conveniences of a class “that is afraid of everything – even of the imagination itself ”.27 Excepting, mutatis mutandis, Yeats, Claudel, and Brecht, Suassuna thinks that the disappearance of dramatic spectacle has been rather harmful to theatre: [S]omething that might seem to be merely an exterior phenomenon [has affected] … the poet’s very invention. Indeed, the dialogue that can be attributed to two characters in frockcoats is rather different from the one that can be produced by a Devil dressed in red and black and a King wearing mantle, crown, and mask, speaking to the sound of drums, fifes, and viols.28

Given such concern with theatricality, it should come as no surprise that in his theatre Suassuna wants to show the world as a circus. Besides romances, essays, and poems, starting in 1947, Suassuna wrote at least seventeen plays, and at least in one other case – the masterpiece O Santo e a Porca29 – he produced a Brazilian, Northeastern version of a classic text: Plauto’s Aulularia. And Suassuna has remained highly productive. In 1997, he published A História de Amor de Romeu e Julieta, inspired, precisely, by Ataíde’s folheto, O Romance de Romeu e Juliêta.30 Despite the “imitation” announced in his subtitle, and surely bearing in mind not only Shakespeare, but expressly Matteo Bandello and the aforementioned Ataíde, Suassuna preserves the cordel structure, in which the cantador is the main presence, but shares the narrative among different characters, adding medieval and Renaissance references, such as the Iberian poems Bernal Francés and Romance de Minervina, and resorting to contemporary allusions, such as lines from Garcia Lorca. Moreover, given the dramatist’s views on the importance of spectacle, the writing makes no attempt to conceal theatricality; on the contrary, as Elza de Andrade has shown, “Suassuna’s powerful ‘word-scene’ constructs a markedly dramatic, theatrical site, alternating lyricism, comedy, and narrative”.31 Although Suassuna’s metrical pattern is the same as the cordel’s – sevensyllable, six-line stanzas rhyming abcbdb – and he repeats many of Ataíde’s end-rhymes, the adaptation of the cordel romance into verse drama, of course, imposes the transposition of narrative into dialogue, and formal alterations are noticeable. As soon as Quaderna32 speaks the introductory lines, for instance, the point of view changes, and the action starts, with Montequio speaking. Furthermore, valuing histrionics, Suassuna introduces talking puppets who represent Montequio, Capuleto, and Lady Montequio, and who re-enact the scene of the murder, under Montequio’s and Romeu’s watchful eyes.33 And the

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nuptial night scene includes an exciting interpolation, a sequence of twenty lines, first spoken by Romeu, then repeated by Julieta, inspired by Garcia Lorca’s powerfully erotic poem “A Casada Infiel”,34 published in Romancero Gitano (1928). The lines are spoken by the young couple and refer to their undressing and exchanging voluptuous caresses. All in all, the content of Suassuna’s play is remarkably close to Ataíde’s romance. Apart from the indication that it will take six to seven years (instead of five to six) for the reader to forget Juliet’s suffering, Suassuna’s introduction differs little from Ataíde’s. Most importantly, in Suassuna’s rendering Romeu is also urged to avenge his mother’s foul murder, by killing Capuleto, with the same dagger that “robbed” him of his mother;35 furthermore, Romeu is also given the dagger with which Capuleto stabbed the boy’s mother; and the woman’s body is also dragged and thrown into the sea. Like Ataíde’s, Suassuna’s opening stanzas tell us that Romeu witnessed his own mother’s murder at the hands of Montequio, the only difference being that, in Suassuna, Romeu was 4 years old (as opposed to 2), which makes him 20 at the time this Romeu meets Julieta. The circumstances of Julieta’s birthday and the encounter of the future lovers are quite alike in the cordel and in the verse play and, interpolating a poem from the Romance de Bernal Francés, Suassuna has his Romeu (like Ataíde’s, enchanted by Julieta’s beauty) fall immediately in love and just as soon forget the promise made to his “old father”. The subsequent action – involving Juliet’s plans for the marriage, Teobaldo’s death, Romeu’s imprisonment (here only seven days, as opposed to more than a month in Ataíde) and exile in Mântua, the impending marriage to Paris, the Priest’s interference, the sleeping potion, and the lovers’ deaths – are fairly similar in either appropriation. And in the concluding stanzas, Suassuna’s Quaderna reiterates Ataíde’s condemnation of Romeu’s betrayal of his family – all for “beautiful breasts, / a sprig of violets” – and announces the ensuing punishment. The moral is the same as in Ataíde: “Where old hatred exists, / there can be no friendship”.36 After berating Romeu, Quaderna, with almost the same words that Ataíde had used (only substituting “history” for “romance”), finally, presents himself as the author, saying, that he wrote but does not like the story of Romeu. Suassuna has written that “cordel is the only medium in which the Brazilian people have managed to express themselves without distortion or imposition coming from outside or above”.37 Yet, as various theorists have demonstrated, national culture is often produced through processing what comes from outside or above by way of a critical dialogue. Local acts of appropriation, which some Shakespearean scholars have notoriously referred to as “small-time Shakespeare”, often imply transgression, as Martha Rozett says, a “talking back to

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Shakespeare”. Recognizing that cordel readers (or listeners), whose lives are often so precarious, need to feel that their suffering will eventually be rewarded and evil punished, the Brazilian poet and the dramatist after him insist upon rugged principles of moral cause and effect. Aware that his readers could not condone a man’s breaking his word when his own mother had been viciously murdered, Ataíde makes the young hero a “traitor”. And Suassuna, whose play is overtly informed by the cordel ethos, follows suit. True, most of the alterations introduced by Ataíde and Suassuna transform the tenor of the narrative, but they do not critically affect the story line. However, the interpolation of a crucial thematic element – an element that establishes the primacy of kinship ties over romantic love – renders Ataíde’s and Suassuna’s appropriations noticeably different from Shakespeare’s drama, that is, originals in their own right. Undoubtedly, Shakespeare as cultural capital has high “exchange value” the world over. And, yes, Brazilian Northeastern culture, as “target”, does promote a literal reduction of the magnitude of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, turning the English bard to the ends of the ideology of the landowners’ clan system of the Brazilian backlands, “with its emphasis on loyalty to the clan and family honor above all things”.38 Whatever happens, however, the process implies dialogue and exchange more than mere reduction – albeit surely “without permission”. In the last analysis, Ataíde and Suassuna can be seen to appropriate Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a source, as Shakespeare seems to have used French and English translations of Matteo Bandello’s story, inverting, reconstructing, appropriating the source, entering the parent text from a new angle, to reinforce his own popular cultural traditions.

NOTES 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi, “Appropriation,” in The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 17. Ibid., 11. Christy Desmet, “Introduction,” in Shakespeare and Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (London: Routledge, 1999), 4. Also known in Brazil as folhetos, that is, chapbooks. The word cordel refers to the string along which the chapbooks were suspended for display in open-air markets throughout the Brazilian countryside. Interestingly, Alexander Shurbanov has recently discussed a similar founding revenge motif in a Bulgarian appropriation of Shakespeare – Vicenso and Angelina – by Konstantin Velichkov (1855–1907). In the Bulgarian play, it is Vicenso’s father, and not mother, who has been murdered by Angelina’s father. Like Ataíde’s and Suassuna’s Romeus, Vicenso is torn between his mission to avenge his father and the desire to

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6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

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elope with Angelina. In a comical denouement, however, Angelina’s father dies of a heart attack, which frees Vicenso of any moral obligations, so he can have his Angelina. Respectively, “Vaqueros and Ballad Singers”, “Five Books of the People”, and “Thematic Cycles of Chapbook Literature”. In the present essay, all translation into English is my own. “Loose Sheets”. “Leaflets”, “sheets”. “Literature of colportage”. An extravagant or absurd report or story; a fabricated sensational report or statement. Candace Slater, “Romeo and Juliet in the Brazilian Backlands,” Journal of Folklore Research 20 (1983): 36. Also known as repentista, a poet capable of improvising verse, often to the sound of the viol or fiddle. A chapbook published by Chagas Batista in Campina Grande, Paraíba, in 1902 is extant and can be seen at “Casa de Rui Barbosa”, in Rio de Janeiro. Aimara da Cunha Resende, “Text, Context, and Audience: Two Versions of Romeo and Juliet in Brazilian Popular Culture,” in Latin American Shakespeares, ed. Bernice Kliman and Rick Santos (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 273. João Martins de Ataíde, Romance de Romeu e Julieta, ed. José Bernardo da Silva (Juazeiro do Norte: Tipografia São Francisco, 1957), 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. Slater, “Brazilian Backlands,” 43. Ataíde, 5–6. Ibid., 11–12. Ibid., 13–14. Slater, “Brazilian Backlands,” 40. Ibid., 37. Ataíde, 30–31. “Brazilian Imitation of Matteo Bandello.” Ariano Suassuna, “Genealogia Nobiliárquica do Teatro Brasileiro,” O Percevejo 8 (2000): 102. Ibid., 103. Ibid. “The Saint and the Sow.” In 1998–99, Suassuna’s play was staged by Confraria da Paixão, a company formed by students of the School of Theatre of the University of Rio de Janeiro, and toured different theatres in Rio, in an award-winning production directed by Elza de Andrade, to whom I am grateful for making the visual records of the production available to me. Elza de Andrade, “Entrevista com Elza de Andrade,” O Percevejo 8 (2000): 146. Here a choric figure, Quaderna is also present in Suassuna’s romance A Pedra do Reino and has been compared to Don Quixote. In the play, Quaderna often returns to the stage, providing transitions between scenes.

58 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 In performance, the actors playing Montequio and Romeu react with humorous disgust to the puppet show. “The Unfaithful Married Woman.” Ariano Suassuna, “A História de Amor de Romeu e Julieta,” F. de São Paulo. Mais! 19 de janeiro de 1997, 5. Ibid., 7. Ariano Suassuna, “As Utopias de Quaderna-Suassuna,” F. de São Paulo. Mais! 19 de janeiro de 1997. 7. Resende, 273–4.

5 Tadashi Suzuki Directs King Lear – Again

Tetsuo Kishi

So far Tadashi Suzuki is the only Japanese director – or the only non-Western director for that matter – to be featured in the prestigious “Directors in Perspective” series published by Cambridge University Press, which includes monographs on such luminous personages as Antoine, Brecht, Brook, Copeau, Meyerhold and Reinhardt. Clearly nobody could question his importance as a director in world theatre today. One of the reasons why he is so important and so widely respected is, I think, that he as a Japanese living in modern times has been trying to redefine his relation with classical drama, whether it is Japanese or Western. He was the first Japanese director to receive the award named after Stanislavsky and in 2004 he directed King Lear for Moscow Art Theatre, which was co-founded by the eminent Russian director (with Nemirovich-Danchenko). While Suzuki has never underestimated the work of Stanislavsky, he doubts whether his so-called method is really appropriate when tackling plays by classical authors such as Shakespeare who after all was writing in a society significantly different from that of Chekhov or Ibsen. He is also hesitant about Japanese actors and directors adopting (or rather naïvely imitating) Western approaches to Shakespeare.1 This is because Suzuki is one of the few directors – there ought to be more of them – who are well aware of the importance of an actor’s body as well as an actor’s voice in a theatrical presentation. He realizes that a Japanese actor’s body, the proportion of which is somewhat different from that of a Western actor, requires a different kind of movement and that the Japanese language, which is different from Western languages in many points, requires a different kind of delivery. I know what I am going to mention may be a trivial case but Suzuki’s concern with actors’ bodies reminds me of an experience I had several years ago. I saw 59

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a Japanese production of Contact, a “dance play with music” which was a 2000 work of the successful Broadway choreographer and director Susan Stroman. The Japanese production used the original choreography. While its cleverness and wit were unmistakable, I noticed something vaguely unsettling about the whole production. A few weeks later when my memory of the Japanese production was still vivid enough, I saw the London production of the same piece also directed and choreographed by Stroman, and at once I realized what the problem was. It was clear that she had in mind tall Caucasian and African American dancers with long legs, when she created her dance. Perhaps she was not even conscious of the fact because they were the only kind of dancers she was used to. While I admired the London production I felt those well-trained and highly competent dancers would probably look pathetic or even embarrassing if they were asked to perform a piece of traditional Japanese dance in which dancers frequently bend their knees and deliberately shorten their height to show their closeness to the stage which often represents the earth. It may be true, as some people seem to claim, that young Japanese men and women today have more Western-looking bodies than those of their parents and grandparents but the question Suzuki has been trying to explore is still crucially relevant. One of the most remarkable experiments with Shakespeare Suzuki has conducted is his production of King Lear. Fortunately there is an extremely probing essay written about it by Yasunari Takahashi, “Tragedy with Laughter: Suzuki Tadashi’s The Tale of Lear” which is included in Performing Shakespeare in Japan, edited by Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies.2 A slightly revised version of the same essay became Chapter 9 of The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi which Takahashi co-authored with Ian Carruthers for the already mentioned “Directors in Perspective” series.3 Takahashi succinctly describes the basic premise of Suzuki’s production of King Lear: Suzuki has framed Shakespeare’s King Lear within the fantasy of an old man in a hospital (or nursing home). Obviously an ordinary specimen of present-day society, the Old Man must have suffered similar (although, of course, much more pedestrian) familial misfortunes in his own life. Apparently he had been reading King Lear, and he now identifies with Shakespeare’s hero.4

Then the story of Shakespeare’s play unfolds itself, and while it is essentially faithful to the original version, Suzuki has omitted a number of memorable passages. The exchange between Kent and Gloucester which opens the original is gone. In fact there is not a trace of Kent. The King of France does not appear either. Cordelia does appear in the opening scene but she only makes her second appearance as a corpse toward the end of the play, which means her reunion and reconciliation with her father never takes place. The exchange between

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Kent, Edgar and Albany which closes Shakespeare’s version has been cut. The invasion of the French army is referred to but we hear very little about the war which ensues. Altogether Suzuki’s version is far bleaker and lacks the scale of the original so that it can concentrate on the personal misery of the old man. Suzuki himself describes his own stance: The hero is an old man who, left all alone in a hospital after the disintegration of family ties, has nothing to do but to wait for death. It is his memories and his fantasies which provide a framework within which Shakespeare’s King Lear is performed. Why this “Chinese Boxes” concept? Because I wanted to focus on the solitude of Lear as an old man and the resultant loss of his mental balance, thereby pointing to the truth of human weakness which has universal significance beyond the differences in historical or racial customs. Lear’s tragedy of solitude and madness must be brought forth not as specific to his kingship in distant time and space but as relevant to any old man living in any age in any country. To achieve this objective, a kind of editing has been necessary, selecting and emphasizing (often to extremes) only certain aspects of Shakespeare’s play. You may be shocked and cry “This is not Shakespeare!” Maybe – I can only beg you to believe me when I say that I hold this work to be as profoundly provocative as any masterpiece can and should be and that I have paid him as much respect as any director has.5

The production was first mounted in 1984. When it was revived in 1988, the director made several important changes. Again Takahashi’s essay is most helpful: Suzuki exploited to the full that sharply distancing effect which had always characterized his works. The newest and most telling device responsible for this effect was the introduction of the Nurse (played by a male actor). At the outset of the play, she finds a book on the floor beside the chair on which the Old Man is sitting, probably dropped from his hand as he drowsed. The Nurse picks it up and, squatting by the chair, starts reading it silently but avidly, with a box of popcorn beside her. Handel’s stately, hypnotic Largo announces the beginning of the Old Man’s fantasized enacting of the Lear story, but the slow-moving ritualistic entrance of courtiers is disturbed (for the audience, although not for the courtiers) by a raucous cackle from the Nurse. If the play-within-a play structure was already clear in the first production, the new version added another framework. The continual presence of the Nurse leads us to suspect that the dramatic action going on onstage is not only a figment of the Old Man’s fantasy but also a representation in the “real time” of what she is reading. We keep wavering between the two possible perspectives. The double framework, in other words, is far from clear-cut. From time to time the structure is turned inside out, and parallelism becomes intersection.6

Takahashi died in 2002, and in 2003 Suzuki mounted yet another production of King Lear which also introduced a number of changes. If Takahashi had been able to see this new production, no doubt he would have revised his own essay. It is really intriguing to imagine, for instance, what his response would have been to a new treatment of the nurse, because although the book-reading

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nurse still appeared, she did so only after the play was well under way. In other words she did not “start” the play in the way she had done in the 1988 version. It made “the double framework” less conspicuous and consequently even more ambiguous and puzzling. There are directors who try to make their productions as “clear-cut” and easy to understand as possible so that the audience can sit back and relax and enjoy them without wondering what they are about. Of course I do not mean to say such directors have no significance. Without them the so-called commercial theatre will be forced to flounder. But what is vitally important in this context is that Suzuki has never been one of them. Usually his productions are profusely ambiguous and open to a set of interpretations which are not always compatible with each other. He is an extremely demanding director not simply of his actors but of his audience as well and he expects hard thinking and a high degree of concentration from them. It is true that he is sometimes accused of elitism but sitting through his production almost always turns out to be an exceptionally rewarding experience. I think it is because Suzuki realizes as well as anybody that life is full of questions to which there can be no simple and “clear-cut” answers and that making a play which deals with such difficult questions deceptively easy is an insult to his audience. The stage of Suzuki’s King Lear is dominated by a huge wall which, we soon realize, consists of several panels.7 In the centre of the stage an old man in a wheelchair is reading a newspaper. Suddenly the panels fly open and reveal several courtier-like characters, who are Albany, Cornwall, and Lear’s three daughters. All of them are played by male actors and the actor playing Regan even has a beard. Neither he nor the actor playing Goneril tries to speak with a pseudo-feminine voice as female impersonators in Kabuki do. There is no attempt whatsoever to mask the actors’ masculinity, which is reminiscent of Noh. However, there is a strong trace of femininity and it is in the language. Japanese is a language where a differentiation between male and female styles is more obvious (than in English, for instance) and sometimes even mandatory.8 Suzuki’s production uses the translation by Yushi Odashima who is a great popularizer of Shakespeare and whose translations are widely known for their accessibility and colloquialism. Regan and Goneril in Odashima’s version certainly sound far more feminine than their English equivalents. As I said earlier, Suzuki has cut many memorable passages but Odashima’s style remains virtually intact. The discrepancy between the femininity of the language and the masculinity of its speakers will no doubt sound odd and unnatural. If it does, I think it is exactly the effect the director aimed at, for the discrepancy irrevocably shows the audience that what is happening on the stage is not a Stanislavskyan representation of reality but a theatrical presentation, nothing else. In this sense there is something Brechtian about Suzuki’s work.

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The similar unnaturalness is found in the actors’ delivery and movement. Suzuki’s rigorously trained actors do not exactly “chant” their speeches, but they intone them with a careful shift of the pitch and the volume – nobody speaks like that in daily life – and this style is shared by all the actors. The stylization endows Odashima’s essentially prosaic translation with a curiously poetic quality. It may sound rather strange to Western readers but it is both pointless and virtually impossible to translate Shakespearean blank verse into Japanese verse.9 In spite of this, the delivery of Suzuki’s actors which is often rather musical without being inarticulate makes the audience feel as if they were listening to something elevated and sublime. The style and the vocabulary of the translation may be mundane, but the delivery is not. We notice the same effect in the stylized movement of the actors. It is not directly derived from Noh or Kabuki but the way the actors move without keeping much distance between themselves and the stage is clearly reminiscent of traditional Japanese theatre and traditional Japanese dance. The first speech of the play is the one uttered by the old man as Lear about the division of the kingdom. It is followed as in Shakespeare’s version by the exchange between him and the three daughters, although it is heavily cut, and the scene ends with the angry Lear’s speech condemning Cordelia. There is neither a confrontation between Burgundy and the King of France nor Cordelia’s betrothal to the latter. The next scene is a shortened version of Act 1 scene 2 of the original. It begins with Edmund’s soliloquy and Gloucester reads what he believes is a letter written by Edgar (see Figure 5.1), but the scene ends before the encounter between Edmund and Edgar takes place. Then comes the scene where the short exchange between Goneril and Regan at the end of Act 1 scene 1 is delivered (see Figure 5.2). It is followed by a short scene with Goneril and Oswald, which is close to Act 1 scene 3 of the original. Then we get the encounter between Edmund and Edgar which ends Act 1 scene 2 of the original. I know it is cumbersome to follow the development of the play in Suzuki’s version so meticulously, but nobody could help noticing the sense of speed. Suzuki has divided Shakespeare’s opening scenes into short units, which shows a nearly cinematic technique. Such technique is feasible because Suzuki’s acting space, exactly like that of Shakespeare, is fundamentally undefined and allows the director to treat it most freely. In some scenes he uses the whole stage and in others he uses only a small portion of it. In the next scene Lear is served with a meal – the kind of meager meal often served in hospitals – and he vents his anger against Goneril while eating the meal. It is in this scene that we meet for the first time a nurse in modern uniform. So far the characters we have met seem to belong to the world of King

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Gloucester reads the forged letter

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5.2

Regan and Goneril discuss their father

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Lear (which is almost certainly an illusion of the old man) because they wear vaguely courtly costume. But the nurse’s modern uniform separates her from the world of the illusion. Is she then a real nurse working in the hospital? Possibly. And yet the fact that she is played by a bearded male actor would indicate that the situation is not quite so simple as that. She does not comfortably belong either to the world of the old man’s illusion or to the real world. She seems to represent a tie the old man keeps with the real world, but the relation between the two worlds is meant to be complicated and ambiguous. When the nurse starts speaking, the audience who are familiar with Shakespeare’s play will realize she is repeating the Fool’s words. This device will not be appreciated by the audience who are not familiar with the original version. In the cases of other characters, such as Goneril and Gloucester, the familiarity with the original version is not indispensable (though of course it will help), because apparently Goneril and Gloucester are not played by a particular character living in the real world. We cannot ignore, however, the fact that the Fool is supposed to be played by a nurse who by the way does not look like an ordinary nurse. Of course I do not know why Suzuki discarded the device he used in the 1988 version whereby the nurse appeared at the outset of the play, but I think he probably wanted to make the relation between the fantasy and the reality hopelessly complicated by delaying the appearance of this character. As it happens, the Fool in Shakespeare’s version also appears after Lear’s decline begins. Like him the Fool as played by the nurse both mocks and takes care of Lear – or rather takes care of him by mocking him. In the subsequent scenes which involve Goneril, Albany, Gloucester, Edmund, Cornwall and Regan, something strange – something which is not in the original version – happens. Throughout these scenes Lear remains visible to the audience. Then in a scene where the Fool is beside Lear and reads a book (which is likely to be King Lear) they are watched by Goneril (see Figure 5.3). It is as if the characters who do not directly take part in the action of the scenes function as a kind of chorus. In a production which depends on the idea of a play-within-a-play, characters (or actors playing them) frequently remain on the stage and keep watching the central action of the scenes they are not meant to appear in. Perhaps Suzuki was thinking of this device which after all is not a particularly original one. Again, however, the way he uses the device is disturbing because the choric characters are not always detached but on some occasions visibly and audibly respond to the central action which is supposed to take place in the world of fantasy. The margin of the world of fantasy is never clearly defined. Lear is afraid of going mad (see Figure 5.4). The storm approaches and he is plunged into it. Charles Lamb notoriously said that the storm scene in King

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5.3

Lear (left) and Fool, watched by Goneril (rear)

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King Lear fears madness

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Lear is unactable. Suzuki’s production could be an eloquent refutation of Lamb’s argument. Because his tale of Lear unfolds itself in the fantasy of the old man (who is almost certainly deranged) he does not have to depend on any naturalistic means to express a storm. The delivery and the movement of the old man is all that he needs. Then, to our great surprise, a scene which is not in Shakespeare at all is shown. The panels fly open, several characters enter and perform a kind of dance. Lear (or is it the old man?) eventually joins the dancers. It would be easy (and tempting) to treat the whole scene as part of the old man’s illusion, but Suzuki seems to prevent us from reaching such an easy solution. A group of nurses wearing the same uniform as the male actor who plays the Fool but played by female actors this time, appear and watch the proceedings. They appear again in one of the later scenes, but they have no lines to speak and they do not seem to be involved with the action of the tale of Lear itself. Surely they cannot be creatures living in the old man’s illusion. It would be more natural to regard them as real nurses working in the hospital where the old man is living. According to the basic premise of the production, it is a visualized fantasy of the old man, but Suzuki seems to be trying carefully to differentiate his perspective and the audience’s perspective so that the latter will never completely identify themselves with the central character. Understandably it is the scenes depicting Lear’s madness which figure largely in Suzuki’s version. The mock trial (which is not in the Folio text of the play) is retained but it is accompanied by peals of laughter from the characters who are not on the stage. Of course the laughter may be a product of the old man’s hallucination. We never know. The encounter between the blind Gloucester and his son Edgar (as “Poor Tom”) is watched by the characters who are standing near the open panels. Similarly the blinding of Gloucester is watched by Lear and the Fool who is still reading a book. Again the whole effect is strikingly Brechtian. The scene in which Gloucester tries to kill himself (see Figure 5.5) is followed by another scene which has nothing to do with the original version. The nurses played by female actors cross the stage pushing wheelchairs which carry some of the characters from the tale of Lear such as Goneril and Regan. This seems to suggest that the other characters in the tale are played by the old man’s fellow inmates. I do not mean to say they actually play these parts in a production ostensibly directed by the old man – such interpretation would be both superficial and unconvincing – but it would be only natural if the old man’s images of “the other characters” have faces which are familiar to him. We notice a fascinatingly clever stroke of imagination which makes the nature of the old man’s fancy more complicated and more beguiling.

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Gloucester attempts suicide.

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Toward the end of the play the Fool (or is it the nurse?) appears pushing a wheelchair which carries Lear who in his turn is carrying the dead body of Cordelia. While Lear laments the death of his daughter, the Fool reads the book. Then Lear himself dies. After a few seconds, however, the dead characters stand up as if to indicate the end of the play-within-a-play – the scene is reminiscent of the ironical speech delivered by Hieronimo in the final scene of The Spanish Tragedy – and the Fool closes the book with a loud laugh. The actors make their exit – Suzuki does not dim the light so that everything is blatantly visible – and the production ends with the female nurses watching the empty stage from the panel. The whole production takes a little over ninety minutes. (Later the actors reappear to take a call but strictly speaking I do not think we can treat the scene as part of the production.) Suzuki’s production is a strongly Japanese one but it is never exotic in the way it might please some non-Japanese audiences, because its “Japaneseness” is not in such exterior (and easy to appreciate) elements as scenery and costume – “exterior” since they do not belong to actors’ bodies. Its Japaneseness is more inherent. It is represented by the delivery and movement of the actors – the elements they are required to convey with their own bodies. It will be more than obvious to anyone who is interested in serious theatre that the production is a profound examination of the idea of metatheatricality. Suzuki has succeeded in this examination by asking his actors to embody the fundamental paradox of acting – the fact that actors are at once themselves and the characters they play. There is absolutely nothing exotic about the kind of logical thinking which supports this director’s work, and I think it is exactly why he is so widely respected.

NOTES 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

See for instance an interview conducted by drama critic Ken Murai which was broadcast by NHK Television on 13 February 2005. Yasunari Takahashi, “Tragedy with Laughter: Suzuki Tadashi’s The Tale of Lear,” in Performing Shakespeare in Japan, ed. Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The Japanese co-editor’s name should be “Ryuta Minami” if we follow the “Western order”, “Minami” being his family name. Conversely “Tadashi Suzuki” should be “Suzuki Tadashi” in the Japanese order. Yasunari Takahashi and Ian Carruthers, The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Ibid., 247. Tadashi Suzuki (Shizuoka: Shizuoka Performing Arts Center, 2004), 23. The book is in three languages: Russian, English and Japanese. The English section was prepared by

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6. 7. 8.

9.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 Yasunari Takahashi, Thomas Rimer and Leon Ingulsrud. It is not clear who translated this particular essay. Takahashi, “Tragedy with Laughter,” 247–8. What follows is based on an analysis of the video of the 2003 production, kindly provided by Mr Suzuki and the staff of Shizuoka Performing Arts Center. See Tetsuo Kishi, “‘Our language of love’: Shakespeare in Japanese Translation,” Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, ed. Ton Hoenselaars (London: Thomson Learning, 2004), 68–81. This problem is discussed at length in the first three chapters of Shakespeare in Japan by Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw (London: Continuum, 2005). See also Kishi, “‘Verse or prose, that is not the question’: Translating Shakespeare into Japanese,” The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Vol. 3, edited by Graham Bradshaw, John M. Mucciolo, Angus Fletcher and Tom Bishop (London: Ashgate, 2003), 329–35.

PART II

Poems

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6 That’s Amores! Latin Love and Lovesickness in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

Lisa S. Starks

In his first publication, Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare, like Marlowe in Hero and Leander, aligns himself with the dark side of the Latin legacy of Renaissance literature – Ovid. Throughout the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Ovid had been “sanitized for English protection” – his erotic verses suppressed, his skeptical outlook infused with Christian beliefs, his twisted myths translated into moral tales. These medieval allegories did serve a purpose, though – they enabled Ovid’s poetry to survive.1 In the Renaissance, these views shifted, but the tendency to moralize Ovid continued, medieval allegory (allegoresis) giving way to humanist interpretations that stressed classical literature as a guide to ethical behavior.2 In the 1590s, however, a “new Ovidianism” sprang up in Elizabethan England, a movement that led to the rejection of these moralistic readings of Ovid and to the emergence of fresh, open readings of Ovid’s original texts and translations, including Ovid’s previously banned Amores, his erotic poetry that had eluded the moralizing of previous generations.3 These elegiac verses, still deliciously scandalous, were eagerly devoured by Elizabethan poets like Marlowe and Shakespeare. It is not surprising that Amores inspired the new surge of passion for Ovid in poets like Marlowe and Shakespeare, as they were the “forbidden fruit”4 of poetry, which offered the “wicked pleasures of Ovidianism”5 and also provided the “source of poetic and even licentious delight.”6 Marlowe translated them, and Shakespeare undoubtedly read them – along with Ovid’s other poems – in the original Latin.7 The new immoral Ovid sparked a feverish poetic energy in sixteenth-century poetry that could not be suppressed, even though authorities attempted to do so, resulting in the banning and burning of Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores in 1599.8 With this new perspective, Elizabethan poets were enthralled with the figure of Ovid as the rebel of Augustan Rome who challenged the Virgilian 75

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status quo. Although these poets may have been simply enchanted with Ovid’s “bad boy” image at first, as William Keach comments, upon further examination, they became engrossed more with the “deep … and … disturbing range” of Ovid’s poetry than with the attraction of his defiant persona.9 Ovid’s poetry provided Elizabethan writers the impetus to explore forbidden territory, to question dominant philosophical and religious orthodoxy, to experiment with form, and to refashion classical genres. Inspired by Ovid’s emphasis on the protean nature of existence and the transformative potential of poetry, these Elizabethan poets found in Ovid a primary source of fresh artistic inspiration – a skeptical, irreverent depiction of gods and religion; a profound, disturbing, yet often comical eroticism; and a playful sense of style and form – all of which seemed to them to be thoroughly modern.10 Moreover, they found in Ovid’s brilliant textual transformations the model for their own imitations, translations, and adaptations of his poems.11 Wrested free from obligatory moral allegories and interpreted in its full context, Ovid’s poetry offered Shakespeare and others all that the classical epic denied. Inspired by this new movement, Shakespeare, in Venus and Adonis, takes on Ovid’s most radical poetic move – his assault on the Virgilian epic and the ideal of Augustan uirtu that it endorses – by experimenting with a new genre based on Ovid’s anti-epic poetics. As Shakespeare and his contemporaries well knew, the Latin epic is deeply implicated in the service of dynastic power and imperial conquest, as the primary purpose of its narrative is to build poetic monuments of national history and identity from inherited stories, chronicles, legends, and myths. At least on the surface level, the epic supports the dominant order – even if on another it may seem to criticize that order by mourning the losses and futility of war. Despite the counter-discourses it may contain, the epic nevertheless aims at the glorification of martial victory and conquest as the fulfillment of imperial destiny.12 Consequently, the Latin epic necessarily valorizes the ideals and attempts to solidify the notions of national masculine identity.13 As Alison Keith explains, the “classical epic was a privileged site for negotiating questions of masculine identity”14 – and the Roman epic more so than the Greek. The Greek epic centers on issues of masculine prerogative, codes of behavior, and skill on the battlefield; but the Latin epic is built around “additional pressure on gender … given the centrality of uirtus in all senses to the genre at Rome.”15 According to Alison Sharrock, the Roman epic explicitly endorses a “masculine order” in the realms of “Augustus, arma (war and epic), and political life.”16 For the Augustan male, “masculinity” does not merely relate to virility or gender norms, but to the larger sense of autarky – control and restraint of one’s self,

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both inside and outside. The Roman male must be invulnerable to all emotional stimulation or passion, for “a Man to be a man must be durus (hard), but love (for which he needs to be durus) will make him mollis (soft).”17 Masculinity thus means “impenetrability.” The line is drawn here – a “real Roman man” is the “active penetrator” not the “passive penetrated.” The borderline between active = male/passive = not male must be constantly policed, for as Ellen Greene points out, this Roman “masculine identity is thus always at risk.”18 This anxious, hyper-masculinity is evident in the Latin epic – both what is included in and what is excluded from its narrative. The Latin epic represses that which exceeds or impedes its project of constructing Roman masculine identity, but this repression is never completely successful. The epic narrative’s apparently seamless surface is torn – these tears, or “unresolved gaps,” in Elizabeth Bellamy’s words, form “the trace-structure not only of a political unconscious, but also of the unconscious of individual epic subjects, which intrudes to mark the limits of imperial ideology.”19 That which is repressed in the epic resurfaces in the genre of romance, which becomes “the narrative of narcissism as the locus of ego formation,” in which the ceaseless repetition of the quest – regardless of the object of that quest – is “in the narcissism of romance, endlessly deferred by the recuperation of the lost self (or Freud’s Verliebtheit) back into the ego-libido.”20 Romance disrupts unified masculine identity as constructed in the epic, a point that was not lost on Elizabethans who were fascinated by the incongruity of the two genres.21 The search for an alternative poetic genre, one that challenges the conventions of the epic without falling into those of the romance, led Shakespeare and his contemporaries to experiment with a counter-genre drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses – now inflected with his elegiac verses and their inherited legacy of the Petrarchan sonnet – which I will call the “Ovidian narrative.”22 This anti-epic conflation of the narrative and the elegiac mode enables the Ovidian narrative not only to derail the epic but also to stop romance in its tracks. For Sharrock, seen in this light, The Metamorphoses “constructed (and deconstructed) the ideal of Roman masculinity and structured itself around the heart-rending force of sexual love.”23 Like the romance, the Ovidian narrative takes on what exceeds the epic’s boundaries, thereby destabilizing the epic’s imperial, masculine order; unlike the romance, however, the Ovidian narrative fails to fulfill the fantasy of the ego’s return to its origins. If anything, these poems, through Ovid’s combined narratives and elegies, dramatize the dismantling of the ego through the unsettling forces of the unconscious, ceaselessly repeating the origin of trauma – the ego turned against its self. As in Plato’s Symposium, these poems represent love as a wound that cannot be healed, desire as a painful yearning that cannot be fulfilled.

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The boundaries of the Latin epic were made more visible when viewed in relief of its opposing poetic genre, the love elegy, a tradition that Ovid revived from earlier generations of Latin poets – Catullus, Gallus, Propertius, and Tibullus. These Latin poets, in turn, had drawn from an earlier tradition of erotic verse from the poetry of ancient Greece, namely that of Sappho.24 Like the earlier Catullus who raged against Julius Caesar’s political machine while perfecting a poetic form that played dangerously on the edges of Roman masculinity, Ovid wrote elegies in defiance of Augustus and all he represented, clearly pushing the edges even further in his amatory verses. Even Ovid’s choice to write in this genre constituted a radical departure from poetry sanctioned by Augustus, as the love elegy valorizes everything that is shunned in the Roman masculine ideal. Therefore, Ovid’s elegies challenge the Augustan order of things by collapsing the opposition between genres and question dominant notions of masculine identity by exposing the vulnerability that lurks just beneath the seemingly impermeable, rigid surface of Roman uirtu. Although writing of love, not war, Ovid nevertheless grapples with the ideal of uirtu and the imperative of war in Roman masculinity by his ironic use of martial metaphors in the rhetoric of his love poetry (militia amoris or “soldiery of love”) and also by his complex examination of erotic dynamics – domination and submission, violence and desire, impenetrability and vulnerability – in amatory relations. As Sharrock claims, “[Ovid’s] poetry is constantly showing us both the violence and the uis of love and also the vulnerability of violence” (italics added).25 It is obvious why this Roman poetry spoke directly to the English poets of the 1590s – a generation that refashioned the Renaissance love sonnet in its own image – for the Latin elegies incorporate many of the familiar Petrarchan conventions: Petrarch meditates on his Laura, Ovid his Corinna, Catullus his Lesbia, and so on. Similar to later Petrarchan poetry, the Latin love tradition generally involves a male speaker who, a self-proclaimed slave to love, devotes his life to everything except what the Roman ethic dictates – serving his cruel Dominae or “slave mistress,” rather than Augustus or Rome; spending his life in the pursuit of passion and pleasure, rather than reason and military discipline.26 Of course, the Latin love tradition deals with the physical and psychological dimensions of amatory relations without the incorporation of the Neoplatonic ideal that underpins the love poetry of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, which often foregrounds the tension between spiritual and physical love. By the time Sir Thomas Wyatt imported the sonnet to England in the mid-sixteenth century, the Neoplatonic, spiritual element was either completely eradicated or employed merely as a conventional gesture, not as a meaningful expression or philosophical outlook. The poets who followed

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Wyatt’s generation, like Marlowe and Shakespeare, must have found in the earlier, pre-Christian Latin poetry – particularly that of Ovid – a sophistication and a skepticism that challenged and provided an attractive alternative to the later, Renaissance Italian tradition that the English sonneteers had inherited. Ovid self-consciously writes from this tradition of Latin amatory verse – but with a difference. He, too, plays on this masochistic fantasy in his love poetry, but in so doing he unabashedly examines its erotic dynamic and boldly makes manifest the latent desires repressed in Roman ideals of manhood, using the speaker’s perspective ironically to expose the fragile façade of masculinity in all its guises. “Thus,” argues Greene, “by implicating his amator in a multitude of contradictions and letting us ‘see through’ his manipulations and exploitations of women, Ovid shatters the fiction of the male narrator as enslaved and the female narrative subject as his enslaver.”27 Through this use of the ironic narrator, Ovid “reveals what he believes to be the hypocrisy in the elegiac pose,” thereby “attempt[ing] to destroy the myth of the elegiac lover as the upholder of an ideal.”28 Ovid utilizes irony in his elegiac poetry to bring to light its violent and destructive motives, much like the way Ovid demystifies mythology in The Metamorphoses to uncover the disturbing desires lurking in the minds of gods and mortals.29 In his elegies, Ovid exposes the vulnerability of the lover and examines the psychology of “mournful love,” an earlier, Roman version of early modern “lovesickness.” This mournful love, I argue, is the strain in Ovid’s elegies upon which Shakespeare plays most heavily in his Venus and Adonis. Here, Ovid draws from the tradition of “lover’s lament” that is epitomized in Catullus’ homoerotic poems of love and loss for his beloved Calvus (especially #50). Philip Hardie carefully traces this tradition of “erotic desire and lament” in the Latin elegy from Sappho to Catullus and then to Ovid, who makes it the matter of his elegies and also his narrative poems,30 creating an intertextual connection across two genres that are generally considered to be oppositional. For Hardie, Ovid uses the primary myth of “Apollo and Daphne” in his Metamorphoses as a “mythological reworking of the elegist Ovid’s initiation into love and love poetry in the Amores.”31 This connection is especially evident in this myth and in the song of Orpheus, which frames the multiple narratives in Book X of The Metamorphoses (including the story of “Venus and Adonis”). Orpheus’s song – “a concatenation of tales of desire and loss that strive to offer textual substitutes for the irreplaceable lack caused by the death of Eurydice” – is founded on the conflation of love and loss, a theme that, as Hardie has shown, is deeply woven into the Latin elegiac tradition.32 Shakespeare employs this theme of the lover’s mourning – the lovesickness or melancholy that exposes masculine vulnerability – to reshape Petrarchan

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conventions in the image of this Ovidian/Latin tradition. In a sense, Shakespeare goes back to Ovid to rework the later Petrarch, employing the former’s religious skepticism to counter any remaining shreds of Neoplatonic idealism in English love poetry. Shakespeare revises the Petrarchan sonnet as Ovid had done the Latin elegy. For Shakespeare, like other Elizabethan lyric poets, the path leading back to these earlier traditions moved through Petrarch. Petrarch himself refashioned Ovid’s elegies, of course, writing love poetry to the aloof mistress as Ovid and forerunners had done; Petrarch also appropriated the mythological framework (Apollo and Daphne; Diana and Actaeon) and the dominant themes, conceits, or metaphors – such as the hunt – from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This connection between Petrarch’s sonnets and Ovid’s poetry would have been obvious to the Elizabethans, whose Ovidian narratives were published in the same collections as their sonnets.33 But, I would argue, Shakespeare revises this relationship between Petrarch and Ovid in his Venus and Adonis. Rather than using Petrarch to read Ovid, Shakespeare switches the chronology and imagines the influence in reverse: He employs the new Ovid to re-read Petrarch. In his Venus and Adonis then, Shakespeare foregrounds Petrarchan rhetoric while couching it in the disturbing, dark forests of Ovidian mythology, infusing Petrarchan metaphors with Ovid’s playful yet grim and violent energy, which had been forced into the poetic unconscious by later Renaissance traditions. 34 This brutal vitality, according to L.P. Wilkinson, Ovid inherited from the “predilection of Hellenistic poets for stories of the monstrous or forbidden love.”35 Ovid foregrounds the violence to lay bare the destructive potential of sexuality, particularly (but not always) masculine aggression and domination. Ovid creates a mythological world that balances on the thin line between eroticism and terror, or desire and death, with intertwining, recurrent themes: the sexualized hunt, with the wicked reversals of the hunter and the hunted; the rape, with the forest as its terrifying locale; and the theme of dismemberment, with the mutilated body of the hunter who becomes the “prey.”36 Of course, Petrarchan verse inherits these metaphors, settings, and themes. But in Petrarch, the hunt is an extended metaphor for desire; the forest and landscape is subordinate to that of the speaking subject; the theme of dismemberment is embedded in the blazon and suggested in references to mythological figures like Actaeon. In contrast to Petrarch, this violence is made literal in the myths of Ovid. In Ovid’s poetry, the register of meaning constantly shifts from the literal to the figural and back again. There may be a literal hunt for prey, cast in erotic language; or there may be an actual stalking of sexual prey, described in the rhetoric of the hunt. As these registers shift, the subject positions do, too. The subject and its desired object (who hunts whom; who rapes whom; who muti-

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lates whom) constantly reverse positions in Ovid. The forest becomes the literal site where violent sexual crimes are committed, and it also becomes a participant in the act of these crimes as well as a metaphor for them. The theme of dismemberment is rendered graphically physical in Ovid’s myths, many of which involve the recurrent act of gory mutilation – as with Actaeon, who is torn to pieces by his own hounds after being turned into a stag for viewing the virgin huntress Diana bathing naked; and with Orpheus, who suffers a similar fate. Ovid’s erotic vision exceeds the boundaries of Petrarch’s as well. In Ovid, a full range of normative and non-normative desires – heteroerotic, homoerotic, masochistic, sadistic, pedophilic, incestuous, bestial, necrophilic – are all made manifest in his narratives. Although Petrarch may play on such desires, as in his verses to the dead Laura that suggest necrophilic longing, the eroticism in Petrarch’s poetry is more latent and figurative than it is in Ovid’s. As he does in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare fuses Ovidian devices with Petrarchan rhetoric to uncover the wicked starkness of Ovidian myth, the poetic unconscious of the English sonnet, literally and figuratively aligning desire and death. Shakespeare achieves this effect, in part, through the subject of his poem and its contexts in Ovid and Roman mythology. In choosing the story of “Venus and Adonis” from Book X of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Shakespeare is able to draw not only from Ovid’s version of the myth, but also from the larger contexts of Book X, other parallel myths in The Metamorphoses, Ovid’s elegies, and by extension, from his own sonnets.37 Tellingly, the heading above Shakespeare’s dedication to Henry Wriothesley, his patron (and, possibly, the object of adoration in his sonnets), is a quotation from Ovid’s Amores: Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo Pocula Castalia Plena minister aqua. (Ovid, Amores, 1.15.35–6) (Let vile people admire vile things; may fair-haired Apollo serve me goblets filled with Castilian water.)

Here, Shakespeare declares his allegiance to the new Ovid and the delights of poetry, while identifying himself, as poet, with Apollo, the god of poetry, and his poems with Ovid’s “Castilian water.” These fluid meanings spill over into The Metamorphoses, the context for Shakespeare’s subject, aligning Shakespeare with the figure of Apollo in chase of Daphne, a parallel to Venus in pursuit of Adonis. Shakespeare transforms his Venus and Adonis greatly from the version in The Metamorphoses, but makes it increasingly Ovidian by incorporating other Ovidian contexts into his version of the tale. In creating desires and characters that cross over gender lines, Shakespeare incorporates the fluid conception of

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gender and polymorphous sexuality from the larger contexts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and his poetry in general, so that Shakespeare’s version, oddly enough, could be considered more Ovidian than Ovid’s own rendition of the tale.38 In Shakespeare’s poem, of course, he makes one drastic change that shifts the perspective and meanings of the myth, a change that virtually every critic of the poem has addressed. He makes Venus the wooer whose love is unrequited by his disdainful “mistress,” the boy Adonis. Rather than reciprocating Venus’ love for him, Shakespeare’s Adonis rebukes the goddess’s many advances and rejects her love. Shakespeare focuses in on Venus and her pain, making even the central idea of the myth into something quite different from the emphasis of the tale in The Metamorphoses.39 Shakespeare’s poem begins with a figure of melancholy and the pain of abandonment familiar in Ovid’s love poetry, as it centers on Aurora’s (the dawn’s) tears of sorrow as the sun (with pun on “son”) abandons her (ll.1–2).40 Like the goddess of dawn, Venus suffers from lovesickness, a kind of melancholy described in medieval and early modern psychological and medical discourses.41 The narrator uses the term in Venus’ introduction, describing the goddess as “Sick-thoughted” over the boy virginhunter, Adonis, who scorns her love (l. 5). A “lovesick queen,” Venus burns under the heat of the sun and the heat of desire for the “son,” Adonis (l. 175). In a more comic vein, the narrator parodies her misfortune in a lengthy anecdote in which two horses mimic the pattern of Petrarchan wooing. Described as a “melancholy malcontent” (l. 313), the horse responds to his “mistress’s” coy disdain; and, as “lovesick love,” he begs for her attentions and is finally “blessed” with them (l. 328). Here, Shakespeare makes the obvious connection between lovesickness and love poetry, which he does throughout, dwelling on the central emotion of “love and lament” that Ovid, in his elegies, recalls from Catullus’ homoerotic verses. Early modern lovesickness was thought to be caused by multiple factors, particularly one’s physiology or humoral imbalance. Here, as Robert Burton does frequently in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Shakespeare depicts a mythological explanation of its origin. In his treatment of lovesickness in myth, Shakespeare places his poem directly in the tradition of Ovid’s elegies and the Latin love tradition, with its Greek roots in Sappho. Shakespeare’s Venus articulates this central theme of the poem quite simply and clearly upon Adonis’ death: hers is the story of lovesickness, the origin of sorrow in love: Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend. It shall be waited on with jealousy, Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end;

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Ne’er settled equally, but high or low, That all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe. (ll. 1135–40)

Venus’ description of love as anguish begins her curse on love for all future generations. She continues her prophesy, listing a catalogue of love’s abuses. Love will be “fickle, false, and full of fraud” (l. 1141); it will either be experienced too little or too much, “sparing, and too full of riot” (l. 1147), turning everything into its opposite. It will be full of suspicion and anxiety, too lenient or too strict, making the cowards brave and the brave cowardly. Love will cause enmity, calamity, and war, for “Sith,” Venus adds, “in his prime death doth my love destroy, /They that love best their loves shall not enjoy” (ll. 1163–4). By the close of Venus’ curse, Adonis’ metamorphosis into a blood-red flower has transpired. It is not Adonis’ loveless state that generates Venus’ sorrowful lament, but her sickness of love, for as Keach notes, “Love’s existence – not its death – intensifies disorder and ‘sickness’ of Love.”42 Despite the brief gestures to Neoplatonism, as in the description of Adonis’ “true sweet beauty” (l. 1080; additional references include ll. 434, 1019–20), the idealism of beauty is constantly undermined by the overwhelming view of the inability of it to transcend or to elevate love from “lust” (l. 799–804). In this gesture, Shakespeare refuses both the Neoplatonic and the Humanist readings of Ovid. No transcendence is to be found; no ethical lessons are to be learned. To live is to desire; to desire is to “die” – to suffer. In typical Petrarchan fashion, Venus equates a kiss with death and disdain with “killing” (ll. 496–9), her beloved’s rejections having “murdered” her “poor heart” (l. 502). In making the “origin of lovesickness” the subject of his Ovidian narrative, Shakespeare examines the fear of and simultaneous longing for vulnerability that is truly at stake in Ovid, and in his own sonnets as well, undoing and remaking the Petrarchan conventions in Ovid’s – and his own – image. At first glance, the portrayal of Venus as a lovesick queen may not seem unusual, for she serves as the embodiment of an ailment often associated with femininity – love melancholy, or lovesickness.43 However, Venus is no typical female, goddess, queen, or otherwise. Shakespeare imagines her as a huge yet light being who easily can tuck the diminutive, lithe Adonis under her arm to take flight. She is forced to take on the male prerogative and position of the Petrarchan lover, that of the predator or wooer, even as she longs to be the prey or beloved instead: “She’s Love; she loves; and yet she is not loved” (l.610). Venus as the aggressor is depicted in the language of the hunt as an eagle or vulture swooping down on and capturing her prey (ll. 55–66; ll. 547–8). But unlike a typical Petrarchan lover, she is reluctant to be cast in this predatory

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role, longing instead to be Adonis’ “prey.”44 Although cast in the dominant role of the wooer, Venus finds that she has no real power or mastery, playing a part that lacks much more than the “woman’s part.” In her song of woe in love, Venus bewails the lover’s pain, for “love makes young men thrall, and old men dote,” and “love is wise in folly, foolish-witty” (ll. 837–8). Desperate not to overpower Adonis in a dominant way, but instead to use her power to make him overpower her, Venus flings her arms around his neck and pulls him down to fall on top of her: “She sinketh down, still hanging by his neck./He on her belly falls, she on her back” (593–4).45 She does not long to rape Adonis, as Bate has suggested; nor does she want to be the sexual aggressor in this way. Rather, she wants him to play the man, him to topple her – which, ironically, would thus enable her to exercise all of her power over him as the goddess of Love. As reluctant Petrarchan lover, Venus must blazon herself in another unsuccessful attempt to become Adonis’ mistress: Thou canst not see one wrinkle in my brow. Mine eyes are grey, and bright, and quick in turning. My beauty as the spring doth yearly grow. My flesh is soft and plump, my marrow burning. (ll. 139–42)

And in an erotic, comic twist on the Petrarchan conceit of the lover imagining himself as an object enveloping his beloved, Venus offers herself to be the “park” on which Adonis, as her “deer” may “feed.” In an extension of this conceit, she depicts her body as a maternal, Edenic feminine paradise for Adonis’ pleasure. “Graze on my lips,” she continues, “and if those hills be dry,/ Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie” (l. 231; ll. 233–4). And, she adds, Within this limit is relief enough, Sweet bottom-grass, and high delightful plain, Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough, To shelter thee from tempest and from rain. (ll. 236–8).

Importantly, Venus does not imagine herself as Adonis’ aggressor; rather, she envisions herself as a “suffocating mother,” an Eve/Mary wishing for him to take pleasure from her body, to “nurse” him in an erotic and maternal way. The disdainful Adonis returns the images of the maternal womb with one of a tomb (l. 244), but Venus sees her beloved’s dimples as womb-like “pits” that “Opened their mouths to swallow Venus’ liking” (ll. 247–8). Although she seeks to “swallow” Adonis, she knows that she is the one who is being swallowed by her desire for him – not the other way around. Even though she attempts to trap

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Adonis, Venus knows that it is she who is entrapped – she who is truly the captive, the thrall, the slave to love. Venus is usually cast in the role of the pursued, not the pursuer. But, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Venus has invested the position of the object or beloved with the power of mastery. She has played this “dominatrix” successfully in the past, she reminds Adonis – mastering the most manly of them all, Mars, while apparently fulfilling her own desires as well. She explains to Adonis how she conquered the God of War who set out to conquer her, making him her “captive” and “slave” who begged for her love (ll. 101–2). In dotage, Mars hung up his shield and devoted himself to a life of pleasure with Venus. She continues, Thus he that over-ruled I overswayed, Leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain. Strong-tempered steel his stronger strength obeyed, Yet was he servile to my coy disdain. O, be not proud, nor brag not of thy might, For mast’ring her that foiled the god of fight. (ll. 109–14)

She recounts this story to Adonis in order to incite his mimetic desire for her, but to no avail. Clearly, however, issues of mastery – the erotic play on roles of domination and submission – are of major significance, as here Shakespeare inserts and foregrounds the story of Venus and Mars, an anecdote which is not even included in Ovid’s version of the myth. Raging and burning throughout the poem, Venus seems trapped like a wild animal in a cage not of her own making. She can only be the hunter, never the hunted, although she – like Actaeon – seems hunted by the hounds of her own fervent desire, with Adonis as the figure of Diana, the ambivalent, cruel virgin/hunter. It is Adonis who undergoes the Ovidian reversal from hunter to hunted, thereby suffering a violent death and transformation. In creating Venus as the Petrarchan lover, Shakespeare sets up Adonis as the mistress – in this case, of course, the “mistress” as a beautiful but reticent boy. As numerous critics have rightly pointed out, the Petrarchan dynamic in Venus and Adonis – as well as recurrent themes and images – strikingly parallels that developed in Shakespeare’s sonnets. This interpretation is supported by the tradition of “mournful love” that Ovid inherited from the homoerotic elegies of Catullus and by other tales in The Metamorphoses. As noted above, Orpheus laments the loss of Eurydice. But also, Orpheus turns from his grief to the love of boys, becoming a figure that represents both endless mourning and homoerotic love, particularly that of men for boys. Ovid develops both themes throughout Orpheus’ stories from Book X.

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Seen from this perspective, Venus may be identified with Shakespeare of the sonnets, as many critics have explained,46 which shifts the Petrarchan lens to a more Ovidian focus. The identification of Shakespeare with his Venus suggests an even more radical sexual dynamic than that posited above, that of the goddess wishing to be empowered as the love object of Adonis. With Shakespeare as Venus (the Petrarchan lover) and the young male of the sonnets as Adonis (the beloved), Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis becomes a homoerotic love poem in which a male lover painfully longs to be mastered by his “master mistress,” longs to be his object of desire, to be his beloved – and, therefore, longs to conquer his beloved by reversing their positions and taking on that of the beloved himself.47 In Venus and Adonis, as in his sonnets, Shakespeare goes much further than either Catullus or Ovid in exposing masculine vulnerability, in laying bare desires that not only exceed the Roman masculine order but also completely question its validity – not because his poem deals with male/male desire, which need not conflict with this order, but because his poem explores the male desire to play the passive, not the active role in male/male love. Shakespeare, with this one level of meaning, shatters the mold of Roman masculinity – and, poetically, the world of the epic – by refashioning the epic “hero” into the image of the male martyr. Shakespeare incorporates into his version of Ovid’s tale the icon of wounded, bleeding body of the male god, which – as is obvious in his and others’ depictions of Adonis – is an erotic figure that suggests the body of Christ. The myth of Adonis, or Attis, strongly parallels its later Christian variation of the god’s holy birth, death, and resurrection, as Ted Hughes documents fully in his seminal text on myth and Shakespeare. As was known in early modern culture, ceremonial rites in which this god’s sacrificial death and rebirth were dramatically reenacted were common practice in the ancient world. In one such ritual, the dismembered body parts of the sacrificed god were flung at the image of the “great goddess” Cybele (also known as Isis, Aphrodite, or Venus), after which the image was washed in blood.48 The parallels between this and other myths involving the dismembered male body that figure so prominently in the poetic imagination – Actaeon, Orpheus, Bacchus, Dionysus, Osiris – would have been obvious to early modern readers well versed in mythology, as would be the multiple meanings associated with the boar who kills Adonis. As Hughes notes, variations of the myth assign alternate identities to the boar. In one version, the boar is an incarnation of Persephone, the “dark” variation of the Great Goddess, queen of the Underworld; in another, the boar is Adonis’ rival, Mars.49 The erotic dimensions of the myth are flagrantly obvious in visual and narrative depictions of Adonis’ ravishment and death by the wild boar. The “Death of Adonis” is a

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popular subject in Renaissance illustrations, paintings, and other visual and narrative versions of the myth.50 In some depictions, such as Henry Peacham’s illustration of the boar attacking Adonis from Minerva Britanna (1612), the boar is lustfully mounting Adonis in an obvious act of rape. In an anonymous narrative version of the myth entitled The Dead Adonis, the boar confesses to Aphrodite that his attack of Adonis was prompted by a passionate yearning to kiss the youth’s “naked thigh.”51 These emphases are readily apparent in Shakespeare’s poem, particularly in the highly sexual depiction of the boar’s “conquest” of Adonis (l. 1030) and the “wide wound” (l. 1052) he inflicts. Shakespeare’s boar “but by a kiss” attacks Adonis, “nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine/Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin” (ll. 1114–16). Christian allegorical readings of this myth often interpreted these figures typologically, with Adonis as a “type” or precursor to Christ, emphasizing the moral rather than erotic dimensions of the stories. In exploiting the eroticism inherent in the figure of Adonis, Shakespeare re-infuses the image of Christ with the pagan eroticism of Adonis. Shakespeare suggestively employs visual iconography to make obvious the parallel between the erotic display of the gored youth Adonis and the naked, wounded body of Christ. This image of the wounded, bleeding body of Adonis as an eroticized, Christ-like figure is another scene often foregrounded in illustrations of the myth, such as The Death of Adonis from Johannes Sprengius’ edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Frankfurt, 1563; Newberry Library, Chicago); and in paintings, such as Baldassare Peruzzi’s fresco (1515, Villa Farnesina, Rome), in which Adonis is positioned like an erotic Christ figure, lying on his back with his left arm propped behind his head.52 Whether or not Shakespeare saw copies of these paintings, he would nevertheless have been familiar with the images in common illustrations of the myth and would have had a mental, visual connection between the sexualized image of Adonis and visual representations of Christ. In this way, he appears to work within the Christian interpretations of Ovid while radically overturning them at the same time. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Adonis does suggest Christian myth, but in so doing, it exposes the pagan roots of that myth; and, via Ovid, it resurrects the figure of Christ as an object of desire – or, rather, reveals the eroticism inherent in the sacred representations of Christ dying on the cross. This association is developed further in the fusion of the erotic and maternal in Shakespeare’s figure of Venus with the divine child, which on mythic levels suggests the iconic image of Horus Harpocrates cradled in the arms of Isis and, by extension, the Madonna and child.53 Adonis is depicted with Venus alternatively as the Christ child (“son/sun”) on her lap and as the crucified Christ lying in her arms in a pieta. This image, like that of the dead Adonis, reinvests

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the Christian iconography with eroticism from earlier pagan traditions and their later Christian manifestations in the cult of the Virgin.54 In his fascination for pagan eroticism, Shakespeare shared with Marlowe and other Elizabethan contemporaries a passionate zeal for a neo-pagan perspective that, although mostly inspired by the new Ovid, extended to religious iconography and mythology, as well as poetry.55 The movement allowed Shakespeare and others to position themselves within the earlier, Latin tradition of love poetry, refashioning Petrarch while fashioning a new Ovidian poetics. From this movement, Shakespeare shaped a new genre allowing him to challenge the masculine uirtus of the epic, while enabling him to explore the violence and vulnerability inherent in the fluid, transformative aesthetic of Ovid.

