The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Vol. 10: Special Section, the Achievement of Robert Weimann

Citation preview

The Shakespearean International Yearbook Volume 10: Special section, The Achievement of Robert Weimann

Edited by Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop and David Schalkwyk

The Shakespearean International Yearbook Volume 10: Special section, The Achievement of Robert Weimann

This page has been left blank intentionally

The Shakespearean International Yearbook Volume 10: Special section, The Achievement of Robert Weimann

General Editors

Graham Bradshaw and Tom Bishop Special Guest Editor

David Schalkwyk

© The editors and contributors, 2010 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, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. The editors and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The Shakespearean international yearbook. Volume 10, Special section. The achievement of Robert Weimann. 1. Weimann, Robert – Influence. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Dramatic production. 3. Theater – England – History – 16th century. 4. Theater – England – History – 17th century. I. Bradshaw, Graham. II. Bishop, T. G. III. Schalkwyk, David. 822.3’3-dc22

ISBN 9781409408581 (hbk) ISBN 9781409408598 (ebk) III ISSN 1465-5098

Contents Part I: Special Section, The Achievement of Robert Weimann

1 Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre: Ministerial and/or Magisterial?   Robert Weimann    2 3



Traction Control   K. Ludwig Pfeiffer

31



The Spectator, the Text, and Ezekiel   Dennis Kennedy

39



Text and Performance, Reiterated: A Reproof Valiant or Lie Direct?   David Schalkwyk



Shakespeare Performance Studies   W.B. Worthen



Author’s Voice? Acting with Authority in Early References to Shakespeare   William N. West

93



The Author’s Accomplice, or the Unsearchable Complicities of Players in the Making of Elizabethan Drama   John Gillies

119



Disciplining ‘Unexpert People’: Children’s Dramatic Practices and Page/Stage Tensions in Early English Theatre   Jeanne McCarthy

143



Bifold Adam: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Actor’s Voice   Nora Johnson

4

5 6

7

8

9

3



47 77

165

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

vi

10

“Grose Indecorum”, “Contrarietie”, Vice-Descendants and the Power of Comic Performance: Weimann and Shakespeare Among the Neoclassicals    Robert Hornback

183

Part II 11 Rusting, Bright, and Resting Weapons: A Textual Crux, and Closure in Romeo and Juliet   Richard Levin 12

13 14

207



Circes in Ephesus: Civic Affiliations in The Comedy of Errors and Early Modern English Identity   Atsuhiko Hirota



“If imagination amend them”: Lucretius, Marlowe, Shakespeare 257 R. Allen Shoaf



Twice-telly-ed Tales    Ruth Morse

Notes on Contributors   Bibliography   Index  

231

281 299 303 325

PART I SPECIAL SECTION

The Achievement of Robert Weimann

This page has been left blank intentionally

1 Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre: Ministerial and/or Magisterial? Robert Weimann

In our time the unsettled space of performance in Shakespeare’s theatre raises questions that were undreamt of only a generation ago. Surrounded by our own rapidly changing, increasingly mediated culture, we begin to understand that, on Elizabethan stages, the conjuncture of language and show was more complex, more variable and more vulnerable than has traditionally been assumed. The rise of early modern drama involved an unfixed, largely untested encounter of literature and theatre as two different institutions, two different modes of cultural production. Since the difference between these two media is derived from genealogies that were deeply divided in both social background and cultural function, their conjunction on early modern stages was neither tidily smooth nor purely formal. In twentieth-century Shakespeare studies, these different constituents of Elizabethan drama were by and large recognized; in fact, in the late mid-century and after, a sense of complementarity, even cooperation of a sort, prevailed between page-centred and stage-centred approaches. Only recently has this somewhat pragmatic division in Shakespeare criticism been challenged by a new, culturally inclusive, concept of performance. Informed by linguistic, anthropological, and political uses, this new concept of the “performative” resisted being reduced to any “derivative” status. In the wake of its most influential theorists – among them J.L. Austin, Victor Turner, and Judith Butler – performance practice is envisioned as authorized by its own workings, as an independent, self-sustained practice. As a socially formative, behaviourfashioning, encounter-structuring, even “psychobiological” (Erving Goffman) force, performance organizes both everyday and especially celebratory events, contacts, and responses.





THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Such performative modes, which include staged performance in the theatre, have, as W.B. Worthen notes, “no intrinsic relation to texts”.1 Hence, in its theatrical uses the performative does not have any “intrinsic relation” to what language can represent. As distinct from such representation, the working of performance should be perceived in terms of a so-called “performativity”, which per definitionem involves a “dislinkage” in relations “between the signifier and the world”,2 which ensures a “radical estrangement between the meaning and the performance”.3 Such estrangement has reinforced the alienation between textual and performance approaches to Shakespeare criticism. It is not surprising, then, that in their most recent polemical confrontation these two approaches have reached a “rhetorical impasse” which “prevents not merely agreement, but debate itself”.4 The present essay cannot hope to do more than focus on a single, potentially crucial argument in the much larger field of the current text/performance debate. The question is, to what extent and to which effect would performance practice in Shakespeare’s theatre exceed, if it does at all, a “ministerial” quality in its relation to dramatic language? This question (which, incidentally, addresses partially open, unformulated horizons of my own work5) is deliberately raised at ground-level. This is a starting point in a fresh attempt to come to terms with some of the rapidly changing parameters in the theory and practice of early modern drama produced both materially as an event with live performance and as a textually sustained imaginary act. This question will be addressed on two levels. First, in terms of the historical moment and situation of Shakespeare’s theatre, where the alliance between writing and playing was inseparable from their divergence. In these circumstances, the difference between texts and bodies served as a tensionridden, dynamic impulse in Shakespeare’s “swelling scene” (Henry V, Prologue, 4).6 In this intricate relationship, the socio-cultural and aesthetic differences between writing and playing marked the ways that each medium informed, and was informed by, the other. This first section seeks to examine some of the potentially fresh perspectives that the new notion of performance offers for our understanding of Shakespeare’s achievement in the early modern theatre. The second section studies some of the changing text/performance relations in today’s Shakespeare productions through the examination of the tension between text and performance in avant-garde, modern theatre. These changing constellations between word and body require some direct experience of Shakespeare’s plays as performed on the living stage. Such immediate response is indispensable for the perception of a past significance through the inescapable lens of a present meaning.

Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre



The Untamed Performative: Sources and Traditions In a long view, the formation of new performance concepts in Shakespeare studies is likely to be traced back to the twentieth-century phalanx of stagecentred critics as its precursor rather than, as it is from today’s perspective, its antagonist. As Barbara Hodgdon observes, it is not without irony that “a field of study so predicated on restaging, re-presenting, and playing back” could “become amnesiac about its heritage”.7 To re-view twentieth-century performance criticism as an at least partially usable inheritance does not necessarily deny that its “rhetoric”, as W.B. Worthen has shown,8 was ultimately predicated on a concept of drama as a text-oriented genre. Even so, critics like Bernard Beckerman, John Russell Brown, Michael Goldman, J.L. Styan, and others pursued a scenario “informed by a sense that the performances are revealing potentialities latent in the plays rather than producing new meanings”.9 This scenario was partially anticipated by Harley Granville- Barker and, on the Continent, by far-sighted scholars like Rudolf Stamm. These critics groped for what in performance enriched the text, qualified its meaning, and even served as a unique (in Beckerman’s phrase) “self-generative” force.10 Such an inclusive perspective must have been available after the decline of the New Criticism, even among textually oriented critics. Take, for example, Harry Berger, Jr., who assumes a “problematic relation of Shakespeare’s text to the instituted theatre process in terms of which he wrote”.11 As Alvin Kernan notes even earlier in a study of Shakespeare’s representation of the poet in the theatre, that image was not an untroubled one. Rather, it reflected “a need to resolve the very real tensions created by a situation in which the writer’s conception of the nature and value of his art did not square with the actual circumstances” in which his plays were produced and performed: “Shakespeare was, the evidence suggests, suspended between a vision of his art as noble as the highest Renaissance views on the subject, and questions about that art as it had to be practiced in the actual conditions of playing in the public theatre.”12 Thus, Renaissance poetics sought to enclose representation within an architecturally and verbally imposed frame which, bounded by closure and the unities, kept in check subaltern actors and restrained them from any “self-resembled show”.13 As distinct from, say, the Renaissance stage within the precincts of the Ducal Palace, the conditions and effects of playing in public places were marked by an outgoing and sometimes “self-resembled” force, unrestrained by standards derived from an absent, self-contained, verbal composition. Ultimately, such outgoing freedom from closure harked back



THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

to what Anne Meredith Skura has called “the nonmimetic roots of theater in ritual celebrations, popular pastimes, and folk tradition”.14 Thus, in the Elizabethan theatre the relationship of text and performance was marked by variable liabilities on either side. While today it is, of course, difficult to assess the impact of anonymous, largely non-verbal performance traditions, these do appear to be alien to and different from the scriptural culture advanced by both humanism and Reformation literacy. The performative élan, the verve and vigour of late ritual and ceremonial occasions, seasonal mayings, mummings, and misrule practices can only be reconstructed through rare fragments and the lens of censure and reforming zeal of antitheatrical polemics. But what a few observers like Philip Stubbes and others allude to is an entire panorama of rural performance practices that were not subjected to verbal, let alone authorial, authority. Next to these largely seasonal, post-ritual ceremonies there developed in mid-Elizabethan London large playhouses, bear-gardens for baitings and related sports, all marked by a good deal of non-verbal performance practices. In particular, large commercial venues like the Red Lion (1567), the Theatre (1576) or the Curtain (1577) operated in the absence of dramatic scripts as we tend to think of them. In these places, theatre historians have perceived a startling “disparity between theatrical activity and printed texts”.15 Once we acknowledge a “gross discrepancy” between what was done and what was spoken on these stages, we need to conclude that whatever performance practices prevailed, they disposed of a fairly self-assured extra-textual matrix. Historians of the early Elizabethan theatre, such as John Astington and William Ingram, are agreed that these stages offered shows or entertainments and enjoyed responses which were not subservient to any literary standards and meanings. Nor were the extra-textual modes of playing forgotten after Kyd and Marlowe had introduced blank verse as a dramatic vehicle of Renaissance secular passion. Recall, for example, the “predominantly visual” style of performance associated with the Queen’s Men, in which “spoken language tends to be subordinate”.16 In their itinerant progress they had a “Turkish ropedancer” in their repertory and on occasion were able to split into two groups – one of them “tumblers”. This non-representational background of performance practice must have invigorated a tradition and stimulated a cultural memory well into the seventeenth century, when the discrepancy between the dramatist’s prescribed text and the performer’s wilful action could itself be staged as a comic burlesque in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1608). A grocer and his wife intervene against a textually laid-out city comedy and cheer their

Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre



apprentice when he performs as “May Lord” (3.399–400), only to proceed in the name of “Saint George” with “drums, and guns, and flags” to lead the city trained bands to Mile End (5.57–156).17 Decades later, Ben Jonson, the dramatist most jealously anxious about his own scriptural authority, would complain against players who attempted to “possess the Stage against the Play”.18 Clearly such self-sufficient ways of extemporal performance were anything but “ministerial”; in fact, they defied textual authority. It is difficult to account for the extra-textual strength of Elizabethan performance traditions unless we acknowledge a residue of their free-wheeling independence of textually dominated scripts. At the same time, there were traditions of a text-oriented performance whose uncomic uses of language and gesture, especially in the delivery of an “excellent actor” (Edward Alleyn or Richard Burbage, for example), made a powerful impression even on large audiences. We have the well-known early testimony of Thomas Nashe in his Pierce Penniless (1592) about “brave Talbot” newly “embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators” who “in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding”.19 In cases like these a dramatic text must have helped performers (as well as spectators) partially at least to identify with what was performed. It is difficult to envision large audiences in tears without assuming that they were moved by Talbot’s language of the “heart” (4.1.80; 4.7.11) and the rhymed verbal bond of filial affection which “warm’d thy father’s heart” (4.6.11) unto the last.20 In view of the different histories and the enormous varieties informing relations of performance and language in early modern culture, there is reason to be sceptical about any univocal definition of the relationship in question. My doubts about any universally valid formula of either a “ministerial” or a “magisterial” role of performance must at this point remain strictly provisional; but if the evidence collected in Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice suggests anything, it is that the extraordinary spectrum of performance practices embraced both ways of “secretly open” presentation and the “secret close intent” in plot and character. Between these different modes of ‘playing’ and ‘acting’ there was a host of transitions and combinations, to different degrees dominated by either the power of performance or, increasingly, the puissance of imaginary uses of language. If, in the contingency of this context, an absolute distinction between text and performance is questionable, that does not detract from the usefulness, in contemporary Shakespeare studies, of those recent, more broadly comprehending vistas of performative action. Indebted to Victor Turner’s work,



THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

new anthropological premises, especially in concepts like liminality or van Gennep’s rites of passage, can usefully be applied to the Elizabethan theatre. Comprising social as well as aesthetic forms and events, these concepts offer a helpful matrix in terms of which text, performance, and audience may relate in, say, the opening and the concluding action of a play.21 In conjunction with J.L. Austin’s idea of illocutionary speech action and Jacques Derrida’s ideas of iterability and citationality, the new performative is open to hybridity and conjunctions of different media. Nonetheless, while the new concept of performance has been remarkably comprehensive, even privileged as an almost paradigmatic figure, the outcome was not without a certain irony: the unforeseen danger was that particularly intense, intimate ties between performance and theatre were occluded. As Elin Diamond notes, “the terminological expansion of performance” has resulted in “its drift away from theater.”22 Part of the reason, as hinted above, was that a non-representational concept of performance was at odds with the theatre as an institutionalized site of rendering dramatic images of characters in worldly circumstances. Unfortunately, the new performance theory grounded its disaffection from representation on what many in the profession believed was a culturally and politically avant-garde position. This position is in fact derived from a dated reading of (neo)Aristotelian versions of mimesis. While Aristotele’s poetics is dominated by literary concerns, it seeks to domesticate those unruly forms and functions of mimesis, which Platonic anxiety bore witness to. But we know at least since Hermann Koller that the thrust of early forms of mimesis was not exclusively towards imitation, but was also marked by strong links to dance and song. In its aversion to representation, the new performative favoured a politics and poetics that tended to ignore recent dynamic developments in the concept of mimesis, including those advanced by Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin, Jacques Derrida, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, not forgetting Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and her reading of “representation” in Marx.23 Since the work of the new performance theorists cannot be considered a homogeneous or coherent body of thought, there are remarkable exceptions, especially among those who sought to accommodate their avant-garde preoccupations to traditional performance practices in the theatre. To illustrate at least one of these positions, let us look briefly at Peggy Phelan’s project which maintains an intriguing relevance to the study of Shakespeare’s plays. Pointing to the “‘excess’ meaning” that goes with performed representations, she is prepared to conceive of this meaning as at least “a supplement that makes multiple and resistant readings possible”. Since “it fails to reproduce the

Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre



real exactly,” we need to recognize that “representation produces ruptures and gaps”.24 For Phelan, the “chasm” itself “between presence and re-presentation” tends to associate a sense of “loss and grief” which can tinge “the currency of our representational economy”. In this view, “presence” refers to the physical existence on stage of the actor. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for example, Prospero confronts, and even explicates in his epilogue, this “chasm” between the actor’s role and his being. In the ending of the play, this “chasm” serves as the threshold between the fictional representation of Prospero’s magic prowess and the actual presentation of the performing actor requesting applause, and who, in his own voice, acknowledges that “what strength I have is mine own”. The firstperson pronoun may appear to dangle freely, but in fact its motion sways from character to actor. Even when the poetic transition offers an exquisite swerve back to the world of the playhouse, it entails a sense of “loss and grief” in the passage through which the genius surrenders his most precious possession. As the imploding fiction betrays its own absence and illusion, the performer consorts with his entanglement in the interaction between character and being, gracefully undoing the knot that up to this moment has tied his imaginary and his professional identities. Released into an open postscriptural future, he escapes the regime of the play’s representational economy. Although the “chasm” between presentation and representation in the ending of The Tempest may well contain the most felicitous rites of passage, there are at least a dozen other plays which in their conclusions foreground uses of performance at the cutting edge of the disparity between representational and presentational functions.25 Even as the concluding words are spoken, performance practice comes into its own: the story is told, all action is done; what remains is a potentially sovereign mediation – the actor who, having done his job, forcefully generates (and serves) liminality, drawing on untold kinetic energy in the process. And yet, even here this non-derivative use of performance cannot be an absolute one. As we shall see, it assumes its greatest potential wherever a “thick” performative maintains its indigenous strength and independence in the midst of a wide spectrum of multiformity between the media of representation and bodily presence. The acknowledgement in liminality of performance’s independent power can remind us that the “anti-theatrical prejudice” (Jonas Barish’s term) was derived from an anti-histrionic bias. Animated by disdain for a socially inferior habitus, this bias was anticipated in Robert Greene’s scorn for those “base grooms” or John Marston’s devastating treatment of the actors in Histriomastix, Or The Player Whip’t.26 There is plenty of continuity between

10

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

this early scourging of the players and the condescension of eighteenth-century editors who believed the actors “foisted in” that “low stuff which disgraces the work of this great Author” (Sir Thomas Hanmer), especially those “mean conceits and ribaldries” (Alexander Pope).27 To underline the socially inflected origins of such devaluation of the actor’s role helps us to see that we are dealing with two different cultures, two different media – one antedating, the other following what Patrick Collinson calls the “second English reformation” which culminated in the 1580s. There was a veritable “cultural revolution,” which effected a “moral and cultural watershed” marked by withdrawal of the middling sort from traditional sports and pastimes, and the incipient triumph of those who “were cleaning up the shows”.28 Under these circumstances, performance on London stages was considered by many as a waste of time, even when it did survive behind the shield of royal patronage. As Peggy Phelan pointedly notes, performance has “no reproductive” efficacy. Since “performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies”, it “saves nothing; it only spends”, until it “disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where, again and finally, it eludes regulation and control”. Thus, from a modern perspective, performance’s “independence from mass production, technologically, economically, and linguistically is its greatest strength.”29 These brief citations from one of the most distinguished critics in performance studies show how theatrical and extra-theatrical practices can profitably be addressed alongside one another. Phelan is specifically concerned with the performance art of Angelika Festa and related artists. In terms of her wider comprehension of performative practice, the discussion of modern unscripted experiments such as these reveals the staggering degree to which, as a medium, performance is open to all sorts of action and behaviour on the most varied occasions. As Rose Lee Goldberg suggests, it is “an openended medium with endless variables”.30 On the strength of these intermedial leanings, performance – as we shall presently see – can serve as a masterful but also as a ministerial force: it can dominate, but it can also serve such intermedial alliances. One of the earliest modern performance displays without language was the three-day cohabitation of Joseph Beuys with an untamed coyote in the New York René Block Gallery, between 23 and 25 May 1974. The presence of an animal – an unpredictable, non-representational being in a perfectly open, tentative relationship with a human being – constitutes an exemplary performative situation of the first order. As Erika Fischer-Lichte notes in her Ästhetik des Performativen, “the staged animal is the Einbruch (the break-in

Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre

11

and entering) of the real into fiction, accident and chance into order, nature into culture”.31 This performative action has distinct parallels in Shakespeare’s plays, not only in the performance of Launce’s dog Crab or the bear in The Winter’s Tale but, as some penetrating recent criticism has shown, also in the spatial contiguity, even identity of playhouse and bear-garden.32 The cohabitation of Joseph Beuys with a coyote or the work of Angelika Festa and other performance artists provides us with spectacular illustrations of how far performative practice can move beyond the ties of its traditional affiliation with the language of drama. Without in the least challenging the validity of this larger field of performance action, critics like W.B. Worthen, Barbara Hodgdon, Philip Auslander and others have set out to do some countervailing bridge-building between theatre, including that of Shakespeare, and performance studies. Together with earlier work like Clive Barker’s pathbreaking Theatre Games (1977) or later studies like Herbert Blau’s To All Appearances (1992) and Marvin Carlson’s Performance (1996), an expansive and self-centred concept of performance has come to invade the traditional agenda of the theatre, providing sufficient grounds on which to challenge, in Barbara Hodgdon’s phrase, “the supplementary character of the concept of performance in traditional dramatic criticism”. In contrast to the main drift of textuality and the declining linguistic turn, she prefers to pursue “crossdisciplinary allegiances with cultural studies and film studies” but also with recent media like “television, video-cassette recorders, DVD technology”. They all have broadened “the sense of what performance is, what it does and what it might be made to do”.33 No doubt this is a timely and persuasive plea, even when the ever-expanding range of performance has its own problems. For instance, the question is of how to meet the staggering dissemination of all sorts of communicative means, messages, and media and yet retain the focus on the dramatic performative as a stimulating, activating element in the traditional theatre. No doubt some caution vis-à-vis these inflationary developments appears advisable. Specifying the social function of theatre, Worthen, with an admirable sense of realism, cautions us against the “considerable disciplinary and institutional pressure of Performance Studies”, especially since any optimism about the state of our knowledge appears premature. Thus, he doubts “that we have a compelling model, if there can be a single compelling model, for the functioning of writing in dramatic performance”. This is an extremely important warning. Even within Shakespeare’s theatre, and the limited spectrum of his own plays, there is no universally valid pattern of “what the work of writing is and does when it is used, or used up, in/as theatre”.34

12

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

In other words, in Shakespeare there is not and cannot be “a single compelling model”. As a study like Shakespeare and the Power of Performance abundantly shows, dramatic writing can inspire the craft and direction of performance. It is possible, as David Schalkwyk has conclusively shown, for “words” to bring out “the power of the self-authorizing performative as a public act”.35 On the other hand, there is also a compelling thrust, a self-delivered might, in certain types of performance practice that puts writing in its place. Such power of performance is not derivative but self-projected: it prospects as well as projects a surplus force, a textually stirring strength in association with specific uses of open, platea-like space. There is an undisguised presentational element in personation and in conventions of liminality where a chorus, a prologue or epilogue or some induction irresistibly appeals to the audience, bypassing the authority of textual representation. Such given, pre-ordained patterns of performative action have been studied in Shakespeare’s adaptation of the medieval Vice; in exuberant versions of clownage and folly; and in the doubleencoded forms of gendered disguise. Even more important, this performative impulse continued to inform important types of role-playing as long as these were delivered by an actor-character; that is, through the “secretly open” presence, in the character, of its performing “personator”. With these recently scrutinized forms and practices before us, it certainly makes sense, as our title asserts, to speak of an early modern “power of performance”, which cannot be reduced to recapturing or restating “the authority of the text”.36 However, such “power” is not dictatorial; it is constitutional rather than absolute. Double-voiced Bodies: Exceeding and Serving the Text As a matter of course, then, the absence in performance of any single binding model calls for rethinking the linkage between the writing and the acting in Shakespeare’s theatre. It is one thing, in Worthen’s phrase, to release “the stage from a ‘derivative’ dependence on literature”; but it is an entirely different matter, as this phrase continues, to release the stage “from the obligation (even the ability) to reproduce the text”.37 As Barbara Hodgdon describes it, this “obligation” to reproduce the text, “as exhibited in directing, acting, and scholarship, constrains the work of performance”.38 Here is the point on which R.A. Foakes has put much emphasis: the radical notion of a performative designed to liberate the production of the plays from “the Procrustean bed of Shakespeare’s text”.39

Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre

13

From my point of view, a term like “liberate” upsets a differential relationship of text and performance, and in conjunction with “Procrustean bed” the phrase suggests a somewhat rash reversal of hierarchies. In contrast with the traditional, centuries-old privileged status of dramatic language to which performance was taken to be subsidiary, the hierarchy in question is simply reversed: the text is now simply subordinated to the sovereignty of performance. What – as we shall see in the concluding section – appears to be a matter of concern is the practical outcome, as displayed on our stages, of this reversal of priorities in mise-en-scène. It is one thing to resist the reduction of performance to a ministerial practice, to what Worthen justifiably calls a “derivative” and purely “interpretive” function. But it is quite another thing to sanction any absolute resistance of performance to textual modes of signification. Matters are worse still when far from univocal, dialogic uses of language – defined by M.M. Bakhtin “heteroglot” – are felt to place constraints on performing practice. Shakespeare’s dramatic dialogue is a “double-voiced discourse” par excellence that conveys “different intentions” and, as poetic language, “has a double, even a multiple, meaning”.40 On Shakespeare’s stage it is, of course, true that “the authority of the text” does not and cannot exclusively hold sway. In its enunciation the play’s language is exposed to, in fact is bound to consort with, a different authority, which is that of its institutionalized context. On this circumstantial platform, both language and performance serve as “ciphers to this great accompt” (Henry V, Prologue, 17). As editors like G. Blakemore Evans and Andrew Gurr have noted, “accompt” plays on two meanings: the story, the account of historical exploits; and the communicative use of it in the form of the service rendered, the profit garnered. The final arbiter between these two modes is the audience’s response – the story-account’s impact on them, its success. There is not a single but rather a “Bi-fold authority” (Troilus and Cressida, 5.2.144) in Shakespeare’s theatre.41 The two identities (“This is, and is not, Cressid!”) can cleave “a thing inseparate” (148); its “division” (150) informs the drama of perception, but also the perception of dramaturgy. The latter is inspired by the give and take, the pro and con, the dynamic that propels the difference in the two media – one the pre-eminently imaginary, textually sustained account, the other a largely material embodiment of visible bodies and performing voices. Once this reading is accepted, we need to go one step further still. The recent rift in Shakespeare studies is correlative with Shakespeare’s plays themselves. These in their turn submit to those competing forces of authorization which we have alluded to as the perplexing grounds of a constitutive “Bi-fold authority”. As I have suggested elsewhere, “author’s