NOTES 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

For more on this matter, see Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), esp. 25. Ibid., 31. On this new Ovidianism, see William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 31–5, esp. 4. Ibid., 29. Colin Burrow, “Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance Afterlives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 304. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 32. Bate has shown that Shakespeare did read primary texts in Latin (and French), along with English translations of them. See Shakespeare and Ovid, esp. 7–8. See Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 31 and Keach, 29. For more on the role of Amores and Marlowe’s career, see Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). Keach, 35. See ibid., 4–5. Burrow, 302. For a full discussion of the epic and imperialist ideology, see Elizabeth Bellamy, Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), esp. 22–7. On the epic and masculine identity, see Georgia Nugent, “Mater Matters: The Female in Lucretius’ De rerum natura,” Colby Quarterly 30 (1994): 179. Alison Keith, “Versions of Epic Masculinity in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the “Metamorphoses” and its Reception, ed. Philip Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999), 214.

LOVE AND LOVESICKNESS IN VENUS AND ADONIS 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

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Ibid. Alison Sharrock, “Gender and Sexuality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, 102. Ibid., 97. Ellen Greene, The Erotics of Domination: Male Desire and the Mistress in Latin Love Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), xiii. Bellamy, 26. Ibid., 30–31. Bellamy builds on Northrup Frye’s theory of romance in his Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) and The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). See Bellamy, 27. Because Ovid’s poetry refuses easy categorization, it has been subject to numerous generic labeling and re-labeling. Some critics, such as Clark Hulse in Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 3–36 and Brooks Otis in Ovid as Epic Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 2–24, have discussed Ovid’s narratives in relation to the epic, even though they both see Ovid as an “anti-Virgilian” or “anti-Augustan” poet who experimented with genre. Stephen Harrison classifies Ovid’s Metamorphoses as meeting “epic criteria,” but sees its relationship to the epic as “complex.” See “Ovid and Genre: Evolutions of an Elegist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, 87. An apt descriptive label for the Elizabethan take on Ovidian narrative, the epyllion (in classical terms), is Keach’s “Elizabethan erotic narrative.” To emphasize the role of Ovid, however, I’ll most often refer to it as “Ovidian narrative.” Sharrock,“Gender and Sexuality,” 104. On the significant influence of Catullus on Ovid’s poetry, see especially Philip Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 50–55. Hardie links the tradition back to Sappho (53). Sharrock, “Gender and Sexuality,” 102. Greene, xii–xiii. See also Sharrock, “Ovid and the Discourses of Love: the Amatory Works,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, 150. Greene, 67. Ibid., xv. Keach, 14. Hardie, 63. Ibid., 45–46. Ibid., 68. See Hulse, 35. For more on violence and environment in Ovid, see Hugh Parry, “Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Violence in a Pastoral Landscape,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 95 (1964): 268–82; Charles Paul Segal, Landscape in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses: A Study in the Transformations of a Literary Symbol,” (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1969), and L.P. Wilkinson, Ovid Surveyed, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 53–4. Wilkinson, 53–4; also see Keach, 16. For a thorough discussion of Ovid’s use of the forest and hunt in depicting violence and sexuality, see Parry, esp. 270–82, Wilkinson, 53–4, and Keach, 11–16.

90 37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 As many critics have noted, Shakespeare (like other Elizabethan poets) draws from tales in The Metamorphoses other than that of his subject (in this case, Venus and Adonis), as well as from Ovid’s other poetry, particularly the elegies. See Bate, “Sexual Perversity in Venus and Adonis,” Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993): 82 and Keach, 3–35. Also, Shakespeare draws directly and indirectly from his own sonnets in Venus and Adonis, as explained below. Many critics have pointed out the fluidity of gender in Ovid’s poetry. For example, Bate claims that Ovid’s depiction of desire is characterized by the “dissolution of conventional gender barriers” (“Sexual Perversity,” 88). Burrow notes that in his Metamorphoses, Ovid “soften[s] hard distinctions between male and female bodies,” reveling in the “polymorphousness of both narrative art and sexual desire” (305). Interestingly, Bate interprets the poem with the tale of Myrrh as a “pre-text” for “Venus and Adonis.” From this context, Bate argues that Ovid’s depiction of desire overall is “potentially destructive,” as it is “bound up … with polymorphous perversity” involving the incestuous desire of the “family romance” (“Sexual Perversity”, 88–9). I certainly agree with this interpretation in general, but I focus instead on Shakespeare’s use of Ovid’s tale to explore the origins of traumatic love. All references to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton, 1997). Early modern writer Robert Burton describes “lovesickness” – its causes, objects, types (“Love-Melancholy,” “Jealousy,” and “Religious Melancholy”), symptoms, and cures – in the Third Partition of his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). In this famous volume, Burton catalogues myths, narratives, treatises, and other writings on melancholy from classical to contemporaneous seventeenth-century sources. Keach, 82. On the complicated relationship between gender and melancholy, see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). This aspect of Venus’ desire is often misread or unacknowledged. For instance, Bate claims that she is frustrated because, as a woman, she cannot rape Adonis (Shakespeare and Ovid, 65). Heather Dubrow claims that “Venus connects loving Adonis with controlling him, mastering him” in Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 25. Yet, even in her most aggressive moments, Venus clearly expresses the desire that their roles be reversed. She does not wish to rape Adonis, but rather, to have Adonis long to ravish her, which she would then use as a means to “conquer” him. Although her ultimate wish is to “conquer” Adonis, it is not direct, aggressive mastery that she seeks. As many critics have pointed out, this moment in the poem closely resembles the scene Titian depicts in his famous painting, in which he foregrounds the nude back of Venus as she reaches up to cling to Adonis, who is mounted on his horse ready to depart for the hunt. There are conflicting points of view on whether or not Shakespeare could have seen this painting or copies of it, and whether or not his decision to make Adonis reject Venus is inspired by this painting. On these debates, see Hulse, 41–4 and Georgianna Ziegler, “Picturing Venus and Adonis: Shakespeare and the Artists,” in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Garland, 1997), 389–403. Many critics have made connections between Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and his

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47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

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sonnets, both biographically (Shakespeare’s patron Wriothesley as the object of desire in both) and thematically. In both cases, Venus and Adonis is interpreted, like the sonnets, as a poem that explores homoerotic desire. Keach points out thematic similarities between Sonnet 53 and 129 with Venus and Adonis. Ted Hughes goes further to treat the Sonnets 18–126 as a “matrix” for Venus and Adonis and Sonnets 127–54 as a parallel of perspectives developed in Venus and Adonis – with Shakespeare’s young patron Wriothesley as the young man/Adonis figure. For Hughes, Venus and Adonis works on two levels – internally, it deals with his desires for the young nobleman; externally, it appeals to Lord Burghley and Wriothesley’s mother, who were urging him to wed. See Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (New York: Faber and Faber, 1992), 50–64. The latter position has also been fully developed recently by Patrick M. Murphy (“Wriothesley’s Resistance: Wardship Practices, and Ovidian Narratives in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, 323–40), who sees Venus and Adonis as Shakespeare’s advice to his patron on the question of marriage urged by his mother. Interestingly, Hughes reads the poems after Sonnet 17 as reflecting an “abject selfprostration of Shakespeare’s sonnets” that “not masochistic[ally],” he claims, leads Shakespeare to develop an idea of love that is “unconditional” and “self-sacrificing” (59–60). Although I agree with Hughes’s interpretation, I would argue that, from a modern perspective, these desires could be considered “masochistic.” See Hughes, 9. Hughes, 8. In one variation, the boar kills Attis by a “fatal wound” or castration, by which the goddess obtains possession of Attis. Hughes sees a parallel with this idea in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 9 (10). For an excellent discussion of visual iconography and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, see Hulse, 142–62. For a detailed discussion of paintings inspired by the myth, see Ziegler, 389–403. From the Bucolic Collection, 25ff. Quoted in Parry, 280. Hulse, 162. I see even more of a resemblance between these figures of Adonis and the dead Christ than Hulse, who also likens the image to the sleeping Cupid. See Hughes, 10. Many critics have noted the maternal and erotic aspects of Shakespeare’s Venus, but not all have acknowledged her as a figure that inherently depends on this fusion. On the connection between conventions of love and the cult of the Virgin, see Hughes, 60. Critics have long since noted this paganism in the Elizabethan Ovidian narratives, but not all have, I think, acknowledged its true significance for these writers and for their contribution to the legacy of love poetry and erotic literature. Douglas Bush notes this pagan trend, describing it as “the growth of a more aesthetic and ‘pagan’ conception of mythology in general and of the Metamorphoses in particular.” See Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, rev. ed. (1932; New York: Norton, 1963), 73. However, as Keach aptly points out, since Bush inaccurately perceives Ovid’s poetry as only frivolous, light entertainment, he myopically sees this neo-pagan movement of the 1590s as merely an insignificant trend devoted to amusing, titillating, but rather shallow poetry. See Keach, 28–9. Most critics since the 1970s have followed Keach’s lead.

7 Semper Eadem: The Paradox of Constancie in Shakespeare’s Phoenix and the Turtle

Kristen L. Olson

The Phoenix and the Turtle is a poem of paradox. Both rhetorical examination of human emotion and allegorical critique of political moment, Shakespeare’s enigmatic contribution to Robert Chester’s Loves Martyr1 is a verse riddle engaging multiple traditions, poetic and political, converging in the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign. Both spheres of influence – the literary and the historical – are therefore crucial to its structure, and must be integrated in any analysis hoping to make its disparate elements cohere. While many scholarly interpretations extending back to Alexander Grosart’s first major study of the poem in 1878 have intuited a connection between the Phoenix and Elizabeth I, those closely pursuing historical allegory have tended to break down over the course of its 67 lines.2 Similarly, readings of the poem that isolate its meaning within a purely literary context overlook a conspicuous resonance with Tudor iconography. The reading I offer attempts to reconcile these modes of interpretation by examining the ways in which crucial tensions within the ideology of lateElizabethan symbolic authority are inflected in the formal structure of the poem. My reading suggests that the poem’s allusion to the queen inheres in its poetic abstractions, love and continuity, and that the historical anxieties it expresses emerge in the poem’s rhetorical engagement with paradox. I will argue that the puzzling structure of The Phoenix and the Turtle uses the rhetorical complexity of chiasmus in multiple ways. As a figure suggesting both opposition and containment, chiasmus expresses the “dual unity” or “separate oneness” characterizing the paradoxical ideal of love in the poem. In addition, the reflective symmetry of its abba repetition suggests the balanced continuity of cyclical renewal. Shakespeare, I will show, draws upon each of these properties throughout The Phoenix and the Turtle to complicate the traditional promise of the phoenix’ rebirth. My analysis will accordingly examine 92

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how the phoenix motif long exploited by Elizabeth as a symbol of continuity, in terms of both chaste “constancie” and the monarchical Dignitas of Tudor dynasticism, is problematized in the poem’s design.3 I suggest that Shakespeare casts the paradox of continuity in poetic terms, re-contextualizing the gender crossing familiar in contemporary depictions of the queen as the poetic crossing of the chiastic figure, and then extending this crossing principle within the poem as a whole to interrogate the reflexivity implicit in the two-body figure of the queen. Thus, in the courtly tradition of the rebus and the emblem, Shakespeare’s lyric re-fashions Elizabeth’s phoenix impresa, “Semper Eadem” (“Always the same”), into a poetic riddle on the self-contained, self-perpetuating phoenix, conflating love and death in the mutual self-sacrifice of the birds’ “married chastity” (l. 61).4 In so doing, my reading suggests, The Phoenix and the Turtle refigures the ideal of sovereignty projected in the queen’s iconography from one that insures perpetuity to one of implicit demise, poetically exposing the historical paradox of strength and vulnerability that the closed subjectivity of Elizabeth’s chastity engenders for late-Tudor England.

I While many scholars have commented on the power Elizabeth deployed by manipulating the trope of chastity, several have also noted the limitations of its efficacy as a political virtue.5 Indeed, John King aptly observes, “As the queen’s life drew to its close, the political anxieties that her mythology was designed to neutralize became increasingly difficult to stifle.”6 Open critiques of Elizabeth’s chastity, however, were understandably rare late in her reign, and the culture of flattery that persisted at court overshadowed public expressions of anxiety regarding the succession. A growing body of Spenser scholarship now demonstrates how Elizabethan panegyric began to develop a double valence of flattery and critique in the 1590s, and Shakespeare’s poem shows signs of this influence, though this short lyric is couched within a sequence that remains overwhelmingly straightforward in its praise for the queen.7 As Anthea Hume has shown, Loves Martyr follows in the tradition of the “Cult of Elizabeth,” likely serving to further ingratiate Chester’s patron, Sir John Salusbury, with the court.8 The volume’s overwhelming emphasis is the celebration of England’s perpetuity, a theme reinforced in the implicit association of the phoenix with Elizabeth, a point my discussion will examine in greater detail.9 The main body of the collection – in five sections, all written by Chester – begins with a blazon spoken by Dame Nature expressing the “maiesticall” beauty of the phoenix and ends in the celebration of the New Phoenix’ rise

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from the ashes.10 The uniting of phoenix and turtledove, the centerpiece of the volume, idealizes their betrothal as “A perfect forme of loue and amitie,”11 extending the mythical apotheosis of this perfection to the projected birth of the New Phoenix. The concluding Cantoes celebrate the promise of England’s national perpetuity, “a more perfect creature”12 arising from the ashes of the birds’ “perfect loue.”13 This rhetorical framework situates the phoenix of Loves Martyr in a familiar mythic context framing Elizabeth as the inheritor of Arthurian Dignitas, a Cult commonplace most closely identified with Spenser’s figuration of Britomart and the association of married chastity with English dynasticism.14 Indeed the central conceit of Loves Martyr – the journey of Nature and the Phoenix to the isle of Paphos, the site of the birds’ union – provides occasion for Nature to review British history for the Phoenix in an instructive discourse reprising Arthurian mythography as they fly over the “Ile of sweete Britania.”15 Chester’s panegyric thus makes its appeal to the queen by extending the use of phoenix iconography in the register that Elizabeth herself established, a political self-representation that reached its zenith in the late 1590s. Elizabeth’s adoption of the phoenix device likely began with her incorporation of the “Semper Eadem” motto, drawn from her coat of arms, into a phoenix impresa, which Margaret Hotine has suggested appropriates the “en ma fin fit mon commencement” (“Behold, my end forms my beginning”) phoenix impresa used by Mary of Guise, Elizabeth’s cousin and the mother of Mary Queen of Scots.16 In an early instance of Elizabeth’s use of these elements, a frontispiece showing a compilation of the queen’s emblematic devices includes the phoenix image and the motto, Semper Eadem (Figure 7.117). The contemporaneous “phoenix jetton” more concisely links these elements, showing the queen’s profile on the obverse and the phoenix image with the “Semper Eadem” scriptura on the reverse (Figure 7.218). A commonplace of impresa use held that the binary device of motto-and-picture extended to each component of the whole: the motto, seen alone, could suggest the pictura, and the pictura alone conjured the motto associated with an individual known in the social context of courtly acquaintance. The implicit association of these elements, once established as an impresa, invoked the composite device when each component appeared independently.19 Elizabeth’s use of the phoenix image with her own motto effectively preempts any claim Mary Queen of Scots might have had to the phoenix device – something more than a coincidence in the time surrounding Elizabeth’s signing of the order for Mary’s execution, eliminating her potential challenge for the throne – a subtle but clear cue in the courtly language of the impresa.20 Most importantly, however, Elizabeth’s use of the phoenix to represent herself as the locus of renewal in an enduring royal line became an iconographical valence that the queen

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Frontispiece, Hymne. A tres-haute tres-puissante tres-vertuese et tresmagnanime princesse, Elizabeth royne d’Angleterre, France, et Irelande. Georges de la Motthe, c.1586.

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Phoenix jetton. John Rutlinger (attrib.), c.1586.

extended to her public mythography. Elizabeth turned to this device frequently, and it propagated in various public representations of the monarchy from coinage to portraiture.21 Contemporary documents, such as Thomas Churchyard’s 1593 commemoration of the queen’s visit to Oxford, demonstrate the widespread vernacular adoption of the phoenix motif in this context. The dedication of a short sequence of verses in the collection refers to Elizabeth as “the phenix of our world,”22 and the collection as a whole includes several poems that associate the phoenix image with the restoration of life and a national hopefulness. An earlier collection of verses Churchyard dedicated to the queen also invokes the phoenix as an emblem of national rebirth, celebrating the queen’s progress at Woodstock by re-casting her 1554–55 imprisonment in this mode: Old Woodstocke house is glad It shall haue stone and lime That long with Iuy hath bin clad To shew the ruen of time. This seat nay sure this shrine, That thousands now doth praise: That did preserue, by power diuine, The Phoenix of our daies. And in a cruell age, When might did right great wrong: This house was made the Phoenix cage, And held her here so long.

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That no proude tyrants power, Had force to touch her then: True harted people eury houre, And prayers of good men Kept Phoenix safe and sound, And brought her to the crowne: Who doth in vertues so abound, Shee raignes with great renowne.23

This phoenix conceit persists in various poetic miscellanies of the period.24 The popular Phoenix Nest of 1593, for example, includes several pieces associating the theme of renewal with the queen’s appearance.25 In particular, “An excellent Dialogue betweene Constancie and Inconstancie, as it was by speech presented to hir Maiestie, in the last Progresse at Sir Henrie Leighes house,” concludes with Constancie’s pronouncement of thanks to the queen: “the glorye of her countenance, which disperseth the flying cloudes of vaine conceites, commands me too with others, and to be my self as she is, Semper eadem,”26 triangulating chastity and perpetuity with the phoenix motto. In this same manner, Elizabeth’s use of phoenix iconography conflates the constancy of Semper Eadem with the singular continuity of royal sovereignty inhering in her constancie. The well-known Nicholas Hilliard portrait depicting Elizabeth wearing a phoenix pendant is particularly interesting for its linkage of virginity and Dignitas in this way (Figure 7.3). As Roy Strong observes in his description of this painting, the phoenix came to represent the queen’s embodiment of a singularly powerful monarchy, aligning virginal chastity with the political sovereignty Elizabeth maintained by not marrying: [Here] Elizabeth holds a rose in one hand and at her breast [is] one of her favourite emblems, a pendant phoenix arising from the flames. In the hands of the poets this symbol expands and changes meaning. The phoenix was a unique bird which renewed itself by burning and arising from the ages [sic]. For Elizabeth it symbolized above all her virginity and her ‘oneness’.27

Crucially, this idealization of Elizabeth’s self-containment frequently manifests as contradictories inhering in a single figure, a dynamic rhetoricized by the queen herself as gender duality. Frances Teague, Leah Marcus, Mary Beth Rose, and Janel Mueller have demonstrated Elizabeth’s facility in the alternation of pronominal gender in her most important speeches, in which Elizabeth’s construction of identity depicts a feminine body natural and masculine body politic cohering in the singular person of the monarch.28 Likewise, Strong, Susan Frye, Constance Jordan, and many others have observed that the portraits of Elizabeth appearing throughout the height of her reign reveal a similarly intricate deploy-

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Elizabeth I. Nicholas Hilliard, c.1575. National Portrait Gallery, London.

ment of conflicting gender representations, as seen most famously in the “Rainbow Portrait” (Figure 7.4).29 This representation of self-contained duality

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Elizabeth I, “The Rainbow Portrait.” Marcus Gheeraerts (attrib.), c.1600.

reinforced for Elizabeth a political sovereignty exponentially stronger than any singular mode of self-representation could have enabled.30 Strong characterizes this multivalent iconography as a “Renaissance monarchical mythology, which

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tries by the use of extreme forms of contrasting imagery somehow to reconcile the dual nature of royalty, divine and human, soul and body, mind and passions,” ultimately asserting that, “the Elizabethan cult is held together by such paradoxes”31 – paradoxes notably charged by gender identification and the crossing of opposing polarities. While this strategy yielded considerable political strength, it also embodied the queen’s most significant vulnerability. The omnipresent paradox of opposed bodies contained in Elizabeth’s sovereign persona(e) became, as Marie Axton acknowledges, “inextricably connected with the Elizabethan succession question, with its polemics and its reflection in … art.”32 In this vein, I suggest, Shakespeare explores the succession anxiety by turning these received forms of representation into a poetic figuration of paradox, tacitly articulating the emerging tension between myth and history in the Cult of Elizabeth’s idealization of Elizabeth’s “constancy/ie” in his meditation on married chastity in The Phoenix and the Turtle. The two-body sovereign is allegorically represented in the ideal love of the phoenix and turtledove united in paradoxical two-as-one unity, a para-erotic attraction that excludes all other forms of sexuality. The poem’s central focus is the metaphysical quality of this ideal, a condition expressible only in the imaginative context of the artistic. This unearthly ideal, however, created an earthly problem. While the image of a singularly powerful sovereign strengthened England politically, it created a commensurate vulnerability in terms of the succession – an early modern Catch-22. The phoenix and turtle embody a mystical, ideal love; yet its perfection results in their mutual death. One lover does not die for another; they die as one. For this reason, the allegory I suggest identifies Elizabeth with both parts of this perfect unity, a reading sustainable beyond the point at which other historical allegories dissolve. The same degree of reverence and frustration that characterizes Shakespeare’s poetic framing of the irresolvable paradoxes associated with love in the sonnets and elsewhere throughout his dramatic and non-dramatic work defines his portrayal of the self-complicating paradox of strength and vulnerability inhering in the queen’s two bodies united in the mystical ideal of her sovereignty. While many studies of this poem have identified the phoenix with Elizabeth, the allegorical reading of the turtledove has proved more problematic and therefore contentious. Most historically-based interpretations focus on events in the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign, equating the turtle with figures such as Essex or Salusbury, with whom an idealized union serves motives as diverse as reconciling the queen to the execution of a court intimate33 or affirming a recusant agenda.34 Axton has notably suggested a reading pairing Elizabeth with her subjects, integrating the politicization of chastity into this allegory.35

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In Axton’s view, Elizabeth’s body politic is represented by the phoenix, and the turtle represents simultaneously the body natural and the people of her realm. In this way, Axton suggests, the reaffirmation of the body politic that occurs as the populace seeks a new “betrothed” fulfills the expectation of renewal, enabling the queen to provide England in her death with the continuity that she could not in her life. However, this interpretation does not fully suit Shakespeare’s poem, it seems to me, not only because The Phoenix and the Turtle portrays an occasion of mourning but also because the tone and structure of the poem do not emphasize the phoenix’ renewal. Unifying the queen not with an external entity but instead with her own reflexive image of complementary perfection more closely fulfills the paradoxical relation of singular duality that the poem explores. Throughout The Phoenix and the Turtle, chiasmus is used to depict love as paradoxical separate oneness: a perfect symmetry representing the metaphysical ideal of “Two distincts, division none” (l. 27). While I will discuss Shakespeare’s representation of paradox in greater detail in my examination of chiasmus, it is important here to note that this paradigm of unified dichotomy is the fundamental rhetorical scheme informing the poem, and therefore the pattern most likely replicated in its allegory. Reading the phoenix as the body politic, as Axton does, maintains the register Elizabeth activates in associating the phoenix with Tudor dynasticism; reading the turtledove as the body natural, then, fulfills the scheme of paradoxical binary directly available in the context of Dignitas. The phoenix embodies the immortality and continuity of monarchy, while the turtle represents the natural mortality inhering in the body of the individual monarch. Thus, I want to suggest, given that Elizabeth’s iconography asserts duality as an ideal in its use of gender by depicting Elizabethan sovereignty as a self-contained, dual-gendered mythical whole, we can recognize an analogous figure of paradoxical perfection in Shakespeare’s depiction of love in The Phoenix and the Turtle, an analogy that Shakespeare appears to provocatively extend. The self-contained pairing of phoenix and turtledove implies an inherent jeopardy within that mutuality by portraying the death of both lovers in the “mutual flame” (l. 24) that makes a martyr not only of the turtledove but also of the phoenix. In Shakespeare’s poem alone, the turtledove’s self-sacrifice is taken on by the phoenix in an ideal parity that subjects the phoenix to the turtledove’s mortality, a crucial inversion of the traditional relation of these figures wherein the mortal turtledove typically sacrifices himself for the love of the divine phoenix, becoming the martyred hero of love.36 This change marks a significant turn upon traditional mythography, one that Shakespeare calls attention to. Amid a collection of poems praising marriage and fertility through the topos of rebirth, the Phoenix and the Turtle equates married chastity with sterility and death.

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While the association of chastity and death is a Shakespearean commonplace, placing married chastity in this context is an abrupt departure, particularly from the epithalamium tradition in which Loves Martyr participates.37 Like much late-Tudor poetry, Loves Martyr situates chastity in a post-Reformation humanist context in which married chastity signifies an idealized state of active sexuality in which virtue is a function of faithful marriage and procreative productivity. The union of lovers in The Phoenix and the Turtle, however, “Leav[es] no posterity” (l. 59), aligning the birds’ married chastity with the virginal chastity of Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These plays explicitly link chastity and death by offering either death itself or the barrenness of a “nunn’ry” (Hamlet, 3.1.120) as the alternative to marriage, where devotion means “chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon” (MND, 1.1.73).38 The Phoenix and the Turtle partakes of this discourse of chastity, crossing registers with an Elizabethan poetic tradition idealizing the queen’s virginity to re-contextualize married chastity as a site of mortality rather than of rebirth. Shakespeare’s turtledove and phoenix are not Spenserian heroes like Artegall and Britomart but are closer to Romeo and Juliet, lovers “crossed” from the opening lines of their play. Indeed, hereditary Dignitas echoes throughout Romeo and Juliet, where the lovers represent their “households both alike in dignity” (Rom. Pro.1). Juliet’s hyperbolic vow of chastity, “If he be married, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed” (1.5.134), turns to foreshadowing immediately upon the nurse’s revelation of Romeo’s identity. The Phoenix and the Turtle invokes a similar “death-mark’d love” (Rom. Pro.9), aligning married chastity, Dignitas, and mortality.39 Both Romeo and Juliet and The Phoenix and the Turtle depict love as an ideal intersubjectivity that merges love and death – one using the dramatic symmetry of tragedy, the other condensing this property into the rhetorical symmetry of the chiastic figure.

II Chiasmus offers an elegant figuration of the self-contained ideal, which Shakespeare expands well beyond the level of the singular poetic line. In troping this figure, Shakespeare deepens his interrogation of self-reflexive symmetry by embedding chiastic figuration throughout the structure of his lyric. As the poem develops, the reflexive abba rhyme scheme of the invocational Prologue and the Anthem gives over in the Threnos to an unchanging repetitiveness in which the verses’ cyclic momentum is supplanted by the monotonous dirge of the death song. This shift in verse form alters the structural symmetry of the lyric as a whole, a point my analysis will examine in greater

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detail; however, this shift carries a further implication. The re-figuration of repetition from cyclic to constant emphasizes the static nature of sameness once “Death [becomes] the Phoenix’ nest” (l. 56), a profound turn on the Semper Eadem theme. The queen’s identification of constancy, “Always the same,” with the renewing perpetuity of Dignitas is here transformed into the unrelenting perpetuity of mortality assured by the self-containing constancie of chastity. A simple pun thus becomes a formal paradox in Shakespeare’s lyric puzzle. The reflexivity of the chiastic figure, and its rhetorical promise of renewal, is subsumed by the static repetition in the Threnos, a shift that undermines chiastic reflexivity on a broader formal level across the poem. It is critical, therefore, to recognize chiasmus as the poetic keystone of The Phoenix and the Turtle. At its most fundamental level, the single poetic line, chiasmus embodies the crossing paradox of opposition-and-containment defining the idealized relation of the lovers’ married chastity. Adopted into modern Latin from the Greek “ˉÈ∙ÛÌfĩ” meaning “a placing crosswise,” chiasmus evolved as a specific type of antimetabole, a figure of balance and symmetry as well as contradiction.40 Scaliger described “chiasmos” as a “scheme [where] the first element and the fourth, and the second and the third are conjoined giving a scissor formation in the sentence,”41 a characterization echoed by Richard Lanham, who maintains that chiasmus represents “the ABBA pattern of mirror inversion,” further elaborating that its rhetorical function is “to set up a natural internal dynamic that draws the parts closer together,”42 making chiasmus a figure well-suited to depict the paradoxical condition of love described in this poem. Indeed, the figure first emerges in what Hallett Smith refers to as “the dramatic statements of the paradoxes in the anthem,”43 in the lines articulating the lovers’ dual unity: So they loved as love in twain Had the essence but in one, Two distincts, division none: Number there in love was slain. (25–8)

The chiasmus in line 25, encloses the B term, “love(d),” with assonant A terms connoting doubleness in singular words: “they” and “twain.” The sense of paradox inherent in the mingling of singularity and duality is heightened in the contrasts of line 27. While the line offers a balanced chiasmus in grammatical terms, yielding the pattern, adjective : noun :: noun : adjective, the semantic elements of the line complicate this equilibrium. In the A terms, the measurable quantity “two” is set against the quantitative absence of “none.” Similarly, while there appears to be parity between the B terms, “distincts” and “division,” each

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denoting clear separation, a coherence reinforced in their phonological resonance, this parallel is subverted contextually. When the line is taken as a whole, the duality of “division” is negated in its coupling with “none.” Thus, as the mirroring counterparts of the chiasmus cohere as AB, “Two distincts,” and BA, “division none,” the antithetical reflection that emerges in the shifting of parallels enacts the paradox of opposition and containment embodied in the chiastic figure, tropologically depicting the complexities of paradox in the inscrutable dual unity of the lovers’ relation. A further use of chiasmus to illustrate paradox occurs in Stanza XII, as a climax to the building of this dynamic across the Anthem. The lyric gradually develops its contemplation of paradox by semantically tangling and untangling antithetical or implausible descriptions of the “true twain” (l. 45) that seems a “concordant one” (l. 46). Contradictions such as, “Hearts remote, yet not asunder” (l. 29), “Distance” in which “no space” is visibly discernible (l. 30), and “Single nature’s double name / [that is called] Neither two nor one” (ll. 39–40), accumulate to the point at which Reason becomes “confounded” (l. 41), unable to resolve the paradox, a disorientation articulated in Stanza XI: Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together, To themselves yet either neither, Simple were so well compounded. (41–4)

In a “confounding” of grammatical logic, singular and plural elements combine as “themselves” (l. 43) functions as a plural pronoun for the singular antecedent “division” (l. 43), and the singular subject noun “Simple” takes the plural verb “were” (l. 44). This grammatical shifting reflects the thematic transition in this passage from love-as-perfection to love-as-complication. The refiguration culminates in the chiastic line in Stanza XII, “Love hath reason, reason none” (l. 47), which defines the conversion of the world the poem describes from a microcosm governed by the orderly principle of Reason to one governed by the contrasting principle of Love, forming a counterpoint with the chiasmus at the Anthem’s beginning, itself turning upon “love” (l. 25). This chiasmus at the Anthem’s conclusion proceeds, love : reason :: reason : [absence of reason], producing two “confounding” effects. First, it turns “love” from the enclosed B term of line 25 into the encompassing A term of line 47. Love no longer binds, it contains. Second, the chiasm equates through structural parallel “love” and “absence of reason.” While this synonymy is perfectly acceptable out of context, poetically this parallel undoes the premise of the first part of the chiastic line, “Love hath reason,” by undermining its logic in the second part, “reason none,” describing a world in which reason has no reason, fulfilling, in

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the completion of its implied symmetry, the pattern of inversion and “confounding” that the Anthem as a whole describes. At the conclusion of the Anthem, this trope is extended further. The expectation of reflection and renewal implicit in chiastic structure is problematized just at the moment where we would expect the lyric’s theme and form to provide this renewal. Readings placing Shakespeare’s poem among the redemptive affirmations of the phoenix’ rebirth consistent with other contributions to Loves Martyr suggest that The Phoenix and the Turtle offers an apotheosis of the lovers in the Threnos. Yet, Reason’s singing of the Threnos leads the narrative of the poem into the realm of death, revealing a darker reflection on the idealized image of the self-contained binary. The poem invites the reader to envision the phoenix’ funeral pyre as a tomb, where the birds remain “enclos’d in cinders” (l. 55), offering the “urn” (l. 64) of their united bodies as a site of mourning and poetic contemplation. Here, Shakespeare draws attention to competing structural forms across the poem as a whole as the doubleness of chiastic structure is replaced by the singularity of rhyme in the death song. Unlike the cyclic repetition suggested by the abba pattern of the quatrains’ rhyme scheme, the tercets’ unchanging repetition of aaa maintains an unrelenting stasis, one made all the more powerful by the poem’s conclusion in this mode: Beauty, Truth, and Rarity, Grace in all simplicity, Here enclos’d, in cinders lie. Death is now the Phoenix’ nest, And the Turtle’s loyal breast To eternity doth rest. ................. To this urn let those repair That are either true or fair: For these dead birds sigh a prayer. (ll. 53–8, 64–7)44

While a sense of symmetry is maintained within the uniformity of repetition, it is not the balanced symmetry, the “two-as-one” unity, of the preceding sections because of the loss of the b term. The relentless aaa rhyme of the Threnos stands against the renewing abba progression of the Prologue and the Anthem, offering not the reassuring regenerative cycle of an abba pattern, but a static reiteration. The duality of the alternating rhyme has been reduced to monotony, a constancy of a very different sort – one that subverts renewal and rebirth for the unchanging sameness of death.

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III This juxtaposition of competing cyclic and linear models is amplified in the allusion The Phoenix and the Turtle makes to a possible contemporary source, Giordano Bruno’s De gli eroici furori ([London], 1585), a philosophical text contemplating the phoenix’ emblematic relation to chastity and eternity.45 Though the two works differ in style – Bruno’s text is an ethical exposition composed mainly of dialogues interwoven with lyrics and sonnets – Shakespeare likely knew of Eroici furori, and, as with other sources, borrowed elements of Bruno’s work, re-framing thematic and structural elements to suit his own objectives.46 The critical poetic links between Eroici furori and The Phoenix and the Turtle stem from Bruno’s use of the phoenix in connection with the idealization of love. As Paul Memmo discusses in the introduction to his translation of Eroici furori, Bruno links the phoenix with chastity, and specifically the glorification of Diana, another prominent figure in Cult-of-Elizabeth mythography. Memmo further notes the many allusions to Elizabeth in the sonnet sequence of Eroici furori, the first sonnet of which is dedicated to the queen.47 The most persuasive argument for associating these texts, however, is made by Roy Eriksen, who draws several parallels between the theme and form of Shakespeare’s poem and the song of the nine enlightened men near the end of the final dialogue in Part Two of Eroici furori.48 Eriksen contends that both texts assert a redemptive circularity traceable in imagery as well as in stanza structure as a means to portray themes of perfection and continuity. By alluding formalistically to the song of metaphysical transcendence that concludes Bruno’s text, Shakespeare indeed establishes the expectation of formal circularity in The Phoenix and the Turtle; against this anticipation, however, Shakespeare creates a competing asymmetry reinforced by the shift in rhyme scheme in the Threnos. The circular structure of Bruno’s lyric is relatively straightforward. As Memmo remarks in the notes to his translation, “The pattern of the sestets … is of circular structure appropriate to the theme of the wheel of fate. The last verse of each sestet forms the first verse of each succeeding sestet, and the last lines of the last sestet are identical with the first lines of the [poem].”49 Eriksen further identifies the “circularity” of Bruno’s verse with the fulfillment of Puttenham’s conception of the “Roundell or Sphere,” which “resemble[s] the world or vniuers, & for [its] indefinitenesse having no speciall place of beginning nor end, beareth a similitude with God and eternitie,” a form appropriate to Bruno’s theme of universal perfection.50 Bruno’s poem indeed exhibits “spherical” circularity in its rhyme scheme and in the repetition of words and images. This circularity is also reinforced in the poem directly as the introduc-

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tion given by the dialogue encourages the reader to recognize a circular pattern in the song by envisioning its performance as circular, then progresses into the verse: [S]in tanto che, tranquillato essendo alquanto l’impeto del furore, se misero in ordine di ruota, dove. IL PRIMO Cantava et sonava, la cithara in questo tenore. O’ rupi, ó fossi, ó spine, ó sterpi, ó sassi, O’ monti, ó piani, ó valli, ó fiumi, ó mari, Quanto vi discuoprite grati et cari, Che mercè vostra et merto N’ há fatt’ il ciel aperto, O’ fortunatamente spesi passi. ......................... IL NONO. Con una rebecchina. Quant’ occulto si rend’ e aperto stassi, O non nieghi, ó confermi che prevagli L’incomparabil fine á gl’ travagli Campestri, et montanari, De stagni, fiumi, mari, Di rupi, fossi, spine, sterpi, sassi. Dopo che ciascuno in questa forma singularmente sonando il suo instrumento hebbe cantata la sua sestina: tutti insieme ballando in ruota …

But when the excess of that frenzy finally became somewhat subdued, [the men] took their places in a circle, where[:] The first sang and played the guitar in this tone. Oh rocks, oh trenches, oh thorns, oh twigs, oh stones, oh mountains, oh plains, oh valleys, oh rivers, oh seas, how you reveal yourselves gracious and sweet for heaven has discovered to us your mercy and your worth! Oh steps spent for good fortune! ............................. The ninth with a three-stringed viol. Oh, may all that is hidden and all that remains seen not deny, but confirm the incomparable end of our labors, whose witnesses are the fields and mountains, ponds, rivers, seas, rocks, trenches, thorns, twigs and stones. After each one in this form and in his turn, had played his instrument and sung his sestet, they danced together in a circle … (Heroic Frenzies, 2.5) 51

The song’s circularity is realized in the conclusion of the dance, a literal trope echoing the circularity depicted in the song’s repetition of natural images and in its repeating rhyme scheme of abbcca … arrbba.52 In addition to these, Eriksen notes a further repetition pattern comprising epanalepsis, repeated end-words, and antimetabole, an inverting of the order of repeated words. He suggests that by repeating the opening lines’ end words “sassi” (l.1) and “mari” (l.2) at the conclusion of the poem and reversing their order: “mari” (l. 53) and “sassi” (l. 54), Bruno produces a heightened degree of continuity in the poem, “creat[ing] concentric verbal circles which constitute a textual image of the harmonious vision enjoyed by the furioso.”53 What is indeed a chiastic pattern here reinforces the circularity of the rhyme scheme, yielding the form ABbcca … arrbBA, further underscoring the balance and symmetry evoked in Bruno’s conception of universal perfection. The Phoenix and the Turtle replicates this pattern of circularity, as Eriksen suggests, though it is clear that Shakespeare’s lyric is more deeply interested

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in the chiastic formulation of renewal – one that he explicitly sets in tension with a non-renewing linearity. Eriksen’s reading of the Anthem section of The Phoenix and the Turtle identifies a circular pattern of repetition concurrent with his formal analysis of Bruno’s song. Eriksen maps this pattern across the thematic divisions of Stanzas VI through XIII, noting that “[the Anthem’s] many circles represent the rotation of the heavenly spheres, the wheels of fortune … of nature, and of time”54 (Figure 7.5). While I agree with Eriksen’s diagramming of formal repetition in Shakespeare’s poem, I note that the “circular” repetition shown here is also chiastic, and that Shakespeare elaborates on chiastic reflexivity, turning the circularity of Bruno’s repetition into self-reflective chiastic mirroring.

VI

VII–VIII

IX–X

XI–XII

XIII

The birds’ death and departure.

The paradox of two becoming one.

Illumination and metamorphosis of the self.

Reason’s reaction to the paradox.

The birds’ death and apotheosis.

7.5

Eriksen’s representation of stanzaic structure in the “Anthem” section of The Phoenix and the Turtle.55

These patterns of diction and event in Shakespeare’s poem underscore chiastic elements in its formal structure by locating the thematic climax of The Phoenix and the Turtle at the poem’s center. While Eriksen rightly divides the eighteen stanzas of the poem into groupings that follow the structure 5 - 8 - 5,56 I suggest instead that reading this pattern as 5 - [4/4] - 5 reflects a greater sense of chiastic symmetry. Accordingly, the narrative turn of the poem’s climax occurs at the structural midpoint of this central section, the initial line of Stanza X, where a literal “chi” would stand in the text were the stanzas numbered, dividing the poem into two stanzaically-balanced sections of nine and nine, replicating the rhetorical topos of the chiasm.57 Indeed, the union of phoenix and turtledove takes place in Stanza IX, in the transition from the metaphoric “shining” (l. 33) of the birds’ love to a literalization of its force in the “mutual flame” (l. 24) that becomes the site of their immolation, the consequences of which are described from Stanza X onward. The instant of consummation is reflected in the pun on sight/site that acknowledges the lovers’ mutual gaze as an intersubjective ex-

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change of being: “That the turtle saw his right” / Flaming in the Phoenix’ sight; / Either was the other’s mine” (34–6).58 The transactive moment of the gaze, in which the self appears reflected in the beloved, culminates in the structural mirror-point of the poem, the transition from Stanza IX to Stanza X, locating the poem’s thematic climax at this precise chiastic point. The structural form of Shakespeare’s lyric therefore offers a further complexity beyond Bruno’s harmonious spherical composition, depicting a sonnet-like intersubjective mutuality in the chiastic reflection of the phoenix and turtle’s love. This dynamic of reflexivity is paradoxical, being both affirming and destructive, a transition signaled not only textually but also rhetorically in the competing formal resistance to renewal established in the shift in rhyme scheme at the Threnos. When the pattern of reflection is extended to include the five stanzas on either side of the Anthem, the formal continuity of the Prologue and the Anthem is curtailed in the cessation of the cyclic rhyme scheme, undermining in the Threnos the expectation of symmetry and the fulfillment of a structurally-foregrounded renewal. The circular patterning of thematic events is set starkly against the linear progression of the poem’s narrative, which depicts the entombment of its protagonists. Hence, while the chiastic pattern in the formal divisions of The Phoenix and the Turtle is a plausible allusion to Bruno’s “cyclic view of time as a perpetual movement … [wherein] progress was revival [and] rebirth,”59 the structure of Shakespeare’s poem embeds a competing model within the formal scheme of cyclic renewal. The linearity of the narrative, anchored in the unrenewing, a-chiastic rhyme scheme beginning in the last five stanzas of the poem, marks its conclusion as unredemptive, asserting the stasis of a non-circular teleology. The Brunian cycle means regeneration and rebirth, but Shakespeare’s poem both raises and contradicts that possibility by interweaving linearity within a chiastically redemptive pattern, establishing a formal paradox. The significance of Shakespeare’s departure from the typical model of love is echoed in the text of the Threnos, which describes how the self-containing mutuality of the phoenix and turtle’s love – the paradox of their married chastity – results in the discontinuation of the phoenix’ cycle of renewal: Leaving no posterity ’Twas not their infirmity It was married chastity. Truth may seem, but cannot be, Beauty brag, but ’tis not she, Truth and Beauty buried be. (59–64)

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Constancie, in this poem, becomes a site of death. The static repetition of the Threnos not only pulls the verse into a singular direction that bears out the finality of the lovers’ end, but the shift in rhyme scheme also displaces the structural center of the poem from its chiastic pivot-point at Stanza X to the turn from Anthem to Threnos at Stanza XIV, as though altering the balance in a sonnet by relocating the volte. A fully redemptive poem would logically be chiastic, replicating complete renewal formally. Shakespeare’s poem undermines that possibility, however, a loss heightened in the allusion to Bruno’s song of celebration. While Shakespeare’s metaphysical lyric celebrates the perfection of the phoenix and turtle’s union, it is not a celebration of rebirth. Accordingly, the structural balance of the poem skews away from chiastic reciprocity and the formal promise of renewal.

IV In retrospect, while the chiastic reflexivity across the eighteen stanzas of The Phoenix and the Turtle suggests the potential for reflection and renewal, the shift in rhyme scheme as Anthem yields to Threnos subverts this pattern, producing a contradiction that informs the broader trope of paradox developed in the poem. The figuration of perpetuity in Shakespeare’s lyric sets itself against the implicit renewal depicted in Bruno’s celebratory song and, more broadly, in the Tudor panegyric tradition Loves Martyr engages, offering a competing narrative leading to death and the disruption of the Brunian cycle and a break in the mythography of Arthurian Dignitas. Bruno’s conception of metaphysical perfection is circular and renewing; but Shakespeare’s poem asserts that this is not the prospect available in an Elizabethan universe whose chaste ideal of perfect symmetry has condemned its future to the permanence of the urn. The idealized continuity of Semper Eadem is re-cast in Shakespeare’s poem as an ironic, static constanc(ie/y) that imperils the endurance of Gloriana’s Britain. The Phoenix and the Turtle reveals itself as an occasional poem focused on the problem of succession, framing the lineal as its own antithesis: the discontinuation of a line. The married chastity of the phoenix and turtle – the idealized analogue of the two-body sovereign – offers the static and unchanging constancy of the grave against the promise of eternal renewal suggested in the phoenix’ mythography and the formal cyclicality of the poem’s key rhetorical figure, chiasmus. In transforming the iconographical paradox of Elizabeth’s sovereignty into the dialogical opposition-and-containment of the chiastic figure, Shakespeare exposes the conflicting tropes of chastity and renewal in Elizabeth’s phoenix device, portraying the self-containing constancie of chas-

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tity as a strategy of self-representation that undermines the very mechanism Elizabeth engaged to preserve her power. The paradox inhering in the chiastic perfection of “Two distincts, division none” (l. 27) is one of Shakespeare’s most compelling characterizations of love; yet like so many of Shakespeare’s most profound reflections, his depiction of love’s perfection here is tinged with a darker truth – one he extends to Elizabeth’s mortality. In portraying perfection as simultaneous coherence and individuation, Shakespeare’s use of chiasmus to represent this dynamic calls into question the virtue of self-reflexive containment. The closure implicit in chiastic reflexivity subverts the reassurance of this symmetry as chiasmus becomes destructive rather than redemptive, revealing a poetic and a historical anxiety characterized by paradox. Though not fully “tongue-tied by authority” (Son. 66.9), poets voicing anxiety over Elizabeth’s chastity did so in the shadow of the elaborate Tudor panegyric tradition that reached its apex in the closing decade of Elizabeth’s reign. A courtly readership would have readily perceived the allusions the Loves Martyr volume makes, drawing on the well-established cultural context of the queen’s own fashioning. While the object of Shakespeare’s reference may be obvious, its objective is oblique, leaving the reader to puzzle out the relations framed in the poem’s intricate structure. Though many scholars have found the allegorical allusion in this lyric perplexing, it need not remain obscure if grounded in the fluid relation between the concrete and the abstract that Shakespeare’s poetic world continually engaged. In its own time, The Phoenix and the Turtle relied on the symbiosis of historical context and formal structure to be understood; so should its modern readers appreciate this hermeneutic resonance. Through its examination of the abstract perfection of love and the concrete imperfection of human history, The Phoenix and the Turtle “bodies forth” in rhetorical form a paradoxical ideal: England’s Elizabeth. Shakespeare’s fascination with this chiastic figure, as well as our own, remains enlivened by the formal intricacy of his emblematic phoenix poem.

NOTES 1.

2.

Robert Chester, Loves Martyr: or Rosalins Complaint. Allegorically shadowing the truth of love, in the constant fate of the phoenix and turtle (London, 1601). A subsequent edition appeared in 1611 under the title, The anuals of great Brittaine [sic]. Robert Chester’s “Loves martyr, or, Rosalins complaint”: (1601) with its supplement, “Diverse poeticall essaies” on the Turtle and phoenix by Shakspere [sic], Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, etc., ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: N. Trübner, 1878). Malone’s 1780 edition of the poems contained significant editorial reflection, particularly on the question of authenticity, arguing for Shakespearean authorship, yet

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3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 Grosart’s work is generally treated as the first focused critical study, particularly on the question of allegorical reference. Hyder E. Rollins considers the history of the authenticity question in detail in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1938). For an extended overview of critical perspective through 1973, see Richard Allan Underwood, “Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’: A Survey of Scholarship,” Saltzburg Studies in English Literature (Salzburg: Instutut für Englishe Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974). In subsequent parts of this essay, I will discuss in greater detail previous critical attempts to link the phoenix of Shakespeare’s poem to Elizabeth I, but for a comprehensively digested overview of scholarship on this topic, see John Roe’s introduction to The Phoenix and the Turtle in his edition of The Poems for The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Ernst Kantorowicz’ discussion of Dignitas in The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) is now well known, and my discussion acknowledges Elizabeth’s effective exploitation of the political theology of the body natural and body politic. In particular, though, the register of Dignitas most resonant with Elizabethan dynasticism inheres in the distinction Kantorowicz draws between the “Crown” and “The Dignity,” the former referring to the collective interest of the realm, the latter to the investiture of sovereignty in the royal individual. The association of the quasi-divine aspect of Dignitas non moritur with the uniqueness of the phoenix provides the crucial link to Elizabeth’s iconographical engagement with this figure. See Kantorowicz, 383–450 and passim. Citations for The Phoenix and the Turtle are taken from the Second Arden edition of The Poems, ed. F.T. Prince (1960; London: Routledge, 1996). The most comprehensive treatments of this material remain Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989); Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Carol Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); and Leah S. Marcus, “Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines, Elizabeth I, and the Political Uses of Androgyny,” in Medieval and Renaissance Women: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 135–54. The critiques are fewer, and chiefly focus on works by Spenser and Sidney rather than Shakespeare, though as Julia Walker observes in the introduction to the collection Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), this avenue of Elizabeth scholarship continues to broaden. See in particular David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984) and The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (New York: Palgrave, 2005), as well as Walker’s volume. John N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 147. See Judith H. Anderson, “‘In liuing colours and right hew’: The Queen of Spenser’s Central Books,” in Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance, ed. Maynard Mack and George deForest Lord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 47–66; Susan Frye, “Of Chastity and Violence: Elizabeth I and Edmund Spenser in the House of Busirane,” Signs 20, no. 1 (1994): 49–78; and Kimberly Anne Coles, “‘Perfect Hole’: Elizabeth I, Spenser, and Chaste Productions,” ELR 32, no. 1 (2002): 31–61.

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9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

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Loves Martyr is dedicated to Chester’s patron, Sir John Salusbury of Lleweni, who had been knighted in 1601 after a period of estrangement from the court. For a discussion of Salusbury’s position at the time of the volume’s publication, see Anthea Hume, “Love’s Martyr, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, and the Aftermath of the Essex Rebellion,” The Review of English Studies, New Series 40 (1989): 48–71. Several scholars have made this observation, but for an extended discussion see Hume in addition to Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), which, of course, draws on Kantorowicz. Both Axton and Hume discuss the relation of Shakespeare’s poem to the Loves Martyr collection as well as the volume’s engagement with the succession, though both draw differing conclusions regarding the attribution of the turtledove – the major point of contention in the critical history of deciphering this allegory, an issue my discussion will subsequently address. While much Loves Martyr scholarship suggests a clear allusion to James in the New Phoenix, the tone of the collection does not appear subversive. The succession question remained openly unresolved, despite Elizabeth’s increasingly intimate correspondence with James. For an interesting discussion of this relation, see Janel Mueller, “‘To my very good brother the King of Scots’: Elizabeth’s Correspondence with James VI and the Question of the Succession,” PMLA 115, no. 5 (2000): 1063–71 and Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Mueller’s essay suggests that Elizabeth’s rhetorical relationship toward James shifts from one of friendship, as a peer in “kingship,” to one of “kinship,” a rhetorical context more admitting of succession. Nevertheless, Elizabeth had not named a successor in 1601, and to openly acknowledge James’ apparency would have not only offended the queen but perhaps have endangered James’ position, further jeopardizing the succession. Loves Martyr, 132. Ibid. Ibid., 143. Patrick Collinson has extensively examined the notion of dynasty in the religious and political models invoked by Elizabeth; see esp. “The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 69 (1987): 394–424. The literary framework for this ideology emerges in the Cult pageantry linking the queen to mythological forebears, a crucial register activated in Loves Martyr. Spenser’s central homage to Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene in the figure of Britomart, whose cross-gendered martiality recalls the queen’s own political imagery and England’s rise to international prominence under her use of this iconography, idealizes Britomart’s heroic actions, which culminate in her marriage with Artegall. The genealogical link between Elizabeth and Arthur perpetuated in this ideal union conflates Dignitas with the “constancie” or faithfulness of “married chastity”: Britomart’s chastity, directed ultimately toward a faithful sexuality within marriage, is a fertile chastity that will engender the successive renewal of English history. See David A. Summers, Spenser’s Arthur: The British Arthurian Tradition and The Faerie Queene (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997); Margaret Christian, “‘The ground of storie’: Genealogy in The Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies 9 (1988): 61–79, who argues that Elizabeth’s descent from Arthur is monarchical rather than consanguineous; and Andrew King, “Lines of Authority: The Genealogical Theme in The

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15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies 18 (2003): 59–77. King observes that narrative aporia in both Arthur’s and Britomart’s stories suggests a parallel interruption in Elizabeth’s lineal “authority”; see Anderson, Coles, and esp. Frye, “Busirane” for detailed examinations of conflicting representations of chastity in this context. Loves Martyr, 26. The metaphoric view Nature offers the Phoenix is one of global and historical perspective, inviting her, “Looke Phoenix ore the world as thou dost ride” (25). Margaret Hotine, “Shakespeare’s Lament for Mary Queen of Scots?” Royal Stuart Papers XIII (London: The Royal Stuart Society, 1979). Hotine documents several phoenix materials recorded among the personal property of Mary Queen of Scots, many of which include the “en ma fin fit mon commencement” motto. This image is reproduced in Roy C. Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 73, Fig. 49. Though the dating of the illumination ranges from 1584 (Strong) to 1586 (see n. 19, below), the time frame remains relevant. For a discussion of this artifact, see Helen Farquhar, “John Rutlinger and the Phoenix Badge of Queen Elizabeth,” The Numismatic Chronicle, Fifth Series, vol. III (London: 1923). On imprese see Peter M. Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem: Structural Parallels Between the Emblem and Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 27–30 and passim. While the phoenix was associated with Elizabeth from her accession (see subsequent note), this connection of phoenix image with text emphasizing continuity, in particular the Semper Eadem motto, appears specific to this later time frame, a topic worth further historical investigation. Strong catalogues several uses of phoenix iconography including the famous Hilliard miniature: “The Drake Jewel,” (c.1586–87) in Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 82–3, 120–21. Kantorowicz also describes several uses of the phoenix, including coins inscribed with the motto “SOLA PHOENIX” (“Only Phoenix”), which he acknowledges as “signifying her virginity as well as her singularity” (413). For a detailed examination of the phoenix device in commemorative medallions, see George Hill, Medals of the Renaissance, rev. ed. Graham Pollard (1920; London: British Museum Publications, 1978); Edward Hawkins, Medallic Illustrations of the History of Great Britain and Ireland to the Death of George II (1885; Trustees of the British Museum, 1969). Thomas Churchyard, Churchyards challenge (London, 1593), 197. Thomas Churchyard, A handeful of gladsome verses, giuen to the Queenes Maiesty at Woodstocke this prograce (Oxford, 1592), sig. C1r. See Elkin Calhoun Wilson, England’s Eliza (New York: Octagon Books, 1966). Prominent examples of this tradition include both The Phoenix Nest (see subsequent note) and Englands Helicon (London, 1600). The Phoenix Nest, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931) and Englands Helicon: Edited from the Edition of 1600 with Additional Poems from the Edition of 1614, ed. Hugh Macdonald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949). Rollins’ introduction gives a full overview of contemporary texts in this tradition. The Phoenix Nest. Built vp with the most rare and refined workes of noble men, woorthy knights, gallant gentlemen, masters of arts, and braue schollers. Full of varietie, excel-

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26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

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lent inuention, and singular delight. Neuer before this time published. Set foorth by R.S. of the Inner Temple, Gentleman (London, 1593). The Phoenix Nest, sig. D3r. Roy C. Strong, The Elizabethan Image: Painting in England, 1540–1620 (London: The Tate Gallery, 1969), 42. See esp. Frances Teague, “Queen Elizabeth in Her Speeches,” in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 63–78; Leah S. Marcus, “Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines, Elizabeth I, and the Political Uses of Androgyny,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 135–53; Mary Beth Rose, “The Gendering of Authority in the Public Speeches of Elizabeth I,” PMLA 115, no. 5 (2000): 1077–82; Janel Mueller, “Virtue and Virtuality: Gender in the SelfRepresentations of Queen Elizabeth I,” in Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ed. Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 220–46; and Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Marcus, Mueller, and Rose. Extensive readings of gender duality in the portraits include Constance Jordan, “Representing Political Androgyny: More on the Siena Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I,” in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haskelhorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 157–76; Doris Adler, “The Riddle of the Sieve: The Siena Sieve Portrait of Queen Elizabeth,” Renaissance Papers (1978): 1–10; S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, “‘From Myself, My Other Self I Turned’: An Introduction,” in Gloriana’s Face, 1–24; and Daniel Fischlin, “Political Allegory, Absolutist Ideology, and the ‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I,” Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997): 175–206. For a detailed reading of the cross-gendered imagery in the Rainbow Portrait, see Joel Fineman, “Shakespeare’s Ear,” The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 222–31, on which Fischlin comments. Both Fineman and Fischlin, however, overlook an aspect of duality in the rainbow image itself. The phallic rainbow appears deliberately ambiguous in its attribution of gender: a clearly-defined phallus would maintain a stable orientation – it would either originate from the folds of the queen’s garment and move outward, or conversely represent an inward penetration of the fold. The rainbow, however, is dually directional. This dichotomy is reinforced by the interplay of grammatical gender in the motto, “NON SINE SOLE IRIS” (“No Rainbow Without the Sun”), which juxtaposes the masculine noun “sole,” representing the sun, and the feminine “Iris” in reference to the rainbow. By representing herself as the site of both masculine and feminine power, Elizabeth multiplies that agency. For a general discussion of the portraiture, see Strong, The Elizabethan Image, The Cult of Elizabeth, Gloriana, and Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975) and Elizabeth Pomeroy, Reading the Portraits of Queen Elizabeth (Hamden, CT: Archon Press, 1989). Elizabeth was, of course, an active participant in cultivating her public and political images, even participating in living tableaux from the beginning of her reign. See esp. Berry, Of Chastity and Power; Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem; and King,

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31. 32. 33.

34.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 47. Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies, Introduction, x. Proponents of the Essex theory begin with Grosart and extend through the twentieth century; see esp. William H. Matchett, “The Phoenix and the Turtle”: Shakespeare’s Poem and Chester’s “Loves Martyr,” Studies in English Literature, no. 1 (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), and most recently Alzada Tipton, “The Transformation of the Earl of Essex: Post-Execution Ballads and ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’,” Studies in Philology 99, no. 1 (2002): 57–80. Those who extend the allegory to Salusbury cite the dedication of Loves Martyr to him as their strongest evidence, interpreting the occasion of his knighthood as the narrative underpinning the collection; see John Buxton, “Two Dead Birds: A Note on ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’,” in English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner, ed. John Carey and Helen Peters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 44–55; Thomas P. Harrison, “Love’s Martyr by Robert Chester: A New Interpretation,” University of Texas Studies in English 30 (1951): 66–85. Variations on this theme assert a political motive such as establishing Salusbury’s servility following political unrest; see E.A.J. Honigmann, Shakespeare, The “Lost Years” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). Readers seeking an earlier date for the collection substitute Salusbury’s wife, Ursula, in the place of the phoenix; see Carleton F. Brown, Poems by Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester (London: Early English Text Society, E.S. CXIII, 1914). Hume, however, frames a convincing argument against any of the Salusbury hypotheses in light of the relation between Essex and Salusbury, and casts similar doubt on the Essex proposition, noting that a volume dedicated to Salusbury would be unlikely to offer a restorative view of Essex. Hume attributes the primary emphasis of the poem to reconciling the queen’s relation with her subjects in a post-Essex era. A remaining historical reading that preserves Elizabeth as the phoenix, as well as the later dating of the poem, and that, like the Essex theory, falls under the rubric of idealized reconciliation, is posited by Roy T. Eriksen in “‘Un certo amoroso martire’: Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ and Giordano Bruno’s De gli eroici furori,” Spenser Studies 2 (1981): 193–215, who offers Giordano Bruno as the likely turtle figure. I will discuss the parallels Eriksen observes between the formal structure of The Phoenix and the Turtle and Bruno’s text later in this essay, though I believe they will show further evidence identifying the phoenix and the turtledove with Elizabeth, exclusively. Analyses in this vein typically apply to only a portion of the text. A recent essay by Clare Asquith, for example, revisits the links between the Anthem of The Phoenix and the Turtle and the opening invocation of Robert Southwell’s translation of Aquinas’ “Lauda Sion” initially examined by Clara Longworth de Chambrun in My Shakespeare, Rise!: Recollections of John Lacy, One of His Majesty’s Players (London: J.B. Lippincott, 1935), though Asquith acknowledges these parallels are only maintained through the first third of Shakespeare’s poem: “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” Shakespeare Newsletter 50, no.1 (2000): 3, 10, 24, 26. Asquith also lends her support in a May 2, 2003 letter to the editor of the TLS to the claim advanced by John Finnis and Patrick Martin in “Another Turn for the Turtle,” in the April 18, 2003 issue, linking the phoenix and the turtle to recusants Ann and Roger Line [sic]. However, I follow the suggestion made by Katherine Duncan-Jones in a posting to the SHAKSPER online

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35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

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newsgroup that it is highly unlikely that a collection dedicated to Salusbury would idealize Catholic martyrdom, as suggested by Finnis and Martin. Katherine DuncanJones, “Michael Wood and Some Issues Raised,” SHAKSPER [electronic newsgroup], SHK 14.2141, [11 November 2003]; available from www.shaksper.net Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies; see esp. 117–21. See Hume for a thorough exposition of the turtledove as martyr figure. For an extended discussion of the origins of “married chastity,” and early modern characterizations of chastity in general, see Juliet Dusinberre’s Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (1975; London: Routledge, 2003). Hermia’s choices are unambiguous regarding the alternatives to marriage she is offered: literal death or the figurative death of the convent. The proposed marriage to Demetrius becomes a third type of death, a potential site of “enforced chastity” (3.1.193) in the contractual fidelity implied by Athenian law, a loveless devotion that looks backward generationally to her father’s desires rather than forward in the fulfillment of her own. In Hamlet, the ideal of chastity is hyperbolized, turning virtue to vulnerability. Hamlet’s admonition to Ophelia, “Be thou as chaste as ice as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny” (3.1.135–6), is an inversion that conflates an honorable reputation with its opposite, ascribing to purity winter’s resonance with barrenness and death. The figurative nunnery to which Ophelia is consigned becomes literalized in her death as the relationships defining her identity fragment, leaving her isolated and vulnerable. In these contemporary dramatic contexts, chastity and death represent the antithesis of marriage and fertility and their accordant implication of a renewing perpetuity. In MND in particular, the image of the rose is invoked in the context of singularity, casting chastity as a “single blessedness” (1.1.78) and invoking “sovereignty” (1.1.82) in the context of marriage as sexual consent and self-sacrifice. Further such parallels suggest themselves, but it is well beyond the scope of this essay to fully develop them here. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (1979; London: Routledge, 1990); Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (1982; London: Routledge, 1990). In his introduction to the Arden edition of Romeo and Juliet (1980; London: Thompson, 1997), Brian Gibbons comments on the play’s relation to Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry, though these remarks focus primarily on Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 2nd ed., s.v. “chiasmus”; Brian Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (1970; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), esp. 29, 108, 13–32. Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (London: Routledge, 1968), 199. Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 33. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1795. The haunting flatness of the rhyme in these stanzas is reminiscent in tone of the riddling verses contained in the caskets in The Merchant of Venice. Even the helpful song foregrounding Bassanio’s choice seems to taunt its hearers, conflating marriage and death as integral parts of the marriage/chastity ritual: Tell me where is Fancy bred, Or in the heart, or in the head?

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THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 How begot, how nourished? ...................... It is engend’red in the eyes, With gazing fed, and Fancy dies In the cradle where it lies: Let us all ring Fancy’s knell. I’ll begin it. Ding, dong, bell. (MV, 3.2.63–5, 67–71)

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

This riddling seems moreover to satirize formal courtship, as John Russell Brown notes in his gloss in the Arden edition of the play: “Portia and Bassanio are both aware that they have kindled each other’s ‘fancy’… the song warns that there must be a deeper love” (1955; London: Routledge, 1991), n. 80. While the title page gives Paris as the place of publication, Memmo’s introductory notes explain that the six cosmological works published from 1584–85 were actually printed in London by J. Charlewood. See Paul Eugene Memmo, introduction, Giordano Bruno’s The Heroic Frenzies: A Translation with Introduction and Notes, University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, no. 50 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964) 16–17. Bruno’s relationship with the Elizabethan court was extensive, as was his reputation as a poet. Memmo’s introduction discusses in detail this historical evidence; see esp. 21–8, 32–56. The volume itself is dedicated to Sidney. On references to Diana and Elizabeth I, see esp. 40–46; on emblematic tradition, including the phoenix, see 47–56. Roy T. Eriksen, “‘Un certo amoroso martire’” (see n. 33 for full citation). Memmo, Heroic Frenzies, n. 265. George Puttenham, The arte of English poesie, ed. G.D. Willcock and A. Walker (1936; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) 200, 208–9. Quoted in Eriksen, 206. It is perhaps worth noting that the example Puttenham gives of a perfect Roundell takes Elizabeth as its subject, as stated in the heading: “A generall resemblance of the Roundell to God, the world, and the Queene.” The arte of English poesie (London, 1589), 81, sig. Niij. For the Italian quotation, I have followed the punctuation in the original 1585 text. The English translation is Memmo’s, 263–5. See also Des fureurs héroïques, ed. and trans. Paul-Henri Michel (Paris: Société d’Édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1954), 440–45. Memmo’s translation of “ruota” as “circle” closely follows Michel’s translation, “cercle,” though reading this term as “wheel” would more closely approximate Bruno’s characteristic imagery. The trope of circularity is poetically relevant, however. See Eriksen’s diagram of the rhyme scheme (205), which I follow here. Bruno’s lyric tropes circularity on several formal levels, as both Memmo and Eriksen assert, though oddly neither Memmo nor Eriksen comment on the connection between the circularity of the dance and the circularity of the textual forms. Eriksen, 205. See Lanham on epanalepsis and antimetabole. Eriksen, 204–5. Ibid., 207, Fig. 3. Ibid., 194. The chiastic division of stanzas into nine-and-nine further suggests the possibility that

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59.

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Shakespeare doubled the number of stanzas in his phoenix poem, as though to suggest that Bruno’s nine stanzas only yield “half ” of the story. General observations about chiastic symmetry in several plays are made by Max Nänny in “Chiastic Structures in Literature: Some Forms and Functions,” in The Structure of Texts, ed. Udo Fries, Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, vol. 3 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1987), 75–97 and “Chiasmus in Literature: Ornament or Function?” Word and Image 4, no. 1 (1988): 51–9. Marjorie Garber identifies a “Chinese box structure” in The Phoenix and the Turtle, but attributes to this pattern an exclusively circular and recuperative interpretation of the poem in “Two Birds With One Stone: Lapidary Re-Inscription in The Phoenix and Turtle,” The Upstart Crow 5 (1984): 15. Patricia Parker has also observed that the poem appears to offer renewal by using the Threnos as “a means of recuperation” that “smooths out the earlier indigestible language of punning and paradox” (40), concluding that, “the poem’s own processional structure suggests an ironic movement of accommodation as recovery” (56). Yet Parker also acknowledges a tension in the poem’s figuration of desire that lingers beyond the conclusion, a tension not fully reconciled with the poem’s deployment of competing structures as a means to stabilize the “aberrant couplings” (56) that it foregrounds: “Anagogic Metaphor: Breaking Down the Wall of Partition,” in Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, ed. Eleanor Cook, Chaviva Hošek, Jay Macpherson, Patricia Parker, and Julian Patrick (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 38–58. On the intersubjective gaze, I have in mind Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjur’d Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Eriksen too sees this section of the poem as its climax noting, “the theme of the transformed self occurs twice in each of the two central stanzas” (198–9). Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 1.

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PART III

Narrative Designs

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8 Tragedy in Retrospect: Hamlet’s Narrative Infrastructure

Raphael Falco

Speaking of Corneille’s Pompée, George Steiner some time ago observed that the “neo-classical ideal of propriety – horrible or bloody deeds must not be shown upon the stage – is relevant to the entire drama.”1 In fact, as Steiner noted, Pompey “is slain at the outset and never appears on stage.”2 The play, a canny political drama, thus depends entirely on a combination of rhetorical reconstructions of horrible violence and intricate arguments to work out allegiances and ambitions. As is well known, the model or basis for the “neo-classical ideal of propriety” is chiefly Seneca, with a dash of Aristotle and Greek drama added. It hardly needs pointing out that Shakespeare and his contemporaries did not adhere very strictly to the classical rules – to everyone’s relief. The catastrophes (or horrible endings) of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies tend to occur on stage, in full view of an audience apparently entertained by bloody action. At times, in fact, it seems as though playwrights have gone out of their way to show us the horrors – Webster, for instance, in The Duchess of Malfi, with the dead hand or the onstage killing of Cariola; or that bizarre torture scene in Ford’s The Broken Heart in which Ithocles “sits downe and is catcht in the Engine” (4.4.21); or Vindice and the poisoned lips of the skull in The Revenger’s Tragedy. We could easily multiply these examples until it became clear that consigning horrible and bloody deeds to description or narrative is more the exception than the rule in early modern tragedy.3 Thus, when we find a collocation of such descriptions, as in Hamlet, we should examine what I would like to refer to as the infrastructure of the play to determine whether they are merely incidental (or coincidental) or whether, on the other hand, they contribute meaningfully to the tragic circumstances. Taken together, these narrative instances supply the play’s somewhat occulted backcloth of treason, menace, and betrayal that the actual events of the early acts do not convey, despite Hamlet’s brooding anxieties. 123

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I am inclined to believe that the latter is the case in Hamlet. I will link three speeches in the play: the Ghost’s description of his own murder (setting straight the “forgéd process” of his death), the First Player’s description of Priam’s murder, and Hamlet’s narrative of his disposition of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Central to all three of these speeches is the recitation of betrayal and terrible violence – Steiner’s “horrible and bloody deeds.” Until the plot contrived by Laertes and Claudius, in fact, these are the only substantial examples of betrayal in the play. Ophelia’s collaboration with Polonius and Claudius in 2.2 seems to have more to do with filial obedience than outright betrayal (although perhaps we shouldn’t neglect Polonius’s observation that Hamlet’s “solicitings” were “given to mine ear” [2.2.127] reinforcing the offstage instability that is brewing). Putting Ophelia aside for the moment, the other scenes, because they offer pronounced offstage recitations of violence and betrayal, provide a palpable atmospheric function. The Murder of Gonzago of course brings into the play images of the very betrayal that the narrated versions have provided until that point, yet the need to stage a rough simulacrum of the Ghost’s tale of betrayal emphasizes the importance of the narrative infrastructure in affecting the action. That the Mousetrap does as much to confuse the revenge plot as to advance it brings into question the very value of dramatic representation in confrontation with narrative excursus. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate the interdependence of narrative and tragic action and, further, to show that the presence of a narrative infrastructure provides temporal excerpts on which the catastrophe depends. In addition to narrative infrastructure, I develop two other concepts in the course of the essay: “tragedy in retrospect” and dramatische Innerzeitigkeit (dramatic time-withinness). The former concept affords the critical opportunity to understand the narrative parts of the drama as more than simply historical recounting. The latter, dramatische Innerzeitigkeit, is derived from Paul Ricoeur’s interpretation of Heidegger’s Dasein in connection with narrativity. This concept of timewithin-ness helps to characterize the temporal excerpts opened up by the narrative infrastructure. I would like to argue that the concept of dramatische Innerzeitigkeit offers a new avenue for critical discourse by revising the idea of where the work of tragedy takes place. A by-product of my focus on narrative infrastructure is the evidence that Shakespeare repeatedly blurs the line between eyes and ears, at times confusing sight, hearing, and speech. The three speeches I’ve chosen to examine inevitably culminate in Horatio’s unheard (but promised) narrative meant to follow Hamlet’s death. His narrative would complete the frame, although, since we never hear it, the speech reflects the not-quite-completeness of offstage narration in confrontation with dramatic action. Like the entire narrative infrastructure,

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Horatio’s promised words would have a supererogatory function designed to exist in a temporal place at once beyond and within the dramatic frame. In conventional theoretical terms, dramatic and narrative expression would be distinguished as mimetic and diegetic representation. But this distinction, which supposedly is derived from classical models, should not be too firmly observed.4 The categories of mimetic and diegetic, are in fact products more of recent criticism than of ancient or Shakespearean practice, and they tend to introduce a false distinction into dramatic presentation. A cursory reading of virtually any classical play, from Sophocles’s Oedipus to Seneca’s own Thyestes, makes it abundantly evident that, while poets deliberately consign violence to offstage action, the undramatic narrative has a proleptic dramatic force. Edward Costigan quotes Susanne Langer, who claims, somewhat aphoristically, that “[narratives] ‘project a history in retrospect’ while ‘drama is history coming.’”5 Costigan expands on this claim: When a perspective is opened at a tangent to the action by a narrative episode the audience is called upon to bring divergent impressions into alignment. Whether summarizing events already witnessed or introducing new documentation from the unseen past, it is shadowed by the sense that it is a substitute for the direct apprehension: the independently structured, “rounded” reification has more weight and substance than what is going forward, and is at the same time less peremptorily authentic.6

The struggle between “what is going forward” and the “weight and substance” of a narrative episode plagues Hamlet, and Hamlet himself for that matter, as the action unfolds after the Ghost’s speech. The “unseen past” literally haunts the play, and Langer’s phrase “history coming” has particular resonance when we think of Fortinbras. Denmark’s history is drama enacted while Hamlet’s future can only be history in retrospect, a painful narrative episode that begins with Horatio’s “let me speak” in the final moments of the last scene: And let me speak to th’ yet unknowing world How these things came about. So shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads. All this can I Truly deliver. (5.2.384–91)7

Anne Barton has remarked that this speech “sounds like the prologue to a conventional revenge tragedy.”8 But that remark ignores the possibility that Horatio’s promise – “All this can I / Truly deliver” – also sounds like a vow to provide Senecan or “neo-classical” narratives to supplement the “history com-

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ing” of Denmark’s political drama. His speech, in other words, need not be a prologue at all. It could be seen as exactly the kind of extra-dramatic narrative supplement we find elsewhere in the play: in the Ghost’s speech and the First Player’s speeches especially. Interpretation of Hamlet has generally favored a different dramatic infrastructure from the one I would like to explore in this essay. For the most part, critics have conceived the structure of the play – both thematically and in terms of plot development – as a polarity pitting Hamlet’s soliloquies against his abrupt declarations of intent, such as “I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / All saws of books … etc.” (1.5.99–100) or his promise “to put an antic disposition on” (1.5.180) or, later in the play, “We defy augury. … The readiness is all” (5.2.215, 218). The directness and clear resolve of such speeches rise to the surface to form a kind of thematic agon with the soliloquies, where the melancholy prince contemplates (but hesitates to commit) suicide and where he mulls obsessively over his lack of determination to act. Despite the wide array of subjects in recent Hamlet criticism, especially work that forcefully turns away from the old study of character, it is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore the question of action versus inaction because Hamlet himself returns to the subject so often. If we are to establish a version of dramatic or onstage subjectivity, therefore, it would seem that the old critical polarity cannot be avoided, regardless of how inventively we address secondary figures in the play, historical context, and textual issues. Yet Hamlet’s subjectivity might well be constructed from other emphases. Specifically, Hamlet might be seen as the labile intermediary between the fiction of dramatic presence and the fiction of extra-dramatic narrative, the latter relying on descriptive rhetoric and visualization for its force and on a version of mythification for its permanence. Rather than accepting (even passively) the polarity implied by the action versus inaction thematic – rather, in fact, than accepting Hamlet’s own version of his dilemma – we have the opportunity to re-design the structure of the play. To return to Steiner’s observation, in classical drama and its later imitators, extra-dramatic narrative supplements, of the kind Horatio promises, were like rhetorical cages in which poets confined all violent action – “carnal, bloody, unnatural acts … casual slaughters.” Indeed, Horatio’s words might as accurately describe Oedipus’ life as Hamlet’s. And the fact that the unnatural acts and casual slaughters of Hamlet’s life will live only in narrative instantaneously mythologizes the prince and links him dramatically with classical tragedy where the description of “horrible and bloody deeds” constitutes the extent of actual violence on the stage. Thus, in Sophocles, we listen to Oedipus telling of the disastrous action at the crossroads:

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There I encountered A herald followed by a carriage with a man in it, A man like the man you described. This herald, In a surly way, a way unfitted to my rank Or indeed to anyone’s, ordered me off the road. I refused, then this venerable one in the carriage Joined in with equal surliness – he even offered To thrust me bodily off the road. I became angry And struck the coachman. The old man Watched for his moment and, as he passed, Leaned out with a two-pronged goad and hit me Full on the head. What could I do except Seek payment in full for the pain and insult? My stick struck him backwards from his carriage And he fell out. The others attacked me And I – need I go on? If this was Laius, See then what I have done: rendered myself Hateful to gods and men. I was born evil, I am utterly unclean, murderer and polluter Of my victim’s bed.9

So much in the tragedy hinges on this speech; so much of the catastrophe depends on elements that we would call undramatic, or at least undramatized. Yet the very roots of tragic drama, the Iliad notwithstanding, can be traced to this moment when Oedipus is speaking before the Chorus and Jocasta. His description of the violent encounter not only allows his audience to visualize the murder of their king (and Jocasta’s first husband), but also leads Oedipus to recognize himself as the source of the miasma afflicting Thebes. The link between this recounted episode from Oedipus’s past and the present action of the play – including the “horrible and bloody deeds” occurring offstage – Jocasta’s hanging and Oedipus’s blinding – establishes an infrastructure of narratives housing the tragic descent from recognition to catastrophe. Similarly horrific and action-packed narratives occur twice in Hamlet. In the Ghost’s recounting of events, Claudius betrays his brother and poisons him (in the ear) while he is sleeping. In the First Player’s speech, which is supposedly a recital of Aeneas’s speech to Dido, Pyrrhus slays Priam and is portrayed – literally, in the image of “a painted tyrant” – as the purveyor of a betrayal that has driven Hecuba to distraction: “Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steeped / ’Gainst Fortune’s state would treason have pronounced” (2.2.521–2). Both of these narratives (one a revelation and one a set piece) involve extensive description of offstage events, and they clearly fit the Senecan pattern of representing violence rhetorically rather than dramatically. But there is something more to these speeches. They also tend to mix, or deliberately

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confuse, the value of eyes, ears, and tongues: Old Hamlet is killed through his ear; “senseless Ilium … takes prisoner Pyrrhus’ ear”; and anyone seeing the distraught Hecuba would speak “with tongue in venom steeped” and treason pronounce – that is, to see Hecuba is to pronounce the advent of treason. It is as though the exchange of dramatic action for narrative – in other words, of the eye of the observer for the ear of the audience by means of the tongue – is mirrored in the subject matter of the narratives themselves. Ears and tongues don’t exactly replace eyes; visualization by the inner eye is still necessary even in the most articulate and moving narrative (such as the First Player’s speech). But there is a confusion of the dominant senses involved in the perception of the action. The auditory component of the action – shouts, ghostly shuffling, a body thudding behind an arras – rivals the confusion of sight, hearing, and speech in the narrative segments. This conflict between performative reality and the language of the Seneca-style speeches adumbrates the interchange in the tragedy of narrative and action. In contrast, in Hamlet’s narrative in Act 5 scene 2, in which he describes his discovery of the plot against his life and his rewriting of the king’s orders, there is no confusion of eyes with ears and tongues. As many critics have noted, however, there is a crucial link to the written word, another form of narrative that is opposed, supplementary, or possibly prior to dramatic representation. The chief aim of the speech, which Hamlet delivers to Horatio when they meet secretly after his return, is to justify his reversal of the royal plot against his life and his newly galvanized intention to kill Claudius – the latter for a host of reasons, but most significantly, now, because the king has betrayed him rather than merely having assassinated his father. By excerpting this narrative from the present action, Shakespeare places the betrayal of Hamlet in a parallel structural relationship to the betrayals of Old Hamlet and Priam (and maybe Hecuba too). It is a question not only of infrastructure but also of the assumption on Hamlet’s part of a liminal position: half participant, half narrator. This liminality creates a structural continuity with the other instances of participant/ narrators. The Ghost’s liminality is actual – he lives in a spectral limbo; the First Player’s is more like a conflation: at once an actor and a narrator, he is also a participating character in the play Hamlet, exchanging words with the eponymous protagonist. Ironically, these liminal figures have a clarifying effect on the tragic development, even though the events their speeches bring into relief are patently extra-dramatic. The particular case of Hamlet’s narrative in 5.2 serves several additional functions: it raises Hamlet’s moral status, it confirms his awareness of plots against him, and it allows Horatio to question, however tentatively, the prince’s choice to commit murder (or to kill, anyway). Perhaps

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most important, however, it points to Hamlet’s narrative future at the hands of Horatio, who is enjoined at the end of the play to tell the prince’s story. Presumably this final story will fall into place with the other extra-dramatic or supplemental narratives in detailing Hamlet’s betrayal by Claudius, his death by poison, his loss of a kingdom – all elements of the earlier speeches. The import of that final unheard speech in the chain of speeches remains unknown, but it seems safe to assume that Horatio’s soon-to-be-uttered Life of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark will not be tragedy. Nor, according to Freddie Rokem, will it be history either: “At the end of Shakespeare’s play … Horatio’s heroic efforts to mediate between tragedy and history – to create a narrative telling the world what he has witnessed – are drowned out by Fortinbras’s unambiguous orders to ‘bid the soldiers shoot.’ The demands of history, represented by Fortinbras, and the demands of tragedy, represented by Horatio, are consistently kept apart.”10 If Rokem is right, then the “demands of tragedy” that Horatio represents are demonstrably not the demands of dramatized tragedy. Rather, they are the demands of Senecan tragedy: a narrated version of already-enacted events, or, to revise Langer’s phrase, “tragedy in retrospect.” An inevitable dependency develops in the relationship between tragedy in retrospect and narrative infrastructure in Hamlet. Although, as Alan Ackerman points out, we find “the very nature or roots of the theatre, in the Greek theatron or place of seeing,”11 the three speeches (and Horatio’s to come) do not involve actual seeing, nor need they occur in the so-called “place of seeing.” Ackerman notes the confusion between literal and metaphorical seeing in Act 1 scene 2: Hamlet: My father – methinks I see my father – Horatio: Where, my lord? Hamlet: In my mind’s eye, Horatio. (1.2.183–5)

Horatio thinks Hamlet is seeing the Ghost whereas Hamlet is merely feeling a nostalgic twinge. Only after Hamlet’s remark does Horatio offer a brief narration of the sightings of the Ghost. This narration is an early confirmation of Horatio’s storytelling skills – he builds the suspense masterfully, adding numerous descriptive touches – and foreshadows the engagement with which he will tell Hamlet’s story. Moreover, the brief narration relies entirely on Hamlet’s “mind’s eye,” calling on the prince to visualize “a figure like your father” (1.2.199) before Hamlet has experienced the Ghost in the “place of seeing.” The entire passage, coming as early as it does in the play, reflects Shakespeare’s consciousness of the liminal status of narrator and narration: Horatio, it must be remembered, is telling the story of something he, Marcellus, Barnardo, and the audience too have already seen dramatized. It is in fact a re-telling in what we would now call a different genre, just as his last speech promises a re-telling

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of the tragic events already enacted and witnessed. These re-tellings, meant for those who missed the events, depend for their power on visualizations of everything from eerie apparitions to carnal acts and casual slaughters. Taken collectively, they constitute a supplemental, or supererogatory, infrastructure that seems to function with an authority equal to that of the dramatic action, and they depend for coherence, if not on confusion, then on the interchangeability of ears and eyes. Although the narrative infrastructure may be supererogatory, it also functions in an interdependent relationship with the dramatic action. The nature of the interdependence can be difficult to classify. In discussing Othello, a play rife with narrative segments, and in particular Othello’s description of his courtship in 1.3, Bruce Boehrer argues that “readers and viewers of Shakespeare’s play … participate in a pattern of storytelling superimposed upon itself, re-encountering itself in different settings so that the very act of listening to the Moor’s tale becomes an act of structural communion with other listeners in other contexts.”12 Boehrer derives his notion of “structural communion” from Kenneth Burke’s remarks on the essence of communication, specifically the element of courtship inherent in all rhetorical acts when the speaker wishes to commune with the spoken to.13 Boehrer expands on the sexual component of courtship to establish an erotic character – a dynamic of desire, persuasion, and satiation – in all the narrative segments of Othello. While certainly provocative in connection with Othello, Desdemona, and Iago, however, the wholesale eroticizing of narrative infrastructure, first, somewhat distorts Burke’s purpose – the discussion of the communion of speaker and spoken to comes after Burke specifically reduces sexual motives to a position below what he calls “the awareness of ‘hierarchy in general.’”14 Second, in terms of Hamlet, the zerograde notion that all rhetorical function springs from desire (eros), does little to characterize the dramatic value of the speeches I have identified as constituting the narrative infrastructure of the play. Of course, Othello unravels in a welter of sexual misunderstanding and jealousy, so that Boehrer’s “act of structural communion” may correctly describe the narrative motive which Shakespeare bends and inverts to bring about the climax of the tragedy. “Rhetorically,” says Burke in the paragraph quoted by Boehrer, “there can be courtship only insofar as there is division.”15 In Othello, courtship never ends – the tragedy, among other things, records the pathos of a failure to expunge the rhetorical division by a figure deluded enough to think that he has. The situation in Hamlet is much different. Hamlet’s failure can in no way be called a delusion about the status of, or division associated with, rhetorical address. To the contrary, Hamlet himself manipulates language with more acuity even than Iago (though with more blunted purpose). He is too savvy or too

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suspicious of mere rhetoric even to be taken in when he knows he should be – even when he loudly claims to be. Consider the Ghost’s speech in 1.5. The speech begins as a corrective to what has been “given out,” and even before he speaks, the Ghost’s mention of the word “murder” inspires Hamlet’s promise to “sweep to my revenge” (1.5.35, 31). “ ’Tis given out,” says the Ghost, “that sleeping in my orchard, A serpent stung me – so the whole ear of Denmark Is by a forged process of my death Rankly abus’d. (1.5.35–8)

The ear of Denmark is abused by the forgery, or lie, given out regarding the cause of Old Hamlet’s death, which itself was caused by a sort of ear-abuse. But the Ghost wants to disabuse Hamlet of the lie: 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 ears 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 sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine, And a most instant tetter bark’d about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust All my smooth body. 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. O horrible! O horrible! most horrible! (1.5.59–80)

Meant for both his stage audience (Hamlet) and the theater audience, this narration of offstage violence has a dual purpose. Like Othello standing before the Duke, the Ghost hopes (or expects, more likely) to persuade his son to believe him; unlike Othello’s, however, the Ghost’s persuasion is aimed at fostering action, while Othello’s is aimed at stopping it. The second purpose

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of the speech is to recount in Senecan style the horrors of betrayal, fratricide, and the “vile and loathsome” destruction of the king’s “smooth body.” Judging by the subsequent acts of the play, only the second purpose is fulfilled. Hamlet, awed and disgusted by his father’s horrible death, sinks into melancholy. He never sweeps to his revenge for this murder, and certainly not as a result of this speech. Though retaining an interdependent relationship with the dramatic action (at least in Act 1), the Ghost’s narrative only attains its full value as a tragic component when placed in an independent, supererogatory category – alongside counterparts like Hamlet’s narrative of offstage events in 5.2. Only as a relatively independent category can the dialectical force of dramatic narrativity develop. In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur reflects on Heidegger’s Dasein as a key to understanding narrative expression. Following Heidegger, he defines Dasein as “the ‘place’ where the being we are is constituted through its capacity of posing the question of Being or the meaning of Being.”16 Transposed from ontological expression to the site of literary narrative, this “place” becomes a kind of temporal excerpt, an opportunity of expression both beyond time and inescapably within it. Ricoeur notes that the analyses of temporality related to Dasein “are centered on our relation to time as that ‘within which’ we ordinarily act. This structure of within-time-ness (Innerzeitigkeit) seems the best characterization of action for my present analysis.”17 If the notion of “within-time-ness” is useful for Ricoeur’s analysis of action in his discussion of narrative, it is also a valuable concept for my discussion of narrative “place” in tragedy. For my purpose, dramatische Innerzeitigkeit (dramatic time-within-ness) might be a useful term to describe the infrastructure of liminal rhetorical expressions constituted by a capacity to freeze time and, as a consequence of their dialectical interdependence, pose a range of questions related to tragic being. To be more specific, the Ghost’s speech clearly represents a hiatus in dramatic time: a reflection on the past, an ontological challenge of Hamlet’s present self-construction, and a proof-text of the capacity of tragedy to create a “place” in which the question of Being can be posed. The work of perceiving and experiencing tragic circumstance begins so early in Hamlet that the anticipation of events is pre-empted. For all his shifts of disposition, Hamlet remains in an ontological hiatus from his first encounter with the Ghost, although his isolation is reinforced in such moments as the closet scene where he asks “Do you see nothing there?” and “Nor did you nothing hear?” (3.4.132, 134). The doubt surrounding sight and hearing confirms the conflict between what Hamlet perceives about himself and his relations to his family and the stage realities. In the closet scene, as elsewhere in the play, Hamlet responds with every gesture to the question of Being which is raised for the audience by his

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protean self-constructions. But neither he nor his audience ever evades the dramatic time-within-ness that paralyzes all recourse to conventional dependence on sympathy for Hamlet’s anger, vengeful urges, jealousy, and bursts of filial conformity. Hamlet remains the most profound and puzzling play in the canon because it simultaneously reverses the order of tragic dénouement and places the entire course of action in an ontological hiatus, “where,” in Ricoeur’s terms, “the being we are” – or Hamlet is – “is constituted through its capacity of posing the question of Being.” Dramatische Innerzeitigkeit, because it functions as a narrative place both beyond and within the time of the play, offers a more convincing interrogation of tragic being than Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Thus, when reading or hearing the Ghost’s speech we should be aware of its resonance beyond the recitation of horrible events, beyond even its persuasive aim. Like the First Player’s and Horatio’s speeches, the Ghost’s speech perfects a moment of extradramatic retrospection, sealing in the amber of time-within-ness the generic conflict between historical and tragic representation. Apart from its more obvious content, the Ghost’s speech contains a generic meta-commentary, and his description of his own murder fosters more than just narrative background (though it does that too). It also provides the material for a dramatic representation, The Murder of Gonzago, later in the play. It is as though Shakespeare were anatomizing the course of a theatrical idea, from action (the actual murder) to narrative, to dramatization – except of course that the Mousetrap is not the truth in the same way the Ghost’s story is, or is supposed to be. Yet the Mousetrap conflates tragedy, history, and a form of dramatischer Innerzeitigkeit as if to interrogate both the independence and interdependence of narrative and action. As I mentioned earlier, the confusion of sight and hearing signals the differentiation between Seneca-style narrativity and conventional dramatic action. The Mousetrap not only highlights the differentiation, but trumps other versions of spoken mediation by inserting Hamlet himself – who is no more a player in Gonzago than he was a member of the visiting Players’ troupe – as an interpreter. At 3.2.241, after the dumb-show and the long exchange between the Player King and Player Queen, Ophelia says to Hamlet, “You are as good as a chorus, my lord.” This simple statement has powerful resonance in the context of narration and tragic presentation. At once, Ophelia (or Shakespeare) links Hamlet to the ancient tradition of tragedy in which the chorus acts as extra-dramatic interpreter – supererogatory to the action, existing in a rhetorical cage designed specifically for narrative exposition. At the same time Ophelia calls attention to the dramatic time-within-ness in which Hamlet has placed himself specifically for the purpose of questioning his mode of being and determining how he should act. Her statement, made almost

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offhandedly, nevertheless, by application to the scene as a whole, uncannily describes Hamlet’s status as a prisoner in a rhetorical cage, as trapped by the confusions of speech and action provided by the Mousetrap as Claudius is supposed to be caught by the supposed clarity of the play-within-a-play’s representations. Hamlet is both the architect of the Mousetrap and the interpreter of the dramatic excerpts for Ophelia, thereby establishing his position as simultaneously within and beyond the drama. His ostensible liminality as a choral figure lurking in the audience confirms the moment as a virtual diorama of dramatischer Innerzeitigkeit. Herbert Blau, in describing the Kraken group’s production of Elsinore, offers a description of the actors’ dilemma remarkably reminiscent of Hamlet’s during the Mousetrap: “The actors are reimagining at some time in the past what they have done some time in the past to tell the story that, known, comes obscured through history. What was being seen, told now in the present, is motive and cue of its own future, since it is being heard now by the actors who are about to act, already acting out of fear.”18 The inspiration for Elsinore came from conscious meditations on Hamlet’s predicament, and it is valuable to note the actors’ sense that Hamlet’s experience “comes obscured through history.” The actors each become a version of Hamlet, “reimagining,” as it were, the past as “motive and cue of its own future.” The performative essence of Blau’s description resonates with the performative liminality of Hamlet during the Mousetrap. Absent from Blau’s discussion, however, is the place of narrative in the Shakespearean conflation of history and tragedy. The Kraken actors have presumably internalized the narrative infrastructure of Hamlet, but the figure of Hamlet himself remains in the throes of struggle to distinguish what he is hearing – “told now in the present” by the Ghost – from what he is seeing during the Mousetrap. Both theatrically and critically a conundrum emerges because it is difficult to know whether to call The Murder of Gonzago narrative or drama. It is part narrative-within-drama, of course, as the Prologue makes clear (“We beg your hearing patiently” (3.2.146) – another reference to hearing when sight is really at issue for Hamlet). But the Mousetrap is also a dramatized version of the Ghost’s narrative. I don’t wish to be coy here, but the curious status of the Mousetrap exhibits the criteria for conventional tragedy while placing Hamlet’s post facto choral interpretations in the genre of tragedy in retrospect. We are forcibly reminded of Horatio’s responsibility at the end of Hamlet. If Horatio’s promise at the end is to be taken seriously, and if narrative ineluctably follows action, perhaps Shakespeare expects us to regard it as more reliable than its theatrical counterpart. Indeed, maybe this expectation is part of the meta-commentary contained between the lines of the Ghost’s speech. For The Murder of Gonzago, it must be emphasized, is inferior to the Ghost’s

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story insofar as it is a rough imitation of the true events. It may have the force of a threat and therefore be important to the tragic suspense; and it may also offer the audience a kind of enabling sight, in that Claudius’s reaction to the events involving Lucianus provide visual confirmation for Horatio and Hamlet.19 Yet, while the Mousetrap, as the staged representation of the Ghost’s story, ignites Hamlet’s murderous spirit, his purpose is quickly blunted again. Not until Horatio (and the audience) are treated to Hamlet’s own narrative of his betrayal at the hands of Claudius, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cast as knowing participants, do his asseverations of vengeance finally coincide with the dramatic action. If we judge by the outcome of the play, it would seem that, after the ontological hiatus of the Ghost’s speech, narrative rather than dramatic instances spur the tragic dénouement. There is a progression – or, better yet, a moral regression – from the Ghost’s tale of murder to Hamlet’s in 5.2, and the two speeches stand out in the play as linked: they represent a measure of Hamlet’s dissolution, from the doubt that made him unique and charismatic to the meanness of his reduction to avenger, not so much of his father’s murder (which he flubbed) but of his own betrayal by Claudius and of his dashed hopes for election. The tale he tells Horatio features himself as a cross between victim and hero, and might well serve as a model for the story he’d like told of his life after he dies. It is also a model of dramatische Innerzeitigkeit insofar as the narrative affords an opportunity of pausing time while remaining within it. The content of Hamlet’s tale may not qualify as posing a question of Being, but, nevertheless, Hamlet’s characterological being comes into focus in the dialectical relationship his tale creates between action and narrativity. Hamlet begins by saying that, unable to sleep, he left his berth below the deck of the ship carrying him to England, as if moved by a “divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10): Up from my cabin, My sea-gown scarf ’d about me, in the dark Grop’d I to find out them, had my desire, Finger’d their packet, and in fine withdrew To mine own room again, making so bold, My fears forgetting manners, to unseal Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio – Ah, royal knavery! – an exact command, Larded with many several sorts of reasons Importing Denmark’s health, and England’s too, With ho! such bugs and goblins in my life, That on the supervise, no leisure bated, No, not to stay the grinding of the axe, My head should be struck off. (5.2.12–24)

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It’s a good story, full of intrigue and adventure. Horatio can hardly believe the contents of the king’s commission, so Hamlet (who has kept it with him) hands it over for him to peruse at a more convenient time. This too provides evidence of a progression: from the Ghost’s lack of proof, to the First Player’s speech for which there’s a text somewhere (Hamlet has memorized it himself), to Hamlet’s bit of documentary evidence. The narrative infrastructure seems to move inexorably toward an evidentiary historical account, what Philip Sidney refers to as “old mouse-eaten records.”20 The progression echoes Langer’s idea that narratives “project a history in restrospect”; nor should it be lost on us that the archival evidence ends up in the hands of Horatio, the future narrator of Hamlet’s tale. But the tale he tells of Hamlet’s last months, in conjunction with the hard evidence, will offer a Senecan version of tragedy in retrospect, not simply a narrative history. Moreover, while Horatio’s tale might resemble the three Seneca-style narratives of the play, it will not constitute a place of dramatic within-time-ness, because, if it happens at all, it will happen outside the tragic frame. When Hamlet continues with his account he distinguishes himself as a victim from his father. Whereas Claudius murders Old Hamlet, young Hamlet reverses King Claudius’s murderous plans: Being thus benetted round with villainies – Or I could make a prologue to my brains, They had begun the play – I sat me down, Devis’d a new commission, wrote it fair – I once did hold it, as our statists do, A baseness to write fair, and labour’d much How to forget that learning, but, sir, now It did me yeoman’s service. Wilt thou know The effect of what I wrote? (5.2.29–37)

The word “prologue” (l. 30) yet again calls attention to the prevalence of generic meta-commentary in the narrative segments, while also emphasizing Hamlet’s liminality. Just as a prologue, or the Prologue of the Mousetrap, exists within a dramatic presentation and outside its time, Hamlet’s narrative posture blurs the line between the character figure (in history or tragedy) and the actual participant in the action. A prologue is, consummately, a figure reflecting the possibility of dramatische Innerzeitigkeit, comparable among dramatis personae to a chorus. As Hamlet’s story gathers momentum, he becomes a player in the play “They had begun.” But he’s a player with a difference – he has the capacity now, through narrative, to create a structure in which he is at once temporally present and temporally absent. He performs within the narrative as

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an actor in a tragedy in retrospect, while the narrative permits him to arrest the time of the coming tragedy. His tale is a good adventure yarn, and Hamlet, like a good storyteller, taunts his audience with questions like the last lines above: “Wilt thou know / The effect of what I wrote?” Horatio gives the expected answer and Hamlet proceeds. Everything now, the entire drama, is subsumed by Hamlet’s tale – a tale told with classical propriety in regard to violent and bloody deeds. The deployment of Horatio’s reactions in the scene is provocative in contrast to Hamlet’s during the Ghost’s speech in Act 2, where the prince’s reactions seem to advance the action, or at least to offer the promise of dénouement. Horatio’s interjections, on the other hand, advance Hamlet’s story: they have a rhetorical rather than a dramatic function. This rhetorical function is reminiscent of Hamlet’s own interjections during the First Player’s speech. He advances the speech itself, spurring the First Player toward a crescendo of describing the bloodiest deeds imaginable: 1st Player:

Hamlet:

so after Pyrrhus’ pause Aroused vengeance sets him new awork, And never did the Cyclops’ hammers fall On Mars’s armour, forg’d for proof eterne, With less remorse than Pyrrhus’ bleeding sword Now falls on Priam… Say on, come to Hecuba. (2.2.483–6; 497)

And so on to more horrific descriptions of the scene at Troy. As is well known, Hamlet is impressed by the emotion that the First Player brings to his recitation of Hecuba’s misfortunes. It should also be noted, however, that Hamlet urges the First Player to repeat a description he himself knows virtually by heart, and that the First Player is retelling a version of a famous myth. The original genre of the Trojan story, whether we call it myth or history, was epic poetry, Aeneid 2 precisely (in which Aeneas was himself narrating a tragedy in retrospect). The First Player, who is imitating the original narrator, embodies the problematic status of offstage events in the creation of a human subject: he is neither entirely Aeneas nor entirely a dramatic character other than Aeneas. He is a kind of narrator, another liminal figure – like the Ghost on the threshold of existence; like Hamlet as the chorus during the Mousetrap or as the narrator of his own sea adventures; and like Horatio on the threshold of telling Hamlet’s story just when the drama ends. As we fit Hamlet into the pattern of “tragedy in retrospect” established by the Ghost’s and the First Player’s speeches, and promised by Horatio, we can shift the emphasis from dramatic enactment to narrative discursus. The inter-

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change, not to say confusion, of ear and eye that results from this shift allows us to glimpse a version of Hamlet that is uncontainable by dramatic representation, naggingly supererogatory, and permanently in statu nascendi. The ramifications of this state-of-being-born foster a continual tension in the play between the relative closure of dramatic action and the open-endedness of narrative time-within-ness. But the open-endedness is not without purpose in Hamlet. In the temporal excerpts of narrative discourse, a dramatische Innerzeitigkeit provides the infrastructure to frame reflections of history coming and tragedy in retrospect.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Christoph Irmscher, Elizabeth Mazzola, and Michele Osherow for their comments on various drafts. I would also like to express my appreciation to the participants in the 2003 Shakespeare Association of America seminar to which I contributed an early version of this essay.

NOTES 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (1961; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 60. Ibid., 59. This is not the place to explore the problematic term “description” which has a controversial history in narratology. For remarks on that controversy, as well as a discussion of the blurred line between diegetic and mimetic representation that differs markedly from Anthony Campbell’s cited in the following note, see Manfred Jahn, “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama,” New Literary History 32 (2001): 668 and 673: “Plays have a narrative world (a ‘diegesis’), which is not distinct in principle from any other narrative world. They have a story and a plot, and even if they do not literally ‘tell’ their story, tellability and experientiality are dramatic criteria as well as epic ones. Moreover … plays have the double chronology of all narrative presentations … and they admit of the usual temporal manipulations (‘anachronies’).” For the context of Jahn’s statement cf. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 117, 9; and see Chatman’s Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). See also Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). See Anthony Campbell, “Bending Authors and Narrative Straits: Shakespeare’s Telling Strategies,” (diss., University of Western Ontario, 1997), esp. 4–8. Edward Costigan, “Aspects of Narrative in Some Plays by Shakespeare,” English Studies 77, no. 4 (1996): 328. Cf. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (London, 1953), 321.

HAMLET’S NARRATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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Costigan, 341. All references, which will appear within the text, are to the Arden edition, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982). Anne Barton, Introduction to Hamlet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 52. Cf. Costigan, 329, in response to Barton: “the rough abstract of indocile facts is all that is given; discord is not framed into narrative concord since the full account is only promised, not delivered.” Sophocles, Oedipus the King, translated and adapted by Anthony Burgess (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972), 53 (no line numbers). Freddie Rokem, “Narratives of Armed Conflict and Terrorism in the Theatre: Tragedy and History in Hanoch Levin’s Murder,” Theatre Journal 54 (2002): 557. This article is particularly interesting in the context of my argument because Rokem’s main discussion involves a play – Levin’s Murder – which opens with three Israeli soldiers beating a Palestinian boy to death on stage. Rokem uses Hamlet as a contrast to Levin’s plays in showing how modern playwrights effect a union of history and tragedy. But one might also note the similarity in both plays of exhibiting violence on stage, the enactment of tragedy (or unspeakable deeds and horrible endings) as opposed to its visualization in the Senecan style. Alan Ackerman, Jr., “Visualizing Hamlet’s Ghost: The Spirit of Modern Subjectivity,” Theatre Journal 53 (2001): 124. Bruce Boehrer, “Othello’s Monsters: Kenneth Burke, Deleuze and Guattari, and the Impulse to Narrative in Shakespeare,” Journal x (1999): 121. Ibid., 119. See Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 271. Burke, 270. Ibid., 271. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 60–61. Ibid., 61. Herbert Blau, The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 72. I owe the notion of “enabling sight” in the context of the Mousetrap to Michele Osherow. Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 30.

9 The Rape of Marina

Simon Palfrey

I want here to think about one particular incident in Pericles. It is when Marina is saved or abducted by the pirates (4.1.90–102). To the extent that this happening is ever considered, it can be explained away as a typical ‘romantic’ exigency – an unlikely, exciting, geographically expansive instance of serendipity, which never even tries to escape its generic quotation marks. It is not an accident (with accident’s trace of arbitrary cruelty). It is proof, if proof is needed, that Marina is a special one, protected by a (more or less) humorous providence. It is an ordeal, perhaps no less arbitrary than that suffered by Job or Abraham, but fundamentally validated: some kind of ‘absolute’ – an absolute that is not quite present, that must be awaited – permits an essentially comic toying with life. In other words, the event serves romance teleology, the endpoint where all that is lost will return. Perhaps this is all true enough. But is it good enough? Does such rationalization – at once pre-empting and post facto – account for what the play actually gives us? Does it account for what actually happens? And indeed, what is it that actually happens? A young girl of 14 is grabbed at knifepoint by a group of fierce strangers. The girl is very beautiful, and the men have been at sea for a long time. ‘Halfe parte’, one cries to his mates, ‘halfe part’. He is excited but also anxious. He doesn’t want to miss out, so he appeals to the great tradition of equity among seafarers. They will share her, one after the other. ‘Come lets have her aboord sodainly’ (F3r): ‘let’s have her’, that is, let’s ‘board’ her.1 They are all set for a fabulous gangbang. The hired assassin, Leonine, then say this: [T]hey haue seizd Marina, let her goe, ther’s no hope shee will returne, Ile sweare shees dead, and throwne into the Sea, but Ile see further: perhappes they will but please themselues vpon her, not carrie her aboord, if shee remaine/Whome they haue rausiht, must by mee be slaine. (F3v)

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The moment describes something objectively horrific that, in this particular context, becomes wry and blithe. Leonine’s brief moment in the sun can thus seem more than anything a self-mollifying essay in male weakness – certainly more than male brutality or female vulnerability. Nevertheless – almost because of this blitheness – the moment typifies this generic world. For the scene is, entirely characteristically, a kind of dream-rehearsal of an option at the very edges of self-possibility, and, crucially, it is an option that will not here be taken up. The casualness with which Leonine is made to rehearse the stock motifs and movements of the play – sea, sex, and slaughter, of course, but also the ‘romance’ aura of redeemable finality and suspended temporality – proves the point. So, ‘ther’s no hope shee will returne, Ile sweare shees dead, and throwne into the Sea’ is an exact reprise of Thaisa’s ‘death’. For Pericles and Marina, she remains thus buried fathoms deep; for us, however, she does not. The same split-effect works again: Marina will indeed return, just as Thaisa did. But if Leonine doesn’t know this, then how do we? Or do we? We can appeal here to Pericles’ usual method of framing its action through one or another distancing effect. But it is not quite enough to note how terror here is hedged by genre, or how we witness all such horrors as though through the distance and silence of a glass. For while it is true that calamities are invoked but in some basic way unforthcoming, it is also the case that this very redeemability offers a licence to fantasize about exactly such loss or violation. ‘Whome they haue rauisht, must by mee be slaine’ – the desiring male splits himself in two (ravisher/voyeur): he can first enjoy the degradation, and then hastily bury all traces. Rape is constantly in sight in the world of Pericles; perhaps more so than incest, it looms as the primal threat and temptation. Accordingly, Leonine is here hardly less culpable than Antiochus earlier, who similarly fobs off his responsibility through a combination of mythic dressing up (‘this faire Hesperides’, A3r; 1.1.28) and coerced surrogacy (the riddle spoken as his daughter’s pliant report, ‘I found that kindnesse in a Father’, A3v; 1.1.68). But as much as we can recognize this reprise of ‘original sin’, the inyour-face absoluteness of Antioch’s achievement of sin can tend to make subsequent aberrations seem somehow accidental or hypothetical – more in the way of an angled countenancing of guilt than a full-frontal immersion. Such things contribute to the play’s distinctively torpid attitude to calamity, whereby we get the conditions for suffering but little feeling of its experience. Hence we get Leonine’s response to Marina’s abduction: both his almost-programmatic dispassion (‘let her goe’) and his adoption, in the midst of the most terrible possibilities, of an attitude of resistless spectatorship. Leonine bears the traits of the play as one might a fingerprint, or a limp. His lack of feeling, this oddly detached willingness to allow the worst to occur, then both traces

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and provokes our own: we only need compare the way Shakespeare places the audience in relation to the slandering of Desdemona or murder of Cordelia to see how we really do allow Marina’s indignities. We can dignify such a habitual attitude elsewhere with terms like ‘Christian patience’, but this lulled collusion with a cowardly, voyeuristic, incompetent assassin suggests another interpretation. Leonine is absolutely the creature of genre here, and it is a genre that has very little to do with its conventional reputation, with magic or fancy or courtliness. It is not good enough to evoke the ‘romance genre’ and to appeal to some kind of ‘late Shakespearean’ search for peace from strife or accommodation with bad fortune; this is to put a hobbled cart before the horse. If we take the evidence as given then it might just as easily invite conclusions about antinomian callousness, or a sub-Nietzschean pitilessness in the face of suffering. Tragi-comic romance seems rather to be about seeing exactly how much cruelty can be both accumulated and tucked away, be at once mentally acknowledged and, exactly in the acknowledgement, emotionally ‘let goe’: just as Marina is. *

*

*

Let’s step back for a moment and offer some general observations about the play’s manners and techniques. So, Pericles retreats from the psychologicallyrevealing speech-act; it presents calamities as though from a great distance, forcing us into relative passivity as spectators (for example to dumb show) or auditors (for example to Gower’s narration). The action can appear to be happening in a space–time dimension moments beyond our own, one at once familiar and estranged, rendered in a kind of supra-historical slow motion. I mean by this that the play engineers a very distinctive kind of telescoping, and the effect is a kind of lulling, as we watch and hear but strangely do not participate. The details of experience are no longer the micro – the small quiddities of desire or suffering that may or may not add up incrementally to something larger – but are rather the ‘macro’, at once distilled and dilated ‘as’ a specific scenic or characterological shape. It is as though a meta-narrative comes before the feeling, at once impelling, shaping, and (pre-emptively) interpreting it. In other words, Pericles’ relation to suffering is something of a paradox. It wears a grave aspect through all of the tribulations it presents. And yet the actual gravity of the tribulations is lightened, or allowed rather to float, and therein subsist as redeemable. So, we get a number of different sufferers, and their experiences fold into one another’s. The experience of suffering, the knowledge of its ubiquity, grows by accretion. Meanwhile, its present feeling is lessened by the technique of substitution. Rather than penetrating deeper and deeper into one figure’s affliction, we are released from any harrowing contemplation

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by the shift to a new object. Something mathematical or academic then takes the place of dramatic immediacy; hence the importance in the play of semipost-facto apostrophizing (or mime, dumb show, and so on) as though over a body that will never quite expire, whereby some or other figure records the sufferings borne and perhaps the lessons learnt from a state of affairs we are all always just about to leave behind. One important effect of this is that complicity (in temptations or abdications) remains in shadow, or is deflected; this means that contiguous perversions or corruptions remain hypotheses, possibilities rather than commissions. Experience is somehow on hold here (as befits a play in which the hero is almost literally never at home, never on the job). That each figure should have two-dimensions, and two-dimensions only, that they should be as flat as glass, is the determining effect. Some dimension of vertical depth is simply absent. These planes or dimensions can of course be gathered together into something fuller. But the flatness allows the play its romantic freedom, the sense that experience here is both on probation – asked to avoid temptation, put through an ordeal – and on a strange kind of speculative vacation – asked exactly to experience temptation, only in the knowledge that it is never quite ‘you’, or never quite the daily recognized you, that is scenting things forbidden. Whereas naturalistically represented action is happening ‘now’, at once in its acted moment and gone once performed, what we might here call the play’s ‘mimical’ techniques render action as hypothesis, a sketched possibility: one that has happened far away or long ago, not so much in the past or in the future as in some parallel space, one in which an action is important not for its experience, its tensions, its struggles or uncertainties, but for its almost programmatic results (for example Pericles gets information and departs in mourning). The dumb show purports to encapsulate often complicated actions in brief, simplified compass; in doing so it pretends to be done with these actions. But in fact the dumb show always awaits the flesh and noise of some fuller and more clinching act in the future. The thing enacted in mime, that is, does not receive the full seal of experience. It belongs to the story, it is mortgaged to the genre’s ethical teleology: but it is separate from the feeling body, on stage or off. Detached from somatic proof, it is exemplary, or textual, or merely a rehearsal: it awaits the clinching repetition. *

*

*

What then of Marina’s experience with the pirates? Partly this is to say, what is our experience of this experience? One question here is how real or present it is. Should we understand it as simply without substance – in Lacan’s terms,

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a password (mot-de-passage)? That is, the episode is akin to radically empty speech, in which the particular substance of the action is literally nothing. All it does is allow Marina’s fuller recognition as a romance heroine, because she has survived unlikely peril; it allows admission into a certain symbolic space. This emptiness thus creates the conditions for fullness – which we witness in the various subsequent re-stagings of the missing scene: for example Marina in the brothel, and Marina in her father’s ship. The episode with the pirates is palpable mainly as a cipher for anticipated (intuitively, tacitly) repetitions. In a sense Marina’s experience with the pirates has no aesthetic status at all. For to recover the details of the missing action is to threaten the precarious permissions (or forgettings) that allow the episode to serve normative ethics. It has no substance for us as fear, suspense, excitement, recognition, conversion-tale, comedy, and so on – nothing at all. It is before or beyond all pleasure, all recognizable narrative or empathy. As such, it is also outside of ethics. But if it is outside of aesthetics and beyond ethics, then it must either be a phenomenon of faith or of the demonic. At the very least the loss-return of Marina’s virginity treads a tightrope between absolute faith and absolute doubt. Here we might recall Kant’s distinction between noumenon and phenomenon. Does the missing action – or perhaps rather Marina ‘inside’ this action – fit into either category? Is it ‘an object of a non-sensible intuition’ – that is, we intuit the experience even though we cannot see it or hear it? Or is it a ‘thing in so far as it is not an object of our sensible intuition’ – in other words, we posit no realm beyond the phenomenal; our epistemology simply cannot reach to any kind of knowledge of this event. Marina experiences precisely nothing in the interim, she is suspended in a narrative white hole; she simply reappears, fully intact, when the pirates come to sell her. Once off-stage she ascends temporarily to the noumenal; it is the easiest thing. But then what of the words that beckon, surround, and succeed the ‘action’? They could hardly be more explicit. What does Marina’s – or our – transcendence of the phenomenal actually subsist in? *

*

*

It is as well here to recognize the play’s specific innovations. The play is more emphatic than the sources about the pirates’ sexual intentions, and about Marina having to endure it all alone. In Gower the Marina-figure, called Thaise, greets the pirates as saviours – ‘Ah, mercy, helpe for goddess sake’;2 they are ‘theves’, but they have no voice; she is taken on board, the ship is buffeted by storms, then they arrive at Mitelene where the maiden is proffered for sale. In Twine the pirates ‘rescued’ Marina – ‘Thou cruel tyrant, that maiden is our prey and

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not thy victorie’, words repeated in Wilkins.3 She joins numerous other captives on board (‘manie mo men and women’), to be offered en masse for sale as bond-slaves. The pirates are trawling for commodity. Marina is not here exceptional; it is easier to imagine her being bundled below deck to join the other captives. In the play, by contrast, there is no one else. She is alone: it is the pirates who are many. This multiplies the simple threat of violence, making rape the immediate and inevitable apprehension. Equally, it separates Marina from all others. Do we know what happens to this girl once ‘aboard’? If we don’t think that the pirates rape Marina, then why don’t we? After all, the pirates triumphantly declare their intention to act precisely as pirates would act in such circumstances. She is a lucky spoil; they claim her; they exit the stage and set to work, we are asked to infer, in the wings. Let’s look again at what Leonine says, taking it clause by clause: Let her go – There’s no hope she will return – I’ll swear she’s dead – And thrown into the sea – But I’ll see further – Perhaps they will but please themselves upon her – Not carry her aboard – If she remain – Whom they have ravish’d – Must by me be slain.