14

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

pen” and “actor’s voice” (from the prologue to Troilus and Cressida) do not share the same space, poetics, or ontology. Even while they appear happily to complement one another in production, they remain incommensurable in that, as David Scott Kastan poignantly notes, “[n]either is the effect of the other; neither produces, or draws upon (except rhetorically) the other’s claim to authenticity”.42 The difference, in short, is not simply cultural or aesthetic in any general sense; it inhabits two versions of epistemology, two modes of communication, and, in the early modern contexts, two types of socially determined habitus and perception. To trace the roughest outlines of their difference shows up the limitations in what has often enough been described as the “duality of drama”. Nor can my own preferred terminology, the distinction between “pen” and “voice”, be the last word in this matter. If in the “scene individable” (Hamlet, 2.2.399) the difference in question may undergo a certain amount of play,43 then the mere juxtaposition of the two media will not do. Rather, the argument needs to explore their interactive relationship. In this direction, then, Shakespearean performance involves playing with a difference. In other words, the critic would wish to envision, as dramatically potent, the extent to which “actor’s voice” is in “author’s pen” just as, simultaneously, “author’s pen” is in “actor’s voice”. Whether the difference in question is transmuted into play or conflict, bodily action or thoughtful apprehension, the result is a sense of motion, a stirring movement along or across the boundaries between the real and the imaginary. But if this is so, the fixity of an “either/or”, let alone the frontiers of opposition between actor and character, between the speaking voice of the performer and the scripted speech of the performed, dissolves into air, the thin air of theory. Hence, the scenario of performance constrained by a mighty text needs to be qualified insofar as Shakespeare’s language of drama accommodates, and is accommodated by, another compelling medium of artful communication, that of performance. Once such adjustment is understood as mutual, one medium may indeed be seen to impel, and simultaneously to propel, the other. The relationship embraces not so much constraint as a mutual assignment; it is a compelling ensemble marked by goad and impulsion, even when sustained by either common interests or divisive concerns.44 To invoke a differential reading of the text/performance relationship is not to minimize the range and depth of insight that the new concept of nonderivative and non-ministerial performance practice has helped to advance. If, finally, my enthusiasm for this concept is qualified, my hesitation derives from a stubborn resolve to differentiate historically the sources of this relationship and to specify

Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre

15

the spaces of an independent performance practice. No doubt the strength of the latter was most acute before the dynamic rapprochement of the two media in the course of the late sixteenth century. The incomparable cultural ascendancy that reached its peak in the flourishing consortium of literature and theatre was a process of growth through association rather than dissociation, inclusion rather than exclusion. Shakespeare more than anyone else contributed to this growth through an unprecedented degree of interpenetration between writing and playing. Performance Theory and Practice in the Modern Theatre At this point, let us explore further the changing premises on which a revolution in relations of text and performance is occurring under our own eyes. In order to view in conjunction the practice of playing then and the modes of performance now, we must be prepared to consider what is happening to Shakespeare’s plays in our own theatre. Insofar as there may be an element of reciprocity between the staging of Shakespeare’s plays then and their performances now, we may say that any modern “staging of a Shakespeare play results from a dialogue between the historical moment of its creation and the contemporaneity of the mise-en-scène”.45 Since we have studied the former and found “the historical moment” marked by an extraordinary variety of performance practices, the modern side of the “dialogue” remains to be inspected more closely. The question, then, is what does “the contemporaneity of the mise-en-scène” teach us about the grounds and aims of the reversal in the traditional relationship between performance and text? In pursuit of this question, I begin by offering my own experience of an apparent self-authorization of actors, taking my illustrations from productions/ adaptations of Hamlet in the German theatre. There is reason to believe that on the Continent the preoccupation with performance-oriented productions of Shakespeare is most prominent and most virulent. More often than not this preoccupation serves the task of ousting traditional, especially nineteenthcentury, conventions in contemporary theatre. It may well be that the late twentieth-century anxiety over the expenditure on unity, wholeness, and homogeneity borders on a kind of panic, but unless this anxiety blinds us in all our responses, an intriguing reciprocity may be traced in the conjunction of the sixteenth- and the twentieth-century stages. My use of the word “conjunction” seeks to avoid the projection of mere analogy between then and now in favour of a more problematic sense of

16

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

mutual interrogation and illumination between early modern and late modern approaches to performance. There are at least two cultural constellations between then and now that appear to facilitate the proposed conjunctural operation. First, both early and late modern performance practices refuse to take for granted the supreme figure of closure in the architecture of the picture-frame stage. Secondly, neither the early nor the late modern period can be subsumed under an entirely scriptural mode of communication, with the culture of literacy at the undisputed centre of things. Rather, both early modern and late modern civilizations constitute a hybrid type of communicative culture. It is a culture in which, then as now, the Gutenberg paradigm does not go unchallenged by other modes and channels of information, among them such vastly different forms as oral, pictorial, and digital means of communication. In these circumstances which, again, I understand as conjunctural, not analogical, it was then possible and is now (for entirely different reasons) feasible to aim at a circulation of authority in the theatre that is not necessarily and not entirely dominated by one (scriptural) mode of utterance and expression. While, as a consequence, the space for performance practice tends to be enhanced, the expansion in question then and now is energized by a radically different set of forces and circumstances. In our time it is dominated not by the authority of the performer but rather by the power of the director. The latter’s domination has brought forth a Regietheater in which the Regisseur, not the player, decides every move, every gesture, every rendering. As a result, performance practice cannot claim to be self-sustained. As noted above, far from self-authorizing the direction and execution of his/her craft, the actor’s work again assumes a ministerial status. Again, we have a mode of acting that is derivative, in the unquestionable sense that it derives from the director’s aims, concepts, perceptions, and decisions. What is behind these directorial decisions is ultimately a desire to attract attention, to make an impact by the originality, and the quality of this originality, in the treatment of the play. To say this is not to dispute that directorial initiative can serve as a genuine inspiration for actors, in the sense of the working modes of Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, and Konstantin Stanislavsky. Among the most talented and influential directors of Shakespeare’s plays it was Max Reinhardt whose work was based, as Wilhelm Hortmann notes, “on the concord between performers and audience” whereby Reinhardt “would willingly incorporate actors’ suggestions”.46 While this concord was increasingly disrupted in the early twentieth century, elements of a concurrence between performers and sympathizing spectators in the audience persisted. Such was the case in

Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre

17

Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble and in the work of Peter Stein, not to forget Brecht’s disciples in direction, among them Benno Besson and Manfred Wekwerth. In the present context, Besson’s work is important because his name is associated with a highly pertinent revision of the one Shakespearean scene which may be held to be a veritable seismograph to the issue in question: Hamlet’s advice to the players. Besson directed Hamlet in the East Berlin Volksbühne in 1977. This production deserves to be recalled because in it Brecht’s distinguished disciple forged central concepts and ideas that were further developed in his prolonged series of reinterpretations of the same play in Helsinki, Avignon, Geneva, and Paris. Following Besson’s invitation, I was privileged to serve as consultant to the initial Berlin production. In what follows I wish to acknowledge that this re-reading was exclusively the director’s initiative. Rejecting the traditional affirmation of the Prince of Denmark’s authority in affairs theatrical, Besson preferred to present a somewhat obtrusive, loquacious character with altogether uncourtly costume and gesture. But in his advice to the players, Hamlet (played by Manfred Karge) put on an air of self-absorption that informed the ineffectual delivery of a somewhat facile and all-too-familiar poetics of imitation. No less striking was the stance of the First Player (played by Fritz Marquardt). As he was told to “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you, trippingly on the tongue” (3.2.1–2), the First Player’s response was full of reserve. Here, obviously, was a practitioner and a sceptic, slightly bored, if not exasperated, by mere theory, someone who appeared to know more about delivery than any theoretical disquisition could teach him. Suffering Hamlet’s admonitions gladly, the player just went through the motions until he almost defied social distance with his curt “I warrant your honor” (15), and the casualness of his “I hope we have reform’d that indifferently with us” (36–7) – to which F, though not Q2, adds an understating “Sir”. The remarkable thing was that this reading could be so sustained in its ramifications throughout the players’ scenes that it appeared to underline the force of the “controversy”, reported by Rosencrantz, according to which “the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question” (2.2.355–6). To be sure, the First Player had little opportunity for signs of resentment when the author of “a speech of some dozen lines, or sixteen lines”(2.2.541–2) presumed to advise the performer in his (the performer’s) own craft. Even so, throughout Hamlet’s lengthy speech, Besson’s reading informed the scene with a submerged sense of dramatic irritation and suppressed conflict. Challenging not simply the poetic validity of the neoclassical doctrine of imitatio vitae, this reading defied any strictly literate location of authority. Predicated on a rhetoric of exhortation, the

18

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

speech was given a self-reflexive tenor that, seeking to celebrate the marriage of “word” and “action,” revealed in fact how vulnerable the prescribed union was. The advice, as we know, culminated in a call to safe-guard the “necessary question” (3.2.42–3) in the text of the play against extemporal, that is, selfauthorized performance. Besson, of French-Swiss origin, had in the 1950s joined the Berliner Ensemble, where he became acquainted with Brecht’s practical and theoretical work towards a renouvellement of the twentieth-century theatre. In the late 1920s, Brecht’s attention was first drawn to what he then called an ongoing “battle between theatre and play”. Recognizing the “great struggle for supremacy between words, music, and production”, his solution was “a radical separation of the elements”47 of theatre. In this process of separation, Brecht effectively redefined the uses of performance, especially in relation to the text and the textual authority and ideology of the playwright. Although the actor remained under strict directorial control, Brecht enhanced rather than reduced the space for performative action. Thus, the performer’s position was transformed from an agency naturalizing and affirming the text of representation to an agency reviewing, distancing and potentially criticizing this text. By doing so, Brecht deliberately and unrelentingly broke up what he considered the false assumption of unity, in the theatre of illusion, among text, performance, and audience. Insofar as the Brechtian performer was made to serve as a critical agency in the reception and reproduction of the text of representation, he or she was also a divisive agent in the theatre at large. Instead of operating as a congenial mediating instance between the dramatist’s text and its reception by the audience, performance practice was redesigned to differentiate both the meaning of the text and its impact on the audience. The so-called “V-effect”, that is, the Brechtian strategy of alienation, was introduced and used as a crucial means of precluding empathy and identification with any given, authorially prescribed meaning. The idea was thereby to reveal the strange and the unwonted, to expose contradictions, to unmask false pretensions and illusions, to uncover the source of privilege, and to show up the hidden operations of ideology and exploitation. In doing all this, the performer was empowered to question textual authority and, if necessary, to undermine the representational thrust of whatever meaning seemed false or illusory. As opposed to Brecht’s theatre of gestus and commitment, the Nietzschean tradition of a theatre of release from textualized figurations of truth and meaning went several steps further in seeking to emancipate performance from the confines of a literary type of representation. Here, the most provocative

Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre

19

point of departure was that of Antonin Artaud when he called for alternatives to “our theater which lives under the exclusive dictatorship of speech”.48 The gist of Artaud’s radical revaluation of the text/performance relationship lies in the demand that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means. We can perfectly well continue to conceive of a theater based upon the authority of the text … But this conception of theater … is, if not the absolute negation of theater … certainly its perversion.49

The point, of course, is that today this position is no longer that of an isolated avant-garde intellectual. Nor is it an indifferent position vis-à-vis Shakespeare’s reception in the twentieth-century theatre. We need only remember how Peter Brook refers to the “acting revolution through Brecht” and how, through using Artaud “as a springboard”, he set out in “search for a theatrical language as flexible and penetrating as that of the Elizabethans”.50 As Patrice Pavis suggests, Brook’s position may well be considered as the most eminent approach towards a “hermeneutic refusal” in staging the classical text, when that text is received as: a series of meanings which contradict and answer one another and which decline to annihilate themselves in a final global meaning. … The plurality of signifieds is maintained by multiplication of theatrical enunciators (actors, music, rhythm of presentation, etc.); rejection of hierarchy in stage systems; refusal … to reduce them to a fundamental signified; and finally, refusal to interpret.51