There is not the slightest thought here that the pirates will not rape her. Leonine takes this for granted. Indeed we can interpret the past tense ‘Whom they have ravish’d’ in terms of a reported fait accompli: it is already done. The scene’s closing speech thus enacts a temporal telescoping, as Leonine watches the rape and waits to see if his own knife is needed. There we leave him, as there we leave Marina. Of course she returns in the very next scene, albeit after 40 or so lines of brutally reported sexploitation; but a still briefer dramatic-temporal space was plenty both for Macduff ’s family to get slaughtered and for us fully to internalize the horror. This next scene is – apparently – a sudden change of milieu, as we encounter a city brothel. This in itself should present problems for any sanguine trust we have that Marina will survive her ordeal intact: for the shift to the brothel is the most violent such scenic transposition in the play; it is the most stark and abrupt alteration in language or decorum. We can take this leap in various ways: as standing for a large gap in time between this scene and the last; as representing a place far away from what we have just witnessed; or, more insidious, as

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invoking less a temporal or geographical shift than a moral or behavioural one, in the way of a sudden vertiginous lurch into consequences. The floor has been lifted, and here, we might surmise, is the effluence. All of these possibilities should, we might think, imply little hope for Marina. And this before her present situation seems almost gloatingly, callously recalled to mind: Wee were never so much out of Creatures … and they can doe no more then they can doe, and they with continuall action, are even as good as rotten … the stuffe we have, a strong winde will blowe it to peeces, they are so pittifully sodden. (F3v; 4.2.6–18)

In this play full of scenic repetitions and recapitulations, why do we not – how can we not – accept the apparent gift of this homology: in one scene, a young girl dragged off to have sex with numerous men; in the next scene, a description of the same, reinforced by the ‘nautical’ tropes of ‘strong wind’ and ‘sodden’. What do we think is happening? Are we in suspense? Are we terrified or horrified? If not, why not? Even if we are in suspense, and await a calming word (and how many of us do?) how much faith can we have in the pirate’s eventual assurance that she is a virgin? Men lie in this play, all the time, especially when they have savage deeds in mind or in memory. But what happens if the pirate’s assurance is not given? How secure is our ‘faith’? How tenuous are its grounds? No doubt we believe Marina when later she vows ‘Untied I still my virgin knot will keepe’ (G1v; 4.2.146): but it is the interim that matters, when ‘it’ is happening and we turn our minds away. If we don’t think that the pirates rape Marina, then in protecting her from this stain are we absolving them of any ultimate blame (either for abduction, rape, or intention to rape)? They save Marina from execution; they then sell her on to the place where she will first meet her future husband and second meet her father. That is all we need to know; they are necessary; they serve romance teleology. Perhaps they aren’t good in themselves, but they serve the good, and we trust and depend upon something very like goodness – their abjuring of rape, their rationality, pity, or empathy, their power to tell the truth. But again we might compare Kant, here his categorical imperatives, in which when considering good or ethical action there can be no thought of means to ends: consequences do not matter: what matters is the moral character of willing. The moral character of the pirates’ willing is clearly evil – perhaps gang rape, certainly selling another soul into slavery, certainly instilling an almost indescribable fear and terror in their victim. Does any of this matter? Dramatic phenomenology is here worryingly antinomian. For just as emptiness prepares for fullness, so too does evil prepare for good. Žižek is here suggestive:

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[R]adical Evil opens up the space for Good in precisely the same way as empty speech opens up the space for full speech’ … [O]ne is compelled to advance a step further and to conceive of radical Evil as something that ontologically precedes Good by opening up the space for it … Or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, Evil is Good itself ‘in the mode of becoming’. It ‘becomes’ as a radical disruption of the life circuit; the difference between them concerns a purely formal conversion from the mode of becoming to the mode of ‘being’. This is how ‘only the spear that smote you can heal the wound’: the wound is healed when the place of Evil is filled out by a ‘good’ content.4

But what is at stake – or what is permitted – if ethical clarity twists upon a ‘merely formal conversion’? Romance teleology chooses its moments. Some moments matter, other moments do not; some suffering counts, other suffering does not. Whether a moment counts or not depends, it would seem, on its place in the process of repetition. How does this work? Something like this, perhaps: a repeated scene or acting of loss, violation, or threat, but a trust that the threat of loss will not in this instance result in irreparable loss; consequently, a contingent loss, or proleptically ameliorated terror; consequently, because the end is allayed, an erasing of the feelings that attend the intimation or terror of the end or the loss; in this, a simultaneous suspension of experience even as it is being experienced; this repeating of a real felt terror of self-loss does not multiply or even assert the fact of such loss; instead, this accumulation of non-ultimate loss – as though rehearsals that are never quite the act itself, wounds upon wounds that are yet never quite fatal, violations that never quite enter the sacred space – embodies the conviction that fullness will return. So we get a hierarchy of experience. Some is fully present, some not. Some experience matters more than other experience. *

*

*

Is Marina with the pirates really any different from the ‘roast-meat’ of the brothel? Are we any different from the despoilers of either? As Boult says of crying Marina’s virtues through the market: ‘if we had of euerie Nation a traueller, wee should lodge them with this signe’ (G1r; 4.2.112–13). The dialogue almost asks the actor to cast a knowing eye over his audience; the effect is to bring together visitors to the theatre and visitors to the brothel; the ‘signe’ is both the house and its new prize exhibit; and like the ‘proclamation’ of her beauty itself, the statement draws attention to the fact that the customers of the brothel rely upon exactly the same ‘signs’ of beauty, or indeed virtue, as do the customers of the theatre. Bawd and Boult are thus allowed to toy with the ethical responsibilities of theatre. It is as though they have read the anti-theatrical

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tracts and mock the very idea that health or virtue should ever be thought the duty of public entertainment. But is the presumption here – of turning Marina into a mere sign, a signifier without feeling, a password for our always-redeemable pleasures and appetites – any different from what the necessary romance teleology does to her? Is the brothel not tragic-comic ethics incarnate – perhaps theatre incarnate – and we its customers? Of course there are explanations, necessary distinctions. If we allow evil to occur to Marina – if we do not seek or wish to intervene, as we do with Desdemona or Cordelia – it presumably must be because her experience is exemplary. To be an ‘example’ means that its reality is not grounded in its experience, or in its moment of happening. Its real meaning is contingent or suspended – it either awaits, recommends, or forbids imitation; it continues to exist, above and beyond its own historical occurrence, as an immanent admonishment to the present (you should/must not repeat this act …). Our detachment confers exemplarity. It is a tableau, or a hypothesis, that we can witness (without fully bearing witness) or allow (without really allowing) because we are waiting for the proof that this permitting is right, that it is not ethically or politically shameful (although we do not in fact ever doubt this). But still we are in murky territory. How can it be that romance is the preeminent mode of ethical and political imperative, and yet also the one which has as a pivotal organizing device acts of terrible cruelty which we allow, which we observe without horror, almost without feeling? How can we square this phenomenological affectlessness with the genre’s supposed claims upon our morality? Are such claims false? Is romance’s remit of ‘self- or civic upbuilding’ a definitively abstract thing, in the way of a rehearsed lesson as distinct from a felt and shared experience? What allows the break between the experience of the suffering character and the experience of the reader or spectator? The action has to make sense by reference to some larger design. But what kind of goodness or ethics is bartered by a pre-emptively scripted, pseudo-sudden need for fake accidents? If we take the act literally, then the horror is simply horror and must be abjured or fought against. If we view this play or plays like it without generic presuppositions – and where do we get these from? – then it is evil. Such pathways, of course, have been memorably tracked by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, assaying the admissibility of antinomian temptations or narrative devices, and of a strange sort of rehearsal or simulacra of sacrifice – a sacrifice under erasure.5 The ‘ethical is the temptation’ for Abraham – and apparently this is so for us as well, as we allow Marina to be subjected to cruelty and humiliation. But if we allow it, then what do we allow it for? For the greater good? For the absolute? Because we trust in repetition? Here it must be our

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awareness of the immanent narrative teleology. This immanence inscribes an expectation of – of what? – of some kind of repetition, or return to the horrible event, a repetition that will undo the (erased) trauma? Ethics here is at the service of dramatic phenomenology, rooted in dialectical substitution: if we don’t feel it then it doesn’t matter; as long as we feel it in the end, we can leave the theatre having felt how it is right and necessary to act. But in the course of doing so, we have shared in, or witnessed, or allowed, any number of horrors. Perhaps that’s the price; perhaps that’s how we learn from history. *

*

*

If some sort of meta- or meta-generic rebellion seems called for, then perhaps this is what Marina eventually provides. Not because she is a puritan, but because she bears and recognizes – in the fullest sense of the word – the repetitions she endures. She resists them; she feels them, and in doing she absolutely refuses to sublate them into anaesthetizing ‘dialectical’ narrative in which vicissitudes are never more than necessary: Alacke that Leonine was so slacke, so slow, he should have strooke, not spoke, or that these Pirates, not enough barbarous, had not oreboord throwne me, for to seeke my mother. (F4v; 4.2.60–63)

She gives reality here to actions that are otherwise missing; we have to allow for her terror, for her horror at her captors’ ‘barbarism’ (meaning what, exactly?), for her forced enduring of existential extremity. There is more than mere ‘recollection’ here (invoking a casting back of memory). She is back in these earlier moments – when threatened with Leonine’s knife, or anxiously awaiting whatever the pirates have in store. It is a kind of negative repetition: she is reliving past cruelty, wishing it were more absolute, because present cruelty promises to be still worse. There is also here a distinctive meta-awareness: as though she reads her helplessness as that of a clichéd romantic heroine, prey to some joking architectonic and its devotion to absurd narrative rhymes and repetitions. Give me such contemptible ‘coincidence’, she seems to say, rather than these genuinely invasive accidents. Fully prescient of the ‘romantic’ landscapes’ assaults, she is both victim and opponent of the genre’s casual violence and fecklessness. But there is of course more to Marina’s attitude than scorn or stoicism. ‘For to seeke my mother’ is also the most plaintive appeal to the missing link, to the connection that might heal. The allusion is fierce, but not only in its mocking appropriations of super-scripts. It is fierce in the way of love, and more specifically in the way of a love that is nourished daily by the fact of its violent denial.

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Her ordeal, then, embodies both a recollection and a repetition of being born and made from such storm and loss. Indeed every one of Marina’s scenes replays this original one. It is always ‘in her mind’ – it is the thing she chooses to speak about to Leonine, it is the first thing she returns to when the pirates sell her to the brothel, it is the necessary password to reconciliation with her father. For Marina absolutely will not forget: she discovers story in the body, and keeps it there. Her body and mind must bear the repetitions, and must do so despite rather than because of her choices. With Marina in the brothel and beyond, speech is no longer primarily a serviceable descriptive agent, nor a means of lamenting what cannot be altered: speech now acts. This leap into the experience – for both audience and character – of suffering, then, is equally a leap into a less shameful, less furtive, less self-occluding mode of drama. For Marina has more faith in action – meaning speech – than anyone else in the play. Tragi-comic romance is different from tragedy exactly in its search for faith in action, and so in the capacity of self or state to be reformed. But it is no less the case that the play’s effectiveness, and more than that the genre’s very definition, depends upon tracking the movements within and through suffering: of enforcing that suffering’s immediacy and urgency, an emotional velocity that then ‘volatilicizes’ any release from such pain. Equally, the need to feel the suffering is not always, as it were, recognized; as we have seen, there is a contrary movement in the genre toward sublation of the immediate and the subjective – a sort of paralysing of self-motion or anaesthetizing of feeling – both of which might seem to recommend a much more resigned attitude to calamity. The play – perhaps the genre – is plainly at odds with itself here: always tempted by agential renunciation, or by a retreat into amniotic or maternal hibernation, away from the perils of subjectivity or the imperatives of community. The strength of such things attests to the play’s ambivalence or elusiveness as a political event, as a politicized speech-act. Marina always struggles with the responsibilities she comes upon; there is resistance to the inheritance, as though to say she is too young and too much a girl to do it; it shouldn’t be up to her; but in the absence of all others she will and does set the pattern. In this she remains the play’s basic vehicle of sympathy, empathy, and recognition – that is to say the most potent metaphor at once of besieged subjecthood and collective responsibility; she is the one and the many. But there is a tremendous strain upon the character in being both these things – as well as being an exemplar (of chastity, innocence, honesty) always and already beyond the claims of appetite. But she is also unique, open to surprise and accident, forced to survive, given a memory, remorselessly placed in her own (too vulnerable, too attractive) body. The layered models of character – type, allegory, mutating

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individuality – together bear and bear witness to the self-constituting reality of the repetitions she experiences.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Quotations taken from the Malone copy of the 1609 Quarto in the Bodleian, edited by W.W. Greg (London, 1940). Confessio Amantis, 1403; in Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (Routledge: London, 1977), vi, 406. Laurence Twine, The Patterne of Painefull Adventures, in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vi, 454. Slavoj Žižek, ‘A Hair of the Dog that Bit You’, The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Blackwell: Oxford, 2004), 272–4. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 154 passim.

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PART IV

Social Works

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10

Prenuptial Rituals and Bonding in Shakespeare and Elsewhere

Richard Levin

I want to begin by comparing three similar scenes from the early modern English drama that, as far as I know, have never been connected by the critics, even though all three come from well known plays of the period. In Act 3 scene 4 of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, Hero dresses for her marriage to Claudio with the help of Margaret, who is identified as a “gentlewoman attending” on her. Hero says that her “heart is exceeding heavy,” to which Margaret replies, “’Twill be heavier soon by the weight of a man,” and this leads Hero to protest, “Fie upon thee, art not asham’d?”1 In Act 2 scene 1 of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, which follows immediately after Evadne’s marriage to Amintor, she undresses for her wedding night with the help of Dula, who is identified simply as “a lady.” Dula starts off by asking, “Madam, shall we undress you for this fight?/ The wars are nak’d that you must make tonight,” then expresses her envy of Evadne’s forthcoming pleasures, and proceeds to find bawdy meanings in some of Evadne’s innocent words (“undone,” “prick”), and this evokes a series of protests from Evadne: “Art thou drunk, Dula?”; “Thou think’st belike there is no modesty/ When we’re alone”; and “Sure this wench is mad.”2 In Act 4 scene 1 of Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, which follows immediately after Beatrice’s marriage to Alsemero, she prepares for her wedding night with the help of Diaphanta, who is identified as “her waiting-woman.” Diaphanta makes a bawdy joke about Alsemero “roosting” in a “little lodge” or “pit-hole” and expresses her envy of Beatrice’s forthcoming pleasures, and this leads Beatrice to protest: “I fear thou art not modest, Diaphanta./ … Art thou a maid, and talk’st so to a maid?/ You leave a blushing business behind,/ Beshrew your heart for’t!”3 These scenes suggest that we are in the presence of a minor dramatic convention of the period which dictates that, when a proper young lady prepares for her wedding or wedding night, she will undergo a kind of initiation ritual im155

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posed by a less proper attendant who teases her with some sexual banter that the lady finds (or pretends to find) offensive. It is apparently also part of the convention for the attendant to defend her teasing, although the defenses are different. When Hero protests to Margaret, she replies that she was “speaking honorably” because there is not “any harm in ‘the heavier for a husband’ … and it be the right husband and the right wife”; when Evadne protests to Dula, she replies that “this is a trick that I have had/ Since I was fourteen./ … A dozen wanton words put in your head/ Will make you livelier in your husband’s bed”; and when Beatrice protests to Diaphanta, she replies, “’Tis ever the bride’s fashion towards bed-time,/ To set light by her joys, as if she ow’d ’em not.” Two of these attendants also provide a bawdy song for the occasion: in Much Ado about Nothing, Margaret proposes that they “Clap ’s into ‘Light a’ love’ … Do you sing it, and I’ll dance it”;4 and in The Maid’s Tragedy, Dula sings “I could never have the power,” which invokes Venus to celebrate female sexuality.5 Thus this too apparently figured in the convention. If this is a dramatic convention of the time, however, it would seem, judging from these three scenes, that it is always honored in its breach and never in its strict observance. For it assumes – both in the nature of the teasing and in the protests it evokes – that the lady is a virgin; but this becomes a problem in each of the examples. In Much Ado about Nothing, in the scene (3.3) just before Hero’s prenuptial preparations, we are told that, as a result of a deception engineered by Don John,6 Claudio witnessed what looked like an assignation between her and Borachio, and so we know that he believes she is not a virgin and will expose her at the wedding. In The Changeling, in the scene (3.4) just before Beatrice’s prenuptial preparations, she is forced to submit to her “defloration” by De Flores, and so we know that Alsemero will probably discover that she is not a virgin. Thus in both these plays our prior knowledge casts a shadow over the ritual humor. The situation is different in The Maid’s Tragedy, because here our knowledge comes immediately after Evadne’s prenuptial preparations, when she reveals to Amintor that she is the King’s secret mistress,7 so this might be said to cast a retroactive shadow over the preceding ritual humor, which thus becomes ironic. This is another example of Beaumont and Fletcher’s wellknown preference for surprise rather than for the suspense aroused during the other two prenuptial scenes, although even here there are earlier hints that something is wrong, because in the first act we learn that the King, without any explanation, had suddenly ordered Amintor to break off his engagement to Aspatia and marry Evadne, which seems suspicious, and in the wedding masque that ends just before Evadne’s undressing scene, Aeolus reports that the “foul” and “rebellious” Boreas “has broke his chain,/ And struggling with the rest has got away” and “has rais’d a storm,” which seems ominous.8

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The convention is also breached in each of these scenes by a third presence, in addition to the lady and her attendant, that conflicts with the festive tone. (Of course, in all these scenes the bridegroom – Claudio, Amintor, and Alsemero – is also a felt presence, but this is an essential component of the normal prenuptial observance and so does not in itself create any conflict.) In Much Ado about Nothing it is Beatrice, who enters immediately after the interchange between Hero and Margaret and, because she is in a bad mood and feeling “exceeding ill,” is unwilling to join Margaret’s prenuptial jollity. When Margaret asks them to sing “Light a’ love,” she attacks her, “Ye light a’ love with your heels! then if your husband have stables enough, you’ll see he shall lack no barns [that is, bairns, children],”9 and she continues to quarrel with her for the rest of the scene. In the equivalent scene in The Maid’s Tragedy the presence of Aspatia is even more disturbing, because she still loves Amintor and so is the victim of his arranged marriage to Evadne. Immediately after the interchange between Evadne and Dula she speaks up to express her grief, which causes Evadne to complain that she has “spoil’d all Dula’s mirth,” and then she sings a dirge that calls for “a garland … of the dismal yew” and “willow branches” to mourn a maiden who died because her “love was false,” which causes Evadne to complain again and to ask Dula for a happier (and sexier) song, although she later says to Aspatia, “Alas, I pity thee.” In The Changeling the disturbing presence is not another character but an object, Alsemero’s medical “closet,” because Beatrice discovers, just before the entrance of Diaphanta, that it contains a potion for testing a woman’s virginity. Therefore its presence onstage during the ensuing ritual banter functions as a visible threat that increases Beatrice’s fears that Alsemero will discover her condition, which causes her to employ the potion to test Diaphanta, and then to have Diaphanta take her place in the bridal bed. It should not be surprising that the convention is breached in all three of these scenes, and that I could not find any scenes in the drama of this period in which it is strictly observed. That is just what we would expect, because the dramatists would have no reason to present a normal, unproblematic prenuptial ritual, which would consume a significant amount of time without having any significant effect on the ensuing action or on our response to the play. I argued elsewhere that this same principle of artistic economy is one reason that in the early modern drama complete marriages or other religious ceremonies, such as funerals, coronations, baptisms, or conversions, are never enacted but always occur after the conclusion of the play or between the scenes, which is sometimes indicated by showing us the procession to or from them.10 (The other reason is that there seems to have been an unwritten taboo against portraying religious rites on the stage, which, of course, would not apply to the prenuptial

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scenes.) The difference, however, is that we know there were real, complete marriages, funerals, coronations, baptisms, and conversions in early modern England, whereas we cannot be certain of the extratheatrical reality of this prenuptial theatrical convention. Yet the existence of these breached examples in the drama is indirect evidence that the normal, unbreached ritual did exist in real life, and this receives a kind of confirmation in Dula’s and Diaphanta’s defenses of their bawdy humor, quoted above, since both of them testify to the repeated observance of the convention: “a trick that I have had/ Since I was fourteen” and “’Tis ever the bride’s fashion towards bed-time.” *

*

*

Although the scene in Much Ado about Nothing is Shakespeare’s only portrayal of the typical prenuptial ritual, there are several other scenes in his canon that present some aspects of it and seem to derive some of their effects from this convention. Certainly the most striking of these is Othello, 4.3, where Emilia helps Desdemona prepare for bed to await Othello. This is obviously not a prenuptial scene, but it is the nearest that Desdemona ever comes to one, because her marriage to Othello took place in secret before the beginning of the play, and their wedding night was postponed until after their arrival in Cyprus in Act 2, where it was not preceded by any prenuptial or nuptial ceremonies. Moreover, Shakespeare has clearly made a special effort to relate this scene to their wedding night and therefore to the prenuptial convention. We are informed twice that her “wedding-sheets” have been placed on the bed (4.2.105, 4.3.22), which is the same bed used on their first night together, as Iago reminds us (“even the bed she hath contaminated” – 4.1.208). Emilia serves much the same functions here as the attendants in the other prenuptial scenes by helping her undress (or “unpin”) and providing the tonal counterpoint. And we are keenly aware that overshadowing these preparations there is a very serious problem, here involving not the bride’s virginity but the wife’s chastity, because we saw Iago persuade Othello that Desdemona has been unfaithful, so that he hovers over this scene as a kind of third and conflicting presence.11 We are also given a song about a forlorn maiden whose lover was “false,” which is similar to the dirge in The Maid’s Tragedy and even employs the same imagery of willow branches to symbolize disappointment in love. There are some very important differences here, however, because this scene is much more somber than the other three that we compared. One reason for this is the nature of the threat facing the woman, since we know that Othello has decided to kill Desdemona, while the worst that can befall Hero, Evadne, or Beatrice is rejection by her betrothed or husband. Another reason is that, as

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a result of Othello’s behavior in 4.1 and 4.2, Desdemona is aware that he suspects her, which distinguishes her situation from that of Hero, who is also the innocent target of slander and so is in this respect the closest to her.12 (Evadne and Beatrice know, of course, that they are not virgins but they are able to cope with this.) Thus the sense of foreboding – both hers and ours – is more prominent and more ominous here than in the equivalent scene in Much Ado about Nothing, where it is limited to Hero’s complaint that her “heart is exceeding heavy.” Desdemona’s “eyes do itch,” which “bode[s] weeping”; she thinks of using her wedding-sheets as a “shroud”; and the willow song “will not go from [her] mind.” (It is significant that the mournful song in The Maid’s Tragedy comes from Aspatia, who is the third party in the scene and the pathetic victim of Evadne’s marriage, whereas here it is sung by the wife herself, who becomes the pathetic victim of her own marriage.) There is also a striking difference in the role of the attendant. Emilia’s comments on marital infidelity and on her willingness to cuckold her husband for the right price are not really bawdy but worldly and cynical, and their effect is not, as in the ritual prenuptial teasing, to offend the bride’s (pretended?) modesty, but to establish a sharp contrast to Desdemona’s genuine innocence, which is emphasized in her refusal to admit that any wife could be unfaithful even “for the whole world,” and which makes her impending fate even more unjust. It is one of the most poignant scenes in Shakespeare, and it seems to me that some part of its extraordinary effect derives from its connections to, and its departures from, the prenuptial convention. Another Shakespearean episode that I think is related to this convention, although at a further remove, is the interchange between Anne Bullen and the Old Lady in Henry VIII, 2.3. This, too, is clearly not a prenuptial ritual, but, as I said of Desdemona’s scene, it is the nearest that Anne ever comes to one, because her marriage to King Henry (like Desdemona’s to Othello) takes place in secret without the usual preliminaries.13 Moreover, this is the last time we see her before her marriage, and the prospect of it generates and focuses her remarks and those of the Old Lady. Their conversation, however, is very different from the typical prenuptial banter we have encountered. It does not mention the joys or anxieties of the bridal bed – in fact, it is not concerned with sex at all, or even with love, but concentrates entirely on the higher status that the marriage will bring to Anne, and it redirects some of the same sexual locutions found in the prenuptial scenes to this nonsexual subject. Thus Anne swears by her “maidenhead” in order to affirm, not her sexual innocence, but her innocence of any ambition to become a queen; both she and the Old Lady speak of her “blushing” in reference, not to her forthcoming devirgination (what Beatrice called “a blushing business”), but to her forthcoming social elevation;

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and she is told twice by the Old Lady that she will “bear” a “burthen,” not of a man (as in Margaret’s remark to Hero), but of a title. The Old Lady’s comments also evoke protests from her similar to those of the brides in the prenuptial scenes – “How you do talk,” “Come, you are pleasant,” “Make yourself mirth with your particular fancy” – but they reflect, not her (supposed?) modesty, but her (supposed?) lack of ambition; and the Old Lady defends these comments (as Diaphanta defended herself to Beatrice) by accusing her of “hypocrisy,” of pretending to be displeased when she is really pleased.14 This is the pleasure, however, of “eminence, wealth, sovereignty” rather than of sex, and so the Old Lady is much closer to the worldly and cynical Emilia than to the bawdy attendants of the prenuptial brides – indeed the same imagery is used here (“not for all the riches under heaven,” “not … / For all the world”) as in the scene in Othello to define the price that would not tempt Desdemona or Anne but would tempt Emilia or the Old Lady, although here it is the price received to become a queen rather than to cuckold a husband. We should ask what function is served by this scene. It cannot be to prepare the spectators for the marriage, because this play, unlike those considered earlier, is based on historical events (the subtitle is “All Is True”) that were familiar to them, so Shakespeare (and his co-author?) could assume that they knew from the outset that Anne will marry King Henry. Surely the main purpose must involve our knowledge of and attitude toward Anne. I said that this is the last time we see her before her marriage, but in fact it is the last time we see her in the play, and we just see her once before this, very briefly, in 1.4. This scene, therefore, is her only significant appearance, and it is constructed to define her by placing her within the moral framework of the play. In that framework there are two women who are wholly admirable – Queen Katherine and Queen Elizabeth. The play repeatedly shows us that Katherine is the virtuous and innocent victim of the divorce, and repeatedly tells us that Elizabeth will be a magnificent ruler.15 The problem is that the divorce of Katherine is necessary for the birth of Elizabeth, and since this problem pivots on Anne, who will become Katherine’s replacement and Elizabeth’s mother, the scene defines her through her comments on Katherine’s impending downfall and on her own impending rise. Indeed Katherine has a role here similar to that of Aspatia, the disturbing third party in the prenuptial scene in The Maid’s Tragedy, who was replaced by Evadne. (Henry also hovers over the action, like the bridegrooms in the other scenes, and actually intervenes through his Lord Chamberlain, who enters to tell Anne of her elevation to the peerage.) The scene emphasizes Anne’s pity for Katherine three times – at the beginning, in her conversation with the Lord Chamberlain, and at the end – and the Old Lady never questions

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its sincerity. (Evadne also expressed pity for Aspatia, but it was limited to one line, following her complaint that Aspatia “spoil’d all Dula’s mirth.”) And it de-emphasizes her role in the divorce, by showing that she is not what we would now call “proactive” in it, but is only the passive recipient of Henry’s affections and largess. Yet the scene implies that she is not entirely innocent, which becomes evident when we compare it to the equivalent scene in Othello, where we found a sharp contrast between Emilia’s worldly cynicism and Desdemona’s unworldly naïvety, which Emilia never doubts. Here, however, the contrast is blurred because the Old Lady insists that Anne’s denials of worldly ambition are hypocritical, and Anne’s protests are not very convincing. Thus, while the scene presents Anne as a sympathetic character, it makes her less sympathetic than the paragon queen she will supplant and the paragon queen she will produce. A much simpler example that is also, I believe, related to the convention we are examining is the episode in Henry V, 3.4, where Katherine, the French princess, asks her attendant Alice to give her an English lesson. This, too, is far removed from the conventional prenuptial scene, and here we would have to say, not that it is the nearest that the bride ever comes to one, but that it is the nearest that we ever come, because Katherine’s marriage to King Henry will be celebrated after the ending of the play, presumably with some ritual teasing of the bride in French. We would also have to say, again, that its purpose cannot be to prepare the audience for this marriage, because the actions of this play, like those of Henry VIII, are determined by history and would be known to them. But it does have the important function of introducing us to Katherine, who as Henry’s “capital demand” (5.2.96) will become the prize that he wins. It is true that Henry is never mentioned by her or by Alice, but he looms over their lesson, like the bridegrooms in the other prenuptial rituals, because his victory at Harflew in the preceding scene seems to be the reason for Katherine’s sudden decision that she has to learn English (“il faut que j’apprenne a parler”).16 As in the more typical prenuptial scenes, some bawdy talk is provided by the attendant, although here it is the unintended result (unintended by her but not, of course, by Shakespeare) of the coincidence that two of her proper English words sound to Katherine like improper French words; and Katherine, like the typical brides, protests against this offence to her modesty (“ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique”) and swears that she would not utter them in polite company “pour tout le monde,” which is the same locution that Desdemona and Anne Bullen used to affirm their innocence. The effect is obviously meant to be amusing, so that the scene serves as what used to be called “comic relief ” between the serious, and exclusively male, English battle scene and French council scene that precede and follow it. But

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it also serves to set the stage for the happy merger of male and female, war and romance, and England and France that will be achieved when Henry woos Katherine in the conclusion.17 My last example, which appears in Romeo and Juliet, is unusual in that it is divided into two separate scenes, or rather brief portions of scenes – the Nurse’s remarks to Juliet at the end of 2.5 and Juliet’s soliloquy at the beginning of 3.2. Unlike the scenes in Othello, Henry VIII, and Henry V, these are prenuptial in the strictest sense, since in the first Juliet is preparing for her marriage to Romeo, and in the second she is preparing for the consummation of their marriage. Both scenes follow the prenuptial convention in implying the presence of the bridegroom, of course, and also of a third disturbing party, which here is the feud that hovers over the first scene as a vague threat that becomes very specific in the second, because we know, and Juliet is about to find out, that Romeo has just killed Tybalt and has been banished. In the first scene the Nurse’s prenuptial teasing of Juliet is typical, with a reference to her blushing (“Now comes the wanton blood up in your cheeks”), which we also found in the scenes in The Changeling and Henry VIII and in the song at the end of the wedding masque in The Maid’s Tragedy; and another to the “burthen” she will “bear” tonight, which was also applied by Margaret to Hero and (metaphorically) by the Old Lady to Anne Bullen; and even a joke about Romeo “climb[ing] a bird’s nest soon when it is dark,” like Diaphanta’s joke about Alsemero “roosting” in a “little lodge.” The only thing that is not typical about this scene, aside from its brevity, is the absence of any protests from the blushing and soon to be burdened bride. Juliet’s soliloquy in 3.2, however, is certainly not a typical prenuptial scene – in fact, it is unique. The crucial difference is that her attendant is not present, which means that all the sexual talk must proceed from the bride herself. Here she is the one who speaks of her blushing (“my unmann’d blood, bating in my cheeks”), as the Nurse did in the earlier scene, and of the “amorous rites” to come, which she even compares to a kind of conflict (“lose a winning match”), like Dula in The Maid’s Tragedy. Therefore the effect is very different, because the bride, instead of being cast as the reluctant victim of her attendant’s teasing, and so, by extension, of the sexual encounter to follow, here openly acknowledges her own desires and looks forward eagerly to this encounter.18 I think there are several reasons for this departure from the prenuptial norm. One is that Juliet is alone now and therefore has no need to conceal her real attitude toward those “amorous rites,” but that cannot be decisive because we saw that in the earlier scene with the Nurse she did not protest the bawdry – indeed she is the only prenuptial bride who fails to do this. A more important reason is that, after Romeo overheard her declaration of love in the balcony scene,19 she

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has been completely open about her emotions, both to him and to herself. We may also think that she is too young to have learned how to “dwell on form” and to practice “coying,” as she tells Romeo in that scene (2.2.88, 101), or to pretend to a modesty she does not feel. (It is worth noting that in the prenuptial rituals discussed earlier, the only brides who explicitly invoke “modesty” to reprimand their attendants are Evadne and Beatrice, who are certainly not modest themselves.) But these can be seen as aspects of her character, especially of her impressive honesty and courage (much more impressive, I believe, than anything we see in Romeo), which are demonstrated and enhanced in her prenuptial soliloquy. It is also possible that she and the audience would regard this soliloquy as a kind of epithalamion, like the song at the end of the wedding masque in The Maid’s Tragedy.20 As the daughter of a prominent family of Verona, she would expect to have one presented during the ceremonies preceding her bridal night, but now, since there were no ceremonies, she must provide it herself. *

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This survey of the bride’s prenuptial rituals in Shakespeare raises the question of why he does not present any equivalent ritual for the groom. There is a brief interchange that may look like one at the end of Much Ado about Nothing, where Don Pedro and Claudio tease Benedick after his betrothal to Beatrice, as they do earlier in 3.2 and 5.1 after he falls in love with her; but this is a unique situation because in the opening scene he swore to them that he will “live a bachelor” and will never become “Benedick the married man,” so in the resolution he must endure their jokes about his broken vow. (Beatrice made a similar vow to Leonato in 2.1, but it was much more playful and less vehement than Benedick’s, so she does not have to suffer this comic discomfiture at the end.)21 Another brief interchange that might seem to qualify appears in the conclusion of Henry V, where, immediately after the wooing, the Duke of Burgundy directs what he calls “the frankness of my mirth” at King Henry in a bawdy description of the activities of the coming bridal night; but the target of his joking is Katherine (who is presumably out of earshot) rather than Henry – in fact Henry is not at all embarrassed and even goes along with the alleged “mirth” (5.2.291–315).22 Moreover, this little episode, like the one at the end of Much Ado about Nothing, is unique in the canon, and so could scarcely point to a convention in the drama or the culture of the period. Henry’s unembarrassed reaction in this episode, however, does point to the reason that there is no prenuptial ritual for the groom, because we saw that the ritual for the bride depends on the assumption that she is a virgin and, therefore,

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that the wedding night will involve the loss of her hymen and her modesty, which accounts for her attendant’s teasing and her own maidenly blushing. But this does not apply to the groom. The difference is not that he is a nonvirgin, although this may have been assumed (it is not assumed by Juliet, who in her soliloquy speaks of “a pair of stainless maidenhoods”), but that his virginity or lack thereof is simply irrelevant here, because brides were required to be virgins and grooms were not. (That explains why in The Changeling Alsemero’s medical “closet” contains a potion to test “whether a woman be a maid or not,” but no potion to test a man.) Moreover, his “maidenhood,” unlike the bride’s, has no physical embodiment but is only metaphorical. Therefore he has – quite literally – nothing to lose on his wedding night, and so is not vulnerable to the bawdy teasing that the blushing bride must endure. Another major difference is that marriage marked a radical change in the woman’s life, because her social position and even her social identity were determined by whether she was “a maid, wife, or widow,” which is why this classification had become proverbial,23 while it was much less important in defining the man’s social position and identity. Indeed we are not even told the marital status of some of the men in Shakespeare’s plays, because it does not matter, either in their dramatic roles or in their “real” lives, whether they are bachelors, husbands, or widowers – a classification that, significantly, was not proverbial.24 The groom, however, does have something to lose, not in his wedding bed but in his new married state, and that is his honor, which now depends upon his wife’s chastity. When he marries he becomes vulnerable to cuckolding and therefore to jokes about it, and we do find such jokes connected to marriage in four of Shakespeare’s comedies: in All’s Well that Ends Well Lavatch contemplates the “horns” he will have to wear if he marries Isbel (1.3.42–55); in As You Like It the aborted wedding of Touchstone and Audrey is preceded by his disquisition on the “good horns” that adorn “the forehead of a married man” (3.3.48–63); at the end of Much Ado about Nothing Benedick, following his betrothal to Beatrice, tells Don Pedro to “get thee a wife. There is no staff more reverent than one tipp’d with horn” (5.4.122–4); and in the final speech of The Merchant of Venice Gratiano says, “Well, while I live I’ll fear no other thing/ So sore, as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring” (5.1.306–7).25 But these jokes all come from the groom himself, and therefore, while they may well be expressions of masculine anxiety, of which we have been hearing a good deal lately,26 they do not qualify as a prenuptial ritual for him. Nor do they qualify as a prenuptial ritual for his bride because she, by definition, cannot be made a cuckold, no matter how hard he tries.27 It seems to me that the closest male equivalent to the bride’s prenuptial ritual would be the “bachelor party” (also called the “stag party”), but it cannot be

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found in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries or in their culture. Yet I believe that an examination of the significance of this ritual is called for here in order to explain why it did not exist then and why it came into existence later, which may also shed a little light on some of the changes in gender roles and expectations from the early modern period to the present. I should confess that I have never attended any bachelor parties, but I have heard a lot about them and seen two movies named for them,28 so I can claim to have a fairly good idea of what they are like, or at least of what they are reputed to be like. They are male gatherings, given for the bridegroom by his friends, that are usually held the night before his wedding and feature plenty of liquor and plenty of explicitly sexual material, including dirty jokes and stories, erotic paraphernalia, stag movies, and sometimes women “entertainers” in various stages of undress. It is clear that the main purpose of all the sexual material is to tease the groom, but it is equally clear that this teasing, unlike that of the bride in the prenuptial scenes considered earlier, does not depend on the assumption that he is a virgin. In fact, it depends on the opposite assumption – that he has been sexually active, and that he must now give up this activity. Thus in both rituals the sexual teasing focuses on what the teasee will lose in marriage, but the losses are gender-specific: the bride in the prenuptial scenes is supposed to lose her virginity, while the groom in the bachelor party is supposed to lose his sexual freedom. The bachelor party, then, is regarded as his final fling or “last hurrah” before he settles down to chaste husbandhood. I do not know the history of the bachelor party, or even if it has been investigated (if it has not, I would recommend this as a promising research project),29 but I am willing to bet my next sabbatical that the custom was not established until some time after the socio-economico-political triumph of the bourgeoisie and their ideology of companionate marriage, which dictated that, after the wedding, the husband is supposed to remain just as faithful as his wife. This was not a new idea, of course, since it was regularly affirmed in some of the moral and religious treatises of the older prebourgeois dispensation,30 but there must have been a substantial abyme or at least a faultline between this official doctrine and the actual practice, to judge from the number of passages in the secular literature of that time which assume that many husbands indulge in extramarital sex (two striking Shakespearean examples are Adriana’s complaints in The Comedy of Errors, 2.1, and Emilia’s final speech in the episode in Othello, 4.3, that was discussed earlier). It was only under the new bourgeois dispensation that a man who married was really expected to give up his sexual freedom (a freedom that he, unlike a woman, was still permitted before marriage). This change can be seen very clearly in the version of Petruchio’s song “Where Is the Life that Late I Led?” that was composed for the 1948 Broadway

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musical Kiss Me, Kate, where he regrets the necessity of abandoning all his former mistresses now that he is married, which would have been an anachronism for Shakespeare’s early modern Petruchio but is not for Cole Porter’s modern Fred Graham, the actor who moves in and out of this role during the play-within-the-play.31 I believe that the bachelor party also signifies that the new husband will be giving up something else in addition to his sexual freedom, namely, the male bonding that is embodied in the boozy, bawdy, boisterous camaraderie of the party that his friends are throwing for him, and that is lamented in one of the favorite songs of the old barbershop quartets, “The Wedding Bells are Breaking Up that Old Gang of Mine.”32 This, too, seems to be a modern idea that is not found in Shakespeare. In The Merchant of Venice there is a clear example of male bonding in the relationship of Antonio, Bassanio, and Gratiano, but there is no opposition between their friendships, which are centered in Venice, and their marriages, centered in Belmont. In fact, the friendships and marriages support each other, as has often been noted. Antonio borrows money from Shylock to finance Bassanio’s courtship of Portia in Belmont, which leads to the marriages of Bassanio to Portia and of Gratiano, who accompanies him, to Portia’s attendant Nerissa. But when the two men learn that their friend Antonio is in great danger because of his debt to Shylock, they immediately return to Venice to help him, with the encouragement of their wives, who then follow, disguised as a doctor of law and his clerk, and in the ensuing trial they save Antonio and return to Belmont, where they are joined by their husbands and Antonio. This symbiotic interaction of friendship and marriage, and of Venice and Belmont, is symbolized in the movement of the two rings: in Belmont Portia and Nerissa give them as love tokens to Bassanio and Gratiano, who take them to Venice and give them, as rewards for rescuing their friend, to the disguised Portia and Nerissa, who take them back to Belmont and, after some playful delays, return them to Bassanio and Gratiano (who appropriates his, as we saw, for a joke about cuckoldry). Moreover, the final celebration in Belmont of the double victory of love and friendship explicitly incorporates Antonio, since Portia welcomes him to her home and he pledges himself as “surety” to guarantee Bassanio’s fidelity to her, so that at the end the men can have their male bonding and their marriages too.33 There is another example of male bonding at the beginning of Love’s Labor’s Lost, where King Ferdinand, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine sign a quasimonastic pact in which they vow to live together for three years in an isolated “little academe,” where they will study philosophy and avoid any contact with women. But the pact is immediately in trouble when the French Princess, Rosaline, Maria, and Katherine arrive on an embassy and, in effect, lay siege

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to the men. What follows is a series of confrontations between the men and the women, often couched in the imagery of war, in which the men are badly defeated (thus the play could be seen as Shakespeare’s Lysistrata). The first to succumb is Berowne, who falls in love with Rosaline, and then, in an amusing sequence of overheard soliloquies in 4.3, King Ferdinand, Longaville, and Dumaine reveal that they are in love with the Princess, Maria, and Katherine, respectively. This produces some teasing about breaking their vow, but it does not follow the pattern of the bachelor party because each man is both teaser and teased, and it does not threaten their male bonding because they are all in the same predicament and decide to join forces again to court the women. At the end each of the four ex-members of the celibate academy proposes to one of the victorious women and must agree to undergo a year-long trial in order to win her consent. Therefore, while the male bonding of their original pact has been broken up by the women, the men are still working together as friends, so there is now no conflict between this friendship and their forthcoming, but postponed, wedding bells. We do find a conflict between the two in Much Ado about Nothing, although at first the friendship of Claudio, Benedick, and Don Pedro promotes their marriages, since Don Pedro helps to arrange the match between Claudio and Hero, and these two men devise the trick that causes Benedick to fall in love with Beatrice. But trouble arises when Claudio rejects Hero at the altar, as a result of the deception planned by Don John that, we saw, cast a shadow over Hero’s prenuptial scene, and this leads Beatrice, who is Hero’s cousin and close friend, to ask Benedick to challenge Claudio to a duel to prove his devotion to her. Benedick does this, which requires him to choose love over friendship and therefore to break up the male bonding. It is only a temporary break, however, because Don John’s deception is uncovered (thanks largely to the bumbling Dogberry) so that the ending can celebrate both the rebonding of Claudio and Benedick and (after some prenuptial teasing of Benedick) their marriages to the bonded Hero and Beatrice, although Don Pedro, unlike Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, is not incorporated in it, as Benedick points out in his final advice to him to “get thee a wife.” There is a much more serious conflict between male bonding and marriage in Romeo and Juliet. Here Mercutio, Romeo, and Benvolio form Shakespesare’s closest approximation to the adolescent gangs of our own day and engage in some of the same activities, such as “hanging” on the street, cracking dirty jokes, harassing women, guarding their “turf,” and even “crashing” a party. Mercutio, who acts as their leader, resents Romeo’s lugubrious courtship of Rosaline, which has caused him to withdraw from them and made him unfit for male companionship, and he continually teases Romeo about it (in 1.4, 2.1,

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and the beginning of 2.4), although this cannot qualify as a prenuptial ritual because Rosaline is cast in the conventional role of the Petrarchan cruel mistress and so, by definition, will never marry Romeo. Therefore when Romeo rejoins their activities, following the balcony scene, and even wins a wit combat with him, Mercutio welcomes the change: “Why, is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo” (2.4.88–90). (He does not know, of course, that Romeo has wooed and won Juliet, and that Shakespeare arranged this change in his behavior to emphasize the difference between his genuine love for her and his Petrarchan posing and pining for Rosaline.)34 Thus at first Romeo’s love seems to promote his male bonding, but that ends abruptly in 3.1, immediately after his wedding (without bells), which creates a conflict with his friendship. Because of the marriage, Romeo tries to placate Tybalt of the rival Capulet gang, and this gross violation of gang ethics infuriates Mercutio (“O calm, dishonorable, vile submission!”) and impels him to fight Tybalt, which requires Romeo to intervene, again because of his marriage, which results in Mercutio’s death. This finally forces Romeo to choose male bonding over love (“O sweet Juliet,/ Thy beauty hath made me effeminate”) and to challenge Tybalt. His choice, then, is the opposite of Benedick’s (although both result in a challenge) and so is its effect, since it leads to Tybalt’s death and Romeo’s banishment and, eventually, to the two suicides. Thus marriage and male bonding destroy each other, which is a unique situation in Shakespeare. One explanation is that the feud is such an extreme form of male bonding, which, we saw, hangs threateningly over Juliet’s prenuptial scenes. Moreover, the play, unlike all our other examples, is a tragedy – the only Shakespearean tragedy that turns on this conflict. There are two other male bondings in Shakespeare that are in conflict with marriage – those of Valentine and Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and of the cousins Palamon and Arcite in The Two Noble Kinsmen (both plays are named for the bonded men). But their conflict is very different from the preceding examples because in each play the two friends are in love with the same woman (Silvia and Emilia, respectively), although this too is finally resolved. In the last scene of The Two Gentlemen of Verona Proteus woos Silvia, choosing love over bonding (“In love/ Who respects friend?”), but when Valentine reproaches him he repents, whereupon Valentine, in an extraordinary choice of bonding over love, offers Silvia to Proteus, but we know this cannot work because she loves Valentine and Proteus is loved by Julia, who has followed him disguised as a page. Fortunately at this point her identity is revealed and Proteus realizes that he really loves her, so at the end the two rebonded men can look forward to a double marriage to the two women. In The Two Noble Kinsmen there is no second woman to solve the problem (the Jailor’s Daughter falls in

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love with Palamon, but he is literally out of her class) and Emilia has no preference, so Duke Theseus commands the two men to fight in a tournament where the winner will win Emilia and the loser will lose his head, which confronts each of them with an extreme form of the choice we are examining, since to marry the women he loves he must, in effect, kill his best friend. Arcite wins, but then is fatally injured by a fall from his horse before Palamon is beheaded, and with his dying breath he is reconciled to Palamon and gives him Emilia. Thus Palamon is not responsible for his death and can end up, like so many of the other men in these conflicts, by having his marriage and his bonding, even though it is posthumous. These are the only significant conflicts of marriage and male bonding in Shakespeare, and none of them is at all like the conflict lamented in the bachelor party and the barbershop song. Except for Romeo and Juliet, which we found was a special case, the conflicts are all prenuptial and temporary, whereas the bachelor party and barbershop song assume a break after marriage that is permanent. Of course, all these plays (again with the exception of Romeo and Juliet) end in marriages, and we are not invited to ask what will happen to the male friendships afterward – to wonder, for instance, if King Ferdinand and his three lords, when they move out of the academy to live in separate homes with their wives, will still be seeing so much of each other or devoting very much of their time to the masculine pursuit of philosophy. But it seems to me that there is another, more basic reason that this fraternal aspect of the bachelor party, which laments the groom’s loss of his old gang, cannot be found in Shakespeare’s plays, and it is the same as the reason that the erotic aspect, lamenting the loss of his old sexual activity, cannot be found there. Both of these losses, I believe, accompanied the aforementioned triumph of the bourgeoisie and their ideology of companionate marriage, since this included a new concept of domesticity, which required the companionate husband to spend most of his free time with his companionate wife in what came to be known as the bosom of the family, instead of with his former male companions, so a young gentleman who married was supposed to give up not only his sexual freedom but also his social freedom. Indeed I remember reading a Victorian conduct book which ruled that, when a gentleman marries, all his friends should consider their relationship terminated unless they receive an invitation to call on the new couple, the idea being that some of them may have been suitable company for a bachelor but not for a proper married man.35 There are also a few examples of the bonding of young women in Shakespeare’s comedies but, unlike the male bondings, they never involve a conflict with marriage, not even a temporary one. In Love’s Labor’s Lost the French Princess and her three ladies bond together to wage and win what I

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called a kind of war against King Ferdinand and his three lords, but it is not a war against marriage because their goal is to break up or down the celibate pact of the academy by arousing the men’s romantic interest in them, and so their victory is a victory for marriage, which is complete when the men finally propose to them. The bonding of Portia and Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice not only promotes their marriages to Bassanio and Gratiano but even strengthens those marriages when they rescue Antonio, who is bonded to their new husbands. In Much Ado about Nothing the bonding of Hero and Beatrice, who are cousins, also promotes their marriages, since Hero helps to arrange the trick (the counterpart of the men’s trick on Benedick) to convince Beatrice that Benedick loves her,36 and when Claudio breaks off his marriage to Hero, Beatrice fiercely defends her (even inducing Benedick to challenge him) and assists in the scheme to reunite them after Claudio’s repentance. The bonding of Rosalind and Celia (another pair of cousins) in As You Like It is more developed because they run off together to the Forest of Arden and enjoy a kind of freedom there that is Shakespeare’s closest approximation to female adolescence, but it is not opposed to marriage. Rosalind falls in love at first sight with Orlando before they flee to Arden, and in the forest Celia serves as her confidante to whom she can express this love (even officiating at their mock wedding), and later conveniently falls in love at first sight with his brother Oliver, so that these two bonded cousins and the two reconciled brothers can join what Touchstone calls “the rest of the country copulatives” in the mass marriage at the end. It should not surprise us to find that in these plays the bonding of young women never conflicts with their marriages and usually supports them. Although we know that many women in early modern England remained single, there were very powerful social pressures on them to marry that reflected the economic realities of the period. A woman of the middle and upper classes (to which all these characters belong) had no acceptable ways to earn a living, and this meant that, unless she inherited money, a woman who did not marry was doomed to live in the home of, and on the charity of, a male relative, pitied or scorned as a “spinster” or “old maid,” and doomed after death, according to the proverb, to “lead apes in hell.”37 (Needless to say, this did not apply to men, because all the acceptable vocations were open to them and could be pursued succcessfully whether they were married or not, and no opprobrious epithets awaited unmarried men when they grew older and no punishments awaited them after death, which helps to explain the point made earlier that marriage was much more important in defining a woman’s status than a man’s.) Moreover, at this time London had not yet developed the kind of social life where young single women could enjoy each other’s company, along with the

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attentions of suitors and “the pleasures of the town,” which they had to give up when, like Congreve’s Millamant, they “dwindle into a wife.”38 Consequently, these women had nothing to lose by marrying, except for their virginity (which is why it is the focus of all their prenuptial scenes), and a great deal to lose by not marrying. And this gendered “matrimonial imperative” is incorporated in the conventions and therefore in the genre expectations of the plays of the period, so that all the young women in Shakespeare’s comedies and romances, except for a few servants, end up with husbands or prospective husbands, which was an important component in the dramatic closure of these plays, while a number of eligible men, some of them quite prominent in the action, remain unmarried at the end.39 All this changed when a woman married or passed marriageable age, for then she was free to bond with other women without the pressure of the matrimonial imperative. Indeed this kind of bonding appears in one of the earliest English secular plays, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, in the relationship between Gammer Gurton and her “dear gossip” Dame Chat,40 and it becomes more important in several later plays. These friendships, however, are never opposed to their marriages, but always operate to protect their marriages from some external threat or from the foolishness of their husbands. Thus in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page bond together to punish Falstaff, who is trying to seduce them, and to cure Mistress Ford’s jealous husband, Frank; in The Winter’s Tale, Hermione and Paulina bond together to punish and cure Hermione’s jealous husband, Leontes, who rewards Paulina with a second husband; and in one of the subplots of Marston’s The Insatiate Countess, Abigail and Thais, who are old friends, bond together to punish and cure their jealous and feuding husbands, Claridiana and Rogero.41 Nor should the special ability of these married women to protect their marriages surprise us, because in Shakespeare’s comedies and romances the young women who marry tend to be much better at love than the men they marry – they usually feel more deeply and are more constant, more sensible and mature, and often more clever in the courtships, while the men tend to be more shallow and fickle, not as bright, and easily tricked, so that most of them have to undergo a reformation to become worthy of the women, just like the husbands in The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Winter’s Tale, and The Insatiate Countess.42 And the women’s general superiority within this emotional realm also appeared in their bonding later in life, as we just saw, and can still be found in our own society, where the general impression is that friendships between adult women are usually stronger and more enduring than friendships between adult men, which often seem to dwindle after the bachelor parties that celebrate them and lament their loss. But that is a postnuptial story for another occasion.

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NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

Quotations of Shakespeare follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy, ed. Howard B. Norland, Regents Renaissance Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968). Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, ed. N.W. Bawcutt, Revels Plays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). “Light of Love” was the name of a popular dance tune, also mentioned in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1.2.80, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, 5.2.54, and was a term for a “light” or wanton woman – see Henry Porter, The Two Angry Women of Abington, 3.740 (ed. W.W. Greg, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912)), and John Fletcher, The Chances, 1.3.33 (ed. George Walton Williams, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–96), vol. 4). Dula may sing another bawdy song at the beginning of the scene – Lewis Theobald suspected that her two speeches expressing envy of Evadne were a ballad stanza and printed them in that format, and some other early editors adopted his change. Many critics have noted that there is a problem here, since Margaret participated in the deception but does not show any awareness of this in the prenuptial scene that follows it. See the attempts to explain this away in 5.1.300–303 and 5.4.4–6. There is also a problem here: Evadne later explains that she became the King’s mistress to further her “ambition” but never explains how a secret liaison achieves this, and still later she claims that he “stole” her “honor,” “whor’d” her, and made her “the most wrong’d of women” (3.1.182, 5.1.61, 106, 111). The song concluding this masque also assumes Evadne’s virginity, since it calls on night to “hide/ The blushes of the bride” and to “confound her tears and her shrill cryings,/ Her weak denials, vows, and often-dyings,” so it, too, turns out to be ironic in retrospect. I discuss the significance of the stables in “The Lady and Her Horsekeeper and Shakespeare,” Notes and Queries 52 (2005): 208–13. “Shakespeare’s Weddings (and Other Rites),” Shakespeare Newsletter 52 (2002): 63–4. This is why the only wedding ceremonies that Shakespeare shows us are the aborted marriages of Touchstone to Audrey in As You Like It, 3.3, and of Claudio to Hero and then to her supposed cousin in Much Ado about Nothing, 4.1 and 5.4, and the only funeral is Ophelia’s “maimed” ceremony in Hamlet, 5.1. (In The Changeling the wedding procession of Alsemero and Beatrice is presented in a dumb show just before the scene discussed here.) The same principle operates in our movies, which never show a complete wedding or funeral or bar mitzvah. Iago has an equivalent and more visible role in 2.1, where Othello and Desdemona are reunited, having survived all the threats against them (the trial in Venice, the storm at sea, and the attack by the Turkish fleet), while he watches them and plots their destruction. Carole McKewin compares Desdemona’s scene with Hero’s in “Counsels of Gall and Grace: Intimate Conversations between Women in Shakespeare’s Plays,” in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 128.

PRENUPTIAL RITUALS AND BONDING 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

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In light of my earlier conjecture about a taboo against enacting religious rites, it is significant that Anne’s marriage and her coronation and the baptism of Elizabeth all occur offstage – the marriage is reported in 3.2, in 4.1 we see the procession coming from the coronation and hear a description of the ceremony, and in 5.4 we see the procession coming from the baptism. She speaks of Anne’s “mincing,” like the “simp’ring dame” described by Lear who “minces virtue” (4.6.118–23), but that woman pretended to dislike sex, while Anne, according to the Old Lady, is pretending to dislike power and wealth. Katherine’s goodness is emphasized in her trial (2.4) and death scene (4.2), and in the Epilogue (ll. 10–11); and Elizabeth’s greatness is predicted by the Lord Chamberlain in the scene we are examining (2.3.77–9), by Suffolk in 3.2.50–52, and at great length by Cranmer at the end. The chorus to Act 3 (ll. 29–30) reports that her father has already offered Katherine to Henry, but the dramatic sequence creates the impression that she is reacting to the conquest of Harflew. I am aware of the many attempts to ironize the wooing and refute the happy ending – see, for example, Donald Hedrick, “Advantage, Affect, History, Henry V,” PMLA 118 (2003): 478–84, which even extends this operation to the language lesson (482–3). Mary Bly examines Juliet’s sexual language here in “Bawdy Puns and Lustful Virgins: The Legacy of Juliet’s Desire in Comedies of the Early 1600s,” Shakespeare Survey 49 (1996): 97–109; she also quotes some nineteenth-century critics (men, of course) who were shocked by it (100). This attitude survives in our own day – James Seward complains that Juliet “hungers … violently for Romeo’s body” and “comes very close to panting like an animal,” and he condemns the “ugliness” and “rawness of her sexual hunger” (Tragic Vision in “Romeo and Juliet” (Washington: Consortium, 1973), 130–32). This depends on the convention that a character speaking a soliloquy is literally “thinking out loud” and so can be overheard. See the evidence assembled by James E. Hirsh, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003). The idea was first suggested to me many years ago by Gerald Bentley, but it is now generally accepted – see Gary McCown, “‘Runnawayes Eyes’ and Juliet’s Epithalamium,” Shakespeare Quarterly 27 (1976): 150–76. There is also a brief aborted prenuptial ritual in 4.5.1–11, where the Nurse comes to wake Juliet for her marriage to Paris with some bawdry (“you shall rest but little … He’ll fright you up”), but the irony is obvious because we saw Juliet drink the Friar’s potion. This may explain why benedict made it into the OED as a noun denoting “a newly married man; esp. an apparently confirmed bachelor who marries,” while there is no entry for a beatrice. Hedrick (482, see n. 17) is so intent on his campaign against the wooing and the happy ending that he mistakenly gives Burgundy’s most rancid joke (5.2.306–11) to Henry. See Measure for Measure, 5.1.171–80; R.W. Dent, Proverbial Language in English Drama Exclusive of Shakespeare, 1495–1616 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), M26; and the title of Thomas Middleton’s lost play, The Puritan Maid, the Modest Wife, and the Wanton Widow (Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941–68), 4: 892). Widower is the only English word I know in which the basic form is feminine and a suffix must be added

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24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 to make it masculine, suggesting that widow(er)hood was regarded as much more important in defining a woman’s status than a man’s. And the pairing of maid and bachelor is not symmetrical, since the first term refers to a young woman’s unmarried state and her virginity, while the second does not imply virginity – in fact, there is no term for a male virgin. This includes Duke Solinus and Angelo in The Comedy of Errors, the Duke in The Merchant of Venice, the Host and Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Antonio in Much Ado about Nothing, the King and Lafew in All’s Well that Ends Well, Escalus and the Provost in Measure for Measure, and Sebastian, Antonio, and Gonzalo in The Tempest. Compare Benedick’s fear of cuckold’s horns in 1.1.240–42, and the sexual allusions to a woman’s “ring” in The Changeling, 1.2.26–31, and in Steven Doloff, “Iachimo’s Wager and Hans Carvel’s Ring in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Newsletter 48 (1998): 67. In the song at the end of Love’s Labor’s Lost the cuckoo bird “Mocks married men,” but this is not specifically directed at the men in the play, whose marriages are postponed for a year. See Edward Snow, “Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 384–412, and Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). She can be made a cuckquean, but this rare word does not figure in any prenuptial rituals. The first one, written by Paddy Chayefsky, began as a television play and was made into a movie in 1957 (and published by Signet in that year); the second movie appeared in 1984. The earliest OED citations for bachelor party and stag party are from the late nineteenth century, but the custom may have existed before it got into print or even acquired a name. David Cressy, in Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the LifeCycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), chap. 16, “Wedding Celebrations,” describes some drunken, bawdy revelry in which the guests (both men and women) teased the bride and groom, but it is hard to see how this could have evolved into the modern bachelor party. It was affirmed very forcefully in many Puritan tracts of this period – see Coppelia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 120, and the studies cited there. Shakespeare’s Petruchio sings the first line (4.1.140), which also appears in 2 Henry IV, 5.3.140. The rest of the ballad is lost, but we have a response to it which shows that it was not about marriage or a man’s loss of sexual freedom – see my “What Was the Life that Petruchio Lately Led?” Shakespeare Newsletter 55 (2006): 33, 36, 38, 58. There are early modern references to marriage as a “yoke” or “clog” for men, but this restraint, again, is not sexual – see Much Ado about Nothing, 1.1.201, 261, Othello, 4.1.66, and All’s Well that Ends Well, 2.5.53, and compare modern allusions to a wife as “my ball and chain.” There are two movies about adolescent gangs that end (both the movies and the gangs) when the leader marries: The Lords of Flatbush (1974) and The Wanderers (1979). I am aware of the many ironic readings that try to refute this happy ending and to prove that the Christians in the play are as bad as Shylock, if not worse – see, for example, Rene Girard, “‘To Entrap the Wisest’: A Reading of The Merchant of Venice,” in

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34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

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Literature and Society, ed. Edward Said (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 100–119, and Edna Crane, Shylock and the King of England (New York: Vantage, 1996), and compare n. 17. Friar Lawrence defines Romeo’s devotion to Rosaline as “doting” rather than “loving” (2.3.82) and Mercutio connects it to Petrarch (2.4.39). See Benvolio’s and Montague’s descriptions of his behavior (1.1.118–42), and his entrance, when he does not seem to know the time (“Is the day so young?”) or his own father (“Was that my father that went hence so fast?”). I suspect that this reflects the growing power of the companionate wife to control their social life, and that some companionate husbands resisted, as we see in the old comic strip “Bringing Up Father” in the conflict between the newly rich Jigs and his wife Maggie, who insists on living up to their elevated status by dragging him to operas and social functions, while he tries to escape to the fire station to hang out with his old pals. In Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday there is a similar class and gender conflict between Simon Eyre and his wife Margery – as he climbs the bourgeois ladder of success from shoemaker to Lord Mayor, she begins to take on airs, but he scoffs at her and remains bonded to his workers. This make it unlikely that Beatrice’s bad humor during Hero’s prenuptial scene, which she attributes to feeling “exceeding ill” (3.4.53), is really caused by resentment of her cousin’s marriage. Early in The Taming of the Shrew, Katherina clearly does resent the prospect of Bianca’s marriage, not because of female bonding but because, as the older sister, she would be humiliated by it (“I must dance barefoot on her wedding day” – 2.1.33). Dent (see n. 23), M37. Both Katherina and Beatrice (more humorously) think of this as their fate when they contemplate the marriages of Bianca and Hero (The Taming of the Shrew, 2.1.34; Much Ado about Nothing, 2.1.38–45). For some attempts to explain this expression, see Gwendolyn B. Needham, “New Light on Maids ‘Leading Apes in Hell’,” Journal of American Folklore, 75 (1962), 106–19, and http://www.shaksper.net/ archives/2000/20003.html and links. William Congreve, The Way of the World, ed. Kathleen M. Lynch, Regents Restoration Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 4.204. Earlier stages of this development appear in Caroline “comedies of manners” such as James Shirley’s The Ball and The Lady of Pleasure. In addition to Antonio in The Merchant of Venice and Don Pedro in Much Ado about Nothing, the list includes Gremio in The Taming of the Shrew, Thurio and Eglamour in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Slender, Doctor Caius, and Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Jaques and William in As You Like It, and Aguecheek, Malvolio, and Antonio in Twelfth Night. Anon., Gammer Gurton’s Needle, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin, Drama of the English Renaissance: The Tudor Period (New York: Macmillan, 1976), Prol. 8; see also 2 Henry IV, 2.1.94–5, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4.2.9. The term gossip originally meant a godparent of either sex, but at this time it was often limited to friendship between women. The exception that proves the rule is Henry Porter’s The Two Angry Women of Abington, where the titular characters, Mistress Goursey and Mistress Barnes, are always fighting and must be cured by their husbands. On a possible connection between this play and The Merry Wives of Windsor, see Andrew Gurr, “Intertextuality at Windsor,”

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THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 189–200. Mary Bly (see n. 18) connects it to Romeo and Juliet. The most striking exception is Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, who has to be reformed by Petruchio, which may help to explain why it is so troublesome and controversial.

11

Tolerance in Shakespeare: An Introduction

B.J. Sokol

This essay introduces a longer work in progress on ‘Shakespeare and Tolerance’. My argument will be that Shakespeare’s work shows a deep and sympathetic interest in encounters between persons having widely differing cultural identities or outlooks, and a particular interest in the inner aspects, that is the personal or intra-personal aspects, of these encounters. The present aim is to illustrate some of the many ways in which Shakespeare portrayed circumstances or mental states that demand and may give rise to tolerance.1 But first it must be noted that any attempt to show that tolerance was an issue for Shakespeare’s time immediately raises vexed problems of definition. However very similar definitional problems, and even paradoxes, also arise from the alternative, more usual, view that European concepts of tolerance or toleration came into being only in the Enlightenment. For want of space only a brief indication can be given here of these problems. For almost all post-Enlightenment thinkers, down to the present, tolerance is the virtue of forbearance from suppressing or oppressing that which is severely disliked or disapproved of, be this a person, group, community, culture, idea, faith, practice or appearance. Arguably a positive basis can be found for such an essentially negative virtue of forbearance in terms of a Kantian position that true tolerance derives from the support we must offer to divergent others because we must recognize their autonomy as a good in itself.2 But even such a theorized higher motive for a virtue of tolerant forbearance is not synonymous with the positive openness and generosity seen in the impetuses toward tolerance often celebrated by Shakespeare, or sometimes depicted by him as deplorably absent. The differences between the kind of tolerance explored by Shakespeare and that theorized about in later times are made more palpable if we note that the classical definition of tolerance allows for only tolerance of the relatively weaker by those more powerful (otherwise forbearance from oppression has 177

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no meaning). It also allows only for tolerance of that which is already known and pre-judged (so that a settled and known dislike is possible). In Shakespeare’s age of exploration fresh encounters with the seemingly outlandish or mysterious in humanity were more common, and more remarked on, than even quite soon after. Then, also, Europeans confronted with outsiders did not automatically assume that they possessed superior sophistication, power or even an ability to survive, for such overweening assumptions were not yet established beliefs.3 For these and other reasons the classical definition of tolerance, which requires both an asymmetry of power and a fully settled prejudice or bias, has little application to Shakespeare’s work, or to his age. Moving from the above historical and cultural generalities, which need to be argued further, let me propose a very specific setting that likely may have prompted Shakespearean interests in a question of tolerance. Despite widening European horizons of trade and settlement, in Shakespeare’s time among the most common and pressing experiences of cross-cultural encounter arose from indigenous confessional differences. Although most scholars hold that a concept of religious toleration was largely inchoate in Europe then, or only just nascent,4 some varieties of religious pluralism had been tried out with variable or temporary success. In various proportions, factors such as skepticism, mere expedience or the Politique preference for social stability over orthodoxy had led to the allowance of coexisting multiple confessions in post-Reformation France, Germany and Poland. In England, not quite in an echo of this, the admission of strongly protestant refugees from a series of continental persecutions had resulted in the establishment of allowed ‘Stranger Churches’, at first in London and then also elsewhere. These Calvinist churches differed in doctrine and organization from the mainstream English Church, and so issues of toleration did arise. The initial Stranger Church, established in London in 1550 at Austin Friars, was strongly supported by the boy king Edward VI. In fact the premises and the costs of their extensive repairs were donated to the congregation by the king himself. This church divided within its first year into a Dutch Church at Austin Friars and a French Church at Threadneedle Street. The initial Walloon congregation of the French Church enlarged considerably after a wave of Huguenot refugees arrived from France following the St. Bartholomew’s day massacre of 1572. Of course the Stranger Churches were exiled under Edward’s successor, catholic Queen Mary. They were re-admitted by Queen Elizabeth,5 but she was far less keen on their anti-prelatical constitutions and hyper ‘Reformed’ doctrines than her half-brother Edward had been. In consequence both official attitudes to the Stranger Churches, and the curious structures under which they operated (involving the Privy Council and latterly the Bishop of London),

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shifted. Subsequent treatment of the stranger congregations changed from one realm to another, in accord with emerging ideologies, political and economic motivations, and the distribution and numbers of the refugee communities established in various parts of England. The Stranger Churches themselves varied their ‘Disciplines’, or constitutions, over time, although the Discipline of 1588 was widely applied until 1644.6 These complicated matters lay behind circumstances that would have been immediately apparent to Shakespeare and his audiences. Although estimates of their numbers vary widely, the community of Protestant refugees from the continent and their children (as many such immigrant families had reached a second generation) certainly made a very considerable presence in Shakespeare’s London.7 This largely artisan presence on its own, visible, for example, in the immigrant stoneworking workshops of Southwark alluded to both in King Lear and The Winter’s Tale,8 might have been enough to interest Shakespeare. In addition, as has been suggested by Charles Littleton, it is surprising, even, that the economically and socially stressed London of the 1590s did not see serious agitation directed against its employment gaining and space occupying ‘stranger’ communities.9 Perhaps in response to that very threat, Shakespeare dramatized an admonitory episode deploring London apprentice riots directed against immigrant foreigners in his portion of the collaborative play Sir Thomas More, written about 1603–4. Shakespeare may well have been reflecting his own personal experiences when he wrote about resentments aimed at London’s alien strangers.10 For, as is well known, during a period of possibly some years’ duration centered on 1603–4, Shakespeare lodged in Silver Street in the refugee Huguenot household of Christopher Mountjoy. Shakespeare was evidently an intimate of the household, for depositions in a lawsuit brought in the equity Court of Requests in 1612 show that, on the urging of the girl’s mother, Shakespeare had acted as a go-between in the arrangement of a match between Mountjoy’s sole heir, his daughter Mary, and his skilled former apprentice Stephen Belot, also of Huguenot extraction. Shakespeare’s efforts succeeded, for a marriage between the couple was solemnized in November 1604 in the local parish church of St. Olave. The 1612 lawsuit resulted from a long and bitter dispute over the marriage portion. Shakespeare’s compelled testimony and that of others did not resolve the argument. Baffled, the Court ordered arbitration between the parties, and appointed as arbitrators the elders of the French Church in Threadneedle Street, which is quite close to Silver Street. The reason for repeating these well-known facts is to point toward a context in which Shakespeare could have become distinctly aware of problems in contemporary religious pluralism. This context emerges from a close examination

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of certain features of the Belot–Mountjoy suit, features that reveal an anomaly in the allowed religious pluralism. As just mentioned, the royal prerogative equity court of Requests referred the litigants to the elders of the French Church in Threadneedle Street so that their dispute could be resolved by arbitration. Thus the Stranger Church, although Calvinist, was evidently well respected by the court. Yet the Belot–Mountjoy couple were married in the local parish Anglican church, not in the nearby French Church. Why should there have been this discrepancy? The Mountjoy–Belot couple may have chosen to be so married in accord with a considerable degree of integration by the late sixteenth century of many Londoners of immigrant refugee stock with their local communities.11 Alternatively, Stephen Belot may have wished to avoid the much closer moral scrutiny to which the ‘consistory’ of the French Church subjected betrothing couples compared with the practice in Anglican churches. The French Church records show that some years after the marriage both Belot and his father-inlaw Christopher Mountjoy were condemned as ‘desbauchez’,12 and Mountjoy was actually excommunicated on 24 February 1614.13 It has been noted in general that ‘Many couples thwarted by the [strict rules of the French Church in London’s] consistory married in the English Church instead. Marriage in the English Church was apparently quicker and easier than in the French Church.’14 It has also been noted that by King James’s time forces of assimilation had made many of second generation protestant refugee stock lukewarm about their religious differences from other Londoners, so that ‘dual membership in [the English and French] churches was common, perhaps even the norm’ in early seventeenth-century London.15 Therefore maybe the Court of Requests was mistaken in delegating a unique moral authority over the ‘strangers’ to the Calvinist elders. However, statistics indicate that yet some other explanation must lie behind the choices of marriage venues made by many of London’s religious ‘strangers’ in Shakespeare’s time. For the records of the French Church show that far fewer marriages are listed as having taken place there, proportionally, than baptisms.16 The likely reason for that peculiarity would have been that marriages made in the Stranger Churches, although valid according to the then pertaining rules for de praesenti marriage contracts, still could have been viewed by the English courts as dubious or unsafe, and justifiably so. This would be because the 1559 Elizabethan Act of Uniformity (which continued in force until 1640) made it an offense to marry other than by using all the rituals and rubrics prescribed in the 1559 Anglican Book of Common Prayer.17 The forms specified by the

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prayer book included that an Anglican minister, dressed not in a Genevan gown but in a surplice, perform the Prayer Book’s ceremonies (including the taking of the Anglican, not Calvinist, style of communion). The liturgy specified was in English,18 and contrary to strong puritan or reformed objections wedding rings had to be given.19 Nearly all of the highly contentious issues that arose from these demands, by the way, are parodied in a long comic passage in Much Ado About Nothing.20 Even after the long-awaited reforms in Lord Hardwick’s 1753 Marriage Act, only the Anglican church was empowered to solemnize marriages, and following that Act this solemnization became for the first time requisite for forming a valid marriage.21 The Act therefore produced an obstacle which put a stop to all marriages in ‘stranger’ protestant churches (and most other nonconformist ones) until the Marriage Act of 1836.22 Note the anomaly: a foreign or ‘stranger’ church was officially allowed its own congregation and forms of worship, was even recognized by a law court as morally authoritative over its community, but only the English Church was capable of performing the legally demanded ritual of marriage solemnization. Worse still, the case of R v Millis, heard on appeal by the Law Lords in 1843, invalidated a marriage made in Ireland according to Presbyterian rites, and thus released the defendant from charges of bigamy. This was not a unanimous decision; half the court dissented. It has also subsequently been severely criticized as mistaken.23 But the point remains that in relation to marriage religions were not, and still are not, equal in the eyes of the English law, which upholds the Established Church. The relevant question is, what could a thinking person of Shakespeare’s era have made of that fact? We may consider a particular text of that era from which emerges a very surprising picture of the capabilities of thinking persons. It will then be proposed that there is similarity between the tones and gestures depicted in that text and those seen in cross-cultural interchanges dramatized by Shakespeare. The text in question is Jean Bodin’s remarkable Colloquium of the Seven,24 which was almost certainly written by Bodin (and no other) late in his life, probably in 1588.25 Although this became a rather famous work, it existed and circulated only in eagerly-sought copied manuscripts (the earlier in Latin) until long after Shakespeare’s time.26 There is of course no way of knowing if Shakespeare could have seen it. Bodin’s Colloquium contains imaginary dialogues between a Roman Catholic, a Muslim, a Calvinist, a Lutheran, a Natural Philosopher, a Skeptic and a Jew. This cannot be understood as a text centrally promoting a Politique viewpoint, as five of the seven faiths or positions represented in it had no bearing on the stability of the French body politic of Bodin’s time.

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Bodin depicts his seven participants meeting repeatedly to discuss and compare their views on questions of religion. Thanks to their host Coronaeus these private meetings enjoy elegant, cultured, pleasant and convivial contexts.27 All the participants at the end agree that public discussion of comparative religion is not safe or appropriate; after their series of meetings finish it is said that they all ‘held no other conversation about religions’.28 The private/public distinction allowed by Coronaeus’s hospitality supports not only latitude for differences of inner belief (approximating to Queen Elizabeth’s famous ‘I would not make mirrors in [or ‘on’] men’s souls’), but also a free forum of exchange and debate. It is well worth considering these imaginary discussions in relation to Renaissance interest in the rhetorical modes of ‘conversation’ which, in the work of Gary Remer, have been associated with an early modern rise of tolerance.29 It is important to note, however, that Remer’s idea is that ‘conversation’ can promote the discovery of a single truth, while Bodin presents discussions that illustrate multiple viewpoints which do not and cannot wholly coincide, although in the end, Bodin claims, in their chromaticism, they produce a kind of ‘enharmonic’ ‘harmony’.30 Indeed Bodin’s protagonists do disagree heartily on many points.31 Sometimes their robust discussions produce near or actual insults, and the dramatization of this robustness raises matters of great interest. More often harmony or agreement characterizes the discussions in the Colloquium. Near the whole work’s conclusion in Book Six, for instance, the Jewish participant Salomon says ‘There is nothing which I bear more grievously than for piety implanted with the deepest roots, to be mocked; from this source civil disturbances and uprising spring which are too numerous to recount.’ He illustrates with a number of provocations followed by persecutions and expulsion of Jews, and Octavius, the Muslim participant, adds to these an account of the persecution and forced conversions of the ‘Moors of Granada, who were of the Arabic religion’. Fridericus the Lutheran and Curtius the Calvinist participants then end the book by commenting in turn on the excellence of two different late Roman emperors’ support for religious toleration or pluralism. Yet there are exceptions to the harmony between diverse opinions typical of the Colloquium. These include notably several moments of acrimony appearing in Book Four. In these Octavius is badgered, even derided, on account of his Muslim faith, first by Fridericus and soon after also by Curtius. The prelude to this is the formerly Christian Octavius telling the story of his conversion to ‘the Mohammedan faith’, after he had been sold as a slave in Syria following his capture by pirates ‘on the shore of Sicily’. Octavius reveals that, although

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he had been ‘At last convinced by the arguments’ (L. Ad extremum rationibus victus acquievi), his motives for conversion had been mixed. Thus he admits to his confusion about religion after several years of being proselytized, to the influence of reading a book by a Dominican who had converted to Islam, and to the temptation he had of gaining freedom from slavery, which he knew would follow from conversion. He even comments: ‘Many are accustomed to embrace Mohammed and allow themselves to be circumcised in order to obtain freedom.’ Lutheran Fridericus immediately mocks such converts – as he sees them, such Christian apostates – by repeating a story from Pausanias: Once I heard those who went into the cave of Trophonius were accustomed to leap about as if they were driven into madness by the demon. When their friends tried to call them back and had entered the cave, they joined the dancing. We see the same thing has happened to Octavius.32

The repetition of Octavius’s ‘accustomed’ (L. ‘solent’/‘solitos’) makes Fridericus’s mock-comparison particularly jeering in tone. To this gibe Octavius replies, with great dignity: I pass over the insults by which the dignity of Mohammed is torn to bits by the disparagements of his adversaries. I stick to the substance, that is, the true and sincere worship of the one eternal God.33

But soon afterwards, following a brief discussion of the need for ceremony in religion, Curtius, the other protestant participant beside Fridericus, again takes up the attack on Mohammed, alleging that he told deliberate lies ‘to entice the untutored minds of the common people’.34 These rebukes are tinged with sarcasm again. Fridericus’s criticism of promises of a sensual paradise is taken up by Salomon, the Jewish participant. Much more moderate in tone, he claims it is wrong and dangerous ‘to offer men wicked pleasures in place of virtue and piety and to draw the unlearned by false promises beyond what is right’.35 Very interestingly, Octavius’s reply to this is in accord with views of religion and secular sovereignty which had been pioneered by Bodin in texts previous to the Colloquium. In these writings on political theory, some translated into English as early as 1606,36 Bodin presented an absolutist and Politique vision of state and church which promoted the maintenance of good social order above all else. Octavius begins ‘I greatly admire the sentiment of Xenophon and Plato, namely, that it is justifiable and always has been justifiable for magistrates and physicians, as well as the nurses of infants, to lie to the people for the sake of the republic.’37 Salomon replies to this by expressing a dislike of Octavius’s ‘lawgiver’ Mohammed using such lying tactics, but Octavius defends them as a means to a good end, for example the conversion to monotheistic beliefs of ‘the peoples of Asia and Africa’.

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Next the discussion becomes quite heated again, this time about the acceptability of Arianism, which Octavius claims is a precursor to Islam. Just then the Roman Catholic host, Coronaeus, ‘dismissed the gathering’. He halts the conversation, literally mid-sentence, by announcing the topic of an even more exciting one to follow, ‘whether it is right for a good man to feel otherwise about religion than he confesses publicly’.38 He then calls the participants away to dinner, since, according to Bodin, ‘he realized the discussion about the most serious matters would have been drawn out too long’.39 What is going on here is very complicated and interesting, not just in terms of ideas, but also in terms of drama. For one thing, it is evident that Coronaeus is acting as a peacemaker, and is aware that some unfairness has been suffered by Octavius. Thus we are told that he announces the continuation of the discussion after dinner ‘so as not to seem to deny Octavius the right to speak’. Indeed Coronaeus and his creator Bodin do more than this in defense of Octavius’s beleaguered position. We are told that at the start of the dinner hastily announced to forestall any further harassing of Octavius the host Coronaeus commands the reading out aloud of part of a poetic tragedy written by Octavius. Presumably this would be a philosophical closet drama with an Islamic setting of the sort that the aristocratic Sir Fulke Greville, for example, produced in England. We are also told that Coronaeus will use this very passage as a starting point for the next debates. It is, moreover, a passage distinctly echoing Bodin’s own views on the subject of sovereignty.40 Thus poetic art composed by a Mohammedan civilizes, informs and motivates the discussions held in Catholic Coronaeus’s house. And, in fact, Bodin repeatedly assigns to Octavius views echoing his own. For instance, the absolutist conception of sovereignty championed by Bodin is echoed in a verse just mentioned from Octavius’s play: ‘Let there be one all powerful commander for earth.’41 Furthermore Octavius’s remarks on the freeing of Mohammedan slaves in exchange for their conversion to Islam, although derided by Lutheran Fridericus, actually echoes a topic Bodin had pursued earlier and at length and in a way that showed strong approval of Islam. This begins when in Book One, Chapter five of his 1576 Six Books of the Commonwealth Bodin claims that the institution of slavery, which had been universal from classical times and earlier until up to about 1200–1300, alarmingly is becoming ‘againe approved, by the great agreement and consent of almost all nations’.42 He notes, however, that so far France had remained resistant to slavery, as it had been for over four hundred years, and that thankfully even ‘slaves of [foreign] strangers so soon as they set foot within Fraunce become franke & free’.43 In view of such challenges Bodin opens the question as to ‘Whether slaverie be naturall & profitable to a Commonweale, or contrarie

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unto nature and unprofitable?’44 Defying widespread views, traditional opinion and Aristotle’s authority, Bodin sides with ‘the better’ anti-slavery position of contemporary French lawgivers,45 and concludes: Wherefore seeing it is proued by the examples of so many worlds of years, so many inconveniences of rebellions, servile warres, conspiracies eversions and chaunges to have happened unto Commonweals by slaves; so many murthers, cruelties, and detestable villanies to haue bene committed upon the persons of slaves by their lords and masters: who can doubt to affirme it to be a thing most pernitious and daungerous to have brought them into a Commonweale; or having cast them off, to receive them againe?46

Bodin’s chief fear is that a revived use of slavery, with its inevitable cruelties and dangers, might return to infect and destroy France, as it had many former civilizations.47 In the same discussion Bodin explains the decline in most Christian countries by about 1250 of the institutions of slavery. He attributes this freeing of slaves to an ‘imitation’ of ‘the law of Mohamet, who set at liberty all them of his religion’.48 Thanking Mohammedan ideas and practices for first establishing a better moral standard, which was then imitated by Christians and Jews,49 Bodin clearly stands out against those who would harshly berate Islamic civilization. Implicitly this would include certain participants in his Colloquium, and particularly Fridericus. Of course we must remember that Bodin wrote at a time of increasing and cruel New World slavery which had led to the wellknown scandalized writings of (among many others) the Spanish Dominican bishop Bartolome de las Casas, the Spanish Dominican jurist Francisco de Vitoria, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne and the Italian traveler Girolamo Benzoni.50 In this context then, even apart from Bodin’s theory of a historical role of Islam in the freeing of slaves in Christendom, the contemporary Islamic practice of encouraging the conversion of slaves and then freeing them morally trumped many Christian practices. Bodin’s exposure of such contrariant thinking is surprising enough; perhaps even more surprising is the fact that Bodin encapsulates this thinking in his Colloquium not as doctrine, but rather as a viewpoint discoverable only when we closely consider a dramatized cross-cultural dialogue that leaves room for robust and even sometimes quite rowdy exchanges. To return to Shakespeare, we may first note that whatever his religious inclination,51 he was no Calvinist. The obsessive moral prying of an Angelo in Measure for Measure, and the preening sense of moral desert of the hypocritical ‘puritan’ Malvolio in Twelfth Night are not to his taste, and these would have been associated in his age with the enthusiastic supporters of Reform. Although he says very little directly, only making such passing references as those to a hypocritical puritan clergyman’s Genevan ‘black gown of a big heart’ and to ‘a spleeny Lutheran’,52 it is clear that Shakespeare’s work implies a moral stance

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unlike that of the French Church in London. And yet Shakespeare was willingly intimate with the Mountjoys and Belots of his world, perhaps even fascinated by them. And an active fascination with that in humanity which is different and challenging is not necessarily incompatible with an enjoyment of robust, perhaps even somewhat rough, conversations concerning those differences. Models of such conversations appear both in Bodin’s Colloquium and in several of Shakespeare’s plays. Of course this implies no claim that Bodin directly influenced Shakespeare, but it does suggest that the culture of their time offered a potential that both in common could exploit. Space permits only brief Shakespearean examples. One is seen if a certain comic reading is accepted of the ‘four captains’ scene in Act 3 of King Henry V. This episode shows an encounter between the English Captain Gower, the Welsh Captain Fluellen, the Scottish Captain Jamy and the Irish Captain MacMorris, all in Henry’s service in France. The context here of ethnic encounter differs from that in Bodin’s work in that it occurs in an army enduring the hurry and stress of war, and in that Hal’s military men are also naturally more irascible than the leisured and cultured dialogists at Coronaeus’s house. I hope it will not seem a Fluellenism to describe on the other hand analogies that pertain: Shakespeare’s captains differ in nationality, Bodin’s debaters differ in religious outlook; the captains set out to compare views on military strategy, the debaters do the same about faith. In Shakespeare’s scene discord emerges quickly when the unfortunately prolix Welsh Captain Fluellen, speaking to the Irish Captain MacMorris, sets out to expound to him views about persons ‘of your nation’. Anticipating an ethnic slur, MacMorris breaks in enraged: ‘Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain and a bastard and a knave and a rascal? What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?’ (3.3.66–8). Tempers fray quickly, and soon MacMorris offers ‘I will cut off your head’ (3.3.76). Captain Gower then intervenes with, ‘Gentlemen both, you will mistake each other’ and Captain Jamy backs him up with the immediate comment ‘Ah, that’s a foul fault’ (3.3.77–8). Now Gower’s remark has been interpreted variously,53 but in addition to other readings one with a sharply comic import needs to be considered. In this the threats of violence that come before are intentionally and entirely ignored by Gower, and this is done in a ‘deadpan’ manner. So in Gower’s ‘Gentlemen … you will mistake …’ the word ‘will’ predictively expresses a possible future while deliberately eliding the immediate past. This hypothetical concern of Gower about what might happen is comic, coming as it does right on the heels of what just has happened. By pretending to selective deafness or stupidity, and thereby in a sense canceling what has just happened and replacing it with an alternative reality, Gower of course offers both antagonists a face-saving alternative to

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acting on their just-made threats. Jamy’s daft mock-sagacious comment that to ‘mistake each other’ is a ‘foul fault’ neatly matches, and even overtops, Gower’s gesture; it is hyper-unaware of the just-heard angry threats of decapitation. So Jamy’s comic understatement backs up as well as unmasks Gower’s, while both open up a way to bypass impending conflict. A very similar pattern is seen in Bodin’s Coronaeus remarking, in the face of ethnic-religious dissent, that dinner is ready. This is topped and unmasked at once in the omniscient narrator’s (Bodin’s) remark that at this point ‘[Coronaeus] realized the discussion about the most serious matters would have been drawn out too long’. In a similar vein of humor both these remarks, like Gower’s and Jamy’s, mock-ignore, and thus annul, a clash which might otherwise produce destructive or dangerous hatreds or resentments. Sadly, dangerous or destructive ethnic conflicts – religious, national or any other – cannot always be countered by such tactics. A presupposition common to both Bodin’s and Shakespeare’s comic dramatizations of conflict-avoidance is that the participants whose encounters threaten to degenerate into strife have, originally, interests in common implying a motive to continue their association. This circumstance can be further explored. In the Shakespeare and Bodin texts the protagonists may be drawn together by some or all of simple curiosity, a need to work together or a perceived need for coexistence in a world shrunken by travel, migration and trade. But in addition, in both cases, there is an implied epistemological motivation for a cross-cultural dialogue. That is, the participants in both dramatized encounters set out to compare their own with others’ views in order to increase their grasp of matters for which they have a strong desire for competence or knowledge, be these matters the best means to wage war or to worship God. Desire, together with a perceived possibility of some shared work toward fulfilling it, is what (in all cases in Shakespeare’s plays) is seen to bridge national, cultural or ethnic differences (or tragically to fail to bridge them). These differences may also be of gender; there are a number of Shakespeare plays in which the sexes are seen to be divided as if of different nations or sects. The counter force to a resulting suspicion, discord or separation here, of course, is erotic desire. The Merchant of Venice is perhaps the most interesting of these plays, but an earlier and simpler Shakespearean example of gender intolerance, suspicion and even fear can more readily be perceived in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The play’s initiating premise is that three young male courtiers and the King of Navarre have taken vows to resist all sensuality in favor of their self-supposed higher philosophical calling. They reject dealings with women in general as adverse

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to their aspirations, and in particular deny proper courtesy and hospitality to the visiting Princess and her three ladies of France. Lord Biron, who is the wittiest and most insightful of the courtiers, and the one most dubious of the policy of Navarre, finds himself in love, or at least in desire. He very revealingly expresses far more than a mere annoyance that his new passion will make him forsworn. Indeed, albeit with comic exaggeration, he expresses a general sexual fear or loathing not entirely unlike the misogyny of a tragic Lear, Timon or Leontes. Thus in soliloquy he deplores that he must woo: A woman, that is like a German clock, Still a-repairing, ever out of frame, And never going aright, being a watch, But being watched that it may still go right. Nay, to be perjured, which is worst of all, And among three to love the worst of all – A whitely wanton with a velvet brow, With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes – Ay, and, by heaven, one that will do the deed Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard. And I to sigh for her, to watch for her, To pray for her – go to, it is a plague That Cupid will impose for my neglect Of his almighty dreadful little might. (3.1.185–98)

The resentment expressed here leads on to a comically maladroit courtship, and eventually repentance. But the initial gulf seen in the play between male and female is not bridged; Love’s Labour’s Lost ends without marriages, or even assurances that the marriages it posits will ever take place. Prejudice, bigotry, hatred, resentment – and their opposites openness, curiosity, finding human otherness intriguing or charming, and even an impetus toward universal human brotherhood54 – are features identifiable in Shakespearian contexts as widely differing as The Merchant of Venice, Othello or The Tempest, and also in much less obvious contexts such as Love’s Labour’s Lost, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Much Ado About Nothing. Lacking room for further examples, I will conclude rather by remarking briefly on how certain social modes or practices are represented as supporting tolerance equally in Bodin’s Colloquium and in a number of Shakespeare plays. The first of these modes has already been remarked upon: it is a toleranceallowing kind of robust humor in which jokes relating to difference of outlook or ethnicity need not be savage or denigratory. Such humor, though, may have an ‘edge’. In addition to the examples cited above of jokes deflecting an ethnic clash, we can also look, for instance, to Beatrice’s and Benedick’s cross-gender

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banter. This joking encourages the couple to bridge a gulf of opposed outlooks or presumptions far better than do the humorless Hero and Claudio of the same play. Another tolerance-promoting mode or practice is conviviality. Bodin’s host Coronaeus soothes tempers and encourages dialogue by offering his guests feasts of food, music and poetry. Shakespeare also shows the positive powers of conviviality to overcome rancor (where contention still persists) when in The Taming of the Shrew one of the competitors over Bianca proposes to the other suitors: Please ye we may contrive this afternoon, And quaff carouses to our mistress’ health, And do as adversaries do in law – Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends. (1.2.276–9)

Yet, as has been often noted, Shakespeare more typically depicts disrupted or spoiled festivity. For instance, the non-marriages following from inadequate hospitality and abortive festivity, seen in Love’s Labour’s Lost, connect a breakdown of conviviality with a possible loss of a vital connection involving a failure of tolerance. In the recollected times preceding the start of The Tempest, Prospero and Caliban had occupied a household where feasting and learning were combined; the breakdown of that means to learning and accord is bitter and destructive; this arguably mirrored an actual inter-ethnic tragedy known to Shakespeare and his milieu of circa 1606–10.55 Or again, the disaster of a feast shared by a Jew and Christians turning into a cheat is arguably a major motivation for Shylock’s hatred in The Merchant of Venice. That Shakespeare often depicted a loss or lack of tolerance as tragic proves how centrally important certain conceptions of tolerance were for him and his age. Just how those conceptions worked, and worked into Shakespearean theatrical constructions, is surely worthy of further study.

NOTES References given in notes can be found in the list of Works Cited following, as well as in the Yearbook bibliography. 1.

2.

All citations of Shakespeare texts are from Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds., William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Electronic edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Play titles are abbreviated below as in this electronic edition. Bernard Williams (1996: 25) argues that although true tolerance must depend upon satisfying this Kantian demand for respect of others’ autonomy, because this kind of

190

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 respect will always be rare it is ‘as well’ that the real world ‘practice of toleration’ does not depend upon it. And such assumed superiority was not established for very good reasons, including the palpably greater sophistication of some Eastern regions and the lack of the knowledge needed for mere survival in North America, where indigenous peoples were thriving. On these factors see respectively Barbour 2003, and Sokol 2003, especially Chapters 2, 3 and 4. The classic investigations include Jordan 1932–40 and Lecler 1960. Among many more recent studies, see Grell and Scribner 1996, Laursen and Nederman 1996, MacCulloch 1996, Pettegree 1996, Grell 1996b, Laursen and Nederman 1998, Laursen 1999, Coffey 2000, Nederman 2000, Zijlstra 2002, Murphy 2002, Kaplan 2004. A groundbreaking but rare and incomplete 1614 English book on the topic is edited in Busher 1846. On developments in the late seventeenth century and later, see Laursen 2002. See Grell 1996b. See Schickler 1892, Briggs 1978, Pettegree 1986. Pettegree, (1990: 297), states that over 50,000 settled, ‘mostly in London’, between 1540 and 1600. Grell (1996a: 1–33), devotes a whole chapter to the question of numbers and makes this complex by considering the possibility of returns of exiles to the continent, and double exile of some to England; this allows for a total immigration of 100,000 (revising others’ estimates of 200,000) between 1567 and 1590 (4), and suggests a rough estimate of 10,000 refugees in London by 1590 (5). It insists on widely fluctuating numbers in the late sixteenth century, and points out large communities outside of London. Grell (1996b) also considers in detail the re-admission by Elizabeth after the death of Mary of the Dutch and Walloon Reformed community. LRF 2.2.57–9, and on WT, see Sokol 1989. Littleton 1995: 147. If so, this would be an almost unique case where we can now detect the distinct likelihood of a Shakespearean personal impetus arising. It is matched, as far as I know, only by Shakespeare’s use in The Tempest of information and a letter probably obtained through his acquaintance with members of the Virginia Company; on this see Sokol 2003: 80–83 and 123. A widespread at least partial integration of this sort in the course of one generation is the main point illustrated, by means of a survey of wills, in Pettegree 1990. Assimilation is also investigated in Littleton 1995 and Littleton 2003. Grell (1996a: 5) suggests that in London many protestant continental refugees, especially earlier on, as in the 1560s, stayed ‘outside the confines of the foreign [stranger] churches.’ Schoenbaum 1986: 264. Schoenbaum 1981: 39. Littleton 1995: 154; a similar position is stated in Pettegree 1986: 186. Littleton 2003: 97. Referring to a slightly earlier time, Pettegree (1986: 303) points out that ‘The Returns of Aliens [1593] indicate that some 25 percent of strangers regularly attended the English parish churches.’ An overwhelming impression of this emerges from the records reproduced in French Protestant Church London, 1896, vol. 1. 1 Eliz. 1, c.2 (1558) demands compliance, prescribes punishments for violations, but does not invalidate marriages made in breech of this law.

TOLERANCE IN SHAKESPEARE 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

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A Latin or Greek translation of the Prayer Book was allowed for study in the Universities, and liturgical use of a Latin version was allowed in non-English speaking parts of Ireland. A French language Prayer Book was published by 1551 for use in the Channel Islands and Jersey, and revisions followed. The complicated story of these and many other translated versions of the Prayer Book is given in Muss-Arnolt 1914. But none of those versions would have matched the Reformation requirements of the Stranger Churches. However, the marriage gifts of gold or silver named in the first 1549 Prayer Book had disappeared by the time of the third version of 1559; Shakespeare seemingly took some implicit interest in the debates over ‘idolatry’. See Chapter 5 of Sokol and Sokol 2003. Briefly mentioned in Sokol 2001–2002 and expounded in Sokol and Sokol 2003: 73– 92, esp. 88–91. Except for the marriages of Quakers, Jews or members of the Royal family. See French Protestant Church London, 1896, vol. 1: iii. See, for instance, Baker 2002: 483. The modern editions include an English translation of an early Latin text (Bodin 1975), and an edition of an early French text (Bodin 1984). This date is argued in Bodin 1975: xxxvi–xviii note; Bodin’s authorship was confirmed at a 2006 seminar at the Warburg Institute, despite the (in my belief slim) arguments in Wootton 2002. The first complete edition was apparently that of Ludovicus Noack, Schwerin, 1857, modern reprint available as an e-text as Bodin 1970. On the early mss. see Bodin 1984, Popkin 1988. See Kuntz 1998c. Bodin 1975: 471. Remer 1996. The discussion of chromaticism and harmony occupies the start of Book IV of the text (Bodin 1975: 144–50), and the notion of ‘enharmonics’ concludes it (471). Songs are sung as well as plays read, and so on, as parts of the convivial entertainments at Coronaeus’s house. See Kuntz 1998a, b, c and d. This crucial quality is not mentioned by Kuntz. Bodin 1975: 225. Ibid. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 230. Bodin 1606. Bodin 1975: 230. Ibid., 232. Ibid. Ibid., 233. Ibid. Bodin 1606: 34. See Heller 1994 on Bodin on slavery. Bodin 1606: 41 and 42. Ibid., 33. Ibid.: he calls these ‘Lawyers’. Ibid., 44.

192 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 Ibid., 38–9 and 45. Ibid., 40. Nevertheless Bodin (ibid., 43–5), details the ‘deceit’ of many Christians, Muslims and also Jews who defy their own ordinances against enslaving converts. See particularly Montaigne’s ‘Of Coaches’ (Montaigne 1942, vol. 3: 128–51) and Benzoni ([1572] 1862) who gives striking accounts of Spanish cruelties to native Americans (even leading to mass suicide), and to African slaves. By Shakespeare’s time there were many English responses to revelations of a supposed ‘leyenda negra’ of Spanish New World atrocities, usually claiming that the English were kinder: see Sokol and Sokol 1996. I have reasons to believe that he was likely to have been, like most of his fellow Englishmen a moderate, or as Patrick Collinson (Collinson (1994: 228)) put it, a ‘parish’ Anglican – these will be argued in my forthcoming book on Shakespeare and Tolerance. AWW 1.3.93 and AIT 3.2.100. T.W Craik, in the notes to his Third Arden edition of Henry V Shakespeare (1995: 214–15), holds, for instance, that ‘you will’ means ‘you are determined’. An English manuscript c.1609–12 about Native Americans, reprinted in Strachey 1953: 19, reads ‘we are taught to acknowledge every man, that beares the Impression of Gods stampe, to be not only our neighbour, but to be our brother, howe far distinguished and removed by Seas or lands soever from vs’. See Chapter 3 of Sokol 2003.

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Bodin, Jean (1984) Colloque Entre Sept Scavans. Commentary by Francois Berriot. Geneva: Libraire Droz. Briggs, E.R. (1978) ‘Reflections upon the First Century of the Huguenot Churches in England’. Proceedings of the Huguenot Society 23: 99–119. Busher, Leonard (1846) ‘Religion’s Peace’. In Tracts on Liberty of Conscience, edited by Edward Bean Underhill. Transcript of 1646 ed. which reprints 1614. 1–82. London: The Hanserd Knollys Society. Coffey, John (2000) Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558– 1689. Harlow: Longman. Collinson, Patrick (1994) Elizabethan Essays. London: Hambledon Press. French Protestant Church, London (1896–1916) The Registers of the French Church, Threadneedle Street, 1600–1840. Edited by W.J.C. Moens and T.C.C. Fergusson. 4 vols. Lymington, Hants: Huguenot Society of London. Grell, Ole Peter (1996a) Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart London. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Grell, Ole Peter (1996b) ‘Exile and Tolerance’. In Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, edited by Ole Peter Grell and Peter Scribner. 164–181. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grell, Ole Peter, and Peter Scribner, eds. (1996) Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heller, Henry (1994) ‘Bodin on Slavery and Primitive Accumulation’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 25: 53–65. Jordan, Wilbur K. (1932–40) The Development of Religious Toleration in England. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaplan, Benjamn J. (2004) ‘Conscience, Conflict and the Practice of Toleration’. In A Companion to the Reformation World, edited by R. Po-chia Hsia. 486–505. Oxford: Blackwell. Kuntz, Marion Leathers (1998a) ‘The Concept of Toleration in the Colloquium Heptaplomeres of Jean Bodin’. In Venice, Myth and Utopian Thought in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Marion Leathers Kuntz. Section V. 123–44. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kuntz, Marion Leathers (1998b) ‘Harmony and the Heptaplomeres of Jean Bodin’. In Venice, Myth and Utopian Thought in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Marion Leathers Kuntz. Section IV; originally 1974. 31–41. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kuntz, Marion Leathers (1998c) ‘The Home of Coronaeus in Jean Bodin’s Colloquium Heptaplomeres’. In Venice, Myth and Utopian Thought in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Marion Leathers Kuntz. Section II; originally 1985. 277–83. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Kuntz, Marion Leathers (1998d) ‘Structure, Form and Meaning in the Colloquium Heptaplomeres of Jean Bodin’. In Venice, Myth and Utopian Thought in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Marion Leathers Kuntz. Section III. n. p. Aldershot: Ashgate. Laursen, John Christian, ed. (1999) Religious Toleration: ‘The Variety of Rites’ from Cyrus to Defoe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Laursen, John Christian, ed. (2002) Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Laursen, John Christian, and Cary J. Nederman, eds. (1996) Difference and Dissent: Theories of Tolerance in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Laursen, John Christian, and Cary Nederman, eds. (1998) Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment. Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press. Lecler, Joseph (1960) Toleration and the Reformation. New York: Association Press. Littleton, Charles (1995) ‘Social Interactions of Aliens in Late Elizabethan London: Evidence from the 1593 Return and the French Church Consistory “Actes”’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society 26: 147–59. Littleton, Charles (2003) ‘Acculturation and the French Church of London, 1600–circa 1640’. In Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, edited by Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks. 90–109. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. MacCulloch, Diarmaid (1996) ‘Archbishop Cranmer: Concord and Tolerance in a Changing Church’. In Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, edited by Ole Peter Grell and Peter Scribner. 199–215. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montaigne, Michel de (1942) Essays. Translated by John Florio. 3 vols. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. Murphy, Andrew R. (2002) Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America. University Park: Penn State University Press. Muss-Arnolt, William (1914) The Book of Common Prayer Among the Nations of the World. Available at http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/MussArnolt/index.htm. London: SPCK. Nederman, Cary J. (2000) Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, C. 1100–C. 1550. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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Pettegree, Andrew (1986) Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pettegree, Andrew (1990) ‘“Thirty years on”: progress towards integration amongst the immigrant population of Elizabethan London’. In English Rural Society, 1500–1800: Essays in Honour of Joan Thirsk, edited by John Chartres and David Hey. 297–312. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pettegree, Andrew (1996) ‘The Politics of Toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–1620’. In Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, edited by Ole Peter Grell and Peter Scribner. 182–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Popkin, Richard H. (1988) ‘The Dispersion of Bodin’s Dialogues in England, Holland and Germany’, The Journal of the History of Ideas 49: 157–60. Remer, Gary (1996) Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration. University Park: Penn State University Press. Schickler, F. de (1892) Les Eglises du Refuge en Angleterre. 3 vols. Paris: Libraire Fischbacher. Schoenbaum, S. (1981) William Shakespeare: Records and Images. London: Scolar Press. Schoenbaum, S. (1986) William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life. Reprint of Oxford University Press edition, 1977. New York: New American Library. Shakespeare, William (1995) King Henry V. Edited by T.W. Craik. Third Arden ed. London: Routledge. Sokol, B.J. (1989) ‘Painted Statues, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 52: 250–53. Sokol, B.J. (2001–2002) ‘Lawful Impediments’, Around the Globe (Journal of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre) 20: 16–17. Sokol, B.J. (2003) A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Early Modern Epistemology. London: Associated University Presses. Sokol, B.J., and Mary Sokol (1996) ‘The Tempest and Legal Justification of Plantation in Virginia’, Shakespeare Yearbook 7: 353–80. Sokol, B.J., and Mary Sokol (2003) Shakespeare, Law and Marriage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strachey, William (1953) The History of Travell into Virginia Britania. Edited by Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund, transcript of the Princeton ms. presented to the Earl of Northumberland, written 1609–12. London: Hakluyt Society.