Disjunction between Words and Staging Since for many in today’s theatre “the modern-written-text or the classicalshown-text have both been emptied of meaning”,52 the distrust of textual authority in representations is more widespread than most of us would tend to believe. This distrust has inspired the theatrical project of Robert Wilson in America where, as Christopher Innes noted, “the active factor is the disjunction between words and staging”, including “casting against concept” and the shaping of “a visual action that had no illustrative relation to the speeches”.53 In other words, visual action as well as visual scenery can – like

20

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

the performing body – no longer be reduced to a “derivative” function in the service of the text. Wilson’s theatre is, of course, in close touch with the work of one of the leading late twentieth-century German dramatists, Heiner Müller. Significantly, the disaffection from the text of representation is writ large in Müller’s Hamletmachine, first produced and directed by Wilson himself. This adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy is centrally concerned with vanishing locations of meaning in the text of the play, even with a dramatically presumed loss of the “script” itself. Let us look at the main character’s central speech in which, significantly, Müller’s Hamlet shies away from bearing, in “My words”, the burden of meaning traditionally associated with the protagonist’s text: I’m not Hamlet. I don’t take part any more. My words have nothing to tell me. … My drama doesn’t happen anymore. Behind me the set is put up. By people who aren’t interested in my drama, for people to whom it means nothing … My drama didn’t happen. The script has been lost.54

Once the character’s language has ceased to convey anything, the play “means nothing” to its audience. There is a link between this meaninglessness and the alleged refusal, on the part of the performing actor, to do the role in the first place. As Müller has it, the opening speech is no longer Hamlet’s but that of “the actor playing Hamlet”. While the representation of meaning has become questionable, the dramatist is content to render the performer performing the business of performance. To replace the protagonist by the actor playing the protagonist’s role can be read as an image of potentially the most radical liberation of performance from its “ministerial” status. Ironically, it is the author’s pen that dictates the terms by which the player’s voice proclaims the obliteration of Shakespeare’s own authorial meaning and authority. Thus, the agent of performance can displace the discipline of the text by substituting his own fiction of a refusal to speak it and a histrionic wilfulness to throw off the presumed burden of any textually imposed signified. Having got rid of any prescribed course of action and delivery, the player and his audience confront no longer Shakespeare’s tragedy but its vanishing trace, along with a magisterial insistence that the great dramatist’s “drama doesn’t happen anymore”. To replace the protagonist by the actor playing, or even refusing to play, the protagonist’s role can be read as an ironic image, a simulacrum of the player’s refusal to submit to a text, even to one whose “script has been lost”.

Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre

21

As a cultural prophecy, the most troubling outlook is not primarily the rupture between classical text and contemporary performance per se. Rather, what the Hamletmachine heralded in 1977 must today be regarded not as a solitary avant-garde experiment but as an inexorable anticipation of what, for better or worse, the future of the European theatre, especially its continental variety, will look like. From an international point of view, it is startling to realize that these are not isolated adaptations but that these trends in the late twentieth-century theatre are pervasive enough to comprehend the work of theatre practitioners as remote from one another as Brecht and Artaud, not to mention Beckett or even work like that of Robert Wilson or contemporary ensembles in the tradition of the Wooster Group. Wherever we look there are changes in the relations of language and show which permit us to view in a fresh perspective the element of mutuality in the give and take of word, icon, and voice on Shakespeare’s stage. There is no way, of course, to expect our own productions of Shakespeare to achieve anything like a replica of what went on in the Elizabethan Globe. Imitating the past does not bring forth productions pulsating with a living sense of experience. What instead, I suggest, is truly rewarding is a conjunctural relationship, that is, an interaction between then and now. There is a need to work with both the links and the gaps between Shakespeare’s and our own theatre; in other words, relations between the past significance of a players’ theatre and the present meaning of a director’s stage and mise-en-scène. It is in this conjunctural sense that I have chosen two further twentieth-century plays, partially to expose the gaps in their stark impact and to advance potential links between Shakespeare’s own dramaturgy of text and performance and our contemporary options in the staging of classical plays as well. Late modern emphases in mise-en-scène appear particularly prominent where another leading dramatist of the past is chosen to serve as protagonist in yet another of Müller’s own plays. What is at stake in his Gundling55 is Müller’s own treatment of Lessing’s dramatic writings. Viewed as entirely vulnerable, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the eighteenth-century German dramatist, is involved, but only to stage the plight that neither the writing nor, indeed, the dramatist ever gets performed. Although the play’s lengthy title forecasts Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei, the representation of his “dream” never gets properly started. In fact, Lessing as would-be protagonist never actually enters. What we have is an unambiguous use of the figure of performance when an actor, preparing for his role of Lessing, receives his make-up in the form of Lessing’s mask. But the attempt to represent the role

22

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

of Lessing ends up in disaster; the embodiment of the dramatist is abortive. In a crucial scene Lessing is more than half covered under a heap of sand, on which the stage personnel, “disguised as theatre audience”, empty buckets of sand. At this moment, “waiters” enter carrying onto the stage “busts of poets and thinkers”: Lessing searches in the sand, unburying one hand, one arm. Waiters, their heads covered with safety hardhats, topple upon him a Lessing-bust covering head and shoulders. Lessing, on his knees now, attempts to free himself from this bust, without success. A muffled cry is heard from within [the bust]. Waiters, stage personnel (theater audience) applaud.56

The stupor of the poet-performer, first under the mask of his role, then under the weight of his own bust, constitutes a pregnant metaphor of failure. Any mutually sustained relations of language and play appear gravely undermined when the protagonist heaves under the incubus of a throttling performative: Here, of course, we have another simulacrum when ultimately it is a dramatist’s composition which ironically celebrates the muting of a poet-protagonist, the mutilation of the author’s text under the delivery of an exorbitant stage business. As the author of classical texts struggles to rid himself of the meaningless signs of his own potential authorship, both mask and bust are reduced, in a desperate gesture, to a speechless image of the futility of dramatic uses of language. Some of the same scruples about the capacity of dramatic discourse abound in Beckett and other modern dramatists. I have space only to mention Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience (1966). What is truly provocative in this play is the image of a twentieth-century rebellion of an entire group of actors as they refuse to submit to the imaginary text of a dramatic representation. Addressing the audience, they say: You see no picture of something … We are no pictures of something. We are no representatives. We have no pseudonyms. Our heartbeat does not pretend to be another’s heartbeat. Our bloodcurdling screams don’t pretend to be another’s bloodcurdling screams. We don’t step out of our roles. We have no roles. We are ourselves.57

Here, again, is the ironic text of a representation that, paradoxically, seeks to render nothing except the performer’s refusal to represent. As far as this rejection of a basic traditional convention is “offending” spectators, the reason is to be found in the actors’ presumption to abandon or at least to redefine representational action. If anything, the refusal to honour the contract with

Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre

23

spectators and to assume roles in a world of fiction is made to appear as a magisterial not a ministerial gesture of the actors. Although their presumed independence is, again, a “simulacrum”, the (post)modern formally recalls a fraction of early modern practice which, in Schalkwyk’s phrase, can bring out “the power of the self-authorizing performative” in public. Hence, in Benno Besson’s re-reading of Hamlet’s advice to the players as in both Müller’s and Handke’s plays, the act of “liberating” performance comes full circle; it is thrown back upon itself. What this seemingly self-generative performative finally does convey is a representation of histrionic practice and “the power” of its apparently untamed independence. As such, this performance practice may indeed be taken to demonstrate that, in Bill Worthen’s phrase, performance has “no intrinsic relation to texts”. In a long view, these twentieth-century productions do not just content themselves to reveal the unsettled relations of text and performance; more intriguingly, they indicate some of the contingencies that are bound to affect productions of Shakespeare’s plays in the years to come. While it is unwise to speculate about the future, there is one aspect of future transformation that appears safe enough to be further pursued here. If the present foray into nearcontemporary developments in the theatre assures us of anything, it is that the changeful ensemble of communicative channels and technologies may affect and, perhaps, upset the cultural order and context of each single medium within this ensemble. As the theatre combines language/writing/reading with bodily action/show/iconography, the confederation of all these media now appears especially vulnerable, liable to far-reaching changes in the hierarchy and priority of its radically diverse constituents. Once these contingencies are given consideration, the more obvious and perfectly relevant question will have to focus on the fate of Shakespeare’s text on stages exposed to these unsettled relations of language and performance. More pointedly, and in over-simplified abstraction from conditions alluded to here, the question is, can this type of performance practice be considered as a truly independent, self-sustained, even self-generative, practice that is able to bring about a living Shakespeare on our stages? Paradoxically, we have in modern concepts and theories of acting a strong trend to enhance the specific contribution that the individual actor can make. Here is space only briefly to draw attention to two highly influential late twentieth-century theatre practitioners and theoreticians – Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba. For them, the text/performance relationship is strangely threatened by dysfunction or, as Grotowski terms it, by “contradiction”. A sense of balance and confederation, let alone a mutual effect of complementarity is

24

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

out of the question after literature has ceased to be considered as “the creative part of the theatre”. The “important thing”, according to Grotowski, “is not the words but what we do with these words”. If, as he continues to suggest, the very core of theatrical experience is an “encounter”, then, in this encounter as a performed event, the uses of language must content themselves with a secondary role – even when and where they engage in the “contradiction” between, say, “gesture and voice, voice and word, word and thought”.58 The point here, first and foremost, is to suit “the word to the action”, rather than “the action to the word” (Hamlet, 3.2.17). Alongside Grotowski’s position, Eugenio Barba’s view of the “encounter” in question is marked by a related, but even more radical, notion of “a clash”, As he argues: In western theater, the actor is – or should be – a creator. His clash with the text, through his own sensibility and his own historical perspective opens up a unique and personal universe to his audience.59

Clearly, after centuries of “servitude”, the performer, toiling with the burden of an alien text, “is – or should be –” authorized to come into his/her own, allowed to follow his/her own craft and, as Barba says, “sensibility”. The question of course is, if there is “a new ethic for the actor” on the horizon, can we trust “his own historical perspective”? Can we indeed assume that this “ethic”, according to Barba, “has always been the moving force of all theater revolutions: to liberate the actor from servitude”? Here is a prospect devoutly to be wished, one resounding with all the pathos it takes to argue for a new paradigm. But, as soon as the historical comes into the picture and the actor’s function “in society” is being defined as that of “a question mark”,60 one would wish to redefine the nature and degree of the actor’s ‘liberation’ and the ways of his/her independence. Finally, of course, the range of histrionic flexibility will have to be assessed in reference to the circumstances, including the evermore innovative ambitions of directors, conditioning this function in the first place. Rephrasing the question leads us back to where the acting – the profession and the individual – can best hope to serve in the performance of Shakespeare’s plays as a “creator” (Barba’s phrase). It is impossible to advocate a contemporary sense for actors to bring alive Shakespeare’s plays today without taking into account the changeful panorama of the media and their cultural, political, and educational functions. To view written language spoken live by diverse voices in both its own implicit difference and in explicit interaction with other media (print, film, DVD, and so on) amounts to a formidable task, one which confronts an unprecedented rate and density of change in communication technologies. If

Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre

25

the complexity and celerity of these changes defy any meaningful summary in the present context, we must confine our concern to what, arguably, is the most consequential momentum affecting the contemporary spectator’s preferred uses of the senses – that is, the shift from letters to pictures, from reading to viewing, from verbal to pictorial perception. In this momentous move the two media in the theatre are vitally involved. If, on contemporary stages, language and show, text and performance, experience a reversal in the order of which is magisterial and which is ministerial it appears only appropriate for Shakespeare’s plays in mise-en-scène to put up some resistance. This is not to belittle the power of performance in the staging of his plays; but once the power of his pre-representational heritage is fully recognized in the ways and means of its continuity we come to the point where the Shakespearean text cannot and must not be reduced to (I am tempted to say, abused as) a ministerial element in the production. In conclusion, let me affirm the need to defend the players against those directors who have usurped an extraordinary authority that ill consorts with the actor’s “new ethic” of conveying an independent, even “unique vision to his audience”. Let us be wary of taking for granted the proclaimed, all too wishful grounds on which actors can open up a “unique and personal universe” in directorially controlled theatre institutions. Shakespeare’s is an actor’s theatre, a stage run by performers. Barba’s clarion call “to liberate the actor from servitude” has a utopian ring, at least as it ignores that even in our time the actor’s ministerial position has two frontiers of uncongenial subordination. On the one hand, there is an immovable, purely conservative concept of Shakespeare’s text; on the other, we have the obsession with innovation on the part of directors rewriting the plays in their own original ways. While the former tends to turn the great plays into a museum, the latter has reached a point at which avant-garde memories have long since been tainted with commercial success.61 At this juncture, the work of the actor needs more than ever to escape the derivative state of directorial “servitude”. Unless this escape can be implemented in alliance with both the audience and the dramatic text, actors continue to be “reduced to mere tools in the hands of dictator-directors”.62 Notes The author wishes to convey his thanks to David Schalkwyk for the invaluable editorial help he gave to turn the present essay into printable shape. 1. W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 27.