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Williams, Bernard (1996) ‘Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?’ In Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, edited by David Heyd. 18–27. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wootton, David (2002) ‘Pseudo-Bodin’s Colloquium Heptaplomeres and Bodin’s Demonomanie’. In Magie, Religion und Wissenschaften im ‘Colloquium Heptaplomeres’, edited by Karl Friedrich Faltenbacher. 175– 225. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Zijlstra, Samme (2002) ‘Anabaptism and Tolerance: Possibilities and Limitations’. In Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, edited by R. Po-chia Hsia and Henk van Nierop. 112–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART V

After Shakespeare

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Idols in Hobbes, Shakespeare, and Gay

Jonathan Lamb

The figure of prosopopeia is indeed “metaphorical,” insofar as it involves a transfer of properties from one entity to another, but resemblance is not the principle that authorizes such transfers. What is instituted through such prosopopeia resembles nothing, nothing other than itself. (Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy)

This essay poses a question about representation, or what (after Hobbes) I shall call personation, in its authorized and unauthorized modes. Under what conditions might it be possible for a personation to take place where what is represented amounts to nothing? What strain does this put upon the system of representation; what unauthorized energies does it release; and specifically in terms of the drama, what kinds of generic hybrids does it breed? The issue will be pursued anachronistically, beginning with Hobbes’s use of the theatre to define the levels of personation in a commonwealth; then I shall apply the results of that enquiry to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, drawing conclusions that I hope will contextualize one of the more startling pieces of theatrical nonsense in the eighteenth century, Gay’s The What D’Ye Call It. But I hope all sequences of the argument will remain faithful to the single organizing idea of the person as a virtual entity capable of traversing not just the frontiers of authority, genre and reason, but also those of kind and species. This is ultimately an enquiry into how things get a life, and how human beings deal with the gods. In his commentary on the sixteenth chapter of Leviathan, ‘Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated,’ Quentin Skinner invokes A Midsummer Night’s Dream to explain the system of representation that constitutes Hobbes’s Commonwealth. The idea that the state presents the person of the people, and that a sovereign in turn bears or carries the person of the state, is taken from Roman models of oratory and advocacy, but the terms in which that idea is expressed – presenting, bearing or carrying persons – are taken (as Hobbes 199

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himself observes) from the stage.1 Skinner turns to the Athenian tradesmen of Shakespeare’s play for an illustration. Their dramatization of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe involves an elaborate demonstration of the presentation of persons, both inanimate and human. Thus the players are required to ‘present the person of Moonshine’ and to ‘present Wall.’2 For his part Bottom the weaver, who plays the hero, plans to explain to the audience that he merely bears his person, and that ‘I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus.’3 By turning to the stage Hobbes and Skinner are able more fully to explore the degrees of artifice which divide a ‘Naturall Person’ (whose words and actions are considered as his own) from ‘a Feigned or Artificiall person’ (whose words and actions represent someone or something else).4 It is clear from Hobbes’s three-tier notion of the state that the artificial person authorized by the people – the commonwealth or ‘Mortall God’ (120) – proceeds to create another called the sovereign. Although authority for this double transformation derives ultimately from the natural right of each individual, it is sieved and refashioned as each successive artificial person spawns others to represent it, for in descent from the artificial person of the sovereign there are delegates such as governors, magistrates and priests. These in turn ‘personate,’ or are personated by others, including inanimate things. Indeed it is when he gets to the issue of personating things, such as churches, hospitals and bridges, that Hobbes reveals the limitless potential of the network of personation. ‘There are few things, that are uncapable of being represented by Fiction’ (113). Two different multitudes stand either side of the focal point of the Mortall God: a host of natural persons who have authored it, and a host of artificial creatures (including things) who variously bear its person or have their persons borne by it. ‘There are few things, that are uncapable of being represented by Fiction.’ It is not a phrase to Skinner’s mind. He is unhappy with it because it implies an attenuation of real political rights into total artifice. He prefers the Latin version of Leviathan, where Hobbes wrote, ‘paucae res sunt, quarum non possunt esse personae,’ or, ‘there are few things incapable of being persons.’5 Neither he nor Hobbes wants the reader to believe that a person represented by a fiction is not duly authorized. Authorization means that the original natural right belonging to an author has been successively covenanted away to actors, those who represent or personate the author. No authority is lost in this process. The owning of actions by authors, which is immediately evident in the deeds of natural persons, still occurs seriatim in the case of artificial ones. There is no action undertaken in the Commonwealth which no one owns. But it is different among the tribes of Israel and in the Roman republic where things are personated which have no basis in natural right or reality. These are idols, mate-

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rial representations in wood, stone and metal of gods that represent mere figments, ‘without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the Brain.’6 ‘An idol,’ says Hobbes on the authority of St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (8:4), ‘is nothing’ (114). It is worth probing a little further the difference between a foreign idol and an English church, hospital or bridge. The idol is nothing, refers to nothing and derives from nothing, but in Rome it was a fiction with legal status, being personated by someone recognized by the state as fit to act for the god, holding on his or her behalf ‘Possessions, and other Goods, and Rights’ (113). Such gods owned property and owned the actions attributed to them, all mediated by an official delegate. As well as property, then, the god owned a history in the form of myth or fable. But it would be impossible to trace this ownership to an original natural right possessed by a natural person. The priest or vicar of the god had authority only to represent it by fiction. The god’s right to property and narrative came solely from the motions of the brain, out of whose confusion ‘did arise the greatest part of the Religion of the Gentiles in time past, that worshipped Satyres, Faunes, Nymphs, and the like; and now adates the opinion that rude people have of Fayries, Ghosts and Goblins; and of the power of Witches’ (18). Nor is it much different with a bridge. ‘Things Inanimate cannot be Authors, nor therefore give Authority to their Actors’ (113). The actors – that is to say their overseers or trustees – get their authority from ‘those that are Owners, or Governours of those things.’ It is not clear why these owners or governors are any different from the overseer who personates the bridge. Each owns a fiction, a person that never existed as anything but stones and mortar, and one whose representation can never emerge from the trap of fictionality. The actor-overseer has no author but the actor-governor, who is in effect another actor authorized by a sovereign, himself a person of a person of the people. Yet this is no impediment to the civil life of the bridge and the Roman god; both possess endowments and the rights that go with them. The same is true of fools and madmen, to whom the state assigns guardians whose duty is to personate them; but actually what they personate is as inchoate as the ideas in which idols originate, mere motions of the brain severed from reality (446), on account of which fools and madmen are judged (like gods and bridges) incapable of authorship. But their estates and property are administered in their names. The issue is brought back to the theatre by Hobbes in De Homine, where he uses the example of Agamemnon to show how a purely artificial entity may be personated. His argument is that the mask or prosopon of the ancient theatre was always supposed to divide the actor from the figure he personated, and that even when the literal mask disappeared from the performance, the audience

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acknowledged that Agamemnon was distinct from the fiction by which his actions reached them. Skinner puts it like this: If I play the part of Agamemnon on the stage, the actions I perform in the persona of Agamemnon will be taken by the audience to be Agamemnon’s actions rather than mine. They will not ‘truly’ be taken to be Agamemnon’s actions, however, but only ‘by fiction,’ since the audience will remain aware of the fact that (as we put it in a knowingly ambiguous phrase) I am only playing. This will especially be the case, Hobbes implies, if I follow the convention of explicitly pointing out that I am merely engaged in a performance. For then it will be clear that I am only pretending to be an imaginary character, that there is no other person whom I am ‘truly’ representing, and thus that there is no one else to whom my actions can validly be attributed.7

In order to rebut Hanna Pitkin’s point, namely that actors embodying a fiction on these terms occupy the stage as purely artificial persons destitute of all authority,8 Skinner points out that plays were licensed by the Master of the Revels. The actor in the role of Agamemnon stands in the same relation to the Greek king as an overseer to a bridge, or a guardian to a lunatic, as someone vested with authority to personate them by the state. But Pitkin’s point seems good, since the authorization of a performance by a state official restores no link with the rights or attributions of natural persons, the historical Agamemnon in this case, only between one fiction (the performance) and another (the playscript). A Midsummer Night’s Dream covers all these bases, being a play exclusively concerned with the invention of fictions and their personation. At the centre of the play about the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta is another play called Pyramus and Thisbe dealing with the transformative effects of lovers’ passion, and its tendency to blur the boundaries of fiction and truth. Curling around this embedded fiction is another, promoted by the fairy powers (themselves agitated by desire), which causes the aristocratic characters to mistake their objects of true love. In all three of these nested dramas love has caused a radical change of affection: Theseus loves the woman who was his enemy; Lysander and Demetrius stop loving Hermia and love Helena instead; and Titania turns from her lovely Indian boy to dote on a monster. The justification of dramatic art – its representation of the truth in a fiction – comes under strain because here, densely thematized, are examples of the reverse, a layer of fictions displacing the real state of the case. The question is to what degree these theatrical representations can vindicate a fixed and reliable point of judgement. Helena and Bottom both experience a representational vertigo in which this fixed point is entirely lost. When Lysander and Demetrius declare their love for her, Helena is denied the part of forlorn maiden that has been hers in the play, for now she has one more lover than she needs. To sustain her role at all she must believe herself conscripted into an impromptu plot hatched by these

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two men to mock her misery. She can only find some semblance of stability for herself, that is to say, if she multiplies the fictional levels of the world in which she is acting. Her plight is mirrored in Bottom’s metamorphosis, which shoves him out of the play of Pyramus and Thisbe into another where he must take the part of the bemused object of Titania’s improbable passion. It is by no means an unpleasant interlude but it convinces him of three things; first, that his life has become a dream; second, that it could well be represented in a ballad; and third, that its fictionality is bottomless. From different sides, certainly from different orders of society, and with different sensations, Helena and Bottom find out what it is like to become purely artificial persons, creatures of fancies outside the realm of the nature of things, figments of a ‘dream and fruitless vision’ (3.2.371). In effect they are actors who know what it is like to be Agamemnon, Pyramus or Thisbe, persons without rights enveloped in a performance over which they have no control. Responsibility for their lodgment in sheer fiction is claimed by Oberon and Robin, but both of these operators have made mistakes and been unsure of what they were doing, or why. Behind them shimmers the vastly mobile mind of the poet, whose infinite inventive reach seems to set at an even greater distance the possibility of distinguishing between truth and fiction, nature and artifice. A relationship between the imagination of the poet, the lovers and the simple actors of Pyramus and Thisbe is supposed by Theseus to exist, but it is not one in which he has much faith. Of Bottom and his company he observes, ‘The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination mend them’ (5.1.210–11). Of lovers and the mad he says they are seduced by their imaginations to believe in demons and paragons; as for the poet’s mind it gives body to nothing and to things unknown (5.1.15). Imagination, he concludes, is a personifying force, ‘that if it would but apprehend some joy/ It comprehends the bringer of that joy’ (5.1.20). But then, as a lover, who is he to say? Does the love he feels for Hippolyta have its source in his own heart or in Love, the figure of the passion? The poet gives a habitation and a name to ‘airy nothing’ (5.1.16) by personifying the figments of his brain as fairy gods and their elfin agents. They proceed to recruit human actors as the persons of their fantasies, performers who are partly aware that they are ‘just playing’ (as Theseus pretends to be by analyzing the illusion in which he appears) but who are mostly absorbed and altered by fictions bred of fiction. Either way, there is no reality principle here. The poet embodies pure figments of his brain to see whether order, legislation and harmony can be framed out of them, or whether they are just nothing. Hobbes provides the political stake for this experiment insofar as the almost illimitable capacity of fiction to represent the constituent parts of the commonwealth is being tested to see whether it is a

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system that works, that is, one which marries human action to the realities of the political world, or whether it may include structural elements of ‘gloriation of mind,’ when mere idols, ‘without place, habitation, motion, or existence,’ masquerade as persons of authority.9 The acid test of this experiment in the play is the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. The restored Bottom takes the leading part, playing to an audience of restored lovers who, to their shame, are unaware how closely the performance points at them. ‘It is nothing, nothing in the world,’ says Egeus (5.1.78), a judgement their commentary largely endorses. The tradesmen’s best efforts at bearing the persons of those whom they would represent are devoted oddly enough to nonhuman objects. Once the play begins, there is no mask or prosopon for the actors playing the lovers. Quince says briefly, ‘This man is Pyramus … this beauteous lady Thisbe is’ (5.1.128–9). But he explains that Wall is represented by a man, and that another will represent Moonshine. Snout duly announces himself as the person who will act the part of Wall, and Snug introduces himself by name as the one who is to play the part of a lion. Starveling is most particular in his imitation of Moonshine, for he carries a lantern to present the moon, and he shows himself, with his thorn bush and dog, as the man in the moon – as it were a personation inside a personation, prompting Theseus to exclaim, ‘the man should be put into the lantern. How is it else the man i’th’moon?’ (5.1.241–2). Quince anticipated this double artifice when he said during the rehearsal that the actor must say he comes ‘to present the person of Moonshine’ (3.1.55–7), that is, to seem to be the man who makes a person of the moon. Perhaps disoriented by these mises en abyme and by the audience’s wit, Starveling attempts an extempore distinction between fiction and action, his artificial and natural persons, by telling the quibblers, ‘The lantern is the moon, I the man i’th’moon, and this thorn bush my thorn bush, and this dog my dog’ (5.1.252–4). But whether these are the properties of the moon, or the man in the moon, or the actor who plays that man, is left in the dark. What began as a courtesy to verisimilitude – human scenery – and an insurance against its more alarming effects – a lion that can say he is not really a lion – has turned into something else. The rhetoric of the play is largely devoted to confirming the success of these representations and personations by addressing them in high-strained apostrophes: ‘O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall … O wicked wall … I thank thee, Moon … O wherefore Nature didst thou lions frame?’ Quince began the play by affirming the importance of these three characters (‘Let Lion, Moonshine, Wall … at large discourse’ (5.1.149–50)), and at the end Theseus notes, with Wall down, ‘Moonshine and Lion are left to bury the dead’ (5.1.342). Starveling, Snout and Quince had been going to

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play the parts of the lovers’ parents, but they have been written out. The displacement of the human by the nonhuman shapes the argument as well as the action, for according to Quince’s prologue it is not Thisbe but her mantle which is slain (5.1.144). The importance of inanimate or nonhuman things as rhetorical tennis balls was evident during the misprisions of the lovers, who in the whirlwinds of their passion variously assailed each other with the names of dog, burr, dwarf, cat, maypole, puppet (3.2). In Ovid’s story of Pyramus and Thisbe the precedent is set of addressing the inanimate as persons: ‘O wall … . O all ye lions … O tree,’ and so on (1.183–9).10 When Psyche’s lamp drops oil upon her lover in The Golden Ass, she exclaims, ‘O rash and bolde lampe … how darest thou bee so bold as to burne the god of all fire?’11 Peter Holland points out how Shakespeare parodies the extravagant exclamations of Gascoigne’s Jocasta and even of the Nurse in his own Romeo and Juliet.12 But in this demotic Pyramus and Thisbe the physical intimacy as well as the rhetorical prominence of the thing personified is extraordinary. Thisbe confesses to Wall, ‘My cherry lips have often kissed thy stones, / Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee.’ And when Pyramus demands a kiss, she laments, ‘I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all’ (5.1.189–90, 200). The broad humour emphasizes the interposition of the actual stuff of the wall’s person in what amounts to (in Hobbes’s terms) an accidental idolatry. He says, To worship an Image, is voluntarily to doe those externall acts, which are signes of honoring either the matter of the Image, which is Wood, Stone, Metall, or some other visible creature; or the Phantasme of the brain, for the resemblance, or representation whereof, the matter was formed and figured; or both together, as one animate Body, composed of the matter and the Phantasme, as of a Body and Soule.13

Hobbes gives the example of the throne (which he also calls the stool) of a prince that is reverenced on account of the power and authority it represents. ‘But if hee that doth it, should suppose the Soule of the Prince to be in the Stool, or should present a Petition to the Stool, it were … Idolatry’ (449). Within the representational system of Leviathan however the succession of images does not vitiate the reality of power and authority, ‘So an earthly Soveraign may be called the Image of God: And an inferiour Magistrate the Image of an earthly Soveraign’ (448). This is the standard distinction in iconoclastic discourse between prototype or eidolon and similitude or simulacrum, dividing an image consubstantial with what it represents from one which represents a separate or absent being. Both Hobbes and Carlo Ginzburg regard the former as ‘intrinsically meaningless signs,’14 but Hobbes concedes that an idol is the material form of a fantastic idea. He puts it as follows: ‘But in these Idols,

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as they are originally in the Brain, and as they are painted, carved, moulded, or moulten in matter, there is a similitude of the one to the other, for which the Materiall Body made by Art, may be said to be the Image of the Phantasticall Idoll made by Nature’ (448). The image is not so much a representation as a manifestation of the idea. Answerable to the multitude of human figures enclosed within the body of Leviathan on the titlepage of his book, the idol encloses a multitude of fancies within the extraordinary shape of wrought matter; the difference is they bear analogy with nothing else. Hobbes’s example is the centaur, the mixture of horse and human, ‘a Figure [made up] out of the parts of divers creatures’ (448) and found nowhere but among the motions of the brain. John Locke observes that fantastic ideas are those ‘made up of such Collections of simple Ideas, as were really never united, never were found together in any Substance; v.g. a rational Creature, consisting of a Horse’s Head, joined to a body of humane shape.’15 In his essay on idols Carlo Ginzburg cites Origen’s attack on all the fantastic combinations of bodies, heads and species to be found in idols, a chaos which Aquinas exemplified as the head of a horse joined to a human body.16 Lucretius spends time showing the impossibility of a creature framed half of a horse’s body and half of man’s, ‘I say this that you may not believe that Centaurs can be formed or be, composed of man and the seed of the burden-bearing horse.’17 This most potent image of the idol, idolness itself, is achieved in Bottom’s metamorphosis. The correspondence between the multifarious contents of the brain of the poet and all its various personations on the stage, actors authored out of thin air, is concentrated in this hybrid figure. Titania worships it idolatrously, enthralled by its shape, smitten by its properties, its fair ears, sleek head and amiable cheeks. She adores it just as other idolaters fall down before wrought metal, wood and stone, believing it to be consubstantial with the presence of a god. Titania’s fondness for this idol, deriving from the lewd interlude of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, where a noblewoman falls in love with Lucius while he is still in the shape of an ass, is nevertheless rendered in verse of transcendent sweetness, as of a god to a mortal, although here Titania plays the mortal’s part: ‘Come, sit thee down upon this flow’ry bed, / While I thy amiable cheeks do coy, / And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head, / And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy’ (4.1.1–3). The mistaken object of passion so lusciously accosted glances in the direction of Wall, with its properties of stones, lime and hair on which Thisbe lavishes her kisses, and also towards the remarkable episode of Psyche’s vision of Cupid in Apuleius’ story. When she finally beholds her invisible spouse she is enthralled with the details of his body, ‘his haires of gold … his neck more white than milk, his purple cheeks … his tender

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plume feathers, dispersed upon his sholders like shining flours, & trembling hither & thither.’18 The passion of a woman for a lover of doubtful shape, undimmed by proof that he is not human, attaches itself to the specific properties of his being, or what Hobbes calls ‘the visible creature.’ The referent of these instances of misprision is a thing so diversely compounded of the material outworks of imaginative effort that it provokes and deserves the emotion being spent on it. Bottom’s ass’s head fulfils the idol’s role much better than Hermia, Demetrius and Lysander, whose feelings shatter into impatience and vituperation as they either worship the wrong object or disdain the right one. This is where Bottom and his company have the edge over their audience. They know the importance of things, and how necessary it is to bear the person of a thing properly, for failure leads to destructive passion and a failure to adore the thing as it deserves. That would be an offence against imagination, if not the god. Even in the domain of things thus represented it is not always easy to assign the property of the material part. Thisbe wishes she could kiss Pyramus instead of Wall’s roughcast, stone, lime and hair. Starveling is not sure where to place dog and thornbush in the presentation of Moonshine. But things have an active life and are addressed as personified agents, without definite or indefinite articles. That is to say they are personifications both in the sense of having their persons borne by someone else, and in the sense of being greeted as causes of their own effects, as Moonshine is of light at night, Lion of mayhem, Wall of illicit communication. As Theseus says, when we apprehend joy we suppose the bringer of that joy, namely Joy (5.1.19–20). So the things of this play act simultaneously as abstractions and as propertied entities, like Hobbes’s Roman gods, or the stool of a prince. Under this idolatrous regime it is when a thing is most fictional that it enjoys the maximum degree of physical presence; similarly a god is never so much a god as when he or she is incarnated in wood, stone and metal. Psyche is a mortal god, a virgin of surpassing beauty presenting Venus’ majesty on earth, ‘the Vicar of [her] name’;19 accordingly she is worshipped as a thing, ‘Every one marveled at her divine beauty, as it were some Image well painted and set out’ (98). It is also true that in this state of maximum visibility and tactility the god attracts the most powerful feelings of its devotees. Psyche’s cult is so popular that Venus’ altars are deserted, her ceremonies neglected. Bottom metamorphosed sits between the two positions of abstraction and materiality. On one hand he incarnates and expresses the myriad figments of a poet’s brain; on the other he exhibits physical attributes so unique they command the eyes, lips and fingers of his lover. To this extent it is never sure whether he is the product of imagination or its trigger. Melville tried to give some sense of the wonder of this equivalence in his picture of Leviathan proceeding across the ocean enveloped in the vapour of

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his own spout. This specific acrid product of a whale’s lungs Ishmael fancies is also the physical emanation from the motion of its incommunicable thoughts, pulsing in time to them and occasionally inspired by the glory of a rainbow, the iridescence of imagination.20 Melville exhibits this equivalence under the heading of property. A whale seen in this state of glorious meditation is the property of no one not fit to present it. ‘For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter’ (294). Accordingly, the poet of leviathan establishes his credentials in the corresponding image of creative thought, for while writing of the whale: ‘I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head … a certain semi-visible steam’ (324). More prosaically whales are capable of making properties on their own account. The decision of Lord Ellenborough determined that a fish making off with harpoons and line still attached to it had ‘acquired a property in those articles’ (345). Moby Dick is rich in both kinds of property, comprising the unownable quality of a self-existent phenomenon and the many corkscrewed lances, harpoons and tangled lines festooning his white body; and Ishmael tries to tell the story of both. It is hard to say exactly how Bottom occupies his role as the idol of imagination. The recursive puns upon his transformation (‘Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream’ (4.1.203)) are strangely insistent upon the stark division between the intoxicating limitlessness of the dream and the narrowness of human faculties. The vision he has enjoyed is ‘past the wit of man … man is but an ass … no man can tell what … man is but a patched fool … the eye of man hath not heard’ and so on. Bottom treasures the uninterpretable uniqueness of the experience, which belonged to what he was when he had it, namely not a man. To announce this in words he is obliged to dismantle links with the species – man – that would mistake what he was by translating it back into anthropomorphic terms. So he fashions a sort of hollow defined by negatives, a place of nonhumanity where no man can possess his meaning or describe his person; for if a man were to do so, the metamorphosis would be a travesty and would make no sense. Access to the wonder of his change is strictly in terms of the properties of an ass: the ears, head and cheeks worshipped by Titania. So Bottom demonstrates a peculiar fidelity to his joint embodiment as dream and shape, which constitutes his property and his power. He is a sort of dramaturgical whale, visible both as an unreadable outline and as a physical trace. Like Thrasileon the bandit in The Golden Ass who, once he has been clothed in a bearskin, resolves to fight and die only as a bear, utterly committed to the conceit of his transformation, so Bottom’s retrospective loyalty to his incarna-

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tion as an idol is absolute; it is what he owns, and he defends it against the wit that might remove it, or transpose it. So it is worth emphasizing the difference between personation as a fiction of delegation within the state, and personation as a result of imaginative work. Wall may not be allowed to be an author, but owing to its materialization as a purely fictive person it acquires property not by virtue of an overseer or a governor but by virtue of an essence that is more than nominal. This is owing to that attribute of self-existence in Wall that is productive of wallish effects. Locke offers this distinction: ‘The nominal Essence of Gold, is that complex Idea the word Gold stands for, let it be, for instance, a Body yellow, of a certain weight, malleable, fusible, and fixed. But the real Essence is the constitution of the insensible Parts of that Body, on which those Qualities, and all the other Properties depend.’21 It is not for us to know these qualities or properties, being destitute of senses acute enough to grasp them. But if someone were to acquire the necessary fineness of sight and delicacy of touch, they would be metamorphosed and, like Bottom, dwell ‘in a quite different World from other People: Nothing would appear the same to him, and others’ (303). They would know what it is in a wall that makes it Wall. Starveling tries to disentangle his property from the property of Moonshine so that he might not have to get inside the lantern, and enter the strange world of the man in the moon. Things with properties all their own are liable to disconcert their human company because the equivalence between these idols and the teeming imaginations that formed them is reflected in a certain extravagance. Thus the deluge in Ovid introduces a world of things so active they invert the order of nature and displace human beings: ‘And where but tother day before did feede the hungry Gote, / The ugly Seales and Porkepisces now to and fro did flote. / The Sea nymphes wondred under waves the townes and groves to see, / And Dolphines played among the tops and boughs of every tree.’22 The images flying from the surfaces of things, and striking our minds to make them move, locate their most brilliant effects (according to Lucretius) in the theatre, where the yellow, red and purple awnings flash their colours so rapidly there are ‘fixed outlines of shapes and of finest texture which flit about everywhere, but singly and separately cannot be seen.’23 Thisbe pays distracted testimony to Pyramus’s manifold qualities in the kaleidoscope of misplaced colours and figures out of which she fashions the memorial of his face, a speech whose passionate improprieties operate like Bottom’s synaesthesias (‘the eye of man hath not heard …’) in demonstrating how magnanimity expresses itself in material diversity: ‘These lily lips, / This cherry nose, / These yellow cowslip cheeks …’ (5.1.324–5). The passion that veers around the properties of idols is both the effect and the cause of their shape. At its most intense the impulse which first lodged itself

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in a specific material form is once again excited by it. Adam Smith remarks how we love what we have long possessed, a snuff-box or a pen-knife, and if the owner should break or lose them, ‘he is vexed out of all proportion to the value of the damage.’ Contrariwise, ‘We are angry, for a moment, even at the stone that hurts us. A child beats it, a dog barks at it, a choleric man is apt to curse it.’24 What we feel for such things is equal to the virtue or force that is supposed to be lodged in them, which has nothing at all to do with public judgements of value, charm or insensibility. Miguel Tamen cites Quintilian to the effect that personification is a method of keeping warm our wrath with inanimate things, and he comments on the institutional dimension of this desire for revenge, or what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls ‘doctrine,’ which preserves not the thing but the person of the thing as a means of wreaking vengeance upon it.25 No wonder then that these doctrines or institutions are haunted by the ghosts of the emotions they once aroused. The question is, what institution and what doctrine? Is it the law, as Tamen suggests, or the stage? As Shakespeare’s rustics go about to perform a play of ‘very tragical mirth,’ persons of things are constructed out of willing human bodies, and made available for passionate apostrophes. The rejection of the human helps to explain the prominence of things and animals in the final version of Pyramus and Thisbe. Passion is most powerfully expressed towards things or in the presence of things, chiefly by actors who have borne the persons of things or briefly been a thing. And in the condition of a thing, Bottom has been passionately addressed by a spirit, just as he apostrophizes Wall and Moon. Starveling’s pedantic apportionment of ownership within his presentation of Moonshine may be understood as deference for the property of the thing, likewise Snout’s presentation of Wall with its careful attention to its hole or chink, its loam, roughcast and stone shows the limits of what he can own as its person. These things are idols, and treated with the same extremes of reverence and expostulation reserved for the material forms of other gods. The passion is proportionate to the belief that matter may be the proper dwelling place of divinity. So there are no passionate encounters in this play that do not require the proximity of things to humans or the imputed transformation of humans into things. This is faithful to the Ovidian original, where the blood of the lovers is preserved forever in the dark red fruit of the mulberry tree. It is also faithful to Hobbes’s belief that on the stage ‘not truth, but Image, maketh passion.’26 The mortal god of his Commonwealth operates on such a stage, transacting between the multitude of fictions that sustains the illusion of represented unity, and the multitude of subjects who may or may not believe in it. In the preface to his play within a play, The What D’Ye Call It (1715), John Gay cites A Midsummer Night’s Dream to justify his use of actors who bear the

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persons of other persons and other things (or semi-things), such as a chorus of Sighs and Groans and the ghost of an embryo. ‘Shakespeare hath some characters of this sort, as a speaking wall, and Moonshine.’27 The loose resemblance of his piece to Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – both involve dramatic performances mounted by the poor in order to entertain the rich and powerful – was no accident. He had collaborated with Richard Leveridge who (clearly under the influence of The What D’Ye Call It) wrote The Comic Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe the following year (1716). In his preface, Leveridge plunders Gay’s, demanding the reason why ‘I may not turn Moonshine into a Minstrel, the Lion and Stone Wall into Songsters; and make them as Diverting as a Dance of Chairs and Butterflies have been in one of our most Celebrated British Entertainments?’28 Gay had written, ‘Mr D’Urfey of our own nation has given all the fowls of the air the faculty of speech equal with the parrot. Swans and elbow-chairs in the Opera of Dioclesian have danced upon the English Stage with good success. Shakespear hath … a speaking wall.’29 In fact, personated things do not take a very large part in Gay’s play, but things themselves have an importance arising from the simplicity of the characters, the force of their feelings and the generic indeterminacy of the piece. This latter novelty seems to engage the larger part of Gay’s attention, his invention of the first ‘tragic-comi-pastoral farce.’ This owes something to Peter Quince’s description of his play as ‘The Most Lamentable Comedy’ (1.2.11), and his subsequent promise of ‘very tragical mirth’ (5.1.57). In Gay’s opinion his own handling of the mixture is distinguished from tragi-comedy by the impossibility of identifying the constituent generic parts. The four ingredients cannot be ‘distinguished or separated.’30 So the prologue promises that the play will give the audience a variety of opportunities for response, it ‘may make you laugh, or cry … move with distress, or tickle you with satyr’ (41). This indeterminate play of affect is aided, and possibly controlled, by Gay’s use (on Bossu’s authority) of concealed sentences or morals, otherwise irony. But in this case irony is supposed not to be inimical to the passions possible to be represented in a burlesque format. So the complicated relation between the novelty of the poet’s inventions and their clownish exemplification on a rural stage are referred, like Bottom’s, to warnings against too easy an interpretation of the action. To give further weight to these strictures, Gay issued in the same year A Complete Key to the last New Farce, The What D’Ye Call It. It is a mock-negotiation between the apparent irregularities of the action and the author’s motives for inventing them, ‘these odd Fancies in the [poet’s] Brain.’31 It aims to spot all the satirical allusions to heroic tragedy that are allegedly quilted together in a production that only pretends to naïvety. The critical mind Gay is imper-

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sonating cannot admit that anything in the play is there for its own sake; it must be a parody of Rowe, Dryden, Addison or Otway. Thus in the execution scene many allusions are found to Venice Preserved, and the writer of the Key remarks, ‘The Solemnity of parting with dying Friends, which has so often drawn Tears … is here made a Subject of Merriment’ (18). If every incidental phrase or scene in the farce recalls distinctly a tragic parallel, emphasizing its incongruity in order to fetch a laugh, not much would survive of the effects the poet claims for his new genre in the Preface. Why would we feel distress at the mockery of distress; or laugh at the absurd trace of pathos? The author of the Key however has no other point to make: ‘The Application of a fine well-work’d Passion to a mean Object certainly makes it Ridiculous … and the most moving Passages in all the Antients … may by this means be sunk into Contempt’ ([iv]). How might Gay’s irony have infiltrated such an obtuse argument? Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream the matter at hand is the presentation of persons. In this story of a peasant (Thomas Filbert) forced to enlist because Dorcas falsely claims he is the father of her child, and another (Timothy Peascod) who is to be shot for desertion, the descent of authority through the persons of the arch-person of the sovereign instigates the action on two levels. Within the play itself, recruitment for the army has principally been organized by magistrates such as Sir Roger, Sir Humphrey and the Justice, who have sent generations of men off to Flanders to be killed or maimed as punishment for poaching fish and game, as well as for fornication. They cite ‘his gracious Majesty’ as their authority (42), and a train of ghosts and a chorus of Sighs and Groans rise up to accuse their inhumanity. However, the law issues a reprieve for Peascod at the very moment that the Sergeant who was arranging for his execution is arrested for stealing a horse. Peascod is naturally pleased with this outcome, and tries to express his pleasure by running changes on the statute that subordinates human life to the ownership of a horse: ‘He shall be hang’d that steals a mare’ (55). The play itself has been commissioned by Sir Roger, lord of the manor and a real magistrate, presumably with the idea of affording a Christmas entertainment that exemplifies the mercy as well as the awfulness of the law. So rather than love, which dominates the action of Pyramus and Thisbe and the context of its rehearsal and performance, the law is principal mover in The What D’Ye Call It, with love in second place, as it is again in Gay’s masterpiece The Beggar’s Opera, whose germ is clearly visible here. So when he surveys the cast, Sir Roger sees very little difference between the persons presented in the play, and the tenants who do the presenting. He says, ‘We have so fitted the parts of my tenants, that every man talks in his own way! – and then we have made just three justices in the play, to be play’d by us three justices of the

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Quorum’ (39). For their part it is true, they play themselves smoking and drinking and passing sentence; but it is different with the tenants. Filbert is played by Sir Roger’s son Thomas, who is the father not of Dorcas’s child but of Kitty’s, the steward’s daughter, who plays the part of the innocent virgin Kitty Carrot to whom Filbert is eventually married – really married by a ruse of the steward, who has a genuine curate perform the ceremony in the play. So the smooth parallel between the two sorts of persons supposed by Sir Roger – personations deriving from sovereign authority twinned with personations deriving from his own – breaks down, together with the system of obedience it upholds. The clergyman, a person of authority who only pretends to be a presented person in the performance, marries two people who are on the stage only pretending to talk as tenants ‘in their own way,’ while secretly settling their own business. Thus the three of them snatch some justice from a Justice who otherwise would not easily have parted with it. This state of affairs is signaled by an insistent use of doublets, chiefly by Sir Roger, intended to affirm the solidity of theatrical presentations. ‘Why neighbours, you know, experience, experience,’ he says, alluding to his thorough knowledge of the world and the stage, before announcing, ‘The Prologue, the Prologue’ (39–40), his introduction to a performance indistinguishable from real life. Of Othello he recalls, ‘and he would put out the light, and put out the light so cleverly’ (40), gesturing at the same equivalence between the actor and author of a deed that lets his tenants perform what they already are, or that allows him and his colleagues to ‘sit and smoak at the same time we act’ – that is, to sit and smoke while they ‘sit and smoak.’ When he defends having a parson play the part of a parson he calls it ‘an innocent thing … an innocent thing’ (59). But when the innocent thing proves less than innocent and more than mere performance, incredulously he echoes his son Thomas’s phrase, ‘If I be a husband, if I be a husband!’ (61), only to have it confirmed by the steward, who points out that the names of the actors who were married are identical with the real couple, Thomas and Katherine, and that the marriage is good in law. ‘Good in law,’ exclaims Sir Humphrey, instantly seconded by Justice Statute, ‘good in law’ (61). Now the repetitions indicate a rupture in the supposed symmetry of representation as Sir Roger finds out that what is good in law is not in this case good for him. In Hobbes’s terms the system of artificial persons on which the law depends has been invaded by a special kind of artificial person (the curate) acting in the service of a fiction, which is nevertheless promoted and confirmed by a deed that only a delegate of the sovereign can perform. The fiction serves the interests of two natural persons, Thomas and Kitty, but undercuts the authority of a hierarchy the play was meant to illustrate and enforce by employing it in a dubious context.

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Gay uses genre to deal with this complexity. Comedy defines the play Sir Roger thought he was involved in, where the real experience of his tenants was to be represented in a manner congenial to them and to the order of things. Tragedy offers a fund of expressions apt for the failure of that harmony, as when the law menaces lovers with separation or death. Pastoral, as he says in the Preface, abounds with sentiments that put the lowest country people on a level with the greatest: ‘their thoughts are almost the same, and they only differ as the same thought is attended with a meanness of pomp of diction, or receives a different light from the circumstances each character is conversant with’ (32). Farce consists of ‘absurdities and incongruities’ such as ghosts, Sighs and Groans, speaking walls and Moonshine. The Key limits all judgements of the piece to its imperfect pursuit of tragi-comedy, noticing pastoral only as a symptom of its failure (‘a Milk-Maid raving with the strains of a despairing Empress’),32 and farce as the unintended outcome of undisciplined ridicule (‘It seems impossible for mortal Eyes to distinguish the Person represented, unless the Ghosts are so kind as to inform them who they are’ (11)). Gay’s priorities are the reverse of the Key’s. He had published The Shepherd’s Week the year before, and he incorporates bits of ‘Wednesday’ (Sparabella’s options for suicide) into Kitty’s mad scene.33 But if he was to persuade his audience that the pathos of common life was not just an opportunity for literary condescension, he needed to show pastoral and farce functioning independently of burlesque alliances of high and low, with its shadowed forms of authority that are never really meant to be mocked. One way of doing this was to incorporate the ballad into the generic mixture, a technique he was to perfect in The Beggar’s Opera. In The What D’Ye Call It, Kitty’s friends sing a song just before she runs mad, ‘’Twas when the seas were roaring,’ set to music by Handel. Cowper thought it an extraordinary exhibition of the strengths of the ballad, ‘a species of poetry, I believe, peculiar to this country, equally adapted to the drollest and the most tragical subjects.’34 It must have operated on the play’s early audiences like Polly’s ‘O ponder well’ in The Beggar’s Opera, crystallizing an emotion from the incongruous elements of the scene that induced them to take it seriously on Kitty’s terms. As for farce, Gay makes it plain he had Pyramus and Thisbe in mind, particularly its personations of figures whose pure fictionality carries them outside the system of authorized representation, such as his ghosts who inform the audience who they are, and then accuse the three personations of sovereign power of injustice. We have seen how in Shakespeare’s play farce (or what Gay would label as such) builds a bridge between the motions of the poet’s brain and the material circumstances of the characters, fostering the personification of incidental things (Wall) that attracts and concentrates the loose affect of a scene

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(‘O Wall!’). The same is true of Gay’s. The ‘odd Fancies in the Brain’ are located in things that carry the freight of emotion, such as Kitty’s rake. When she promises to go off to the wars with Filbert, he asks, ‘O Kitty, Kitty, canst thou quit the rake?’ using a synecdoche of rural labour that is subsequently transformed into a prosopopeia as Kitty’s passions rise and she addresses it as a companion: ‘On thee I lean’d, forgetful of my work, / While Tom gaz’d on me, propt upon his fork.’35 The lovers’ passionate exclamations, ‘Ah!’ and ‘Oh!’ appear as the personified Sighs and Groans, disconsolate ejaculations disconsolately ejaculating, ‘Ah! Oh! poor soul! alack! and well a day!’ (56). At this stage lots of property changes hands as token or keepsake: ‘Take you my ’bacco-box – my neckcloth, you. / To our kind Vicar send this bottle skrew. / But wear these breeches, Tom; they’re quite bran-new’ (53). The country folk try to seduce the cruel Sergeant into compassion by offers of things that are not so much bribes as embodiments of pathos: ‘And take my founteen-pence … and my cramp-ring … take my box of copper … and my wife’s thimble … and this ’bacco-stopper’ (50). The correspondence between the heterogeneous accumulations of things and a powerful surge of local sympathy teaches the audience to appreciate how the odd fancies of Kitty’s distracted brain coincide with a temporary metamorphosis: Hah! – I am turned a stream – look all below. It flows, flows, and will forever flow. The meads are all afloat – the haycocks swim. Hah! who comes here? – my Filbert! Drown not him. Bagpipes in butter, flocks in fleecy fountains, Churns, sheep-hooks, seas of milk, and honey. (58)

The Key finds sources for these wild associations in Nourmahal (Aurengzebe) and Belvidera (Venice Preserved). It seems more like Ovid’s deluge crossed with Swift’s A City Shower, with touches of the Land of Cockaigne. It bears comparison with the Arcimboldo effect Thisbe produces out of her lover’s countenance when she is too overcome by grief to get the tints and similitudes in the right order. Searching for an image of a mind so ambitiously self-authorized it feels able to declare things its own without reference to the magistrate, Hobbes came up with a similar fantasy of things randomly clustered and filled with initiative: ‘We may as well Expect that Fish and Fowl should Boil, Rost and Dish themselves, and come to the Table; and that Grapes should squeeze themselves into our Mouths, and have all other Contentments and ease which some pleasant Men have Related of the Land of Coquany.’36 For Hobbes there is an exact correspondence between this mistake about property, the fantasy that it can be

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so absolutely our own that it mediates its own consumption, and a mind so chaotic it believes what it imagines to be true. These kinds of fiction liberate things from laws of property and of matter, whereupon they fall into arrangements that not only feed our appetites but are peculiarly well adapted both to express the passions and to harbour them. Before he is to be shot, Timothy Peascod is handed a copy of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, whose title-page he reads out loud, stuttering with emotion and with Jonas Dock’s speech impediment: ‘Eighth edition – London – printed – for – Ni-ch-olas Boddington: with new ad-di-tions never made before.’ He cannot go on, ‘Oh!, ’tis so moving, I can read no more.’37 The author of the Key gets very cross about this, which he takes as a slight to Addison’s Cato and that moment where the hero picks up a book of sentences to confirm him in his resolution, reading it and then conceding, ‘It must be so, – Plato thou reason’st well.’38 Plainly Peascod’s reading of Bunyan has nothing to do with the sentiments of the story, for he never gets into it. Instead his mind dwells on a random series of data contained on the first page of the wonderful thing in his hands, which acts as the frame of feelings so strong they would otherwise have none. It is at once the means of his expressing these feelings (a book) and apparently the source of them too (Book). It is a wild and inaccurate way to treat print, to be sure, but it is psychologically apt as well as properly deferential towards the ‘ownness’ of the text (as Mark Rose calls it). In moments like these Hume detects the origin of polytheism, ‘By degrees, the active imagination of man, uneasy in [the] abstract conception of objects, about which it is incessantly employed, begins to render them more particular, and to clothe them in shapes more suitable to its natural comprehension. It represents them to be sensible, intelligent beings, like mankind.’39 And hence what Ernst Bloch calls, ‘this uncanny pathos derived from the vitalization of the inorganic.’40

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 120, 121. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 3 (Hobbes and Civil Science) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 181–2. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 178. Hobbes, Leviathan, 111. Skinner, Visions, 195. Hobbes, Leviathan, 446. Skinner, Visions, 193.

IDOLS IN HOBBES, SHAKESPEARE, AND GAY 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

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Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 23–5. Hobbes, Humane Nature (London: T. Newcomb, 1651), 90; Leviathan, 446. Ovid [P. Ovidius Naso], Metamorphoses (Loeb Ovid III and IV), 2 vols, ed. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1:183–9. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans. Richard Adlington (London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1923), 111. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 240 n. Hobbes, Leviathan, 449. Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes, trans. Martin Tyle and Kate Soper (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 107. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 374. Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes, 105. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, ed. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 449 [5.890–91]. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, 111. Ibid., 97, 114. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (London: Everyman 1907), 324. Locke, An Essay, 439. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. John Frederick Nims (Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2000), 13 (1.351–4). Lucretius, Nature of Things, 283. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Mackie (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976), 94. Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 81. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 68. John Gay, The What D’Ye Call It, in The Plays of John Gay, 2 vols (London: Chapman Dodd, 1923), vol. 1:35. Richard Leveridge, The Comic Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe (London: W. Mears, 1716), [ii]. Gay, The What D’Ye Call It, 1:34. Ibid., 1:31. John Gay, A Complete Key to the last New Farce, The What D’Ye Call It (London: J. Roberts, 1715), [i]. Ibid., [iv]. John Gay, The Shepherds Week in John Gay: Poetry and Prose, 2 vols, ed. Vincent A. Dearing with Charles E. Beckwith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1:108; Gay, The What D’Ye Call It, 1:55. William Cowper, Correspondence, 2 vols, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 2.155. Gay, The What D’Ye Call It, 1:55. Hobbes, A Dialogue of the Common Laws, ed. Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 66. Gay The What D’Ye Call It, 1:49.

218 38. 39. 40.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 Gay, A Complete Key, 16. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 47. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) 92.

13

Politics of Theatre vs. Politics of (Non)State: Shakespeare in the Repertoire of Polish Nineteenth-century Theatres

Marta Gibin´ska

The history of Polish theatre in the nineteenth century is as complicated as the political history of Poland at that time. Nothing that concerns Polish culture in the nineteenth century can be viewed as separate or non-political, if only because Poland was a non-state: partitioned among the three powers of Russia, Prussia and Austria (1795–1918), it was, from the point of view of political geography, a paragon of non-existence. From the point of view of the politics of power of the three governments, however, it was a dangerous nuisance which was suppressed by various means and with varying intensity throughout the century. The three partitions meant three different threads of history. The law and administration, as well as their execution, belonged to the owner of the partition, and the people, no matter what their nationality, had to accept new citizenship with its consequences – subjection to one of the respective Kaisers or to the Tsar. Subjection entailed giving up political freedom and independence on the one hand, and agreement to being second-class citizens on the other. From the very beginning this was a major problem for middle-class Poles (at the beginning of the century that meant mainly szlachta, that is, gentry). Three military uprisings mark the history of partitioned Poland, all three great failures. The first was the Kosciuszko Uprising in 1796, and its failure sealed the final act of partition; the second – of 1830 – brought about considerable tightening of repressive measures in at least two partitions; the 1863 uprising was the most tragic because the most widespread territorially and socially, and the result in all three parts of non-Poland was not only loss of blood, but also loss of hope, energy and belief in any military resistance. This last uprising also brought 219

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about large changes in the demographic structure of the society as well as its considerable impoverishment. Thus while language, shared traditions and expectations of freedom in some distant future unite the three partitions into one history of Poland in this period, in all other respects in which the history of a nation is gauged things went along three different paths.

BETWEEN THE TWO UPRISINGS: 1830–63 Anything that happens in the Polish theatre in the nineteenth century must be studied in relation to the three parts and the two later uprisings. My earlier review of the presence of Shakespeare in Poland covered the time up to 1830.1 After that date everything looked different. The problem of the political use of Shakespeare in Polish theatres after 1830 is inseparably tied up with the presence or absence of the great national repertoire and the role theatres played in supporting the survival of Polish national identity. I The failure of the 1830 military coup in Warsaw and the defeat of the relatively small army brought about a period of unbelievable political and spiritual stagnation coupled with repressions. In the Russian part, Polish universities in Warsaw and Vilna were closed down, and the western part of Polish territories under Russion occupation, including Warsaw, was controlled by police and local government officials who were strengthened by the failure of the coup. However, the territories to the east – covering the area of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, which were inside the Polish borders prior to 1772 – were not regarded as ethnically Polish and were less strictly controlled; measures taken against Poles were less strictly implemented. Since the Poles living in that area made up more than a third of the population, it was natural that whatever Polish cultural activity was allowed under the Tsar took place there. So, until 1863, the ex-Polish eastern provinces enjoyed a relatively vivid Polish theatrical life, though in style and scope quite provincial, old-fashioned and looking back to the models of the late eighteenth century. The vividness of theatrical life there is reflected in the considerable number of regular touring companies who performed in bigger towns, very often repeating the same play in Polish and Ukrainian or Russian. Theatres fared better than universities in the two big cultural centres, Warsaw and Vilna; against all expectations, they were allowed to stage plays, and plays in Polish. When one looks at the theatre in Warsaw as an institution one may even be impressed.

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Apart from the significant change of the name – formerly National, now Warsaw Theatre – nothing seems to show cultural stagnation: the enterprise is state owned, has its presiding committee whose president has large prerogatives and funds. The committee and the presidents are Russian, of course, but they seem to care for their institution and it grows. In 1833 the largest and most impressive town theatre in Europe is opened in Warsaw with much acclaim; three years later in one of the wings opens the other stage of the enterprise, a continuation of the earlier tradition, the Variete Theatre. The Great Stage is used for operas and ballets, the Variete for regular plays. In the 1850s the Warsaw Theatre seems to be doing very well, with well-stabilized companies and regular seasons. Stagnation is clearly visible, though, when one looks at the repertoire: fierce censorship did not allow plays by our chief Romantic playwright Julisz Słowacki on the grounds that he was a political exile (in Paris until his death in 1849). No Victor Hugo was allowed because he was a suspect libertine; no Shakespeare because the matter of the plays was too full of plots and assassinations. What, then, was played in the theatre in Warsaw after 1830? Contemporary French melodrama and light comedy safe from any political suggestions, offering good entertainment for the bourgeoisie with a suitable moral, far from questioning any kind of authority. Comedies by a minor Polish playwright, Józef Korzeniowski, were frequently put on, though not without occasional skirmishes with censorship; were equally well made and equally dull with their duly exercised fun and morality. Yet there is more to this than meets the eye: until 1830 Shakespeare had been a frequent feature of the season, and well established, keen and intelligent theatre reviewers and critics had marked their presence in the theatrical life of the town by frequent debates about the state of art in theatre or the aesthetics of playwriting. The best ever Polish comedy writer Alexander Fredro, who premiered all his early plays in Warsaw, after 1830 disappeared from the Warsaw stage. After 1830 there is literally no reviewing in newspapers until 1842, and then when reviews appear, they are a very far cry from what used to be the standard. And the audience? In the new impressive building the audience found itself under the control of architecture and technology. In the pit there was no standing room any more: everyone was seated in the wide elegant hall with copious gilded ornaments against white clean walls, while the latest word in lighting, gas and by the early 1850s electricity, allowed the audience to sit in semi-darkness while the stage was illuminated. Quite a difference from the previous small crowded room stinking with the odour of twenty (yes, twenty) candles illuminating both the stage and the pit. The elegance, the newness and the seats enforced quiet and awed behaviour, or to put it in the language then politically

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correct, they taught the audiences dignified and cultured manners. No riots, of course, no hissing, shouting or spitting. Thirty years is a long period in the history of the theatre, and I do not want to suggest that things were the same all the time. The 1850s mark a slight change in the politics of the repertoire, introducing more ambitious French haute comedie and the idea of a well-made play. This link with Paris, however, is also telling: the French high comedy was antiromantic stuff, a propaganda pitting rationality against impetuosity of instinct; any serious thought was concerned with social morality, not fraternity, egality or liberty, all of suspect romantic provenance. The new comedy invited safe bourgeois stability as an ideal. I hope it is plain that I politicize the development of the Warsaw Theatre in between the two uprisings: full control of the enterprise by the state was economically most efficient. But the economy was of course an instrument of submission and correction. Audiences were offered a stately palace where they got what was safe from the point of view of the occupant – safe and elegant, a cultural dish of air. The almost complete absence of Shakespeare is a most telling sign: he is considered subversive alongside the romantic Hugo and the patriotic Słowacki, and cannot be shown. Some few works of Shakespeare were shown, though very little in comparison with earlier times, and the choice of titles and place is telling. In Vilna the provincial 1844 Hamlet (that is, in a garbled, poorly translated version) was shown in 1853. In Warsaw The Shrew appeared in 1836 – a telling choice of the company playing mostly comedies and melodrama. There was only a single tragedy: Othello, in 1862, significantly, a tragedy where no king is killed. The degree of state control over theatrical activities in Warsaw is even more evident when compared with what was going on in the eastern provinces with their nomadic Polish troupes. Granted, their level of acting and their choice of plays were nothing to boast about, but they did things that were unthinkable in Warsaw. For example, in Kiev – far out to the east in Ukraine where the Tsar regime did not think Poles were any dangerous presence – they staged Part IV of Mickiewicz’s most subversive play Dziady (The Forefathers, a national, Romantic, revolutionary and anti-tsarist classic, which, quite by the way, was also considered subversive by the communists in Poland of the twentieth century!). It is true, this was done in a quiet, semi-conspiratorial way, but it was done. One actor, Stanisław Malinowski, took it in the form of a monodrama across Ukraine and played before private audiences in manor houses.2 These nomadic troupes most probably also played bits and pieces of Shakespeare in the old adaptations, but there is no extant evidence. Here we might digress to show “time’s little revenges”: the quiet submission of Warsaw theatre in the thirty years between the two uprisings allowed for the

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development and growth of the institution. The theatre became a steady feature of Warsaw life in the way of entertainment; there was continuity of acting traditions, and a developing interest in European dramatic novelties (even though limited in nature) and in new acting and staging techniques. Moreover, all productions were in Polish, so the theatre kept the language of the non-nation alive; the language, and the cultural habit of spending an evening in the theatre with well-known, if not beloved, actors. This all provided something to build on after the next political catastrophe of 1863, even though the quality of the plays had been less than ambitious. II The Austrian part of Poland, with two large cultural centres – Cracow and Lemberg (Pol. Lwów, Ukr. Lviv) – enjoyed a different history. Since the 1830 uprising did not constitute an upheaval comparable to what happened in the Russian partition, the measures taken by the Austrian empire did not bring a particularly opressive reality. Until 1846 Cracow enjoyed the status of a free city. In 1843 a new comparatively modern town theatre was opened (now called the Stary – “Old”) with modest subsistence from municipal funds; a new theatre had opened in Lemberg a year earlier, supported by the private funds of a local magnate. Obviously these new theatres were opened because there was cultural demand large enough to secure profits. The demand had followed from the vivid and energetic growth of theatrical life in the early nineteenth century, when stagings of Shakespeare showed a strong German and Austrian influence.3 Cracow continued to be a free city until the convulsions of 1848, when the “Spring of Nations” political movement disturbed the Austrian part of Europe much more than the Russian empire. In Małopolska, the region of Poland under Austrian occupation, the movement triggered much social and political unrest, up to and including the events of 1848. Cracow’s loss of status then went hand in hand with other, tighter anti-Polish policies: German, for instance, became the official language in administration and higher education. But in the city’s theatrical life this meant no more than the presence of new, well-subsidized, German competition: after 1853 there was a regular German theatre in Cracow. The energy of the theatrical life in this partition may be measured by features of the repertoire. At first the Lemberg stage offered more rewarding material: the activity of J.N. Kamin´ski, director of the new Lemberg theatre until 1848, ensured the presence of Shakespeare. Kamin´ski had been interested in Shakespeare for a long time; he attempted his own translations, and produced various adaptations of Shakespeare plays in the early years of the century.4

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Kamin´ski was also responsible for bringing Hernani to Cracow a year after its first staging in Paris. He staged Calderon and Schiller, and above all, undertook cooperation with Fredro, the great comedy writer mentioned above. All of Fredro’s best plays were first performed in Lemberg in the years 1832–35, well before the new theatre opened. The troublesome 1840s were responsible for less and less ambitious seasons in Lemberg and Cracow, despite the promise of comfort in their new theatres. In 1843, an ambitious theatrical critic, Hilary Meciszewski, made his way to the directorship of the Cracow New Theatre with plans to turn it into a European stage, following the pattern of the Comédie Française or the Burgtheater, with a prestigious national and classical repertoire. He tried hard to revive the eighteenth-century Polish classics, introduced Schiller, and regularly staged Fredro, although never the great romantics. He left disappointed in 1845, after two years. Paradoxically, the great Polish patriotic repertoire appeared in a very difficult year for Cracow, 1848: a passage from Part III of Mickiewicz’s Dziady. Three years later another great absentee in the Polish theatre made his entrance in Cracow: Juliusz Słowacki, whose tragedy Mazepa was the first ever play of this remarkable poet to be staged in Poland. After that Słowacki became a great presence in the Lemberg and Cracow theatres: three of his other tragedies were shown in Lemberg in the early 1850s and in Cracow in the 1860s. The Cracow theatre also took Słowacki’s Mazepa in 1852 to Poznan´ (Posen), the chief town in the Prussian partition. I spend so much time on Słowacki because he is a companion playright to Shakespeare in the political sense, but also because Słowacki learned his dramatic craft among others from Shakespeare. Słowacki enjoyed a great cult as a national bard, but was largely unknown as a playwright. His plays contained much disappointment and bitterness with the political thinking in Poland after the fall of 1830, but also bore a load of patriotism and romantic liberal spirit heavy enough to become a subversive threat to any regime. The fact that his plays were produced in Lemberg and Cracow shows a certain measure of both artistic and political daring. A wave of criticism and misunderstanding of his plays (especially of Mazepa) may have been partly responsible for the lack of any political intervention from the censor offices. But Shakespeare was allowed, too: in the German tradition Shakespeare had become by that time too much of a cultural symbol to be struck off the repertoire. Słowacki, so close in spirit and structure, could not, I believe, be thought harmful in the shadow of that giant. Thus, the two appear or disappear together. In Russia they get practically no visas before the 1870s. In the German speaking world no harm is seen in either, though not much of either Shakespeare or Słowacki appears on the stage. The success is that they appear at all. Thus Hamlet, in Kamin´ski’s adapta-

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tion, was produced in Cracow in 1840. Twelve years later another production of Hamlet (along with the first production of Mazepa) was taken to Poznan´. It is difficult to speculate what kind of adaptation it was and whether the production had anything to do with that of 1840. But the scarcity of Shakespearean titles after 1830 in Cracow suggests that an adaptation of Hamlet must have been in use. Shakespeare had more luck in Lemberg than in Cracow, though slightly later: Macbeth appeared there in 1859, and Richard III in 1864. III Polish theatrical life in the western Polish territories under Prussia was not impressive. The chief centre of Polish culture was Poznan´, but here the effect of the 1830 uprising was devastating. The Prussian authorities closed all public activities in Polish for eight years. The town had no building in which to install any regular company. So after 1838 only visiting companies came to play, mostly the players from Cracow. In the years 1844–59 they visited the Prussian partition ten times, also toured smaller towns, and occasionally played in Silesia as well.

AFTER THE NATIONAL CATASTROPHE: 1865–90 Raszewski, the great authority in Polish theatre studies, believes that the political catastrophe of the 1863 uprising sealed the end of the early Polish theatre: the audiences changed radically. After being an essentially gentry-oriented institution (even though in towns) the theatre now had to cater for town dwellers of a decidedly bourgeois or petit bourgeois kind.5 The change of social structure must have had an impact on the profile of the stage. At the same time one has to stress that the changes were not identitical in the three parts of Poland. To illustrate the matter in short: the Tsarist regime took very strong measures and punished Poles, especially the educated gentry, first by taking their lands and leaving them destitute, second by sending large numbers of them to Siberia. This was a heavy blow directed against what then constituted a sort of middle class and Polish intelligentsia. Some of those who had been rendered destitute went to live in big towns, especially Warsaw; many others emigrated to the Austrian part where Poles were left in relative peace. In Prussia the anti-Polish measures were extremely hard, but the chief blow was directed against language and education. The effect was that the gentry, who mostly stayed in the country, and particularly the women, became responsible for the clandestine private education of the young in their language, literature and history. Theatre became

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a great ally: the Prussians had left a loophole in their law whereby a theatre company could be registered as a private enterprise, and private business could operate even in Polish. Law was law. The fate of Poles in the Austrian part was tied up with the changes in the Empire, which in the middle of the century became a sort of federation. Galicia – this was the name of the ex-Polish territory – gained a form of autonomy where Polish language, Polish institutions and Polish cultural activities were allowed. From the heights of Vienna, Galicia was hopelessly provincial and very poor. But from the heights some details seem trifles and may not be duly recognized: demographic changes and migrations changed Lemberg and Cracow into strongholds of Polish culture which, together with Warsaw, paradoxically and against all Russian expectations, ensured the survival of the national identity and continuity of cultural growth. Shakespeare, as it happens, is at the very centre of this process. First, translations have to be mentioned. Until the mid-nineteenth century most translations were from French or German adaptations, though in the 1840s the first – not very felicitous – attempts to translate from ‘original text’ of Shakespeare, that is, from available English editions, took place. By the end of the 1860s there existed quite a few volumes of new translations by various translators, of whom the most important by far was Józef Paszkowski, who began publishing single plays in translation in the 1850s. They were destined to become the classical standard, and have remained the most loved, well-known and much quoted versions of Polish Shakespeare. They were immediately recognized by the theatre as beautifully ‘playable’. Soon there appeared more really good translators, and the Collected Works (the first three volumes appeared in 1875–77) became available in Polish bookshops and libraries. One of the ways in which Shakespeare became a political presence in the latter part of the nineteenth century in non-existent Poland was by becoming as strongly internalized a text as the national tradition of the great Romantic bards, Słowacki and Mickiewicz. This process of internalization or acculturation of Shakespeare’s texts went together with the rapidly growing number of his plays in the theatres of the three parts of (non)Poland. Again, there were differences in the ways the process unfolded in each of them. The theatres of Cracow and Lemberg deserve the first place in our discussion of the period after 1865. Not only did the Austrian state not bother to control them from the political angle, leaving them much more free to act, but artistically they became more important and gave the lead to all Polish theatres at the time. Their autonomy led to the dissolution of the German companies in Cracow in 1867 and in Lemberg in 1872: German competition ceased because the authorities of Galicia were more interested in subsidizing native artists (for

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example, in Lemberg apart from the Polish group there was a regular Ukrainian company). Repolonization of schools, courts and administration brought about freedom of language to the extent that Polish was no longer a political issue. This is an extremely important factor in the development of the theatres for two reasons. First, directors and actors could concentrate on artistic issues because the word attracting crowds was their own word – censorship was more than lax. Second, the audiences educated in Polish very soon became more exacting, while criticism and reviewing became a much desired and definitely ‘untrammelled’ voice in the debate on drama, acting, interpretation and fashions in stage designing. The directorship of Stanisław Koz´mian in the years 1865–85 marked twenty years of unprecedented growth of the Cracow theatre in its artistic dimension. Koz´mian played an important role in forming the beginnings of modern directorship: enforcing team work in the ensemble, working towards achieving an equally high standard of acting from the first to the last actor in each production, and introducing a line of interpretation which would bind the whole spectacle. Also, he brought from Paris and Vienna new ideas about acting, which became more restrained in gesture and declamation, but deepened in the subtlety of psychological and situational verity. And last but not least, he introduced the great European repertoire which included eighteen Shakespearean titles (seven produced for the first time in Poland) side by side with Schiller, Słowacki and Fredro, all of whom became equal favourites with the audiences. His great merit was to teach Polish audiences to enjoy Shakespearean comedies – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It – which became great hits alongside the Polish comedies of Fredro and the French plays of Musset. The politics of choice were defined clearly enough: the plays had to contain great thought and great art. No matter what he understood under the two terms, such criteria show well that he was not limited by political considerations. Being fairly conservative in his views, he did not look for revolutionary ideas, neither did he find them in the plays he staged. One omission, however, does suggest his political stance: he avoided Mickiewicz’s Forefathers and Słowacki’s Kordian, both highly inflammable stuff. To sum up: Koz´mian was free to act as nobody in the Russian or the Prussian part of Poland could, but he had his own political agenda which allowed him to steer away from the rocks of Austrian politics or patriotic enthusiasm onto the wide waters of artistic issues. It is in this theatre that Helena Modjeska made her name, and from the early 1870s one talked of the Cracow School and its innovative ways of acting and staging. The plays of Shakespeare, played in the new way, were to show human nature and human passions – Koz´mian’s deep belief was that this was the truth of Shakespeare. The ideas of Cracow radiated in all directions. For

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instance, Warsaw, the magnetic place for actors where the style of acting and directing was dominated by the star system, drained Cracow of some of the best names (for example Modjeska). But while the actors from Cracow easily accepted their star positions, they also did their best to convince Warsaw that Shakespeare and Słowacki were indispensable for any great theatre. The Cracow actors had an altogether different impact on theatrical life in the Prussian part of Poland. In the years 1866–69 the Cracow company regularly visited Poznan´, bringing their plays to audiences who had otherwise only had access to German theatre. When in 1870 it appeared that the anti-Polish law did not extend to the registration of free enterprise, the Poznan´ Poles immediately registered an acting company. Five years later they managed to obtain their own building, and so in the midst of Bismarckian repressions the Polish Theatre began to operate. After 1882 they were strong enough to tour the region of Wielkopolska, made occasional tours down south to Silesia and up north to Danzig. Their artistic prominence was low in comparison to Cracow or Warsaw. But the Cracovian standards were known and Shakespeare stood strong in the west of (non)Poland: the Cracow Company brought to Poznan´ Hamlet, King John, The Merchant of Venice, fragments of Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the twenty-five years after the theatre opened, Poznan´ audiences could see productions of King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, As You Like It, Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing. The presence of Shakespeare in the western territories was perhaps more obvious than in Warsaw because of the German cult of the playwright. The political significance of his plays there depended chiefly on the fact that they appeared in the new attractive Polish translations. In Prussian Poland, Shakespeare became, as in the Russian part, the vehicle for the Polish language, the source of identity shared with Poles all over their (non)state. Shakespeare became also ours, not only theirs. In the Russian part the geography of Polish theatrical activities changed radically after 1865: there was practically no possibility for small touring companies to move around Ukraine, Belarus or Lithuania as before. Logically, though paradoxically, they moved east, following large numbers of Poles exiled into the depth of Russia. In Warsaw, the theatre kept growing as a successful institution: by the 1880s it had seven different stages seating up to 6,000, five regular companies and two orchestras.6 Apart from this official giant, from 1868 Warsaw was filled with a number of thriving ‘garden theatres’ which operated only in summer. As the state-operated and controlled theatre offered steady wages and good contracts, even some social security, it was no wonder that the best Polish actors came there in great numbers. They in turn became a

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great magnetic force for large audiences. In the political void of the time, when no political views or activities were allowed other than loyal and obedient citizenship, theatre filled the void and offered an antidote. Audiences were divided into parties of fans and followers of particular actors and actresses, whose cult grew to an unusual exaltation of stardom and absorbed social energies which thereby were chanelled (from the point of view of the authorities) into safe ways. But, of course, there was another side to the cult of star-actors. They played in a repertoire which was more seriously regulated than anything that was printed (and no book could appear without a censor’s approval). The word which attracted crowds had to be watched. The word was dangerous because it was Polish: posters were printed in Russian and Polish, but on the stage it was exclusively the Polish language. Anything the stars did to enhance the artistic and ideological content of the Warsaw repertoire must be counted as a political achievement. Fortunately, the president of the State Theatre Committee in the years 1868–80, a Russian official Serge Muchanov, was a highly cultured man who seriously cared for the development of ambitious programmes. His partner in greatness, Maria Kalergis, a pianist and an intellectual of wide connections and reputation, seconded him in bringing to the Warsaw theatre repertoire that mattered: both Shakespeare and Słowacki became notable presences. Shakespeare did better than our Polish playright: Maria Stuart (1872) and Mazepa (1873) were allowed only as a plays by a mysterious J.S. – his full name did not appear on a poster until 1906.7 Neither was Shakespeare’s appearance without struggle against censorship. Othello was passed in 1873 on condition that Iago not be referred to by the title of ‘namiestnik’: the word the translator used for ‘ancient’ is in Polish identical with the title of the tsarist governor of Warsaw; the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream had to be purged of any allusions to the cruelty of kings or to walls ‘willful to hear without warning’ (5.1.211); The Winter’s Tale was forbidden on the grounds that it subverts the law of monarchy; in Antony and Cleopatra all lines either immoral or expressing weakness of the monarch had to be cut; Macbeth was not allowed until 1878, while Hamlet could be produced only when Madame Kalergis persuaded the censors that all assassinations in the play are in fact a private affair of the Hamlet family.8 Still, the strictures of censors were directed first of all against the national spirit, the sense of history and identity; the theatre as an institution was kept up as a façade of the Tsar’s liberalism. It offered the Russian dignitaries who kept responsible positions in Warsaw a feeling of running a cultural capital (even though provincial). The censors kept their eye on the theatre’s repertoire to make sure it did not grow into a Polish institution, so that the real

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treasures of Polish drama had little chance to get through. So much more important then was the function of Shakespeare’s plays. The presence of Shakespeare on the Warsaw stage is also closely connected with the star cult. Helena Modjeska came to stay in Warsaw in 1871, but had visited as a guest star earlier too, and very energetically fought for Shakespeare’s plays, in many of which she had played leading roles in Cracow and Lemberg. Her victorious battles brought to the stage the first productions in new translations of Romeo and Juliet (1870), Hamlet (1871), Othello (1873) and Much Ado About Nothing (1876). Z˙urowski offers statistics: in her appearances on the Warsaw stage Modjeska played Shakespeare 86 times, Dumas fils 48 times, Korzeniowski 48 times and ‘anonymous’ Słowacki 37 times.9 Interestingly, she appeared in Hamlet and in Mazepa the same number of times. One must not exaggerate the political motivation of Modjeska. In the star theatre of Warsaw she became the brightest of them all, especially in her interpretations of Shakespearean ladies: she was an unforgettable Juliet, a most movingly beautiful Ophelia, a tragically virtuous Desdemona. She knew the potential of the parts, and her success in Warsaw was easier in comparison to Cracow because the ensemble work was so poor in Warsaw. Modjeska was an intelligent reader of Shakespeare and fought for his presence also because she was convinced of the great and unique artistic value of his plays. She had to fight not only the censors but also the public who did not quite understand the appeal of, for example, Much Ado or As You Like It (in the latter she failed: a woman in hose would not do! The play appeared only in 1891). But her efforts had a measurable political effect as well: by 1890 fifteen plays by Shakespeare, as against two tragedies by “J.S.” and seven plays by Schiller, shaped the programme of the most influential institution in the Polish life of Warsaw in spite of fierce russification in schools, universities and administration. Shakespeare’s new Polish word seconded Fredro’s rich and juicy language (23 plays in the same period), and together with Schiller filled the gap of Słowacki’s striking semi-absence, thus ensuring some continuation of the romantic rebellious spirit in an age of complacent positivist ideals. The choice of plays needs some discussion as well, otherwise our conclusion about political Shakespeare in Warsaw would be far from justified. Fifteen plays is less than half of Shakespeare’s output translated and published by the end of the 1880s. The absence of some plays in Warsaw forms a telling index: such explicitly political plays as Julius Caesar or Coriolanus, Richard II or King John, even Richard III, did not find their way to the stage in Warsaw. Hamlet in 1871, Macbeth in 1878, King Lear in 1879 did not figure at the top of the favoured list, and strikingly less so in comparison with Cracow and Lemberg, or even Poznan´. Antony and Cleopatra in 1880 was relatively late

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and made politically correct with the help of censorship. Of the great tragedies, prominence was given to Othello largely due to star appearances: not only Modjeska as Desdemona, but repeatedly Ira Aldridge immensely successful as Othello (1862–67 in various towns). We may assume that politically the play did not contain any threatening points from the censor’s point of view. Romeo and Juliet in 1870 belonged to one of the earliest Shakespearean conquests in Warsaw. In addition, the wave of Shakespearean tragedies in the repertoire of the Warsaw Theatre in the late 1870s owes much to the visit of the Italian star Ernesto Rossi who came to Warsaw in 1877 and 1878, on the second occasion bringing the ‘politically dangerous stuff ’ of Macbeth and Coriolanus.10 Following Rossi’s visit the first Polish Macbeth was produced in December of the same year. After 1879, Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet were regularly shown. Great comedies, too, were almost all there: The Merchant of Venice (1869), Taming of the Shrew (1873), Much Ado About Nothing (1876), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1884), Twelfth Night (1885), As You Like It (1891). Such a cursory look at the titles offers an insight into what was unacceptable to the regime and what, with time, became the staple diet offered to the Warsaw audiences: the comic and the melodramatic were perceived as politically more tame and therefore acceptable. Tragedies made a rather precocious appearance after some arch arguments with censorship, but the plays containing explicit political debate were definitely barred. Tadeusz Sivert sums up the Warsaw Theatre repertoire until 1890 as undistinguished in the propagation of the Polish national cause.11 But ideas of liberation and revolutionary feelings were largely burnt out after 1863. Public opinion sympathized with the idea of “organic work” and political conformity; the former propagated ideas of economic growth and development, the latter opposed any open confrontation with the authorities as potentially dangerous for the prospects of a prosperous society. Why then should theatre fight? It too worked “organically” for the cultivation of the Polish language and for the general cultural education, and, as Sivert himself aptly states, it “brought hope and comfort amid general inertia, ignorance and hollowness of public life and manners”.12 A large share in the exacting task of keeping up the language and the cultural tradition, of ensuring continuous public education and refinement of taste in drama and literature goes to Shakespearean plays, newly and successfully translated in the middle of the century, increasingly present in the life of Poles, their language and their cultural identity, in spite of political nonexistence. When in the early twentieth century liberation and political reintegration into an independent state became an issue, Shakespeare was an obvious text from which a new generation learned how to understand their new ideas.

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NOTES 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Marta Gibin´ska, “Enter Shakespeare: The Contexts of Early Polish Appropriations,” in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, ed. A. Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 54–69. Zbigniew Raszewski, Krótka historia teatru polskiego (Warszawa: PIW, 1990), 105. Gibin´ska, “Enter Shakespeare,” 62–5. See Krzysztof Kurek, Polski Hamlet. Z historii i wyobraz´ni narodowej (Poznan´: Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza, 1999). Raszewski, Krótka historia, 129. Ibid., 146. Andrzej Z˙urowski, Szekspir w cieniu gwiazd (Gdan´sk: Tower Press, 2001), 30. See Henryka Secomska, “Warszawska cenzura teatralna w latach 1863–1890,” in Teatr polski od 1863 r. do schyłku XIX wieku, ed. Tadeusz Sivert (Warszawa: 1982), 307. Z˙urowski, Szekspir w cieniu gwiazd, 32. Tadeusz Sivert, “W królestwie polskim,” in Teatr polski od 1863 r. do schyłku XIX wieku, ed. Tadeusz Sivert (Warszawa: 1982), 105. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 93, my translation.

14 “Useful and fancy articles”: Relics of the Nineteenth-century Stage

Elizabeth Williamson

Like Autolycus, I am a “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.” Horace Howard Furness1

Horace Howard Furness’s collection of Shakespearean memorabilia, now housed at the University of Pennsylvania, has been described as a great American shrine to bardolatry.2 It contains, most importantly, a large number of early modern quartos and folios amassed while Furness was compiling his Variorum editions of the plays. But Furness also left behind a wide variety of stage properties associated with famous Shakespearean actors of the nineteenth century. Furness’s correspondence reveals his enduring fascination with the minutiae of collecting, mixed with a mild sense of embarrassment about the acquisition of such items. On the one hand, Furness labels himself a “snapperup of unconsidered trifles,” thus drawing a self-effacing comparison between himself and Autolycus, the charming swindler from The Winter’s Tale.3 On the other hand, Furness was not a salesman but an unabashed hoarder. Rather than attempting to sell whatever commodities he could find, he viewed his “trifles” as the all-important traces of an ephemeral theatrical tradition. I argue here that if we consider the intricacies of the theatrical marketplace, we can better understand the complexity of the analogy between the collector of Shakespeareana and the peddler of trinkets. Although Furness himself was attempting to remove his stage properties from the commercial sphere, it is also true that when they were first used on the nineteenth-century stage they were central to a profitmaking venture we can trace back to early modern England. The dramatic enterprise that emerged in Shakespeare’s London spawned literary works of enormous emotional power, but it was fundamentally rooted in the acquisition and circulation of material objects: costumes, sets, and properties. Because the theater’s financial success relied on using these objects to create fictional scenarios, polemicists frequently compared it to the Catholic 233

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church, which used the eucharist and other ritual implements to enact the miracle of transubstantiation. The reformers insisted that Catholicism’s focus on the literal presence of Christ’s body in the bread and wine was a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the mass: they saw the central Christian ritual as a remembrance of Christ’s death rather than a sacrifice in and of itself. And just as radical Protestants set out to destroy Catholic icons because of their dangerous emphasis on materiality, so the public theater’s most virulent critics argued that the acting companies used superficial trumpery to seduce spectators into ungodly thoughts, causing them to mistake the representation for the thing it was designed to represent. In Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions (1582), Stephen Gosson argues that the theater is simultaneously trivial and idolatrous, pointing out that there can be nothing edifying about dramatic fictions whose plots are resolved “by a posie in [a] tablet, or by a broken ring, or a handkircher or a piece of a cockle shell.”4 Thus theater, like the Catholic church, was accused of overvaluing mere things and of encouraging audience members to do the same. But the negative connotations surrounding the materiality of the theater survived long after the most fervent period of church reform, and may account for the mixture of fascination and self-denigration with which Furness approached his properties. Furness’s reference to The Winter’s Tale is particularly revealing because, as James Kearney has shown, “trifle” was such a resonant term for English men and women in the years following the Reformation.5 Words such as “trifle”, “toy,” and “trinket” were used to define the Catholic objects Protestants had the deepest loathing for, like those depicted in the image from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments whose caption reads: “Ship ouer your trinkets and be packing you papists.”6 But Foxe’s woodcut also begs the question of what actually happened to objects that were removed from English churches, those objects which became, in the eyes of the reformers, mere trash. The displacement and re-circulation of Catholic church furnishings provides a useful model for thinking about stage properties, which are often valuable only within the context of popular performance and usually drift into obscurity after the performance run is complete. The analogy between the post-Reformation circulation of objects and the circulation of theatrical properties further underscores the argument made by Jonathan Gil Harris, who suggests that “the props of the early modern theatre provide a good starting point for theorizing the diachronic dimensions of objects in general.”7 The rhetorical trajectory linking the theater to Catholic idolatry is well known to scholars of the early modern period, but we have also unconsciously inherited some of the puritans’ distaste for the objects that occupied the Shakespearean stage. Consequently, our modern readings of dramatic scripts tend to ignore stage properties and the range of meanings they

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carried with them.8 As Harris points out, even the recent turn to an object-oriented historicism is tinged with a lack of regard for collectors such as Furness, who contribute to our understanding of the diachronic dimension of stage objects, past and present, by providing us with a more nuanced picture of the dynamic relationship between the theater and modern capitalist economies.9 As replaceable components of the commercial theater, stage properties were often seen as trifles, but this was not the only label they acquired when they entered the marketplace. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some stage properties came to be classified as “relics,” a term that invokes, among other things, the objects that were at the heart of traditional English ritual before being thrown into circulation by the reformers. Relics, in Patrick Geary’s words, “are most peculiar sorts of symbolic objects – symbols without intrinsic significance.” He goes on to point out that “[u]nlike other objects, the bare relic – a bone or a bit of dust – carries no fixed code or sign of its meaning as it moves from one community to another or from one period to a subsequent one.”10 The relic becomes sacred once it has been authenticated and enshrined within a community, but it can also circulate as a commodity, an object with economic rather than religious value. Geary does admit that, “[a]ny consideration of sacred relics as commodities in the Middle Ages may seem to be pushing to the extreme the definition of commodities as ‘goods destined for circulation and exchange.’”11 At the same, time, however, his arguments about how relics move from the church to the marketplace and back again provide an excellent example of anthropologist Igor Kopytoff ’s assertion that commodification is not a one way street. Rather, Kopytoff suggests, the commodity can only be labeled as such at the precise moment of exchange. Kopytoff encourages us to pay attention to what he calls the cultural biography of an object: “the story of [its] various singularizations, classifications and reclassifications in an uncertain world of categories whose importance shifts with every minor change in context.”12 Thus, theatrical relics are linked to Catholic ones by the processes that designate them as commodities or as sacred icons, but also by the fact that those processes are reversible. As Jonathan Gil Harris writes in his own response to Appadurai, the question is not where is the object, but “how is the object constituted as it passes historically through multiple sites of discursive and economic production?”13 If a close study of stage properties helps us to understand the fluctuating status of objects in early modern London, an examination of stage relics shows us how the theatrical enterprise itself became an institution capable of endowing mere things with an almost religious sacrality. The theater may take its properties out of the realm of commodity exchange, but it simultaneously profits from presenting them on stage as a part of a larger narrative.

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The Oxford English Dictionary identifies many of the key theological concepts behind the terminology of the relic. Most importantly, its primary definition clearly indicates that the sacrality of the relic is located in its proximity to the body of the saint: at the top of the entry, the relic is identified as “[s]ome object, such as a part of the body or clothing, an article of personal use, or the like, which remains as a memorial of a departed saint, martyr, or other holy person, and as such is carefully preserved and held in esteem or veneration.”14 It is no accident, therefore, that many of the theatrical relics now housed in rare books libraries are clothes and pieces of clothing. Furness’s library, for example, contains several pairs of gloves supposedly worn by Henry Irving in Much Ado About Nothing and one pair that enthusiasts have traced back to the poet himself. We can define stage relics, then, as items that would not necessarily be of any special value to players or playgoers during the moment of performance, but that accrue meaning – both affective and economic – as traces of that performance once the run has ended.15 In reference to Catholic ornaments, William Pietz notes that “anyone can manufacture an object intended for worship, but only the priestly lineage or the church can empower them for the community of the faithful.”16 In the case of theatrical properties, there is no officiating priest, but the power of stage relics does rely upon a community of believers, namely playgoers and collectors, and great weight is placed on documentary evidence. As with Catholic relics, the point is to connect the object to the body, or rather the spiritual essence, of the departed saint. In more secular contexts discussed elsewhere in the OED entry, the term “relic” overlaps directly with the idea of the remembrance or memento. On the one hand, the relic is the “residue” left behind by an individual or by a society, but on the other it functions metonymically, linking its owner to the absent body in its entirety.17 Here the language of relics picks up on the dichotomy expressed in the reformers’ critique of the host, namely, the opposition between embodiment and memory. In Hans Belting’s formulation, “[t]he relic as pars pro toto was the body of a saint, who remained present even in death and gave proof of his or her life by miracles.”18 Thus the finger of Saint Theresa connects worshippers to the mysterious power of the historical personage, and allows them to contact her directly to ask for her help. As we move further down the OED entry, the sub-definitions become increasingly secularized, including one sentence that simply describes a relic as “[a]n object invested with interest by reason of its antiquity or associations with the past.”19 This formulation points to another important overlap that is especially relevant to the current discussion, namely the connection between the “relic” – or “relique” in its most common early modern spelling – and the “antique.”

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The concept of the antique originates in the sixteenth century, often with a specific reference to the classical past. In citations from the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s, however, the term points in two very different directions: it can designate an object as “venerable,” but it can also read as “old-fashioned, antiquated … no longer extant.”20 This split seems to be a useful one for thinking about stage relics, which are constantly in danger of going out of fashion once their former owners fade from the public imagination. Another significant aspect of the word’s meaning, which emerges in the nineteenth century, is the idea that antiques are “sought for and collected by amateurs.”21 Here , however, the antique becomes less relevant to the history of theatrical relics, for, as I will discuss in more detail at the end of the essay, the Shakespearean relic trade begins with gentlemen amateurs, but coincides with the increasing professionalization of the Renaissance as an object of study and veneration. To greater and lesser degrees, all collectors of Shakespeareana are aware that their efforts may be construed as idolatrous, and the subtle differences between the terms “relic,” “remembrance,” and “heirloom” become particularly apparent when scholars and entrepreneurs attempt to distinguish dedicated antiquarianism from unseemly worship. The term heirloom, for instance, is first and foremost associated with an estate, usually an ancestral one, rather than an individual.22 Another important difference lies in the fact that the heirloom represents stability, the solidification of property and economic value, whereas the relic is by definition an object that has been taken out of its original context, quite literally so in the case of saints’ body parts that have been re-housed in reliquaries and shifted from the marketplace to the church and back again. Once they had been relocated from the theater to the library, theatrical relics, like Catholic ones, were valued for their ability to provide a link to an absent body, in this case the body of the performer. And although these “trifles” often lack reliable information about their history, it is clear that attempts have been made to authenticate them, to mark them as objects that point directly back to specific moments in time. Even in the medieval period, however, the process of designating sacred objects as genuine relics was fraught with difficulty. As Jonathan Sumption argues, “the trade in relics reached epidemic proportions after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, when the market was inundated with objects whose authenticity it was impossible to prove.”23 Ironically, the proliferation of relics in the marketplace caused many competing monasteries to steal each other’s relics so as to preserve them from the threat of commodification and duplication. By removing them from the marketplace altogether, relic thieves temporarily masked the embarrassing overlap between an object’s sacrality and its economic value.

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The dual processes of theft and reconsecration provided a viable solution to the excesses of the relic trade, but from a Protestant point of view, relics continue to present an entire spectrum of ethical and theological problems. The reformers were concerned about the alarming way in which relics tended to multiply, but they also worried about the fact that their authenticity could only be determined by church authorities, and that those same authorities often had an interest in the profits made by selling or displaying relics to pilgrims. It was a commonplace of Reformation-era satire that all the pieces of the true cross, if gathered together, would easily sink the best English ship – the underlying implication being that relics are bad for the nation as a whole – but in many ways the Protestant use of the term “relic” actually collapsed the distinction between the problem of worshipping false relics and the problem of worshipping objects that should never have been designated as holy in the first place.24 During the early years of the Reformation, when many prelates still believed they could control superstition by outlawing the abuse of traditional religious objects rather than the objects themselves, church officials such as Nicholas Shaxton seemed willing to accept the premise that some relics might actually be authentic. According to Eamon Duffy, Shaxton instructed that all the relics confiscated from private homes in Salisbury be brought to him, “together with any documentation concerning them, and those that were judged ‘undoubtedly true relics’ would be returned, with instructions how they might be used.”25 Under later generations of iconoclasts, however, the term relic would come to stand for any object or practice that was thought to be a holdover from traditional Catholicism, as in Richard Overton’s New Lambeth fayre newly consecrated and presented by the Pope himselfe, cardinals, bishops, Iesuits, &c. Wherein all Romes reliques are set at sale, with the old fayre corrected and enlarged, opening and vending the whole mistery of iniquity (1642). In post-Reformation England, and particularly among Shakespearean scholars, the significance of the relic continued to morph, eventually combining with the idea of historical lineage. Furness’s props represent an effort to preserve traces of the dead among the living, and like all relics their value is enhanced by documents that speak to their authenticity, but in many cases these objects are designated as “heirlooms,” a word tied to geneaology rather than to organized religion.26 The exhibition card attached to a human skull housed in the Furness collection, for instance, begins with the famous lines from Hamlet about Yorick’s skull and goes on to assert that this particular object once belonged to a licensed pharmacist named Mr. Carpenter, “who had loaned it to many actors playing at the Walnut Street Theatre.” By way of proof, the signatures of some of these actors, who, if we are to believe Mr. Carpenter, used the skull as a property when playing the title role in Hamlet, are still

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visible on the cranium.27 Furness’s project, one that the gravedigger undertakes in a more ironic fashion when speaking about Yorick to Hamlet and Horatio, is to prove that the skull is not just any skull. According to its curator, this prop provides a link between several generations of actors while simultaneously bringing modern viewers into indirect contact with a cast of legendary Shakespearean performers. Furness’s efforts to preserve his relics within the sanctified space of his private library assume a type of affective value that seems to collide with the realities of the modern marketplace, but in fact they merely reveal the way in which monetary and emotional value are always linked when it comes to commercial theatrical production. During a performance, any attempt to attach a single set of meanings to an object such as Desdemona’s handkerchief is complicated by the fact that the actual handkerchief, the stage property, is itself a mere commodity, a financial investment. As the handkerchief repeatedly changes hands, it demonstrates the difficulty of attaching any meaning, whether cultural, economic, or religious, to an object that is constantly in circulation. But the play’s treatment of the handkerchief also mirrors the basic economic fact about stage properties, which is that a majority of them, especially the small ones, are easily replaceable.28 Within certain limits, one handkerchief can stand for any handkerchief, and if a company preserves such an object it is only for the purpose of reusing it. The handkerchief deployed in a production of The Spanish Tragedy, for example, could easily reappear in a subsequent production of Othello. We can conclude, then, that the affective value of the prop is largely determined by the dramatic contexts in which it is placed.29 Similarly, Catholic relics only took on their sacred resonance once they were placed within a particular geographic setting such as a chapel or cathedral. What, then, does it mean for a stage property to be sacred? For collectors such as Furness, stage properties served as the material traces of otherwise ephemeral performances. From this perspective, the stage property may be said to have four very different social lives, each of which corresponds to particular type of value. In its first life, the property is a commodity, a financial investment made by a theatrical company. In the second, it undergoes a kind of transformation as part of a theatrical performance. In Othello, for instance, an ordinary handkerchief is first represented as a love token, then as a kind of magical charm once it is lost, then as a piece of needlework to be copied in Bianca’s hands, and finally as an “antique token” in Othello’s narrative of Desdemona’s infidelity.30 In its third life, the prop returns to obscurity, to be reused in a later play, to be pawned or sold, and, when worn out, to be recycled or discarded. Finally, collectors such as Furness give the property a fourth life as the physical trace of a theatrical event. Both the theater and the private col-

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lector participate in a fantasy of singularization that is “real” in so far as the consumers, whether theatergoers or scholars, continue to accept the narratives they tell about the object’s value. This is not to say that the theaters were in reality the preservers of Catholic idolatry that radical Protestants accused them of being, but the church, the library, and the stage can all be seen as locations to lend the relic a set of meanings commensurate with their respective value systems. At the same time, by thinking about the ways in which an object circulates from one location to another, we can develop a narrative of its shifting value that helps to account for the complex interplay between sites such as the church and the marketplace, or the marketplace and the theater. In what follows I provide a few examples of what it might mean for a stage property to pass through multiple moments of commodification and singularization. These transformations speak to the ways in which individuals connect themselves to the transcendent figures of Shakespearean theater – the great actors, as well as the elusive author himself – while simultaneously reproducing the cultural values that effect that transcendence. Though many relics are venerated as actual body parts, other relics, labeled relics of touch or brandea, “acquired miraculous powers through contact with the holy remains.”31 Mary’s tunic, for instance, was deemed valuable because of its proximity to the body of the Virgin, and along with a substance said to be her milk, it became the main attraction at Chartres. Similarly, theatrical relics were described in terms of their closeness to the original actor or moment of performance. Documents such as the sale catalogues for the estate of American drama critic William Winter, printed in the mid-1920s, are quite explicit about the relative value of the items in the collection. A purple velvet purse once owned by Ada Rehan is categorized somewhat dismissively as “nice personal relic” while another, a girdle worn by Helena Modjeska in the role of Cleopatra, is “a most interesting and desirable relic of the great actress.” This is a particularly striking example of the way theatrical memorabilia fall across a spectrum from the relic to the heirloom or remembrance. Other items, such as Rehan’s paperweight of a foxhound, are classed as “association relics” because they link their owners to the life of the actor but not necessarily to the theater itself.32 The relics that were once stage properties are in some ways most striking, for they have accrued their value because rather than in spite of the ephemeral nature of dramatic performance. They link their collectors to the fleeting moment of a particular production, allowing them repeated access to the sense of being in the theater with Terry or Irving or Modjeska.33 In subsequent decades, of course, relics such as Mr. Carpenter’s skull have become valuable not just to the collector but to others who view them as historically interesting curiosities. Such objects, to borrow a term from Appadurai and

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Kopytoff, continue to resist desingularization despite their roots in a commodified enterprise.34 By far the most extraordinary American collection of Shakespeareana is housed at the Folger Library, and although the Folger does own objects such as “Shakespeare’s hair,” many of its relics are connected not to the playwright himself but to nineteenth-century actors.35 Among these objects is a prayer book property bound in velvet, used by Charles Kean in his production of Hamlet. The manuscript has eighty-eight real pages that can be turned, but those pages are covered with watercolors rather than illuminations and decorative calligraphy rather than devotional instructions.36 Other noteworthy items include the dagger Henry Irving carried in Hamlet and a set of fake noses used to create his Shylock, along with several dresses, belts, hats, and swords worn by a range of famous performers. The surviving properties have provenance records almost as scant as those in the Furness library, but we can contextualize the shifting value of these and other stage relics by examining a variety of printed inventories, also owned by the Folger. These inventories arise from estate sales as well as from museum exhibitions, and give us vital information about both the singularization and the commodification of stage relics. We learn, for instance, that in 1938 the London Museum displayed a range of theatrical memorabilia once owned by Irving, including a feather he plucked from Ellen Terry’s fan during a production of Hamlet in 1877.37 The feather, which was subsequently pasted to a photograph of Terry taken by Edward Bell, is a particularly vivid example of the desire to preserve the memory of an individual performance. The photograph serves to authenticate the feather as belonging to Terry, while the feather itself serves as the physical trace of her actual costume. The photograph is necessary here because the feather itself bears no external marks that testify as to its original link with Ellen Terry. Like Theresa’s finger, the feather stands in for the whole costume, and by extension for the whole actor, but one has to accept this on faith unless provided with the appropriate documentary evidence. The same London Museum exhibition also displayed a handkerchief “spotted with strawberries.”38 This object is not an artifact of a particular production, nor is it associated with any individual actor; the catalogue entry simply identifies the item using the language of the play itself, which is understandable, given that the handkerchief passes from character to character rather than being tied to any single person. An analogous object is the “strawberry handkerchief ” in the Folger collection, which according to the card catalogue was used by “various actors.”39 In both cases, the object’s relatively anonymous afterlife seems to have been predetermined by its fluctuating status in the play. At the same time, however, the handkerchief associated with the Irving production is unique in that it commemorates a

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specific director. If this handkerchief is not the valued trace of a particular performance, it is nevertheless a witness to Irving’s fame as an actor and stage manager, like the other items that appeared in the exhibition. Among the relics listed in the catalogue are a number of handkerchiefs noteworthy because they once belonged to Irving, but with no connection to specific theatrical productions. Only one was the property used in his Othello, and yet on any given night a second handkerchief might have been substituted for the one “spotted with strawberries” without the audience noticing. The object’s value, like that of any relic, is dependent upon context and proper documentation. A few of the objects described in the Folger catalogues are props that have explicitly Christian connotations within their respective theatrical fictions, further complicating the analogy between the sacred status of Catholic implements and that of theatrical relics. The Folger, for instance, owns a brass chain and cross worn by Adelaide Neilson in As You Like It, but perhaps the most dramatic example of a religious stage property is a “[p]aste cross and gilt metal chain with pattern collar” which Irving wore as Richelieu in the early 1890s. This item sold at an estate sale for the sum of sixteen guineas.40 Another item from Irving’s estate was the pectoral cross he wore in the role of Thomas Becket. In this case, an item that was religiously sacred within the fiction became theatrically sacred through its association with Irving. Like other stage props, these religiously oriented items also circulated between actors: Adelaide Ristori’s carved wooden crucifix, for instance, was eventually given to Edwin Booth, while Augustin Daly gave his wood cross and set of beads to Ada Rehan in 1893. The rosary eventually passed to William Winter, who kept it, rather irreverently, hung on his study chair.41 More dramatically, the Maltese cross “enamelled and set with pastes” which J.P. Kemble used in his production of Hamlet passed first to Ellen Kean, who wore it as Queen Katherine, and then to her husband. This item was sold off at Christie’s for forty-four guineas, yet a newspaper reviewer, pointing out the object’s lack of commercial value, labeled it a “piece of tinsel.”42 Tinsel, like pasteboard, is a prop-making technology that dates back to the religious dramas produced in pre-Reformation England. The term, which originated around the year 1500, eventually came to be “applied to a cheap imitation [of gold or silver] in which copper thread was used to obtain the sparkling effect.” A representative use of the term in this sense appears in the dedicatory epistle to Mayne’s City Match (1639): “[m]asquers, who spangle, and glitter for the time, but tis through a tinsell.”43 Writing nearly three hundred years later, the reporter reviewing the 1905 Christie’s sale was still picking up on the antitheatrical resonances of the term “tinsel,” revealing the pervasive attitudes that continue to associate stage properties with mere ornamentation. Recognizing this residual uneasiness with the

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theater’s ability to endow ordinary objects with extraordinary meanings provides us with another surprising connection to generations of long-dead audiences and critics, while at the same time reminding us that that we need to pay more careful attention to the objects that are at the heart of the modern theatrical enterprise. Although stage relics might pass directly from actors to their family members or to savvy collectors, they took on even greater weight if they could be said to have first passed from one performer to another: such objects possessed a double resonance, and could simultaneously be linked to an even older historical moment while preserving the invisible residue of multiple performances. Adelaide Neilson’s cross with white stones, for instance, was presented to Modjeska, who wore it when she played Rosalind, before giving it to Elsie Leslie Milliken.44 Costume accessories, which might at first glance seem simultaneously more fragile and more personal than objects such as daggers, also circulated widely, for the scarves Salvini used to create his Othello were eventually passed to Booth.45 The Sotheby’s catalogue of the objects in Kean’s library includes the “scales, weights, knife, and sealed parchment bond” used by both Charles and Edmund Kean as Shylock. Similarly, a sword listed in the 1938 Irving exhibition catalogue is described as having passed from Kean, who stabbed Caesar with it, to Irving, who did the same. One circassian dagger apparently had a lengthier journey, passing – so the catalogue claims – from Lord Byron to Charles Kean, and thence to Ellen Kean. For her part, Mrs. Kean gifted it to her niece Patti Chapman, who gave it to Irving. The piece sold for thirteen guineas at the 1905 sale, significantly less than the tinsel cross that had been traced back to Kemble, perhaps because it was less of an antique.46 Byron also apparently gave a short sword to Edmund Kean, who used it in Othello, before passing it to Charles Kean who carried it in the same play; this item sold for more than twenty-two guineas in 1898, while swords that were generically designated as “Kean’s” went for mere shillings.47 Although these items might be designated as “heirlooms” because they encapsulate a kind of theatrical genealogy, they are always also linked to the originary moment of theatrical performance, which renders them sacred, but also translatable in a way that heirlooms, objects located in individual homes and individual families, are not. The 1898 inventory relating to the sale of Charles Kean’s estate is particularly useful for thinking about the diachronic lives of stage relics because many of the items in it had originally appeared in the catalogue of his father’s possessions. When Edmund Kean died penniless in 1833 many of his effects were sold off at a public auction, but at the sale his son Charles was encouraged to buy back some of his father’s properties, including a sword that was presented

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to the senior Kean in 1819 by a group of admirers from Edinburgh who approved of his Macbeth; this same sword was then resold upon Charles’s own death in 1898 for almost five times the original sum.48 Other circulating objects include ones that more closely resemble Catholic relics, including the tooth of George Frederick Cooke, which was given to Booth, and a lock of Edmund Kean’s hair cut in 1833 that passed through Irving to a London playing company, who listed it in their inventory of 1896.49 All these examples help reinforce the ways in which the concept of a theatrical lineage enhances the value of stage relics; they are celebrated as transcending both past and present, but they are also valorized as a concrete link to the originary moment of English theater history. The further back these objects can be traced, the closer their collectors can get to the first Shakespearean performances – and, by extension, to the fantasy of Shakespeare himself.50 A clipping from the New York Dramatic Mirror accompanying the Folger copy of the 1905 Irving sale catalogue remarks somewhat disparagingly that several of the pieces derived their value from “sentimental reasons,” but for whom were these objects sentimental?51 Irving and other actors did sometimes pay attention to their own mementoes, but just as often their relics were preserved only through the intervention of collectors and wealthy theater patrons. The Folger owns a steel sword with brass and leather hilt worn by Edmund Kean in Richard III which was bought, presumably from an estate sale, by an English antiquarian, who then presented it to Richard Mansfield.52 Another sword used by Kean as Richard was given to Irving by a Mr. Chippendale on the night of 29 June 1877, when Irving took over the role. Irving’s family apparently saw fit to return it to the marketplace, and it was listed in the 1905 sale for an unknown sum.53 At times, actors themselves expressed a sense of skepticism about the reverential attitude taken toward these objects. One of Irving’s contemporaries, Sir Squire Bancroft, remarked that the dueling sabres that went for twenty-nine guineas at Christie’s were “just ordinary things with which we used to fight.”54 Bancroft’s offhand remark reinforces the notion that within the moment of performance, these relics are relatively unimportant, while simultaneously reiterating the importance of looking at these objects diachronically. At the moment of performance, the sabres are central to the fiction – one cannot have a fight without them. At the same time, they are transformed by the stage fight into potential relics (their fate depends on the longevity of the actors’ fame). That transformation is not evident in the objects themselves, except in further wear and tear, a fact which in turn makes the relic itself easier to fake. Stage relics fluctuate in value as they move in and out of the marketplace, but they also change status depending on the attitude adopted toward them by their owners and by the other players in the economic transaction. They

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begin to increase in value, both affective and economic, only when they have left the theater, and their status relies very much on the subsequent performances of the actor in question, which fuel the audience’s desire to have access to earlier moments in his or her career. Always the language of the relic highlights the interplay of embodiment and memory, transcendence and finality, presence and absence. At times the theater itself can even become the object of remembrance, if, like the elusive performer, it happens to disappear. The Folger owns a tin and brass armlet that, according to its accompanying tag, signed by a Mrs. Conway, was “the only piece of armor of Edwin Booth’s production of Julius Caesar saved from the Brooklyn Theatre fire.”55 Just as stage properties link collectors to an ephemeral moment of performance, traditional Shakespearean relics are meant to establish a connection to the poet’s own life story. The wood of the mulberry tree that once stood in Shakespeare’s yard, under which he and Ben Jonson were said to have drunk copious amounts of sack, was famously “converted” into a huge number of commodifiable knick-knacks by one Thomas Sharp of Stratford. These objects were then copied by other entrepreneurial craftsmen and widely circulated, like the pieces of the true cross, making it increasingly difficult to assign any authenticity to the first items, or to distinguish the forgery from the original. Collectors even paid for items such as a “penholder made from the scion of the mulberry tree,” because they provided a link, however indirect, to Shakespeare the man.56 Similarly, a number of theatrical relics were converted to new purposes as part of the process of preserving them. The Irving sale catalogue, for instance, contains a description of a “turned wood box” that had been made from a piece of the stage at Drury Lane as well as a doublet made from one of his waistcoats.57 Another catalogue records the existence of a plate made from silver that was taken from the ruins of the Park Theatre.58 The catalogue of the relics possessed by William Burton, impressively titled Shakspeariana Burtonensis, includes the description of a cup made from mulberry wood, said to be the former possession of David Garrick. The term mulberry had by this point become a kind of brand name; collectors attempted to authenticate each piece as a fragment of the original tree, but always did so with the knowledge that their buyers would be as skeptical as if they had offered them a fragment of the true cross. When selling the goblet, priced at one hundred pounds, Mr. Christie reputedly suggested that it might be used to collect donations for the Dramatic Fund.59 Christie’s instinct was that the object should be put to use for the good of a new generation of actors, but in fact the mulberry tree itself was entirely cut off from the theatrical enterprise. In attempting to point back directly to Shakespeare, the narratives of these “original” relics bypass the stage altogether, while at the same time they owe

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their continuing value to Shakespeare’s status as the anchor of the contemporary theatrical establishment. Like the sacred objects associated with Catholic saints, stage relics can be the products of forgery, and their collectors were acutely aware of the need to distinguish the authentic from the fraudulent. Moreover, these questions of authenticity are often tied up with issues of the authority behind the designation, an authority that can arise from intellectual credentials or from aristocractic and genealogical ones. James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, the famous Shakespearean biographer and literary critic, owned a set of mulberry tree rings made by Mr. Sharp for the 1769 Garrick Jubilee.60 Along with other gentlemen scholars, he believed that Sharp, who had sworn an oath on the Holy Evangelists that his material was nothing other than the “true wood,” was the only confirmed manufacturer of these objects. Based on Sharp’s testimony, and that of one Crofton Croker, Halliwell-Phillipps sought to distinguish his own possessions from other “suppositious reliques.”61 A 1925 article by antiquarian Charles Haines, in which the author reviews the current state of Shakespeareana, is somewhat more skeptical. Haines is willing to entertain the possibility that there might be such an object as “Shakespeare’s sword,” but he ultimately dismisses it: “A sword may have been among Shakespeare’s stage properties, and a basket-hilted sword, said with pleasant credulity to have been used in Hamlet, was long shewn at the Birthplace, but a scoffer asserts that the Prince Regent in 1815 stated that ‘he knew the family fairly well that gave it.’”62 In this case, the anecdotal evidence labeling the sword as the gift of an aristocratic family makes it recognizably English, and perhaps Shakespearean in some loose sense of the word, but actually undermines its potential authenticity as a stage relic, because it cannot be attached to an individual saint. The curators at the Theatre Museum in London have been similarly cautious in labeling their specimens. The museum houses a rich collection of Shakespearean stage relics, but many of the displays indicate that these objects are only “reputedly” linked to actors such as Irving and Bernhardt. Even more telling is the account of a mulberry tree relic in the 1866 catalogue of the objects in the library of William Harrison. The author of the inventory notes that although almost all the mulberry relics are “spurious,” this one has the proper documentation, and furthermore, is of greater value having not been “cut up and made into a box.” (He might be pleased with an object currently housed in the Furness collection that can best be described as a very dusty log.) The fact that the wood has not been touched by Sharp or anyone else seems to point to its authenticity, but at the same time the very acknowledgement of the existence of fraudulent relics casts doubt upon the object in question.63

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Despite their lack of connection to the properties of the nineteenth-century stage, these Shakespearean fragments are relevant to my study of stage relics for two reasons. First, they help to underscore and clarify the prominence of the relic terminology. Like stage relics, they are authenticated by their lineage, and by the degree of proximity to the originary event: either the life of the bard or the performance of a particular stage actor. Second, the attention that has been paid to Shakespeare relics by scholars such as Barbara Hodgdon and Graham Holderness is analogous to the recent trend, documented by Jonathan Gil Harris, toward tracing objects of material culture in order to glimpse the everyday lives of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.64 What Harris suggests is that by paying closer attention to stage properties and their diachronic trajectories – the movement from the church storehouse to the second hand shop to the tiring house and from the Office of the Revels to the storerooms of less wealthy acting companies – we can develop a more dialectical understanding of how objects functioned in the early modern period. What we need to resist, Harris argues, is the tendency to see objects as “portals through which may be glimpsed the contours of an overarching structure or system.”65 Similarly, I would argue that we can enhance our understanding of what Hodgdon calls the “commercial, collectible bard” by looking at the way stage properties gain and lose value within the world of nineteenth-century collecting.66 What the sale catalogues and library inventories reveal is a complex cast of characters, from antiquarians to auctioneers, from actors and theater fans to librarians, all of whom had a hand in creating and documenting the lineage of the objects that passed through their hands. To the extent that anyone with enough money can participate in this system of exchange, it is a relatively egalitarian process of preserving social capital, tied up with an open marketplace in which circulating objects have no fixed value.67 As with the relic trade in the Catholic church, however, there are always arbiters of value who have the power to influence the reception of these objects. As an American scholar, my initial research on stage relics has largely been limited to a close examination of the objects in the Furness and Folger collections. There is also something peculiarly nationalistic, however, about the business of relic preservation when the deity in question is an icon of English high culture. In 1852 Halliwell-Phillipps was already concerned that the “opportunities of procuring genuine Shakespearian reliques” were few and far between, and that “[o]ur public libraries and museums are remarkably deficient in the department of Shakespearian curiosities.”68 In bemoaning the lack of curios and relics, he was undoubtedly referring to quartos and folios as well as to fragments of the mulberry tree. On the other hand, the term “relic” helps us to acknowledge the degree to which these textual treasures operate as physical

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traces of the past in the same way that the mulberry tree does.69 He also seems to be evoking the language of the heirloom by encouraging his English audience to take a proprietary interest in objects that can be construed as a legacy held in trust for the entire nation. Would-be collector Charles Haines was also gravely worried about the flow of relics overseas. His fear, as he puts it, is that “the powerful lode-stone of the almighty dollar will, unless steps are taken to contrast the attraction, gradually draw all our Shakespearian rarities” to New York, Philadelphia, or Boston. He complains bitterly that Mr. HalliwellPhillipps sold many of his own treasured items to Mr. J. Marsden Perry of Providence, noting that “such precious heirlooms should not have been allowed to leave the country.”70 The attitude Haines and others took toward Shakespearean relics was diametrically opposed to the fervor with which Foxe’s Protestant heroes shipped Catholic trinkets out of the country. But it is also possible to see a residual distrust in sacred icons as part of the value system that allowed these relics to fall into the hands of American collectors. Thus, when Fanny Kemble gave a pair of gloves she believed to have been Shakespeare’s to Furness in 1874, she included the following caveat: “the worship of Relics is not the most exalted form of devotion but ‘the meanest garment that ever has but clipped’ one whom we love and revere becomes in some measure dear and venerable to us for his sake, and so we may be permitted to keep Shakespeare’s gloves with affectionate regard.” Despite the fact that the gloves “were in Garrick’s collection and given by Mrs. Garrick to my Aunt,” thus proving to Kemble’s satisfaction that they were genuine relics, she urged Furness to eschew devotion in favor of “regard,” and to see them as a gift from one dear friend to another, in memory of their mutual affection for Mr. Shakespeare.71 To evoke the binary English Protestants attempted to draw between themselves and their Catholic forbearers, Kemble viewed the gloves as a remembrance rather than a relic, the object of an intimate personal exchange rather than the embodied remains of a national icon. Kemble also sought to remove these objects from any taint of Catholic idolatry by keeping them within an upper class gift economy. Her hope was that only those who knew their true value, and who would not treat them with superstition, would be able to handle them. At the same time, she believed that the gloves had managed to escape the fate of many relics, that of commodification, by passing from one friend to another. Kemble may have been unaware of the fact that Furness, like Henry Folger, was at the forefront of a movement to professionalize the study of Shakespeare, and that their collections would be held up by future generations of scholars as examples of “the democratization of privately held intellectual and cultural capital.”72 She would certainly have been uneasy had she known that the gloves would be made accessible to

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innumerable theater fans and college students, many of whom might succumb to the temptation to see the gloves as relics, especially as they are now housed in a glass-covered case lined with red velvet. In this postmodern age, where Shakespeare has become available to a dizzying variety of theater practitioners, including large numbers of actors working in languages other than English, it is relatively easy to dismiss figures such as Haines and Kemble as elitists. On the other hand, these individuals provide an essential link in the history of the Shakespeare trade. Close enough to the poet’s own lifetime to believe in the existence of genuine sixteenth-century relics, and yet thoroughly embroiled in the modern theatrical enterprise and the cult of the actor, they represent a pivotal moment in the history of the commodification and fetishization of Shakespearean theater. The trade in stage relics is, of course, only one example of the complex Shakespearean inheritance that was passed on to actors, collectors, and readers in North America. But these objects provide an especially striking indication of the overlap between affective and economic value that characterizes our collective fascination with our shared Shakespearean legacy. Even a brief glimpse at the variety of stage relics available to collectors in the nineteenth century demonstrates the complex ways in which emotional and monetary value corroborate one another, both within the theater and outside it. These objects indicate the fervor with which theatergoers sought to connect themselves to Shakespeare, but also the ways in which that semi-religious attitude was tinged – as it is in the case of Catholic relics – with consumerism. If any of these relics were to appear without its museum label in a London pawnshop, it would be worth no more or less than any other similar commodity. It would be disingenuous, however, to say that there is no institutional “authority” behind the value of such theatrical objects. While performances themselves are ephemeral, the theater as it emerged in Shakespeare’s England was a capitalist enterprise driven by the prestige of companies, actors, and theater managers. Things such as Booth’s sword, Irving’s beard, and Modjeska’s satin dress were elevated to the status of relics by those who collected them because they had once been associated with the living stage, which was itself a commercial medium as well as an artistic one. I have been implying that the economics of nineteenth-century collecting are very much rooted in the innovations of sixteenth-century theater practitioners, who used apparently worthless objects to construct a highly successful profit-driven enterprise, but it is precisely the fantasy of a connection between centuries that informs the creation and circulation of theatrical relics. Whether authentic or fraudulent, stage relics underscore the very real power of theatrical lineage, a living tradition built on the shoulders of long-dead actors.

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NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

This quotation appears in an 1894 letter to John Sartain, located in the correspondence section of the University of Pennsylvania’s H.H. Furness Memorial Library manuscript collection, 1791–1985, box 5. Expert librarians at the University of Pennsylvania Special Collections Library and at the Folger Library were instrumental in helping me to begin my research on stage relics. I am particularly grateful to John Pollack, Lynne Farrington, Daniel Traister, and Georgianna Ziegler, as well as to Peter Stallybrass. A version of this essay was presented at a seminar on “The Presence of Shakespeare” at the Shakespeare Association of America in 2006. I am indebted to Susan Bennett for giving me the opportunity to share my work with the seminar, and to Tom Bishop for his insightful comments on the article in its present incarnation. My title is taken from John Rabone’s pamphlet, “Shakespearean relics: the history of Shakespeare’s brooch” (Stratford-upon-Avon: E. Fox, 1883), reprinted from The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 13 April, 1883. Rabone recounts the afterlife of the mulberry tree that once stood in Shakespeare’s yard and was reputedly chopped down by an over-zealous neighbor: “the wood of the mulberry tree was not burnt, however, but was reserved by a Mr. Thomas Sharp of Stratford, who converted the greater part of it into useful and fancy articles of many kinds, which were eagerly bought up and treasured as souvenirs of England’s greatest poet and dramatist” (50). For more on Sharp and the mulberry tree, see p. 245. “My father named me Autolycus, who, being as I am littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. With die and drab I purchased this caparison, and my revenue is the silly cheat” (4.3.24–6). All citations to Shakespeare’s works refer to The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Stephen Gosson, Playes confuted in fiue actions (London, 1582) (STC 12095), C6r. James Kearney, “Trinket, Idol, Fetish: Some Notes on Iconoclasm and the Language of Materiality in Reformation England,” Shakespeare Studies 28 (2002): 257–61. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of matters most speciall and memorable (London, 1596) (STC 11222), 1178. Jonathan Gil Harris, “The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects,” European Journal of English Studies 4, no. 2 (2000): 122. This is due in part to a lack of evidence about early modern staging practices. Notable exceptions include Frances Teague’s Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1991), Andrew Sofer’s The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), and Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda’s Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Harris and Korda make the point about our own scholarly prejudices quite eloquently in the introduction to this volume. As Harris notes in his article on Shakespeare’s hair: “for all that the antiquarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries placed a naïve faith in objects as the unmediated residue of the past, they were nonetheless attentive to a dimension of materiality that object criticism has all too frequently overlooked; the diachronic trajectories of things through time and space.” “Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 4 (2000): 480.

RELICS OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY STAGE 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

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Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 152. Patrick Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 194. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1986): 90. Harris, “The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects,” 112. In this piece Harris urges literary scholars with an interest in material culture to consult the work of anthropologists such as Appadurai, who help us to see that “the object functions as a turnstile between opposing temporalities that are encoded simultaneously within it” (119). From the Oxford English Dictionary entry on “relic,” 1.a. Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd edition, copyright Oxford University Press, 2006. Although the term “relic” points to a specific element of traditional Catholicism, it is also firmly rooted in the secular discourse of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A clipping pasted into the middle of the Folger’s copy of the catalogue from the sale of Henry Irving’s estate notes that among his personal effects, “[t]he relics of theatrical lineage naturally attracted much attention.” The author of the newspaper article also comments that “[t]he stage relics associated with Irving himself were generally fought for with heartiness.” On the back a later collector has noted in blue crayon that the header was “Sale of Irving Relics / Over 2,500 Pounds Realised” and that the date was Tuesday, 15 December 1905. Catalogues of Theatrical Collections sold by Christie (Manson and Woods, 1905). William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” Res 13 (Spring 1987): 23–45, 30. OED “relic,” 3.a. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 299. OED “relic”, 5. OED “antique,” 2, 3.a. OED “antique,” 8. “1.a. A chattel that, under a will, settlement, or local custom, follows the devolution of real estate. Hence, any piece of personal property that has been in a family for several generations. 1.b. Anything inherited from a line of ancestors, or handed down from generation to generation” (OED, “heirloom”). Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 31. “From the merchants’ point of view,” Patrick Geary argues, “relics were excellent articles of trade. They were small and easily transported … As highly desirable luxury items, they brought excellent prices in return for little capital investment.” “The best aspect of all,” he goes on to say, “owing to the difficulties of communication between communities involved, was that the body of a popular saint already sold might be sold again to another customer” (Furta Sacra, 63). This adage appears in the 1563 Homilie Against Idolatry, but was originally attributed to Erasmus. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400– c. 1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 415.

252 26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 It is worth noting that there is a connection between the archive and the reliquary; both may be more costly than the object they enclose, and indicate the degree to which relics can actually gather economic value around them. The notion of pilgrimage also applies to modern bardolatry, of course. Just as Chartres was founded on the trade produced by pilgrims who came to view the tunic of the virgin, so the Shakespeare industry in Stratford has been built around relics at the Birthplace and at the parish church. The radical recontextualization of this object is reminiscent of the “round red priest’s hat” made famous by Stephen Greenblatt’s “Resonance and Wonder,” an essay from Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990). Greenblatt originally claimed the hat as Wolsey’s, and used it as an example of the way in which sacred objects were evacuated of their meaning by the Reformation before ending up in the hands of secular acting companies. It turns out that there is little or no proof to back up this narrative, but Greenblatt eventually corrected his mistake, presumably after having read Anne Barton’s insightful critique in the New York Review of Books (28 March 1991). In the paperback edition of the book, Greenblatt has emended his story, citing evidence that the hat belonged to Horace Walpole before being used in Charles Kean’s production of Henry VIII. What is fascinating, as John Lee points out in his analysis of the two editions, is that this revision of the object’s life history does absolutely nothing to alter Greenblatt’s argument, or even his pagination; whether or not the hat was actually Wolsey’s, its oscillation between the aristocratic manor, the stage, and the church still serves to illustrate his model of “cultural production”. John Lee, “The Man who Mistook his Hat: Stephen Greenblatt and the Anecdote,” Essays in Criticism 45, no. 4 (October 1995), 285–300. This was true of many Renaissance stage properties, which partly explains the paucity of documents describing their cost and whereabouts. In contrast to costumes, which were far more expensive, stage props appear infrequently in the surviving inventories. One could argue that the handkerchief used in Othello must somehow be identifiably “spotted with strawberries,” but it is questionable as to whether many audience members would have been able to see the object well enough to discern such a detail. Harris makes a similar observation about the skull in The Revenger’s Tragedy, remarking that “given this stage property’s prominent place in a work that consistently exposes its own parasitic relation to Hamlet, it becomes hard to avoid the conclusion that the skull had in all likelihood previously starred as Yorick” (“Shakespeare’s Hair,” 489). It is worth noting that larger objects, like beds and tombs, are often associated with specific plays in documents such as Henslowe’s inventory. As Peter Stallybrass has pointed out to me, it is possible to argue that these properties were instrumental in helping to determine the repertory of a given company, for once a group of players invested in something as expensive as a bed, they were likely to commission more scenes for it. Othello, 5.2.214–15. Belting, 59. The Library of the Late William Winter: sold by order of his son Jefferson Winter; books, pamphlets, manuscripts, literary and dramatic memorabilia and association relics; to be sold at auction (New York: Walpole Galleries, 1922–27), 2b.258, 220, 77, 2e.198. Nineteenth-century collectors of Shakespeareana often bought pieces of costumes, which, like Catholic relics, were no less valuable for being broken or frayed. Among

RELICS OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY STAGE

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

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the treasures owned by a London acting company was “a fragment of a dress worn by Garrick in the character of Hamlet.” Catalogue of Relics in Safes Belonging to The Players: 23 April, 1896 (New York, 1896), 4. According to Appadurai and Kopytoff ’s model of an object’s social life, any given thing can be “singularized” or made sacred, but it can also be commodified, made indistinguishable from an object with a similar market value, as it passes into larger spheres of social exchange. See n. 9 above. This object is described in detail in “The Pen’s Excellencie”: Treasures from the Manuscript Collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library, ed. Heather Wolfe (Washington D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2002), 220. The show is documented in a pamphlet aptly titled, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Relics of Sir Henry Irving (London, 1938). Ibid., 23, 28. The object, which is described only on a card in the “Costume Collection” drawer in the special collections alcove, is number 11-1-51-1. Catalogues of Theatrical Collections, 6. Catalogue of relics, 1896, 4; Library of the Late William Winter, 2e.20. Catalogues of Theatrical Collections, 8, 18. OED “tinsel,” 2. This is item 6-25-1 in the Folger collection. Catalogue of Relics, 1896, 3. “Library of the Late Charles Kean,” in Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, ed. A.N.L. Munby (London, Mansell Information/Publishing; Sotheby ParkeBernet Publications, 1971– ), 422; Catalogue of an Exhibition of Relics, 24; Catalogues of Theatrical Collection, 27. “Library of the Late Charles Kean,” 422, 421. Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, 377, 422. Catalogue of Relics in Safes Belonging to The Players (New York: Devinne Press, 1905), 8; Catalogue of Relics, 1896, 6. It is a tribute to the power of the Shakespeare myth that the tradition of collecting theatrical relics persists in the twenty-first century. Both John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, for example, auctioned off personal effects through Sotheby’s in 2001. Many of the items are strictly domestic heirlooms, but the Richardson catalogue includes a pair of costume gloves made of red satin with crosses embroidered in them. The accompanying letter attests that “these gloves were worn by H. Irving when he played Cardinal Wolsey in 1892. They were left to me in her will by a cousin of mine – who was a great friend of Irving and E.T – when she died … I knew she would like another great actor to have them.” The signatory is designated only as “Glen”; nonetheless, Sotheby’s priced the gloves at five to seven hundred pounds. As in the Furness collection, a little documentation goes a long way toward enhancing the value of the relic – in this case its economic and historical value. The Ralph Richardson Collection: Sold by Orders of the Trustees of the Ralph and Meriel Richardson Foundation (London: Sotheby’s, 2001), 86. The clipping is pasted into page 77 of the catalogue; it is taken from the January 1906 issue of the New York Dramatic Mirror. This is item 10-15-41-5 in the Folger collection.

254 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61.

62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 Catalogues of Theatrical Collections, 26. From an unidentified clipping pasted into page 18 of the 1905 catalogue. Folger Collection item 10-15-41-11. Catalogue of Relics, 1896, 8. Italics added. Catalogues of Theatrical Collections, 9. Ibid. Shakspeariana Burtonensis: being a catalogue of the extensive collection of Shakspeariana of the late W.E. Burton, esq. … forming part of his very extensive and unique histrionic library (New York: Joseph Sabin and Co., 1860), 71. According to Christian Deelman, the Jubilee marked the “point at which Shakespeare stopped being regarded as an increasingly popular and admirable dramatist, and became a god.” At the very least, it served to inaugurate the modern trade in Shakespeare relics. The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (London and New York: Michael Joseph, Viking, 1964), 7. The Folger owns several decorative items, including a ring with a setting of mulberry wood, attributed to Sharp. Some account of the antiquities, coins, manuscripts, rare books, ancient documents, and other reliques: illustrative of the life and works of Shakespeare / in the possession of James Orchard Halliwell (Brixton Hill: Printed for private circulation only [by T. Richards], 1852), 121. What Personal Relics have we of Shakespeare? The Antiquarian Quarterly, no. 8 (London: Spink and Son, 1926), 226. Descriptive catalogue of a collection of Shakspeariana: consisting of manuscripts, books and relics, illustrative of the life and writings of Shakespeare, in the library of William Harrison, esq. … (London: Printed by Thomas Richards, 1866), 90. This catalogue is housed in the Furness Library. For instance, Harris sees the influential model of “social circulation” described in Shakespearean Negotiations as largely synchronic, that is, concerned with analyzing the object at a particular moment in time, but notes that Greenblatt’s reflections on the transformation of church vestments into theatrical costumes have broader implications for a study of the diachronic lives of objects and stage properties in particular (“The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects,” 122). For more on the Shakespeare industry, see Marjorie Garber’s “Shakespeare as Fetish,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1990): 242–50, Barbara Hodgdon’s The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) and Graham Holderness’s edited collection The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988). Harris, “The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects,” 114. Hodgdon, 232. For more on this issue, see Howard Felperin’s “Bardolatry Then and Now,” in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. Jean Marsden (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 129–44. Halliwell-Phillipps, vi. English manuscripts were also thought of as relics, as in J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps’ and Thomas Wright’s 1839 anthology Reliquiae Antiquae. Haines, 225, 229. The letter, dated 17 January 1874, is reprinted along with other authenticating evidence on a card, perhaps created for an exhibition, now stored with the gloves. Furness’s own

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account of the gloves, printed on the same card, precedes the transcript of the letter: “On the death of GARRICK, the Gloves passed to his widow who died in 1822 and whose Will contained the following bequest: ‘I give to Mrs. Siddons a pair of gloves which were Shakespeare’s, and were presented by one of his family to my late dear husband, during the Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon.’ Mrs. SIDDONS bequeathed them to her daughter, Mrs. GEORGE COMBE, by whom they were given to Mrs. KEMBLE, and by this ever dear and gracious Lady given to the present possessor.” Michael Bristol comments on the nationalist motives of Folger’s collecting habits, noting that he made the United States into a “leading center of cultural authority” in large part by “acquiring private collections mostly held by wealthy British families.” Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 72.