26

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

2. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds, Performativity and Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 2–3; italics in the original. 3. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 298; cited by Parker and Kosofsky Sedgwick, Performativity and Performance, 3. 4. David Schalkwyk, “Text and Performance, Reiterated: A Reproof Valiant or Lie Direct”, Chapter 4 in this volume, p. 48. For the most recent controversial discussion see John Russell Brown, “Learning Shakespeare’s Secret Language: the Limits of ‘Performance Studies’”, New Theatre Quarterly 24 (August 2008): 211–21. 5. What follows is an independent essay, but it may also be read as an epilogue to two closely connected studies which seek to engage the interlocking area of difference and alliance between text and performance. My Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) confronts this conjuncture in the Elizabethan theatre as socio-cultural institution. Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), co-authored with Douglas Bruster, approaches these variable, highly differential relations between language and show in terms of specific practices and figurations of performance, especially in the formative phase of Shakespeare’s plays. 6. My text throughout is The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 7. Barbara Hodgdon, Introduction to A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 6–7. 8. See W.B. Worthen’s influential study “Deeper Meanings and Theatrical Technique: The Rhetoric of Performance Criticism”, Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 441–55.This important intervention is adapted in chap. 4 of his Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, 151–91. 9. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, 223 n.5. 10. Bernard Beckerman, Theatrical Presentation: Performer, Audience, and Act, ed. Gloria Brim Beckerman and William Coco (New York: Routledge, 1990), 6–7. 11. Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition. Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), xli; cf. 157, 159. 12. Alvin B. Kernan, The Playwright as Magician. Shakespeare’s Image of the Poet in the English Public Theater (New Haven: Yale University Press,1979), 53, 152–3. 13. The phrase is from Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum (1597)], 1.3.34 (reprinted in The Works, ed. Philip Wynter, vol. 9 [Oxford: AMS Press, 1969]) where the subaltern context is unambiguous: it is that of the “base clown” who enters in “vile Russetings” (l. 29). 14. Meredith Anne Skura, Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 57–8. I have collected evidence of widespread residual traces of these anonymous (non)verbal, extremely variable performance practices in my Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). For further evidence, especially path-breaking on juggling and tumbling, see Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7–73. 15. John Astington, “The London Stage in the 1580s”, The Elizabethan Theatre 11 (1990), 1. Here the work of David Bradley, William Ingram, Janet S. Loengard, Paul

Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre

27

Whitfield White, and others has shed some valuable light on the terra incognita of mid-Elizabethan playing. 16. Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 125. 17. My text is Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. John Doebler, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (London: Edward Arnold, 1967). 18. C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, ed., Ben Jonson: The Complete Works, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), vol. 6, 397. 19. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R.B. Mckerrow, 5 vols (London: 1904–10), vol. 1, 212. 20. Stephen Orgel, “What is a Text?”, in Staging the Renaissance. Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (London: Routledge, 1991), 87. 21. For liminality in Shakespeare’s endings, see my Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice, 216–45; for the threshold in his openings, Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre. Performance and Liminality in Early Modern Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 22. Elin Diamond, ed., Performance and Cultural Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), Introduction, 12 n. 22. 23. See my introductory piece, “Representation and Mimesis: Towards a New Theory”, together with the essay, “Doubly Encoded Representations in Modern Drama and Fiction: Rupturing Coordinates of (Re)Semblance and Meaning”, both in Symbolim 6: 3–36 and 97–136, respectively. For Hermann Koller’s study, see Die Mimesis in der Antike (Bern: Francke, 1954), 12; 119. For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s distinction in representation between “portrait” and “proxy,” see her reading of Marx’ Brumaire in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66–111. 24. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked. The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 2; subsequent citations 163–4, 172. For another singular exception, see Elin Diamond’s redefinition of mimesis in Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Mimesis and Theater (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). 25. See Robert Weimann, “Thresholds to Commodity and Memory in Shakespeare’s Endings”, Representations 53 (1996): 1–20. 26. For illustrations, see my Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice,124–25. 27. See, for instance, Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David Nichol Smith (New York: Russel & Russel, 1962), 48, 86f., 89. 28. Patrick Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation (Reading: The University of Reading Press, 1986), 8, 12; and The Birthpangs of Protestant England (London: Macmillan, 1988), 101, 108. 29. Phelan, Unmarked, 148–9. 30. Rose Lee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 9. 31. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 185 (my translation). 32. See Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002), 83–106; Andreas Höfele, “Humanity at Stake: Man and Animal in Shakespeare’s Theatre”,

28

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Shakespeare Survey 60 (2007), 118–29. My thanks to Andreas Höfele for letting me use and cite from an unpublished essay, “‘More than a creeping thing’: Baiting Coriolanus”, where “the species crossover” is explored “in the opposite direction”, projecting “creatures from the bear-pit onto the stage”. For a reading of Launce and his dog, see Shakespeare and the Power of Performance (104–10) where I view the performing animal as part of a travesty of representation. 33. Hodgdon and Worthen, A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, 3–4. 34. W.B. Worthen, “Texts, Tools, and Technologies of Performance: A Quip Modest in Response to R.A. Foakes”, Shakespeare 2, no. 2 (2006): 208. 35. David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 32; cf. 50f., 111f., 214. 36. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, esp. 23–8. Cf. Michael D. Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), for more comprehensive uses of “ministerial,” 58, 83. 37. W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37. 38. Hodgdon and Worthen, A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, 5. 39. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, 178; see R.A. Foakes, “Performance Theory and Textual Theory: A Retort Courteous”, Shakespeare 2 (2006), 50 et passim. But the phrase should not be overemphasized when read in the context of a polemic against “the armchair reading of speech” as theatrically “normative” modern “interlocution”. See in this connection Worthen’s brilliant critique of Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who “recapitulate Austin’s mistaken substitution of ontological for historical formations” of theatre (226, n. 18). 40. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 296, 324–7. 41. Cf. my essay on “Bifold Authority in Shakespeare’s Theatre”, Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (Winter 1988), 401–17. 42. David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8. 43. See my essay “Playing with a Difference: Revisiting ‘Pen’ and ‘Voice’ in Shakespeare’s Theater”, Shakespeare Quarterly 50 (1999): 415–32. 44. Again, readers will notice that my use of “difference” or “differential” is closer to Saussure than to the theorists of deconstruction. 45. Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare. I have further grappled with this dialectic in “Shakespeare on the Modern Stage: Past Significance and Present Meaning,” Shakespeare Survey 20 (1967):113–20. 46. Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 31. 47. Brecht on Theatre. The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1978 repr.), 22, 37. 48. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 40. 49. Ibid., 106. 50. Peter Brook, The Shifting Point, 1949–1987 (New York: TCG, 1987), 43, 58. This confronts the danger of a “deadly theatre”; see Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Athenaeum, 1969), 10.

Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre

29

51. Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. Loren Kruger (London: Routledge, 1992), 60. 52. Ibid., 59. 53. Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, 1892–1992 (London: Routledge, 1993), 204f. 54. Heiner Müller, Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage (New York: PAJ, 1984), 56. 55. The full original title of the text which I use (and adapt) in translation, is Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preußen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei (1977). 56. This is a stage direction (in my own translation) taken from Heiner Müller, Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preußen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei. Ein Greuelmärchen (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1982), 43. 57. Peter Handke, Kaspar and Other Plays, trans. Michael Roloff (New York: Farrar, 1969), 44. 58. Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, with Preface by Peter Brook (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 33, 58, 56, 18. 59. Eugenio Barba, Beyond the Floating Islands (New York: PAJ, 1986), 57. 60. Ibid., 58. 61. Take only the 75-minute duration of The Tempest, produced in the Viennese Burgtheater, directed by Barbara Frey; or the Hamlet produced in the Hamburg Thalia Theater, directed by Michael Thalheimer, which, without either Horatio or the Gravediggers, ran for under two hours. In either case, these durations cannot of course serve as a gauge for the quality of the performances. 62. Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage, 292. In this connection, see the superb chapter on the rise of the modern director in Dennis Kennedy’s The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 26–48, where the commercial conjunction between profit and innovation forever after is cogently demonstrated.

This page has been left blank intentionally

2 Traction Control K. Ludwig Pfeiffer

I In Robert Weimann’s Shakespearean scholarship, representation and performance – representational meaning and performative eloquence – have always been in flexible relationships with each other. Recently, the emphasis has shifted. In the (very) early work, representational density and concreteness were more strongly foregrounded. In the later work, starting conspicuously with Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (1978, German original, 1967), layers of intrinsically performative values have more strongly asserted themselves.1 However, none of these dimensions has gained an autonomy of its own. Nor were they, on the other hand, strictly opposed to each other. Weimann’s essay in this volume (Chapter 1, “Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre: Ministerial and/or Magisterial?”) insists, and very rightly so, on the very complex, variable and vulnerable conjuncture of language and show. The introduction to Shakespeare and the Power of Performance (2008, with Douglas Bruster)2 examines the mobility of embodied signs with even greater zest. The book also argues very powerfully for the need to differentiate each of the terms in question. Performance, as in Wolfgang Iser’s literary anthropology, can be thought of as the – purely textual and mental – dynamics of textual organization and its impact. At the other end of that spectrum, it can be illustrated by the bodily autonomy of acrobatic feats. Likewise, the notion of meaning can be used, substantially as it were, for representational or even referential pressures and priorities. But it can also be cut back to a mere external frame. Such a frame might surround performance, preserving it from a total lack of direction, but it cannot control it. A representational framework can be thinned out into an overall or volatile effect which does not condition our response to art; although, without it as a kind of precondition, it would be difficult to begin our engagement with art. 31

32

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Shakespearean studies have been drawn, with particular force, in all of these directions, because Shakespeare’s genius, so often invoked, described and mythologized, can also be said to have revealed the strength and the complexities of performative, semantic and representational urges. No one else has tracked down their elusive interplay as Weimann has. Even for him, as my title suggests, the movement between incipient and elaborate degrees in the autonomy or instrumentality of performance, in the importunity, imposition or imposture of historical meanings as “touches of the real” (David Schalkwyk),3 has been difficult to control. We may move, like Schalkwyk, back and forth between (deconstructive) linguistic analysis and questions of (real) power and society. We may shift our analytical and theoretical presuppositions between (new) historicist assumptions, deconstructively floating signifiers and – perhaps – fairly concrete Wittgensteinian life forms.4 But we never know enough about alleged historical realities, about the plurality of life forms and the mentalities they might imply or enforce, about the impact of performance and the entrenchment of representational meanings in either Shakespeare’s or his audience’s minds. An awareness of the limits of historical knowledge emerges very pointedly in Weimann’s essay for this volume.5 II That is why a second move, in Weimann’s present essay, takes on a crucial (methodo)logical importance. In the second half of the essay, in concentrating on “Shakespeare now”, Weimann appears to move away from the historical, some would say the “authentic”, the “original”, Shakespeare. In reality, if that word is still mentionable, the opposite is the case. My own arguments support Weimann’s move and perhaps even enlarge its legitimate range. First, Weimann appeals to two “cultural constellations” that “appear to facilitate the proposed conjunctural operation” (16). Theatrical performance practices then and now do not take the architectural – and that means also the mental, that is, fictional/real – closure of the stage for granted. Second, both Shakespeare’s and our time respectively constitute hybrid communicative structures. They do not bow much to what has appeared, to all intents and purposes, as the hegemony of the scriptural or textual from, say, the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Both periods might be seen as (relatively welldefinable and comparable) times of expansion. Certainly, expansions in the two periods take place on very different levels. But they produce analogous results in experiential and terminological interpenetrations, which tend to blur