15 “What wretches feel”: Lear, Edgar and Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho

Andrew Fitzsimons

Frank Kermode believes Act 4 scene 6 of King Lear ‘probably the cruellest and paradoxically the most beautiful scene in Shakespeare’, in which, he writes, ‘a comparison with Samuel Beckett seems inevitable’.1 The inevitability of the conjunction arises from the conditions of extreme depredation both Shakespeare and Beckett explore in a language issued from the mind’s limits and wit’s end, in Lear dramatized, in Beckett enacted. According to James Knowlson, Beckett re-read King Lear during the period 1977–82, signs of which enter the works now known as the ‘late trilogy’. In Ill Seen Ill Said (1982), the second of these works, the old woman’s eye is described as ‘vile jelly’; most significantly for this essay, King Lear casts its giant shadow over the last part in this trilogy, Worstward Ho (1983), the composition of which began on 9 August 1981, with the words ‘All before. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’2 Slightly altered, these become the fourth, and most well-known, word-block of the finished work: All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (7)3

Knowlson speaks of Beckett’s ‘strategy’ in the writing of Worstward Ho. The word is apposite in that the text deliberately and painstakingly moves toward the imperative established by these initiating words. The task ‘to fail better’ entails the creation of a lexicon for the descent upon failure degree zero: ‘leastening’, ‘unlessenable’, ‘leastward’, ‘unworsenable’, ‘unworstable’; an effort which takes its cue from Edgar’s speeches in Lear. Various sources confirm that Beckett copied out three quotations from Edgar into his ‘Sottisier’ notebook (RUL MS 2901) during or shortly before composition: ‘The lamentable change is from the best, / The worst returns to laughter’; ‘Who is’t can say, I am at the worst’; ‘The worst is not so long as one can say, This is the worst.’4 Anne Atik’s notes for August 1983, when the composition of 256

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Worstward Ho was more than likely complete, also make reference to Beckett’s re-reading of Lear, of which she reports he said: ‘Unstageable; wild; scenes and words impossible to stage.’ She adds that he was ‘[s]orry he hadn’t retained Edgar’s words before’, and quotes Beckett as saying ‘They’re very important. “The worst is not; so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’.”’5 King Lear appears, so, to have been much on his mind during this period; later that same evening, being walked home by Atik and her husband, the painter Avigdor Arikha, Beckett mentions that he had never seen the play performed.6 Yet Shakespeare, and Lear, leaves significant traces even in Beckett’s earlier writings. Beckett attended Trinity College Dublin from 1923–26. Though his Honours subjects were eventually French and Italian, his first two years of study included, among other subjects, English Literature. It was here that he developed his ‘close knowledge of Shakespeare’s major plays’, under the aegis of Professor W.F. Trench, whose lectures emphasized ‘versification’ and how ‘metrical evidence could be used to date the plays’.7 Despite the dryness of this approach Knowlson assures us that Beckett ‘responded in a lively, direct way to Shakespeare’s language and imagery’, passages of which enter the early stories.8 Knowlson cites Ariel’s dirge in The Tempest as possible source for the title ‘Ding-Dong’ in Beckett’s first fiction, the collection of stories entitled More Pricks than Kicks (1934), and he illustrates Beckett’s self-conscious use of allusions from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in the stories ‘Fingal’ and ‘Draff’. In such early work as More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy (1938), the selfconsciousness and arch playfulness of Beckett’s allusions, from his readings within the English tradition, and from within the wider European tradition, reflect a voracious appetite for literature, accompanied by a voracious dissatisfaction with literature’s modes of apprehending what he calls in his essay on Proust (1931), ‘the real’. Beckett makes a key distinction in this essay between the voluntary and involuntary image. Voluntary memory, he writes caustically, is ‘of Irish extraction’ and resides within the realm of the conventional and received; it is, he says, ‘far removed from the real’.9 Involuntary memory, on the other hand, ‘is explosive … in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works, and in its brightness revealed what the mock reality of experience never can and never will reveal – the real’ (Proust, 33). Part of the derivation of this sense of the real can be seen in his student notes on Greek Philosophy, contained in TCD MSS 10967/9, in which he writes of ‘Eleaticism’ that it ‘[a]ffirms exclusive reality of permanence, deathlessness, changelessness, & the unreality of all that changes and moves’ (Beckett’s emphases).

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Here we can see that the impulse in Beckett’s art to move away from ‘externals’, to remove ‘plot’ from his fictions, the social scenery of the ‘well-made play’ in his drama, and from his language what Robert Pinget calls ‘all trace of rhetoric’,10 is a desire to reach the bare bones of the real.11 This move, as with much else in Beckett’s art, is prefigured in the essay on Proust: ‘The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication’ (Proust, 64). As early as Proust, Beckett delineates the problem with which his work, and in particular his prose work, will struggle, the pursuit of an authentic speech frustrated by ‘an intelligence that is not ours’: ‘Even on the rare occasions when word and gesture happen to be valid expressions of personality, they lose their significance on their passage through the cataract of the personality that is opposed to them’ (Proust, 64). Much of the comedy in early Beckett derives from this resistance to the blandishments of words, and a fatigue with how conducive and at the same time resistant, reality is to the palliative of received representational modes. The writing is delineated and defined by literature, in which everything has already been said, in which event presents itself in terms which invite literary allusion, and in which reality gets the blame: ‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.’12 This fatigued rejection of the external world’s primacy and the dear illusions fostered by language receives its most eloquent justification in Giacomo Leopardi’s ‘A Se Stesso’ [‘To Himself ’], in which ‘non che la speme, il desiderio é spentó’13 [‘not only hope, desire itself is spent’], which Beckett quotes twice in Proust. In his later work not only the source of comedy changes, as I will discuss later, but also the relationship between the Beckett text and the texts from which it borrows. Allusions to Shakespeare and to others’ writings murmur within the welter of a piece’s internal drive, as echoed rhythms and altered phrase. Occasionally they are direct and obvious, as in Come and Go, whose opening line ‘When did we three last meet?’ rephrases and re-situates the opening of Macbeth. The names of the three women in the play (Flo, Vi, Ru) carry further Shakespearean overtones, of the flowers which Ophelia offers in her madness (Hamlet 4.5.169–78).14 Beckett’s allusions to Shakespeare, and Dante and the other touchstones of his art, are integral to the en-voiced consciousnesses remembering, and misremembering, their tattered selves, their comings and goings, doings and undoings. For the ‘author’ of these consciousnesses, a consciousness doomed forever to be in excess of the consciousnesses it en-words, these phrases and rhythms are drawn up from a vast memory store, the pied booty of the hoovering up of aesthetic sensations Beckett made as a young man, through the art galleries of Dublin, London, Kassel, Berlin, which have been

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displaced into the memory vaults of his characters. (Think of Lemuel in Malone Dies, ‘Flayed alive by memory, his mind crawling with cobras, not daring to dream or think and powerless not to’, 245). The archive of his student notes held at Trinity College Dublin testifies to the voracity of his literary appetite and his diligence in recording facts and details, if not to an original questioning back against the works encountered in his studies.15 The notes on the paintings encountered on his travels around Germany in 1936–37 reveal a more actively counter, mature and at times impatient observer, but a dry scholarly element remains. In Malone Dies he lampoons his own propensity for academic catalogue: ‘beside this window that sometimes looks as if it were painted on the wall, like Tiepolo’s ceiling at Würzburg, what a tourist I must have been, I even remember the diaeresis’ (216). To illustrate the evanescent quality to late-Beckett’s allusions, and the Matryoshka doll effect of the tale within tale, author within author world the texts circumscribe, take the following moment in the first work in the late trilogy, Company (1980): But with face upturned for good labour in vain at your fable. Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark. And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were. Alone.16

As Knowlson notes, ‘labour lost’ is Shakespearean, as are other recurring phrases in Company: ‘bourneless dark’, ‘the place beneath’ among them. Knowlson also cites the ‘girdle’ round the earth, which of course not only echoes Shakespeare but, more pertinently, Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, in which the ‘Sea of Faith’ once enrobed the earth like a Renaissance girdle. Waiting for Godot also carries echoes of this work in one of its most famous passages, Pozzo’s ‘They give birth astride of the grave, the light gleams an instant, then its night once more’,17 which borrows from Arnold’s ‘on the French coast the light / gleams and is gone’.18 Such borrowings meld with the context of Beckett’s work so that what they enact is not a saying of the same old thing, nor is it any longer an expression of Beckett’s frustration with the same old thing. The words from earlier texts resound. As the Kermode comment earlier quoted implies, Beckett’s rereading of literary tradition causes the language of prior texts, such as King Lear, to take on ramifications awakened by his work, at times uncannily so. In Lear’s ‘Nothing will come of nothing, speak again’ (1.1.90) Shakespeare sounds like a Beckett before Beckett,19 just as the play’s exploration of the treacherous instability of language might be termed Beckettian (think of Cordelia’s truthful silence in this same scene, and the culpable loquaciousness of Regan and Goneril).

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The title Worstward Ho, of course, carries a number of other literary echoes: to Webster and Dekker’s Westward Hoe (1607), and to Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855), as well as Viola’s ‘westward ho!’ in Twelfth Night (3.1.132).20 In his notes for his course in English Literature contained in TCD MS 10970 Beckett diligently ticked off the plays he had thus far read. He had read five works by John Marston (1573–1634), but not yet ‘Eastward Ho’. He noted that Marston had been called ‘a screech-owl among the singing birds’, and that Charles Kingsley (1819–75) ‘formed with Maurice & Ludlow a group known as Christian socialists’, but he had as yet to read Westward Ho! We do know that in July 1935 Beckett and his mother visited Bideford in Devon, which contains the bathing place ‘Westward Ho!’ from which Kingsley’s book took its name, though some accounts have it the other way around. Kingsley, at least, wrote part of it there.21 What Beckett wrote of Work in Progress is as true of Worstward Ho: ‘the title of this book is a good example of a form carrying a strict inner determination’.22 As Dirk Van Hulle writes, the work ‘is an attempt to reach the worst possible condition’, in order to bring a cease to the process of everworsening, yet it is at the same time possessed of a foreknowledge of failure. This is to be ‘an asymptotic journey’:23 doomed from the start. A knowledge contained already in the phrases Beckett copied from Edgar and upon which he fixes his own obsession with the unceasingness of language: “the worst is not, / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” (4.1.27–8, emphasis added). Enoch Brater writes that in Worstward Ho ‘the language is almost heroic in its mad determination to go on. The void cannot be conquered, but it can still be described, especially when part of the description is the writer’s inability to describe it.’24 The beauty of the language Beckett creates out of this situation is, Anthony Cronin says, ‘late Joycean’, echoing, like much of late Beckett, the incantatory rhythms of Finnegans Wake.25 Worstward Ho, as collected with the other works in the trilogy, Company and Ill Seen Ill Said under the title Nohow On, is, Cronin avers, ‘one of Beckett’s most moving expressions of the belief that failure is the inevitable outcome of all attempts at artistic creation.’26 Shakespeare, through Edgar’s words, influenced not only the drive toward the worst as theme, but also Beckett’s playing with the potential of language to be made to reflect worsening turns within its own procedures: Edgar: Yet better thus, and known to be contemned, Than still contemned and flattered. To be worst, The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune, Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear. (4.1.1–4)

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Beckett takes the rhythmic, self-persuasive thrust of Edgar’s ‘Yet better thus’ and deflects it onward toward the worst. Other cues for his creation of the work’s lexicon come from the overthrown, world gone wrong, counter-natural conditions the play concerns, in which children have cast out parents, where comfort can be harm (‘Away, get thee away; good friend, be gone: / Thy comforts can do me no good at all; / Thee they may hurt’ (4.1.16–18)), in which lack can prove more beneficent than comfort (‘our mere defects / Prove our commodities’; 4.1.22–3), in which experience continually undermines optimism and as long as there is life there is always more to lose. The ideal of the negational mode outlined by Beckett in Proust is a zone ‘at once imaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extratemporal’ (75). Though Beckett articulates here the aesthetic that he will consistently and tirelessly pursue, it was not until after his experiences during World War II, in the work of the immediate postwar years in which he abandoned English for French, that his ‘subject’ emerged, a subject which, despite the language shift, resonates with Lear’s experience on the heath: Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just. (3.4.28–36)

Lear’s words seep through into Vladimir’s ‘Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?’ (CDW, 84). In the work written in the period 1946–1951, Beckett follows Lear’s command to expose himself to what wretches feel. The effect of his experience at the Irish hospital at Saint-Lô in 1945–46 is appropriate in this context: the vision, Beckett wrote, of ‘humanity in ruins’ provided ‘an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again’.27 The ‘revelation’ that his work would need to incorporate depredation was fictionalized, in a setting not dissimilar to the climatic conditions of the heath, in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958): Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision at last. This I fancy is what I have chiefly to record this

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evening, against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for the miracle that … [hesitates] … for the fire that set it alight. What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely – [Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape forward, switches on again] – great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most – [Krapp curses, switches off tape, winds tape forward, switches on again] – unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire. (CDW, 220)28

Worstward Ho follows on from Company (‘With every inane word a little nearer to the last’), as Paul Davies has shown, in that inanity is adopted as the mode of saying most appropriate for the work to fulfil its premise. This mode is, like all of Beckett’s writing, one in which ‘[t]he artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn to the core of the eddy’ (Proust, 65–6). The ‘siege in the room’ of 1946–51, which J.M. Coetzee calls ‘one of the great creative outpourings of modern times’,29 produced the stories ‘First Love’, ‘The Expelled’, ‘The Calmative’ and ‘The End’, the novels Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, the Texts for Nothing and Waiting for Godot, work which became possible, Becket said, ‘the day I became aware of my own folly’, and began to write ‘the things I feel’.30 Anthony Cronin has written that Beckett ‘as an artist … had more false starts and false beginnings than most’.31 The ‘revelation’ of how his work must proceed caused second thoughts about the work that came before, second thoughts which became part of the fabric of the new work. As Cronin writes, ‘Perhaps … repeated failure made him feel more acutely than most the torment of marred utterance.’32 Failure becomes a ‘new occasion’ (Proust, 125), a welcoming of the worst repeated in negative in Malone Dies, ‘The fear of falling is the source of many a folly’ (233). Aporia, as part of this recognition, is essential in Beckett’s art of failure, though aporia itself is placed in doubt.33 In his first published work, ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico. . Joyce’ (1929), an essay on Work in Progress, Beckett had written of how Mr. Joyce recognizes how inadequate ‘doubt’ is to express a state of extreme uncertainty, and replaces it by “in twosome twiminds.” Nor is he the first to recognize the importance of treating words as something more than polite symbols. Shakespeare uses fat, greasy words to express corruption: “Duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed that rots itself in death on Lethe wharf.” (Disjecta, 28)

Christopher Ricks, spotting the misquotation from Hamlet, remarked how this slip from Shakespeare’s ‘ease’ to Beckett’s ‘death’, is typical of the later Beckett’s commingling of pleasure and death, just as his words in praise of Joyce’s words point toward the word-worsening mode he creates for a voice at the end yet again.

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In the middle of Beckett’s burst of ‘negative capability’ came the ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’ (1949), which, in Coetzee’s words, ‘enounce[s] concisely [Beckett’s] paradoxical fidelity to an art of the end of the line, an art that does not know why it exists, does not know to what it should address itself, and has nothing to say – a plight that is properly comical rather than tragic’.34 The comedy that now enters his work issues from Beckett’s ‘violently extreme and personal point of view’: ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’ (Proust, 103). Worstward Ho offers a permutation of Beckett’s solution to this extreme position. Indeed lines from the mock conversation with Duthuit could stand as epigraph to the entire Beckettian oeuvre, just as they offer near quotation from Worstward Ho itself: ‘There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said’ (Proust, 123). Like Edgar conjuring for the blind Gloucester the Cliffs of Dover out of words alone (with which Beckett’s ‘no ground but say ground’ (Worstward Ho, 8) resonates profoundly), Beckett’s failure-artist works ‘in the presence of unavailable terms’ (Proust, 125), an idea which reveals its full potentiality in a work which uses words to unsay what it says. In this negational mode, and embracing of the mistaken and irretrievably broken (recall Beckett’s aside in the last segment of the ‘Three Dialogues’: ‘(Remembering warmly) Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken’ (Proust, 126)), Beckett makes of himself an inheritor (and, in the Eliotic sense, a progenitor) of a line that might be traced back to the very beginnings of literature in English, to the Battle of Maldon, with its hanging first line, ‘would be broken’.35 Beckett also has his place in a failure-pitched strand prominent within twentieth-century Irish writing, with the Yeats of ‘The Circus Animals Desertion’, and in particular with the work of Thomas Kinsella. The rhetorical ploy in Kinsella’s ‘Baggot Street Deserta’ frames the poem within failure: it ‘begins’ as the act of writing is abandoned (‘The will to work is laid aside’36), yet the poem is a highly ‘finished’ work (in rhyming couplets), even as it questions the efficacy of ‘finish’. The speaker, a highly self-conscious poet, is examining, in the peace and quiet after failure, the nexus of concerns that make his poetry, and make it unsatisfactory. Though he claims to be speaking in the hiatus after poetry, what he offers in his account, as Douglas Dunn remarked, is a ‘more risky utterance’37 than the failed, abandoned poem might have done. ‘Baggot Street Deserta’ subjects the theoretical virtues of a conventional art to a rigorous questioning. Within a poem of formal poise, we see dissatisfaction with the formal idea of poetry itself. The consolations derived from language

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and form provide Kinsella with a potential solution to his feelings about the futility of writing, as in Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger: ‘But his love of the Word kept growing sweeter and sweeter, and his love of form; for he used to say (and had already said it in writing) that knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.’38 The tension here between knowledge of futility and the drive that continues despite this knowledge is a constant in Beckett, and is brought to fullness in Worstward Ho. In Conversations with and about Beckett, Mel Gussow recalls Beckett’s remark concerning his inability to translate the first word of the title, ‘I’ve gagged myself … Life’s ambition.’39 Beckett rejects the consolations of form, ‘if form is considered to be order’.40 The sense of life at its weakened, dispassioned end suffuses his work, as does ‘fidelity to failure’ (Proust, 125), so much so that Beckett, at the end, according to Anne Atik ‘thought that he’d failed to find failure’s pulse’.41 Failure is crucial to Beckett’s aesthetic, as revealed most clearly (and humorously) in the ‘Three Dialogues’. Yet from the first, as well as failure, worsening plays a crucial role. The ‘lamentable changes’ include the second act of Waiting for Godot, with Pozzo blinded and Lucky dumb, and the second act of Happy Days, with Winnie’s mound moved from waist to neck; in all of Beckett’s work progress through time is toward a worsening of the initial situation, even if that ‘worsening’ is in its eternal repetition, as in Play.42 If John Calder’s opinion that ‘Beckett is probably closer to Shakespeare than any other writer’ is less than useful given that the only evidence adduced is ‘heightened language’, he does offer useful insight when he writes on Beckett’s style in Worstward Ho: ‘juxtaposing everything that belongs to pure imagination, whether possible or not, with its opposite, [it] becomes a new language’.43 For Enoch Brater Worstward Ho ‘offers us a landscape almost exclusively verbal; there is little appeal to any world outside language itself’.44 In this language-world ‘[e]very word is … fated to be the worst word.’45 Beckett’s resistance to language’s blandishments ushers a contrarian’s desire to forge a language that would ‘the sum assess / of the world’s woes? / nothingness / in words enclose?’, as he put it in the ‘Addenda’ of Watt, a poem which, with Lear in mind, one might argue offers the answer ‘Shakespeare/Beckett’ to its question ‘who may tell the tale / of the old man?’46 Worstward Ho takes its place within this language goal, and within Beckett’s furious, programmatic sundering of English, when related to the famous letter to Axel Kaun (dated 9 July 1937), later dismissed by Beckett as ‘German bilge’ (Disjecta, 170). In Martin Esslin’s translation of the original German it reads:

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It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. (Disjecta, 171–2)

The journey in Worstward Ho, as with Finnegans Wake, begins as it ends, ends as it begins. The language is self-correcting, self-regulating, continually adjusting previous combinations of inadequate words toward formulations which will themselves be revised onward toward the ‘unworsenable’. The theme of saying as both active and passive, action and inaction, a drive toward an issueless point, is introduced from the start: ‘On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on’ (7). We soon discover this is not the start, but the latest stage of the process, what Robert Cochran calls Beckett’s ‘latest last line’.47 That this is a new stage in a continuing journey out of illusioned states toward the furthest reaches of a word-cleansed, de-illusioned respite, can be seen from the elements of past fictions the speaker divulges as he goes on: A time when try how. Try see. Try say. How first it lay. Then somehow knelt. Bit by bit. Then on from there. Bit by bit. Till up at last. Not now. Fail better worse now. (10) A place. Where none. A time when try see. Try say. How small. How vast. How if not boundless bounded. Whence the dim. Not now. Know better now. Unknow better now. (11).

Hugh Kenner in his New York Times review remarked that this is ‘writing hearing its own found sounds’,48 and discerned iambic pentameter breathing through the following lines, metric echoes of Milton and Wordsworth: Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands – no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by held holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade. (13)

The old man and child, figments as they are, are almost (but not quite) replaceable and interchangeable, like Becket’s other ‘pseudocouples’ Mercier and Camier, Vladimir and Estragon, and ‘All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones’ (The Unnamable, 278):49 ‘One old man and child. At rest plodding on. Any others would do as ill. Almost any. Almost as ill’ (13). The imagination is wil-

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ful, capricious. Yet its refinings of its own wilful creations bear the marks of an ex tempore logic of variation: They fade. Now the one. Now the twain. Now both. Fade back. Now the one. Now the twain. Now both. Fade? No. Sudden go. Sudden back. Now the one. Now the twain. Now both. Unchanged? Sudden back unchanged? Yes. Say yes. Each time unchanged. Somehow unchanged. Till no. Till say no. Sudden back changed. Somehow changed. Each time somehow changed. (14)

In this process of combination and re-combination language can still almost convince: ‘The words too whosesoever. What room for worse! How almost true they sometimes almost ring!’ (20), which recalls Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’ (‘Our almost-instinct almost true’),50 a poem which in its own way attempts to filter language down to an essential unillusioned statement of how it is. The experiments in Worstward Ho with addition and subtraction, with the sound and sense of words, recall Beckett’s poem ‘Roundelay’ (1976), which itself recalls Stephen Dedalus’s encounter with the ‘ineluctable modalities of the visible and audible’51 on Sandymount Strand in the ‘Proteus’ section of Ulysses: on all that strand at end of day steps sole sound long sole sound until unbidden stay then no sound on all that strand long no sound until unbidden go steps sole sound long sole sound on all that strand at end of day (Poems, 38)

The figures of old man and child, ‘the plodding twain’ (Worstward Ho, 30) are the ‘Least worse failed of all the worse failed shades’ (31), but the drive toward the ever-finer diminution of their trace in the imagination continues, and here again there is an Eleatic influence, in the variation on Zeno’s never-arriving arrow the text pursues: Naught not best worst. Less best worse. No. Least. Least best worse. Least never to be naught. Never to naught be brought. Never by naught be nulled. Unnullable least. Say

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that best worst. With leastening words say least best worst. For want of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worse. (32)

In Act 4 scene 6, Gloucester says of Lear’s desperate state, ‘O ruin’d piece of nature! This great world / Shall so wear out to nought’ (4.6.134–5), but in Beckett, though there is desire for nullity, the ‘one good. Gone. Gone for good’ (42), it is a state which, while the merest life remains, remains impossible: ‘Till then gnaw on. All gnaw on. To be gone’ (42). In the language and thoughtexperiment that is the descent upon the ‘Unworsenable worst’ the question arises: ‘What words for what then?’ (33). The answer: even then words continue: ‘As somehow from some soft of mind they ooze’ (33). Beckett in his praise of Joyce’s way with doubt in words, and the physical qualities of the Shakespearean word, moved on to Dickens: ‘We hear the ooze squelching all through Dickens’s description of the Thames in Great Expectations’ (Disjecta, 28). Beckett’s choice of ‘ooze’ in Worstward Ho, however, echoes most pertinently the words of the Poet in Timon of Athens, which are illuminating of the dripping space of late Beckett’s ‘imagination dead’: ‘Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes / From whence ’tis nourished’ (1.1.21, Alexander Text). What is remarkable in much, if by no means all of Worstward Ho is the relative ease with which it is possible to tease sense from its condensed grammar, such as from the three ‘saids’ in the following word-block in which, as Paul Davies remarks, ellipsis has been taken ‘as far as it will go’:52 Said is missaid. Whenever said said said missaid. From now said alone. No more from now now said and now missaid. From now said alone. Said for missaid. For be missaid. (36–7)

The reading pleasure derives in no small part from seeing language’s resources deployed so riskily and with such élan in such extreme imaginative circumstances. Having come to this (almost) definitive statement of non-statement, the text now reaches the point where ‘Back is on’ (37), and where ‘The say’ and ‘The said’ are the ‘same thing. Same nothing. Same all but nothing’ (37). The difference between the worded and unworded situation, the ‘nohow on’ and the ‘somehow on’, is elucidated, and the role of words in a world there all along without them: All not gone. Only nohow on. All not gone and nohow on. All there as now when somehow on. The dim. The void. The shades. Only words gone. Ooze gone. Till ooze again and on. Somehow ooze on. (38)

Words hinder, cast the veil of themselves over things which exist without them: ‘Less seen and seeing when with words that when not. When somehow than when nohow’ (39). As Jonathan Boulter has written, Worstward Ho ‘articulates

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again the fundamental themes of the Beckett oeuvre: the agonizing fact of being in a language that endlessly composes and decomposes the subject’.53 As wanton as the imagination’s prerogatives, words call what they say is said into existence. The subtracting tenor of the piece comes to its pitch of direst, inanely gratuitous cruelty when the words move back to the man and child: Say better worse now all gone save trunks from now. Nothing from pelves down. From napes up. Topless baseless hind-trunks. Legless plodding on. Left right unreceding on. (43)

The imagination powered by its own premise of subtraction and inanition elaborates the ‘what ifs’ of its ever-decreasing space, testing the limits of its own workings, into the final reduction, which we have been prepared to see is only a hiatus between ‘nohow’ and ‘somehow’: What were skull to go? As good as go. Into what then black hole? From out what then? What why of all? Better worse so? No. Skull better worse. What left of skull. Of soft. Worst why of all of all. So skull not go. What left of skull not go. Into it still the hole. Into what left of soft. From out what little left. (46) Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on. Said nohow on. (46–7)

Beckett is a belated writer in that a work such as Worstward Ho deliberately places itself in relation to precursors such as Shakespeare. At the same time, the intervention the work enacts exposes the literary tradition it inherits to a rigorous questioning, just as it calls forth and fills out implications latent in the achievements of the literary past. Edgar’s final words, the final words of King Lear, provide fitting testament to the stern imperatives and forbidding legacy both of Lear’s wretchedness and Beckett’s writing: The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most; we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (5.3.322–5)

NOTES 1. 2.

Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 195. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 674.

LEAR, EDGAR AND BECKETT’S WORSTWARD HO 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

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Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1983). All quotations are from this edition. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 674. The archive Knowlson quotes from is at Reading University Library (RUL). Anne Atik, How it Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 117. For the citations of Edgar’s words I have kept the punctuation (and slight variation) of the Knowlson and Atik texts. Later citations are from the Arden edition of King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997). Atik, 120. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 54. Deirdre Bair portrays Beckett as less than tolerant of Professor Wilbraham Trench’s lectures: ‘instead of concentrating on the subtleties of Macbeth, [Beckett] paid more attention to composing complicated, doodle-decorated lists of how many times Trench would say ‘at all’ throughout each lecture. For Beckett, the course was a waste of time, and when he attended lectures at all, he usually left in a state of extreme agitation and boredom.’ Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Picador, 1980), 42. Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder, 1965), 14. James and Elizabeth Knowlson, eds, Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 284. Recall Malone’s frustration with mere description: ‘to hell with all this fucking scenery’, Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (London: Picador, 1979), 254. Tom Stoppard on Beckett’s method of subtraction: ‘There’s stuff I’ve written I can’t bear to watch. They get rotten like fruit and the softest get rotten first. They’re not like ashtrays. You make an ashtray and come back next year and it’s the same ashtray. Beckett and Pinter have a lot more chance of writing ashtrays because they’ve thrown out all the potentially soft stuff. I think Beckett has redefined the minima of what theatre could be.’ From Mel Gussow, Conversations with Tom Stoppard, interview with Tom Stoppard recorded in April 1972 (London: Nick Hern Books, 1995), 6, quoted in Knowlson, Beckett Remembering, 283. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938; London: Calder, 1993), 5. There is a very interesting discussion of Beckett’s use of sun and light imagery in his later work in Richard Kearney’s contribution to the Beckett Centenary essays contained in Christopher Murray, ed., Samuel Beckett 100 Years: Centenary Essays (Dublin: New Island, 2006), 118–19. Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, ed. Niccoló Gallo and Cesare Garboli (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), 229. Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006). Beckett’s practice in these notes is consistent with his later preference for chronology and ‘verifiable details of individual human lives’ rather than explanation and rationalization. See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 244–5, for Beckett’s rationale of this position. Company (London: Calder, 1980), 88–9. Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 83. Henceforward CDW. Christopher Ricks, ed., Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 453.

270 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 7 Compare Lear with Malone in Malone Dies: ‘I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real than nothing. They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark’ (177). The Complete Works of Shakespeare. The Alexander Text (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1951). Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 202. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), 26–7. Dirk Van Hulle, Worstward Ho, from the Literary Encyclopedia, James Joyce Centre, University of Antwerp, published 4 October, 2004. http://www.litencyc.com/php/ sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8883 Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 675. Think of Beckett’s last work ‘What is the word’: ‘afaint afar away over there’, Poems 1930–1989, (London: Calder, 2002), 115, and the last lines of Finnegans Wake (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992): ‘A way a lone a last a loved a long the’ (628). Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), 572. As The Story Was Told (London: Calder, 1990), 28. The quotation comes from ‘The Capital of the Ruins’, which was written for a Radio Éireann broadcast in June 1946 but was not transmitted. Beckett worked as an interpreter and storekeeper from August 1945 to January 1946. See also Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 345–51. See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 351–2 for Beckett’s confirmation of the fictionalized setting of this revelation. Beckett’s actual revelation occurred, he told Knowlson, ‘in my mother’s room’ (352). Eoin O’Brien includes a draft version (from the archive of the Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas) of this speech in The Beckett Country (Dublin: Black Cat; London: Faber and Faber, 1986) in which Krapp says ‘the dark I have struggled to keep out of my work’ (83). J.M. Coetzee, introduction to Samuel Beckett: Grove Centenary Edition IV Poems; Short Fiction; Criticism (New York: Grove Press, 2006), x. Quoted by Anthony Cronin in his contribution to Murray, Samuel Beckett 100 Years, 85. The full quotation is: ‘All I am is feeling. Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel’ (Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 217). It is taken from an interview with Gabriel D’Aubarède, which took place in French and was published in Nouvelles Littéraires on 16 February 1961, 1, 7. The English version was translated by Christopher Waters. Murray, Samuel Beckett 100 Years, 85. Ibid. ‘What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, sooner or later? … I should mention before going any further, any further on, that I say aporia without knowing what it means.’ The Unnamable, 267. Coetzee, xiii. Michael Alexander, trans. The Earliest English Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 114.

LEAR, EDGAR AND BECKETT’S WORSTWARD HO 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

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Thomas Kinsella, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), 11. Douglas Dunn, “Baggot Street Deserta”, Thomas Kinsella Special Issue, Tracks 7 (1987): 14. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice: Tristan: Tonio Kröger, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (1928; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 147. Mel Gussow, Conversations with and about Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 50. In a letter to Antoni Libera in August 1983, Beckett said ‘I find I cannot translate Worstward Ho. Or with such loss that I cannot bear the thought.’ He had asked Knowlson ‘How … do you translate even the first words of the book “On. Say on” – without losing its force?’ (Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 685). That Beckett wanted the work translated can be attested by a December 1983 letter in which Jerome Lindon wrote to Jean-Jacques Mayoux, a Professor of English at the Sorbonne and a Beckett scholar, to see if he would be willing to undertake the task (see Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 827, n. 4.). Edith Fournier did eventually translate the work, as Cap au Pire, a title Beckett chose from among others she suggested (Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 685). Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 134. Anne Atik, ‘The Uses of Poetry’ in Offshore (Enitharmon Press, 1992), quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, frontispiece. Joseph S. O’Leary makes this point in ‘Beckett’s Intertextual Power’, Journal of Irish Studies (IASIL Japan) 18 (2003): 90. John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett (London: Calder, 2001), 102. Enoch Brater, The Essential Samuel Beckett: An Illustrated Biography (1989; London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 135. Ibid. Watt (1953; London: Calder, 1976), 247. Robert Cochran, Samuel Beckett: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1991), 80. Hugh Kenner, ‘Ever Onward,’ review of Worstward Ho, 18 December 1983, http://query. nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CEED81F39F93BA25751C1A965948260 See also Malone Dies: ‘But let us leave these morbid matters and get on with that of my demise, in two or three days if I remember rightly. Then it will be all over with the Murphys, Merciers, Mollys, Morans and Malones, unless it goes on beyond the grave’ (217). Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 111. James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 45. Paul Davies, The Ideal Real: Beckett’s Fiction and Imagination (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), 216. Jonathan Boulter, Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001), 133.

Notes on Contributors

Tom Bishop is Professor of English at the University of Auckland. Among his publications are Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge, 1996), a verse translation of Ovid’s Amores (Carcanet, 2003) and articles on Macbeth, Richard II, the Jacobean masque, Elizabethan music and Australian poetry. He is currently working on a book on Shakespeare’s use of the English Bible. Graham Bradshaw is Professor of English at Chuo University in Tokyo. His publications include Shakespeare’s Skepticism (Harvester, 1989 and Cornell University Press, 1993), Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists (Cornell University Press, 1993) and numerous essays. He is co-author, with Tetsuo Kishi, of Shakespeare in Japan (Continuum, 2005). Raphael Falco (‘Tragedy in Retrospect: Hamlet’s Narrative Infrastructure’, pp. 123–39) is a Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has published Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renaissance England (Massachusetts, 1994), and Charismatic Authority in Early Modern English Tragedy (Johns Hopkins, 2000). His articles have appeared in such journals as Diacritics, MLN, Criticism and Shakespeare Studies. Andrew Fitzsimons (‘“What wretches feel”: Lear, Edgar, and Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho’, pp. 256–71) is Associate Professor in the Department of English and American Literature, Gakushuin University, Tokyo. He is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where he completed a PhD thesis on the work of Thomas Kinsella. He is a former editor of the Journal of Irish Studies (IASIL, Japan). His study of Thomas Kinsella, The Sea of Disappointment is to be published in 2008 by UCD Press. Marta Gibin´ska (‘Politics of Theatre vs. Politics of (Non)State: Shakespeare in the Repertoire of Polish Nineteenth-century Theatres’, pp. 219–32) is Professor of English literature at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland. She teaches English literature from Anglo-Saxon to Victorian times, but her special field is English Renaissance drama. Her book Functioning of Language in Shakespeare’s Plays (Cracow, 1987) read the energies of drama through pragmatic linguistics. Her Polish Poets read Shakespeare (Cracow, 2000) traces 272

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refractions of Shakespearean motifs in the work of contemporary Polish poets. Problems of Polish reception of Shakespeare have been the subject of many of her papers. Alexander C.Y. Huang (‘Site-Specific Hamlets and Reconfigured Localities: Jiang’an, Singapore, Elsinore’, pp. 22–48) is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University (University Park). His publications (in English, German and Chinese) focus on the interactions between writing and other forms of cultural production. His articles in MLQ, Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare Yearbook, and other venues address the question of the nation in the performance and appropriation of Shakespeare, as well as transnational epistemologies in East–West literary exchanges. Ros King (‘Dramaturgy: Beyond the Presentism/Historicism Dichotomy’, pp. 6–21) is Professor of English Studies at the University of Southampton. A musician, theatre director and dramaturg, her books include The Works of Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in Sixteenth-Century England (MUP, 2001), Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Ashgate, 2005) and the revised edition of The Comedy of Errors for the New Cambridge Shakespeare series (CUP, 2004). Tetsuo Kishi (‘Tadashi Suzuki Directs King Lear – Again’, pp. 59–72) is Emeritus Professor of English, Kyoto University. He is co-author (with Graham Bradshaw) of Shakespeare in Japan (Continuum, 2005). He is Vice-Chair of the International Shakespeare Association. Jonathan Lamb (‘Idols in Hobbes, Shakespeare, and Gay’, pp. 199–218) is the Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Preserving the Self in the South Seas (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and is currently completing a book called, provisionally, The Things Things Say. He is also a commissioning editor for a new series being published with Palgrave called ‘Re-enacting History’. Richard Levin (‘Prenuptial Rituals and Bonding in Shakespeare and Elsewhere’, pp. 155–76) is Professor Emeritus of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (University of Chicago Press, 1971), New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (University of Chicago Press, 1979), and Looking for an Argument:

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Critical Encounters with the New Approaches to the Criticism of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003). Kristen L. Olson (‘Semper Eadem: The Paradox of Constancie in Shakespeare’s Phoenix and the Turtle’, pp. 92–119) is Associate Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University Beaver Campus, where she is also coordinator of the Honors Program. She has published essays on James Joyce and on Milton as well as on Shakespeare, and has served as dramaturg for the Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre. Her current book project examines ambivalence in poetic and iconographic representations of Tudor dynasticism. José Roberto O’Shea (‘Family Ties over Romantic Love: Appropriations of Romeo and Juliet in Northeastern Brazil’, pp. 49–58) is Professor of English at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, in the South of Brazil. He has a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, and has spent time as visiting research scholar at the Shakespeare Institute, in Stratford-uponAvon, and at the University of Exeter. Besides articles in books and journals published in Brazil, in the US and in Europe, he has published a series of his own annotated, verse translations of Shakespeare’s drama into Brazilian Portuguese. Simon Palfrey (‘The Rape of Marina’, pp. 140–51) is a Fellow of Brasenose College Oxford. He is the author of Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford, 1997; paperback 2000), Doing Shakespeare (Arden, 2004) and Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford, 2007, with Tiffany Stern), and the general editor with Ewan Fernie of Shakespeare Now!, a series of original ‘minigraphs’ published by Continuum. B.J. Sokol (‘Tolerance in Shakespeare: An Introduction’, pp. 177–96) is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of London, Goldsmiths College. He has authored or co-authored books and articles on Shakespeare and law, Shakespeare and science, Shakespeare and psychology, and Shakespeare and visual art. His current book project is entitled Shakespeare and Tolerance. Lisa S. Starks (‘That’s Amores! Latin Love and Lovesickness in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis’, pp. 75–91) is Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. She has published articles and edited volumes on Shakespeare, Marlowe, Renaissance literature and film. These include two book collections, co-edited with Courtney Lehmann, entitled Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical

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Theory and Popular Cinema (FDU/AUP, 2002) and The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory (FDU/AUP, 2002). Her current work is tentatively titled Transforming Trauma: Violence, Vulnerability, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays. Elizabeth Williamson (‘“Useful and fancy articles”: Relics of the Nineteenthcentury Stage’, pp. 233–55) earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005 and is currently on the faculty at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Her book project, Staging Sacred Things: The Circulation of Religious Objects in Seventeenth-Century Drama, addresses the function of stage properties as objects of devotion, idolatry and remembrance on the professional stage. Excerpts are forthcoming in Studies in English Literature and English Literary Renaissance. The current article, ‘Useful and fancy articles’, is part of a new project on theatrical lineage.

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Index

Ackerman, Alan 129, 139, 276 Adlington, Richard 217, 276 Almeida, Átila de 51, 276 Almereyda, Michael 37 Andrade, Elza de 54, 57, 276 antique, concept of 237 Apuleius 206, 217, 276 Aristotle 123, 185 Asquith, Clare 116, 276 Ataíde, Martins de 49–57, 276 Atik, Anne 256–7, 264, 269, 271, 276 Attridge, Derek 20, 281 Axton, Marie 100–101, 113, 116–17, 276 bachelor parties 164–6, 169 Beckett, Samuel 260, 264, 267, 269, 277 Bellamy, Elizabeth 77, 88–9, 277 Belot-Mountjoy suit 179–80 Belting, Hans 236, 251–2, 277 Benjamin, Walter 29, 45, 277 Bentley, Gerald Eades 173, 278 Bernhardt, Sarah 246 Bhabha, Homi 25 Billington, Michael 10, 19, 278 Bishop, Tom 72, 250, 272, 288 Bloch, Ernst 216, 218, 278 Bly, Mary 173, 176, 278 Bodin, Jean 181–9, 191–6, 278, 285, 289, 294, 299 Boehrer, Bruce 130, 139, 278 bonding, male 166–70; female bonding 170–71 Booth, Edmund 249 Booth, Edwin 242–4, 249 Boulter, Jonathan 267–8, 271, 278 Bradshaw, Graham 72, 272–3, 288–9 Brater, Enoch 260, 264, 271, 279 Brecht, Bertolt 54, 59, 62, 69 Bristol, Michael 255, 279 Brown, John Russell 25, 44–5, 118 Bruno, Giordano 106–110, 116, 118–19, 262, 282, 291, 299 Bulman, James 24, 44, 279 Burke, Kenneth 130, 139, 278, 279

burlesque 8–9, 19 Burrow, Colin 88, 90, 279 Burton, Robert 82, 90, 279 Burton, William 245, 254, 279 Bush, Douglas 91, 279 Calvinism, Shakespeare’s dislike of, 185 Cao, Shujun 45–6, 280 Capon, William 19 Carruthers, Ian 4, 60, 71, 298 Cascudo, Luís da Câmera 50, 280 censorship 11, 16–18, 20, 27, 221, 224, 227, 229–31 chastity 29, 93–4, 97, 100–103, 106, 109– 115, 117, 150, 158, 164, 278, 283 Churchyard, Thomas 96, 114, 280 Cochran, Robert 265, 271, 281 Coetzee, J. M. 262–3, 270, 281 Collinson, Patrick 113, 192–3, 281 Colloquium of the Seven (Bodin) 181–3, 185–6, 188, 193–6, 278, 289, 299 Congreve, William 171, 175, 281 Cooke, Frederick 244 Cooke, William 8 Corneille, Pierre 123 Costigan, Edward 125, 138–9, 281 Cowper, William 214, 217, 281 Cronin, Anthony 260, 262, 270, 281 Crosset, Ann 36 cultural materialism 12–13 Dasein (Heidegger) and narrativity 124, 132 Davies, Paul 262, 267, 271, 281 Deelman, Christian 254, 281 Dekker, Thomas 175, 20 Deloney, Thomas 16 Derrida, Jacques 12, 20, 281 Desmet, Christy 49, 56, 281 Digby, Everard 15, 20 dramaturgy as holistic analysis 13 Dubrow, Heather 90, 282 Duffy, Eamon 238, 251, 282 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 116, 282

301

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Dunn, Douglas 263, 271, 282 Edwards, Richard 273 Eriksen, Roy 106–8, 116, 118–19, 282 Esslin, Martin 41, 47, 264, 282 Falco, Raphael 123–39, 272 Farr, David 10 Felperin, Howard 254, 282 Ferrers, Henry 20 Fineman, Joel 115, 119, 282 Finnis, John 116–17, 282 Fischlin, Daniel 115, 283 Fitzsimons, Andrew 256–71, 272 Fletcher, John 155–6, 172, 277 Folger, Henry 248, 255 Ford, John 123 Foxe, John 234, 248, 250, 283 Furness, Horace Howard 233–6, 238–9, 241, 246–8, 250, 253–4 Garber, Marjorie 119, 254, 283 Garnet, Edward 20 Gay, John 217–18, 283 Geary, Patrick 235, 251, 283 gender 76, 81–2, 89–90, 93, 97–8, 100– 101, 113, 115, 165, 171, 175, 187–8, 295 Genette, Gérard 118, 283 Gerard, John 20 Gheeraerts, Marcus 99 Gibin´ska Marta 219–32, 272, 284 Ginzburg, Carlo 205–6, 217, 284 Girard, René 174, 284 Gladstone, William 8 Godwin, Geoffrey 6, 7, 19 Gosson, Stephen 234, 20, 280 Gower, John 151, 284 Greenblatt, Stephen 90, 252, 254, 284, 240 Greene, Ellen 77, 79, 89, 172, 284 Grell, Olé Peter 190, 193–5, 284 Grosart, Alexander 92, 111–12, 116, 280 gunpowder conspiracy 14–15, 20 Gurr, Andrew 175–6, 284 Hadfield, Andrew 10, 20, 284 Haines, Charles 246, 248–9, 254, 284 Halliwell-Phillipps, James 246–7, 254 Hanmer, Thomas 7 Harpsfield, Nicholas 16 Hartmann, Henrik 37–8 Hawkes, Terence 19, 285

Heidegger, Martin 48, 124, 132, 285 Hilliard, Nicholas vii, 97–8, 114 Hobbes, Thomas 199–203, 205–7, 209–11, 213, 215–17, 273, 285–6, 296 Hodgdon, Barbara 25, 43–4, 247, 254, 277, 286, 296 Holderness, Graham 247, 254, 286 Holinshed, Raphael 21 Hotine, Margaret 94, 114, 286 Howard, Jean 24, 44, 286 Huang, Alexander 22–48, 273, 286, 290, 293 Hughes, Ted 86, 91, 286 Hugo, Victor 11, 221–22, 286 Hulse, Clark 89–91, 286 Hume, Anthea 93, 113, 116–27, 216, 218, 286 idols and idolatry 191, 199–201, 203–11, 234, 237, 240, 248, 251 Ikeda, Carlotta 36 Irving, Henry 236, 240, 241–6, 249, 251, 253, 287, 290 Jardine, Lisa 21, 287 Jiang, Tao 46 Jiao, Juyin 22–3, 28–34, 40–42, 43, 45–6, 287, 298 Jonson, Ben 3, 23, 44, 111, 195, 245, 280, 287, 296 Jordan, Constance 97, 115, 190, 193, 287 Kastan, David Scott 21, 287 Kean, Charles 6–8, 19, 241, 243, 252–3, 287, 295 Kean, Edmund 19, 243–4 Kean, Ellen 242–3 Kearney, James 234, 250, 287 Kearney, Richard 269 Keith, Alison 76, 88, 288 Kemble, Charles 6, 19 Kemble, Fanny 242–3, 248 Kemble, J.P. 19, 242 Kennedy, Dennis 25, 44–5, 288 Kenner, Hugh 265, 271, 288 Kermode, Frank 256, 259, 268, 288 Kierkegaard, Soren 147–8, 151, 288 King, Ros 3–4, 6–21, 273 Kinsella, Thomas 263–4, 271–2, 282, 288 Kishi, Tetsuo 1, 3–5, 59–72, 272–3, 288–9 Kluchun, Pichet 36 Knolles, Richard 278

INDEX

303

Knowlson, James 256–7, 259, 268–71, 289 Knox, Richard 192 Koji, Takao 47, 298 Kopytoff, Igor 235, 241, 253, 289

Murphy, Andrew 190, 194, 292 Murphy, Patrick 91, 292 Muss-Arnolt, William 191, 194, 292 Musset, Alfred de 227

Lamb, Charles 66, 69 Lamb, Jonathan 199–218, 273 Langdal, Peter 37–8 Langer, Susanne 125, 129, 136, 138, 289 Lanham, Richard 103, 117–18, 289 Lao, She 45–6, 289 Larkin, Philip 266, 271, 289 Lecler, Joseph 190, 290 Lee, John 252 Leopardi, Giacomo 258, 269, 290 Leveridge, Richard 211, 217 Levin, Carol 112, 290 Levin, Hanoch 139, 295 Levin, Richard 155–77, 272, 290 Li, Jiayao 47 Li, Ruru 31 Littleton, Charles 179, 190, 194, 290 Locke, John 206, 209, 217, 290 Lorca, Garcia 54 Lu, Gu-sun 29, 45 Lucretius 88, 206, 209, 217, 291, 292

Nänny, Max 119, 292 narrative depictions of offstage violence 123 Nederman, Cary J. 190, 194, 290, 292 Needham, Gwendolyn B. 175, 292 Ninagawa, Yukio 26 Norbrook, David 112, 292 Nugent, Georgia 88, 292

MacCulloch, Diarmid 190, 194 Mann, Thomas 264, 271, 291 Mansfield, Richard 244 Marcus, Leah S. 97, 112, 113, 115, 282, 291 Marx, Karl 9, 20, 33 mask, or prosopon 201–2, 204 Massai, Sonya 24, 44, 291 Matchett, William 116, 291 May Day riots of 1517, in Sir Thomas More, 17–18 McCown, Gary 173, 291 McKewin, Carole 172, 291 Melville, Herman 207–8 Memmo, Paul 106, 118, 291 Michel, Paul-Henri 118, 291 Middleton, Thomas 155, 172–3, 291 Miller, Jonathan 9–11 Modjeska, Helena 227–8, 230–31, 240, 243, 249 Montaigne, Michel de 185, 192, 194, 291 More, Thomas 16–18, 21 Motthe, Georges de la 95 Mueller, Janet 97, 113, 115, 282, 291–2 Munday, Anthony 16–18

O’Brien, Eoin 270, 292 O’Leary, Joseph S. 271, 292 O’Shea, José Roberto 4, 49–58, 87, 274, 292, 296–9 Odashima, Yushi 62–3 Olivier, Laurence 29, 42, 43 Olson, Kristen L. 92–119, 274 Ong, Ken Sen 3, 4, 7–9, 13, 17, 20, 23, 25, 27–30, 32 Orkin, Martin 24, 26, 44–5, 293 Otis, Brooks 89, 224, 293 Overton, Richard 238 Ovid [P. Ovidius Naso] 75–83, 85–91, 205, 209, 210, 215, 217, 272, 277, 279–80, 285, 287–8, 292–3, 295, 299 Palfrey, Simon 140–51, 274 Parker, Patricia 119, 293 Parry, Hugh 89, 91, 293 Pavis, Patrice 49, 293 Pechter, Edward 20, 293 Petrarch 77–86, 88, 168, 175 Pettegree, Andrew 190, 195, 293 Pietz, William 236, 251 Pitkin, Hanna 202, 217, 294 Poel, William 6 Polish uprisings and partitions, effect on theatre 219 Popkin, Richard 191, 195, 294 prenuptial rituals 158–171 Redza, Aida 36 relics and memorabilia 233–55 relics, theatrical and religious 234–42, 247 Remer, Gary 182, 191, 195, 294 Resende, Aimara 51, 294 Richards, Thomas 254, 285 Richardson, Meriel 253, 257

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Richardson, Ralph 253, 297 Ricks, Christopher 262, 269 Ricoeur, Paul 124, 132–3, 139, 294 Roe, John 112, 294 Rokem, Freddie 129, 139, 295 Rollins, Hyder E. 112, 114, 295, 298 romance: generic distancing 140–43 Rose, Mary Beth 97, 112–13, 115, 282, 291, 294 Rowley, William 155, 172, 291 Rozett, Martha 55, 295 Schiesari, Juliana 90, 295 Schoch, Richard 19, 295 Segal, Charles Paul 89, 295 Seneca 123, 125, 127–229, 132–3, 136, 139 Seward, James 173, 295 Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra Polish censorship of, 229–30 As You Like It 164, 170, 172, 175, 227– 8, 230–31, 242 Comedy of Errors 165, 174, 273 Coriolanus 230–31 Cymbeline 20, 140–51, 174, 273, 282, 288 Julius Caesar 10, 19, 23–4, 35, 78, 230, 245, 278 Hamlet narrative infrastructure, 123–39; chastity in, 102, 117; Chinese productions of, 4, 6, 8, 19–20, 22– 3, 25–6, 27–43, 45–7; liminality of Ghost, 128–9, 132–3; Hamlet’s reduction to ‘avenger’, 135; 172, 222, 224–5, 228–32, 238–9, 241–2, 246, 252–3, 257–8, 262, 269, 272– 3, 276, 286–7, 289, 291, 293, 295 Henry IV, Part One 13–14, 17, 19 Henry IV, Part Two 13, 17, 19, 174–5 Henry V 29, 161–3, 173, 186–7, 192, 195, 285 Henry VIII 16–18, 159–60, 161–2, 173, 252 King John 6, 19, 228, 230, 287 King Lear and Beckett, 256–71; Ong’s multicultural production, 32–47; Suzuki’s production, 4, 59–72, 64– 5, 67–8, 70, 179, 188, 256, 259, 268–9, 273 Macbeth Asian productions, 43, 47, 225, 228–31, 244, 258, 269, 272

Measure for Measure and prenuptial rituals, 173–4; and Calvinism, 185 Merchant of Venice and tolerance, 117, 138, 164, 170, 174–5, 187–9, 228, 231, 251, 284 Merry Wives of Windsor 171, 174–5 Midsummer Night’s Dream 24, 102, 117, 199, 202, 209, 211–12, 216, 217, 227–9, 231 Much Ado About Nothing 43, 48, 155–9, 163–4, 167, 170, 172, 174–5, 188, 228, 230–31, 236 Othello 28, 35, 130–31, 139, 158–62, 165, 172, 174, 188, 213, 222, 228– 31, 239, 242–3, 252, 278, 296 Pericles ‘rape of Marina’ 140–51; ‘twodimensional’ Marina compared with Desdemona and Cordelia, 142–3, 148 Phoenix and the Turtle as historical and political riddle, 92–119; paradoxicality in, 100; phoenix device as symbol of continuity and England’s perpetuity, 92–4; 274, 276, 280, 282, 283, 286, 291, 296, 298 Richard II 230, 272 Richard III 8, 225, 228, 230, 244 Romeo and Juliet Brazilian appropriations of, 49–58, 102, 117, 162, 167, 169, 173, 205, 228, 230–31, 257, 274, 294–6 Sir Thomas More 16–18 Sonnets relation to Petrarchan love and Venus and Adonis, 80–81, 83, 85–6, 90–91, 100, 106, 119, 282 Taming of the Shrew 175–6, 189, 222, 228, 231 Tempest and tolerance, 174, 188–90, 195, 257, 296 Timon of Athens 188, 267 Titus Andronicus 81 Twelfth Night 175, 185, 227–8, 231, 260 Two Gentlemen of Verona male bonding in, 168, 175 Two Noble Kinsmen male bonding in, 168–9, 172 Venus and Adonis 75–91, 117, 274, 277, 292, 299 Winter’s Tale female bonding in, 6–8, 19, 117, 171, 179, 188, 229, 233–4 Sharrock, Alison 76–8, 89, 295

INDEX Shaughnessy, Robert 24, 44, 295 Shurbanov, Alexander 56, 296 Sidney, Philip 112, 118, 136, 139, 296 Sivert, Tadeusz 231–2, 295–6 Skinner, Quentin 199, 200, 202, 216, 296 Slater, Candace 52–3, 57, 296 slavery 182–5, 191–3, 285 Smith, Adam 210, 217, 296 Smith, Hallett 103, 296 Snow, Edward 174, 296 Sofer, Andrew 250, 296 Sokol, B. J 177–96, 274, 296 Sophocles 125–6, 139, 297 Southwell, Robert 15, 20–21, 116, 294, 297 Stanton, Domna C. 40, 297 Starks, Lisa 75–91, 274 Steiner, George 123–4, 126, 138, 297 stranger churches 178–81, 191 Strong, Roy 97, 99, 114–16, 297 Suassuna, Ariano 49–50, 53–6 Sumption, Jonathan 237, 252, 297 Sun, Fuliang 45–6, 280 Suzuki, Tadashi 4, 26, 59–72, 64–5, 67–8, 70, 273, 297 Takahashi, Yasunari 4, 60–61, 71–2, 297 Tamen, Miguel 210, 217, 298 Teague, Francis 97, 115, 250, 298 things, personification and representation of 199–218 Tian Benxiang 45, 298 Tian, Han 29 Tian, Liede 45 Tilney, Nicholas 17–18 time-within-ness (Heidegger) 124

305

Tipton, Alzada 116, 298 tolerance, problems of definition 177–8 tragi-comedy, 142, 150, 211–14 translations of Shakespeare: Chinese, 23, 27–30, 46–9; Japanese, 62–3, 72; Polish, 222–3, 226, 228–32 Tuck, Richard 216, 286 Twine, Laurence 144, 151, 298 Umewaka, Naohiko 36 Underwood, Richard Allan 112, 298 updating, Jonathan Miller on 9–10 Van Hulle, Dirk 260, 270, 298 Verdi, Giuseppe 9–11 Walker, Julia 112, 298 Wang, David Der-wei 45, 296 Webster, John 123, 260 Wee, C.J.W.-L 46–7, 299 Wells, Stanley 26, 44–45, 189, 216, 288, 299 Wen, Xiying 32, 45 White, Helen C. 20–21, 299 Wilkinson, L.P. 80, 89, 299 Williams, Bernard 299 Williamson, Elizabeth 233–55, 275 Wootton, David 191, 196, 299 Wu, Wenguang 37, 39–40 Yan, Zhewu 28 Yates, Frances 115, 119, 299 Yu, Shangyuan 27–31, 45, 299 Zhang, Mingrong 45–7, 299 Ziegler, Georgianna 90–91, 250, 299