Traction Control

33

the boundaries between the performative and the representational, between the real and the fictional (or, as I think one should say, not only within the philosophical tradition, the fictive – fictionality being a term which has sprung from epistemological dead ends in literary studies and theory). Heiner Müller and his Hamletmaschine provide a powerfully instructive example. On the face (that is, on the text) of it, that work seems to bear hardly any resemblance to Shakespeare’s almost mythic play. Müller appears to have made his work into one of the most ‘autonomous’ of so-called Shakespearean adaptions. He confronts us, both verbally and performatively, with an explosion of coherent meanings through which an identification, however rough and provisional, of persons and history would have – were it still possible – to be envisaged. In such a situation, we would be ill advised to rehearse an Adornian ruse: to argue, as Adorno did with respect to Beckett’s Endgame in particular, that the general absence of any form of coherence in this play is itself the result of specific historical catastrophes.6 Adorno might have justifiably claimed that Müller’s (like Beckett’s) timeless picture emerged from within the German Democratic Republic, one of the most representationally (some would even have said, ideologically) committed cultures of post-World War II Europe. Müller, I think by contrast, provides us with a double, though much diluted, historical perspective. He presents us with the most radical example of a modern representational-performative scope (as well as its breakdown), which we have to imagine, however, in order to get a sense of Shakespeare’s own potential. Epistemologically, such a scope (and its breakdown) is of course not better than the historical constructions of contexts and their impact which we must, from time to time, indulge in. Theoretically and methodologically, Weimann’s procedure (which I strongly support and would reinforce) is not to be confused with the aesthetics of reception (for example, sensu Jauss) or the theory of aesthetic respose in the mode of Wolfgang Iser.7 Weimann’s present essay, embedded as it is in the continuity of his earlier work, rather undertakes a more challenging, but also more clarifying widening of what he has called, first in the subtitle of a Shakespeare Survey article on “Shakespeare on the Modern Stage” (1967), the almost inextricable interplay (or more nobly and traditionally put, the dialectics) of “past significance and present meaning”.8

34

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

III Challenge and clarification derive from the fact that both performance and its extension by other media have infiltrated the scholarly scene. Let me therefore sharpen the point of my argument. The power of page and stage, of author’s pen and actor’s voice (and these various terms, although seemingly running parallel, do indeed, to repeat, indicate a spectrum of possibilities themselves) must be gauged by what I would call a logic of historical media. Because of Shakespeare’s sheer comprehensiveness, his “universality” (whether seen in terms of Harold Bloom as the invention of the human, or any other) should not be squeezed into the Procrustean bed of alleged Elizabethan theatre conditions, however precisely we may – and Robert Weimann indeed does – describe them. Nor should Shakespeare be put on the bone-breaking torture rack of certain contemporary, chainsaw massacre-like exploitations. The modern version of the old rack, the orthopaedic bed, on which rigidities and stereotypes of all kinds can be smoothed out, might serve as a playful image of my desired logic of historical media. This would provoke the question of whether even a shorthand use of the term “traditional theatre” (11) or, by contrast, “living stage” (4), is advisable. If “living” means “contemporary”, then this living stage is often pretty dead. If “living” means “full of vitality”, then its loci are not always easy to find. Stage construction, design, acting techniques and acting power have varied continuously throughout the ages. If sufficient evidence were available, one might ask, for example, whether many eighteenth-century productions, say with David Garrick in the leading role, might not have demonstrated the potential of performative autonomy and the pitfalls of thematic conventionality to a striking degree. Eighteenth-century handbooks on acting techniques insisted on the priority of body movements. These had to suggest the emotive essence of a situation upon which the words are a mere elaboration. Certainly, the coupling of movement and emotive codes was easier for that time than it has become for us. But the satires on physiognomy and related speculations also show that such couplings were far from reliable even then. Garrick, in his slow-motion movements as Hamlet or Richard III, for example, seems both to have suggested such couplings very strongly, but also transcended them completely. The systematic problem – shifts in the framework of a logic of media as opposed to literary history and the status ascribed especially to the great, that is, canonized works therein – had been brewing, in various places and forms, since the very early sixteenth century. In Florence, the Camerata “invented”

Traction Control

35

opera, amongst other reasons, also because even Dante’s words, in their ordinary form of spoken recitation, did not appeal as strongly as one would have liked and expected.9 Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie, still held a “serious Play” to be “Nature wrought up to a higher pitch”. At the same time, however, he seriously contemplated turning Milton’s Paradise Lost into an opera to be called The State of Innocence. There is evidence that he and Waller visited the elderly Milton to get his permission for a rhymed dramatic version that could serve as an opera libretto.10 Some decades later, G.F. Handel, in an enterprise analogous to the Camerata’s use of Dante, in what we would have to say was the final accomplishment of Dryden’s attempted rape of Milton, composed the music to texts which his “song writer” Charles Jennens had produced under the titles of “L’Allegro”, “Il Penseroso” and, to cap it all, “Il Moderato”. In his report, Handel appears to have been particularly satisfied with the reception of and indeed the admiration for the third piece by an audience made up of the high and educated ranks of society.11 Despite the anecdotal and episodic character of this account, it exemplifies the tension between textual and performative modes that has remained a crucial cultural issue ever since. This tension is not an opposition, because the performative is normally an amalgamation of various levels of mediality, including the textual itself. The manifold and drastic changes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of what modern textual editorship, and, in its wake, the general (scholarly) public, have come to establish or to accept as textually (more or less) normative Shakespearean plays do not amount to their irresponsible violation. Rather, they are a series of (sometimes) desperate attempts to save the powerful impulses irradiating from them under different sociocultural and ‘theatrical’ conditions and their impact on bodily and emotive codes. In spite of scholarship, we have not escaped from this situation which, within scholarship, Robert Weimann has handled with the utmost circumspection. I suspect that the possibilitites for adaptation and performance are intrinsic to Shakespeare. But they do not exist to the same extent in all plays. In a great deal of contemporary scholarship, the tension has been radicalized into something like an original media shift in Shakespeare himself. G.B. Shaw introduced the idea that the famous soliloquies are akin to opera arias: not meant to convey ideas, but rather to function as visible and audible signs of passion (in whichever sense of that word). It would be a bit, though not entirely, far-fetched to link this Shavian provocation to the – very serious – historical scholarship of, say, L.L. Schücking, especially the latter’s 1947 book on Shakespeare and the style of tragedy in his time.12 Schücking emphasized

36

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

the pathos of speeches of figures who, he thought, pace Harold Bloom, were radically un(der)developed as personalities. The German ShakespeareHandbuch, in its turn, connects the Schücking type of work with the “critical modifications” of Robert Weimann (and also M.C. Bradbrook, A. Harbage and A.C. Sprague).13 Weimann must stand out, of course, because, although he can be called a historical critic, the range and sophistication of his theoretical mastery finds no equal or parallel in historical criticism. Other forms of media-oriented criticism have been inspired by modern film, which includes some truly overwhelming versions of Shakespeare. For many advocates of the filmic mode, Shakespeare is basically a screenplay writer. (We might remember that, for Helmholtz Watson in Huxley’s Brave New World, Shakespeare was a genius in advertizing psychology.) As general theses, such assertions go too far on several counts. It seems especially hard to compare the restricted visual dimensions of the Shakespearean stage with the visual opulence and the wealth of visual techniques in film. On the other hand, one could take up Schücking’s notion of the pathos of speech by assuming that pathos is a relatively loosely encoded form of emotion. It suggests psychological urgency without, pace Lily B. Campbell and her slaveof-passion concept of a Shakespearean tragic hero, defining its emotional category.14 In such a perspective, and in some cases, one might see parts of the visuality of Shakespeare films, especially close-ups of faces, as visualizations, that is to say, visual translations of underdetermined, but lively and strong emotional energies which Shakespeare had to suggest through speech only (using the audience intimacy of stage and stagecraft). Robert Weimann was and remains an optimist of the theatre as a crucial cultural form. We must be very grateful for that, and for the farreaching, subtle analyses to that effect, concentrating on and culminating in Shakespeare, because, as Heiner Müller has said, the basic human potential of transformation in its embodiment by living beings can be witnesssed – or should we say, experienced – “live”only on a stage.15 But as Müller also knew (and said on the same page), there are limits to that noble enterprise. The mere fact of having standing theatres with almost continuous productions all year round is detrimental to the aura and the cultural effectiveness of the theatre. Shakespeare’s reaction to that problem provoked what some critics (J.L. Calderwood, A.B. Kernan and Weimann himself) have called “metadrama”. Shakespearean metadrama asserts itself mainly as theatrical scepticism. For us that means that the contemporary stage, whether living or languishing, cannot claim any privilege in the unfolding of (especially) the potentialities of Shakespearean theatre. We also must look at the modern avatars and simulacra

Traction Control

37

of those potentialities which might do more justice to the mythic-original complex called Shakespeare than what we continue to call the theatrical stage. In dealing with those, in enlarging, of necessity, the scope of that “volatile dramaturgy” which Weimann and Bruster speak of,16 we would do well at least to aim for the subtly differentiated comprehensiveness which Robert Weimann has demonstrated with respect to Shakespeare as the mythic, but ineluctable, point of departure and return. Notes 1. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 2. Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 3. David Schalkwyk, Literature and the Touch of the Real (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), especially chapter 2 on Derrida, chapter 3 on Wittgenstein, and their joint impact on Schalkwyk’s discussion of Weimann and Derrida in chapter 4. See also Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2. 4. See, for example, Schalkwyk, Literature, 115–16, 126. 5. See Robert Weimann, “Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre: Ministerial and/or Magisterial?”, Chapter 1 in this volume, 3–29. Further references to this essay will be made in the text in brackets. 6. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame”, New German Critique 25 (1982): 119–50. 7. For the distinction, see Wolfgang Iser, How to Do Theory (Malden, MA, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell, 2006), 57–8. 8. Robert Weimann, “Shakespeare on the Modern Stage: Past Significance and Present Meaning”, Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 20: Shakespearean and Other Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 113–20. 9. See in particular Robert Donington, The Rise of Opera (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1981), 82–5. 10. See James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 264–5, but also more generally 262–4, 269, 323. See further Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 207 (Dryden’s definition of opera as the first “posthuman” art), 433, 482–3; also the extended argument in my book The Protoliterary: Steps Toward an Anthropology of Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 180–94, 210–20. Given the kinds of works Hume writes about in his book, the term “drama” in his title is misleading and too narrow. 11. See Handel’s letter to Jennens, quoted in Robin Manson Myers, Handel, Dryden, and Milton (London: Bowers & Bowers, 1956), 56.

38

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

12. Levin L. Schücking, Shakespeare und der Tragödienstil seiner Zeit (Bern: A. Francke, 1947). 13. See Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and Opera (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Ina Schabert, ed., Shakespeare-Handbuch. Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt, 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2000), 866. 14. Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930). 15. Hyunseon Lee, Günter de Bruyn – Christoph Hein – Heiner Müller. Drei Interviews (Siegen: Universität Siegen Fachbereich 3, 1995), 56–7. 16. Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare, 5. Cf. also ibid., 22, on “Shakespeare in the present” and “an awareness of historicity in Elizabethan performance practices”.

3 The Spectator, the Text, and Ezekiel Dennis Kennedy

For Robert Weimann, magister ludi My ideas have always marched with Robert Weimann’s: his in front, mine behind. From him I have taken much, but chiefly I learned that, without a social orientation, assessment of Shakespeare in the theatre is a barren exercise. In this brief reflection I pick up his concern about text and performance by thinking about what the text, and the idea of a text, might mean in the most direct of social circumstances, that of a spectator in performance. Considerations of the spectator are conspicuously thorny and usually impractical. Audiences are notoriously miscellaneous, their experiences of the event diverse and irregular, and their reactions, while occasionally expressed outwardly, are for the most part internal. Almost anything one can say about a spectator is false on some level. Though that has not prevented critics from making the attempt: it can be argued that much writing about performance in general is recessively or unconsciously about the spectator, even if that spectator is the writer imaging herself as watcher. But rather than talking about actual spectators or imagined audiences, I would like to approach the issue as a philosopher might, a philosopher of performance.1 Actor/spectator = doer/watcher = speaker/listener. This common semiotic assumption, based on Roman Jacobson’s “communication model” of sender/ receiver, imagines the theatre event primarily as conveyer of meaning, its procedures and practices engaged in the manufacture of signifiers that contain messages. Not necessarily intellectual messages, of course, but messages nonetheless, non-material processes that ensue from the materiality of the stage and leap between actor and spectator as a small and invisible current of electricity along a telegraph wire, capable of engendering responses in the minds and bodies of willing recipients. I will return to this at the end; now I want to emphasize that for many commentators who follow that model the 39

40

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

written text has been considered central to understanding performance. It is hardly the only factor involved in the formation of meaning: the stage creates such a multiplicity of signifiers, chiefly visual and auditory but potentially appealing to all five senses, that giving pride of place to the spoken word smacks of puritanical bias. In Shakespeare studies, however, that bias – as unconscious as other biases and sometimes unconscious of the telegraphic metaphor that underlies it – has tended to inflect much consideration of performance, presuming the theatre has an inevitable similarity to literary experience, judging the success of a performed play by its propinquity to the action of reading. How close is that approach to a spectator’s experience? Imagine the first performance of an unknown play called The Prince of Denmark in London around the year 1600. For spectators the text was not a document but a set of vocalities and physical enactments inside a visual field, three elements with approximately equal consequence for reception. The print on the page we now value so highly came to initial spectators only through audition. The paradox of a dramatic script, especially a new script, that its dialogue has been written in order to appear not written, means that its performance always retains originary qualities, implying, even when the text is familiar, that it is emerging for the first time. The opposition Weimann discusses between author’s pen and actor’s voice, hugely important today in the consideration of Shakespeare performance, was hardly an issue in 1600: for spectators thoroughly engaged with the enactment the pen that wrote Hamlet did not seem present, unless one reflected on the processes of theatrical production. Further, before the spoken text arrived in the ears of its audience it encountered the mundane difficulties of actors’ voices rising insufficiently above the ambient noise of a playhouse crowded with coming and going, inattentive auditors, the distractions of costumes and actor movement, sounds of a city busy with river and road traffic, the noise of wind and weather. That was then. Today, of course, a production of Hamlet any place in the world arrives with history, heavy baggage strapped to the back of performance but chiefly loaded on reading, textual and biographical criticism, and the general awareness of Shakespeare as an icon of high culture. Sometimes a director attacks the textual baggage directly; German directors were particularly inclined to this as the Cold War drew to its enervating close. I think, for example, of Hansgünter Heyme’s “electronic” Hamlet in Cologne in 1979, in which an aphasic prince could not talk, so that his text was delivered by a disembodied voice through an amplifier. Or Heiner Müller’s seven-anda-half-hour production in Berlin in 1990 that included his own by-product

The Spectator, the Text, and Ezekiel

41

play Hamletmachine, which saw Shakespeare’s text as impossibly tainted by history, predicting the end of European culture as the Berlin Wall came down. Occasionally a director has staged the impossibility of performing the text of Hamlet at all, relying instead on absurd text fragments and derangements of action, as Frank Castorf did in Frankfurt in 1989 with Hamlet-Material von Shakespeare. But when a production tries to sidestep the baggage of history by offering a radically new or oppositional interpretation, the result is likely to call further attention to the ghostly traces of the play’s past, ironically foregrounding it as a literary document in the midst of its deconstruction. There is nothing wrong with treating a Shakespeare play as a species of literature; people have been reading plays as books for a long time. Writing can be examined variously, in silence, by mouthing the words, out loud, in dialogue, imagining or not the possibility of performance. There is really no need to set text against performance, except to note the rather obvious point that the phenomenon and effect of performance, the Gestus of performance, is not limited to the enactment of speech or to the realization of a pre-existing text. It is a more complex matter than that. Part of the complication involves what a text means for an actor, its mediator-in-chief. We know little about how actors approached learning their lines in the early modern period, or what degree of literacy they possessed, how they were taught to perform, or how thoroughly they were expected to remember the words.2 But the presence of the prompter throughout Europe, attested in Shakespeare’s time and well recorded in most countries from the early seventeenth century, implies that actors were often imperfect of memory. The double practice of repertory playing and casting by “lines of business” (called emploi in France), whereby actors were hired into a company for specific type roles to facilitate rapid preparation for many different plays under quick changes of bill, underlines the probability that they regularly stumbled over the text, or perhaps tumbled over it. The prompt box, in regular use on the Continent, shielded the prompter, a professional as important as the actor, and allowed him to assist speech and correct blocking errors with little disruption to the audience. In proscenium theatres in England after the Restoration the prompter was in the wings on “prompt side”, stage left, which meant he was more likely to be heard by spectators. While the prompter provided insurance that the play would be kept going when actors lost the words or lost their places, he was also a continuing reminder to the audience that the on-stage speech had been written, that a book of reference existed. Such a reminder, an intervention from the realm of the literary, is a risky intrusion in the realm of performance. Theatre is at

42

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

base a preliterate form that does not actually require the participation of a writer. Theatre’s operating procedure, usually unacknowledged, that the actor is inventing the words as we do in ordinary life, is broken by prompts in the way that a scene in the cinema is broken when the power fails or when sound and image get out of sync. Theatre works best when the actor appears to own the text. What does it mean to own the text? At the start of his prophecy (593 bc), Ezekiel gives a frightening account of how he was chosen as god’s spokesman. A vision of a crystal throne in the heavens appeared to him and a voice charged him to instruct the Israelites (“that rebellious house”) to repent. A hand stretched out from the throne holding a scroll, written on both sides with “words of mourning and woe”. A voice spoke: He said to me, O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go speak to the house of Israel. So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. He said to me, Mortal, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it. Then I ate it; and in my mouth it was sweet as honey. He said to me: Mortal, go to the house of Israel and speak my very words to them (Ezekiel 3.1–3).3

The scroll would have been made of papyrus so – hoping for the prophet’s sake it had no winding sticks – it could have been eaten. Eating the writing is an extreme enforcement of the desire for textual accuracy in a speaker. Yahweh does not trust his prophet to remember his words accurately and entirely, human memory being both imperfect and unpredictable, so Ezekiel is commanded to incorporate the words. That is what an actor must do – incorporate the words. Not through alimentation; all peace to Ezekiel, it’s not an aide-memoire. But an actor must nonetheless swallow the text in a metaphoric sense, make it part of bodily existence. In the modern era, under the pervasive influence of Stanislavsky, much of an actor’s preparation, communal and private, is directed towards a thorough embodiment of the text so that it may be reproduced effortlessly, unaffectedly, without prompting and without awareness of its foundation in writing. The disappearance of the prompter as a regular feature is the result of a number of coalescing factors, including the development of long runs rather than repertory scheduling, but it is chiefly due to audience expectation of uninterrupted or unbroken commitment to the moment of action. Affected by realism and the cinema, actors and audiences today are equally distressed by a player who loses his lines. Calling for a prompt now, because it is so rare and so obvious, undermines the play.

The Spectator, the Text, and Ezekiel

43

Which presents an intriguing dilemma for a Shakespearian who insists on the primacy of text over performance. From the standpoint of the show, an actor mistaking the words is better than an actor “drying” entirely. If the speaker dries on “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I”, most spectators would like to hear a confident banality in blank verse, such as “The wind, me thinks, doth blow from far away” or “My feet are sore from walking all night long”. Silly examples, and quite un-Hamlet-like, but a stuttering of “O – O – O”, or an intimidating long pause suggesting the rest may be silence, would be far worse after the protagonist has cleared the stage in order to soliloquize. Technological interventions can aid an actor’s memory, usually without the spectator’s awareness. Some large opera houses place teleprompters inside the proscenium or in the orchestra pit for the on-stage singers; in a somewhat different case it is also common to send video images of the conductor to the chorus in the wings. But in the spoken theatre technology is more likely to fail than the old-fashioned prompter. I was once involved in a production of a talky Edwardian play in a well-known theatre in the United States, where an elderly actor playing an elderly role had severe difficulty with his lines. As a last resort he was fitted with a discreet radio earpiece and given continuous prompt from offstage. The actor became so reliant on the device that one night, when a passing police car interfered with transmission, he repeated “Right, Sarge, I’ll clear those fuckers out of there” before he realized he was off script. Too bad it wasn’t Hamlet: that’s a perfect iambic pentameter line. In my experience as a playwright and director, actors learn their lines best through dialogic repetition with other actors, whether in rehearsal or outside it. Verbal reiteration coupled with physical movement sets the text in the mind and the body; in the end the goal is to use the book in order to discard it. Until the book becomes irrelevant an actor does not own the text, and most good actors understand that they will not seriously advance in characterization until they can toss the book aside. Ezekiel’s vision was wrong. Swallowing the text does not ensure fidelity to the author; swallowing the text means denying its authority, undercutting its primacy, disturbing its textuality, its word-forwordness. The author – even an author like Shakespeare – disappears into the body of the actor. On the way to that goal, however, the pitfalls of memory are legion. For the most popular Shakespeare plays they include an added psychological stress, the awareness that the text is already well known, intensifying the actor’s concern about accuracy. The most intriguing problem in learning lines, however, is the tendency for an actor to rewrite them unconsciously. Once this happens, whether it’s just a word or two or skipping entire passages in a long speech, it

44

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

is very difficult to return the proper text. It happens frequently and often goes uncorrected. So for the spectator in the theatre, what does the Shakespeare text mean? Obviously I cannot speak for everyone, but I think that most ordinary spectators – those who are not specialists in some field of theatre or literature or early modern history – are likely to have a contradictory attitude to the idea of text. On the one hand, they are probably well aware of the significance of Shakespeare’s plays in literary studies, in anglophone culture and in wider global culture. Such an awareness highlights the authority or probity of the written word, and implies the importance of accuracy in the text’s representation. On the other hand, faced with the immediacy of enactment, and usually caring little how the enactment was achieved, spectators, assuming they are not bored out of their minds, are even more likely to be dominated by the presence of the actorincorporating-text rather than the text-in-itself. Which returns me to the semiotic model. The trouble with the concept of sender/receiver as the pattern of theatrical communication is that it imagines the spectator passively, as one willing and able to accept what is on display, rather than as an interactive presence capable of rejecting, altering, or idiosyncratically revising whatever signals may come from the stage, whether deliberate or accidental. The semiotic approach, in short, imagines an ideal spectator as reader: which may be why some Shakespeare performance criticism has been caught in the trap of assuming there are correct interpretations, and correct receptions, for plays in performance. We know that in history and the present spectators attend a play for highly various reasons, often unconnected to its text: to see a striking actress, to accompany a lonely friend, or out of social obligation, or because that’s what a tourist in Stratford does in the evening. Spectators, engaged in the moment-to-moment flow of performance, may be interested in many things, but not necessarily interested in what the performance might mean, whether emotionally or intellectually. If we continue to think of the transmission of meaning as the purpose of theatre, we are in a parallel trap of thinking that text messages constitute its primary goal. To understand better how a performance might affect its audience we need to go beyond all forms of producer intentionality – intentions of actors, directors, designers, and playwrights – to admit that the words of the text and the narrative they order are sparks for a spectator’s experience but do not determine the experience.

The Spectator, the Text, and Ezekiel

45

Notes 1. What follows gives a quick summary of my approach in The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 2. Tiffany Stern’s Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) recapitulates these matters. Peter Holland also brilliantly examines actor and audience memory in “On the Gravy Train: Shakespeare, Memory and Forgetting”, in Shakespeare, Memory and Performance, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 207–34. 3. New Revised Standard Version, quoted from The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). The image of the scroll was used contemporaneously to Ezekiel in Jeremiah (15.16) and recalled in the Christian era in Revelation (10.8–11).

This page has been left blank intentionally

4 Text and Performance, Reiterated: A Reproof Valiant or Lie Direct? David Schalkwyk

The struggle between text and performance that has been waging in recent years has always been implicit in Robert Weimann’s work, albeit complicated by nuance and qualification. He has never treated it as a direct conflict upon a field of winners and losers. As early as his path-breaking Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (1987), Weimann wrote that “the representational forms of mimesis and the nonrepresentational forms of selfexpression existed side by side, and, in the resulting drama, role and actor, the representation of society and the re-enactment of self, became indivisible”.1 Here the terms in productive tension are “representation” and “self-expression”, “role” and “actor” (related to the differentiation of “locus” and “platea”), rather than “text” and “performance”. It took another twenty years for Weimann to recast the bifold practices of representation broached in Popular Tradition as a clash of the respective authority of “author’s pen” and “actor’s voice”.2 In the interim the very notion of “the text” had come under considerable deconstructive pressure, while “performance” as an embodied practice distinct from the (dislocated) structures of “representation” had gained an independent force within a broad array of disciplines. For those concerned with early modern drama, Shakespeare’s text was reconstructed through the practice of the theatre in such path-breaking editions as the Oxford Shakespeare, while critics like W.B. Worthen have played leading roles in the battle to free performance from mere servility to the hitherto-assumed authority of Shakespeare’s text. Those battle lines were redrawn in a recent exchange between Worthen and R.A. Foakes in Shakespeare (The Journal).3 In this essay, I propose to enter the fray from a third position, that of the “performative” inaugurated by J.L. Austin. Whereas Austin is often invoked in discussions of performance, 47

48

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

the philosophical complexities of his analysis are seldom discussed in any detail. While his contribution to the centrality of performance in the uses of language is acknowledged, his subtle distinctions between different kinds of performance, and especially between illocutionary and perlocutionary forms of the performative, are seldom explored for what they have to add to what Weimann has formulated as the contested authority of page and stage in Shakespeare. Using Austin, I propose, first, to clarify what seem to me to be the conceptual obscurities exemplified by the debate between Worthen and Foakes in the pages of Shakespeare. My argument rests on the difference between logical and rhetorical force in Austin’s distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. In the last section of my analysis I complicate that distinction by drawing on Weimann’s historical reconception of the authority of what we might call representation and performance in text and action. This argument introduces a third kind of performative, between Austin’s illocutionary and perlocutionary, in the form of what Stanley Cavell calls “passionate utterances”4 and William Reddy terms “emotives”.5 “Derivative” or “Derived From”? The rhetorical impasse between Foakes and Worthen on the contest between text and performance indicates a conceptual confusion that systematically prevents not merely agreement, but debate itself. Foakes and Worthen may indeed be divided by irreconcilable ideological differences – that is to say, by what they respectively value in the negotiation of Shakespeare’s authority – but it is almost certain that the exact nature of such difference and value is being obscured by the fact that they are talking (or writing) past each other. Worthen concedes as much in his honest admission that an adequate language is yet to be found for the relationship between “text” and “performance”. Foakes writes deprecatingly of the “steamroller of theory” flattening “critical discourse”, whereas Worthen decries Foakes’s “commonsense” position for “increasingly” seeing “nearly all dramatic performance … as oppressively overdetermined by textual meanings, by writing”.6 The proof is in the concepts, and more often than not arguments in this debate proceed by assertion rather than through ground-clearing analysis. What is a “text”, or, more accurately, how is the word “text” being used here? What is each protagonist’s understanding of the key concept, “performance”? And what notions are invoked either to yoke the text and performance together or force them apart? I want to begin by tracing the uncertainty or instability in

Text and Performance, Reiterated

49

the respective positions – respectively for or against “performance” and “text” – first by examining Worthen’s terminology in his Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, and then by retracing his concepts to his recent “quip modest” and his earlier Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance.7 The gist of Worthen’s argument, conveyed especially forcibly by the repeated attack on the notion of performance as a “derivative” phenomenon, is relatively clear: To see performance evoking a force intrinsic to the text … defines performance as “derivative” … To see performance as an independent (though related) mode of production, refashioning texts into something else (behaviour), releases the stage from “derivative” dependence on literature, from the obligation (even from the ability) to reproduce the text, or the ways we may understand it as mere readers. (Force, 36–7)

“Derivative” is a word with a chiefly pejorative usage. We use it in judging one thing to be secondary to, dependent on, or the by-product of, an ontologically and logically prior thing. Taken in this sense, Worthen’s position is completely unobjectionable, even urgently necessary. It is in fact often argued that in the early modern theatre it is the written text that is “derivative”: it is called into being by the needs and demands of performance, even if it may precede performance. But the ontological priority of the text may be questioned beyond the specific historical conditions of Shakespeare’s theatre and the supposed passing of the “oral cultures” of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In apartheid South Africa’s thriving oppositional theatre, for example, written and printed texts appeared after performance, based on workshopped productions that had no script from which they could be derived.8 The question, however, is whether ontological primacy is identical to logical primacy, or, better, whether it is correct to speak of primacy or priority here at all. Let us begin by looking at the grammatical difference between the cognate but not identical terms “derivative” and “derived from”. If to say that A is “derivative” in relation to B means making a pejorative judgement against A, to say that A is “derived from” B does not necessarily imply such a judgement. It may, but it does not have to. Let us take another ordinary, grammatical example. We commonly say that we are going to see a performance of Hamlet. What lurks in that seemingly innocent preposition? What are we saying (and implying) when we say we are seeing a performance “of” Hamlet? Well, that there is an entity, Hamlet (the work? the text? the type?) to which the performance is related in some way. If this relationship were not entailed then we would not be seeing what we can call Hamlet. The rub lies in the fact that

50

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

it is not clear, on reflection, what exactly the relationship between Hamlet and the performance is. The “of” signals a relationship without telling us its exact nature. Would it be fair to say that it suggests that in some way the performance is “derived” from whatever it is that is called “Hamlet”? Remember that this need not imply that the performance is “derivative”. If we said that we would mean something else altogether, namely that there was nothing original about it as a performance, that it merely rehashed old techniques, modes of acting or design, or interpretations of other performances of Hamlet (whatever Hamlet is: text, play, work, type, performance). We could therefore say without ideological prejudice that this performance (like all performances of Hamlet) is derived from Hamlet – otherwise it wouldn’t be Hamlet. We therefore have two different notions of derivation: one pejorative, the other descriptive. Does Worthen confuse the one with the other? It seems that he does. But it would be too hasty to rest our case with the revelation of this category mistake, because the nature of the “of” remains too complex and certainly too opaque as it stands. What is the “Text”? Worthen writes most often against the “text”, setting his sights repeatedly on the ideological priority given to writing over action in the position he attacks. Here is a characteristic statement of this stance: The iterative nature of print changed the understanding of the relationship between writing and performance, giving rise to a sense of theatre as a form of printlike iteration, and so to a distinctive sense of theatrical (in)fidelity, the notion that theatrical performance is a replaying of an artistic identity held elsewhere, within the printed text of the play. (Force, 41)

Worthen’s historical narrative suggests that this displacement of authority (which is where the crux lies) is contingent and accidental rather than ontological or logical. Print produces a durable form of language that would otherwise disappear as a singular event. It is the stability of the printed text or playscript that allows the reincarnation of an event that would otherwise be impossible: this performance “of ” Hamlet. The text can be reiterated as or in performance; but it is only because the text continues to subsist that multiple performances of Hamlet are possible.

Text and Performance, Reiterated

51

Because we have a particular view of iteration, we tend to see the performance as something derivative from the text, something we can either praise for its fidelity or criticize for its infidelity to the printed text. (We should remind ourselves that the pejorative force of this dependency, being historical, is entirely accidental or ideological, but that its logical force does not depend on this accident.) A myriad of philosophical uncertainties besets this way of talking. How are we using “text” here? Is it the black marks on the page, repeated with each operation of the printing press, or is it the iterability of those marks in an act or event of reading, where, as Derrida has shown, repeatability is indelibly crossed by difference. How is the “identity” of the “text” constituted, except through the event(s) or acts(s) of reading, through which identity occurs only through the suppression of difference(s)? And how does performance relate to this multiply complex iteration that we call the text, unless it arises (if it is to be a performance “of” Hamlet) out of the process by which the black marks are transformed by the embodied event of reading? The artistic identity of a text can never simply lie in or on its pages in the form of printed marks. “The text is not the book,” although the term can indeed be used to designate the book.9 But in that case the identity of that material object cannot be projected across its iterations. This book of Hamlet is identical to itself; copy or reprint it and you produce a completely different object. What enables us to call both books Hamlet is not reducible to their material properties. In addition to using “derivative” without making it clear whether the use is pejorative or descriptive, Worthen moves between the two different senses of “the text” that I have been analysing. In one case the text “disappears” in the moment of performance (Force, 74): “we do not see the text onstage” (68), it is “absent” (68). Here “text” appears to mean the marks on the page, which clearly do vanish, rendered invisible in performance, even if the phenomenological understanding of the text as appropriated language event would not be encompassed by this sense. This “disappearing” text is shorthand for the institutional force of a pejorative mode of judgement that seeks to measure performance against the impossible strictures of a prior, commanding structure. It is this priority (called the “text”) that Worthen wishes to leave behind or negate through the alternative force of performance. In other formulations, however, he negotiates a passage between text and performance in a different sense, writing variously that performance “reconstitutes” (59), “refashions” (56), “consumes” and “transforms” (21), “alters”, “reinscribes”, and “rewrites” (23) the “text,” “subject[ing] print to use, to labour, in ways that render it not the container of meaning but raw material for new meanings”

52

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

(56). In this way of speaking, the text is not left behind or rendered invisible by performance; it is rather material to be worked upon, used, and transformed. Especially the idea that the text is to be used – re-produced as a new event through work – signals a move away from a structuralist understanding of “text” to what we may call a Wittgensteinian one. If structuralism ignores use (or la parole) as the consequence of a prior, enabling structure (la langue),10 then Wittgenstein anticipates a problem that post-structuralists, especially Derrida, highlight: there is a gap between structure and signification11 which no conception of the structure as an enabling or constituting, prior system can possibly bridge. Following one half of the structuralist truth that signification can occur only in a language, Wittgenstein anticipates Derrida’s critique by insisting on the equal truth that no structure can determine meaning of its own accord: no rule can determine its own application.12 That is why Wittgenstein subjects use, agency, or performance to painstaking analysis in an attempt to understand the precise sense in which a particular use of language may be said to be derived from a linguistic rule. J.L. Austin’s notion of performative speech acts – that is, that certain uses of language are actions whose force can act upon or transform the world – is closely related to Wittgenstein’s description of meaning as something that arises from the interaction of use or action and language as a system of conventional rules.13 Austin’s argument occupies a strangely displaced but nevertheless central role in Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, which I shall deal with shortly. For the moment, we can summarize this part of my argument by saying that Worthen is in effect rejecting a residual, structuralist conception of the logic of the relationship between text and performance, insofar as these terms could be said to be analogous to the crucial Saussurean hierarchy of la langue (text) and la parole (performance). It is less clear whether he is endorsing either a poststructuralist or a Wittgenstein/Austinian alternative, however. This uncertainly arises chiefly because his reading of Austin is filtered by a post-structuralist critique which sees performative acts as a type of “citation”, a term with which Worthen is understandably as uncomfortable as “text”. Is the Text a Tool? For the moment, let us turn to Worthen’s “Texts, Tools and Technologies” which, as its title suggests, tries to address the inadequacy of “the metaphors we use to think through the work that texts do when they are used in the

Text and Performance, Reiterated

53

theatre” by offering “better ways for localizing the various kinds of work ‘the text’ performs in performance”.14 By now invoking the relationship between tools and technologies, Worthen introduces a metaphor for the relationship between text and performance that, on the face of it, builds on the Wittgensteinian conception of a flexible practice encompassing work, labour, or use, in changing social contexts. Texts should be seen as tools, appropriable for a variety of (nondetermined) uses by technologies, which are akin to the force of appropriating performances. The strength of the new metaphor lies in its intuitive demolition of the idea that the uses of the text are immanent within it. Tools do not carry their uses on their faces. Instead they are appropriable for a variety of different uses: screwdrivers may be used variously to drive in screws or open cans of paint, to steal a car or to kill someone. It could, however, be argued that they have a “purposiveness” which suggests that everything other than the first use is a misappropriation or perversion of their original design. This is not a knockdown argument, but its existence renders Worthen’s own view of variable appropriability at least challengeable, and it renders the heuristic purpose of the new metaphor less than straightforward. The new metaphor is problematic for a more clearly compelling reason, however. Worthen suggests that the metaphor of the text as tool in fact comes from Foakes. If this is true, it serves Foakes very poorly, for a tool is something one discards (or puts aside or hangs up) after it has been used for the technologically designated purpose. A table might bear the marks or signs of the saws, screwdrivers, planes and emery paper that were used to construct it; but they are not part of the table – they have not been incorporated into it. This returns us to the first (and most questionable) of Worthen’s conceptions of the place of the text in Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, namely as something which disappears, is rendered invisible or is discarded in performance. I argue above that this can only be true if the text is taken as the book, the physical marks on the page, not as the signifiers inscribed in the book which, in the second of Worthen’s models, are “raw material” to be “re-inscribed”, “reconstituted”, “embodied”, “transformed”, or “refashioned” through performance. In this later model the text is not the tool but rather the material from which the table is made: it is changed, reshaped, given form by the use of the tools, but it remains as part of the new product, even if parts of it have been discarded and reformed. The language that makes up the text of Hamlet, however refashioned, shaped, appropriated, changed, pared down or expanded in production remains embodied in and through the performance. This “text” is not at all analogous to a tool, which is put away after it has

54

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

been used and makes up no material part (other than through its – unnoticed – marks) of the fashioned product, the result of labour or work. Worthen’s new metaphor thus reiterates the most problematical aspects of his old impulse to leave the text behind through the force of performance. The problem lies with the incorrigible ambiguity of the term “text” and its tendency to shift its signification. For if we take it to mean the marks on the page or the book then it is obviously discarded in performance. But it makes no sense to say that the text in its iterable movement as language – as a variety of iterable speech acts – is discarded in performance. Rather, it is precisely such speech acts that are performed and mobilized through behaviour, which is itself an iterable, conventional, expressive force, and therefore, Derrida would say, textual in its own way. Performance and Performativity Once it is agreed that the language of the text is mobilized or embodied as physical behaviour on stage, we need to think through two related things. First, what kinds of iterability inform both the text as language and acting as behaviour, and what is the relationship between these two forces? Is such iterability a kind of citationality? Worthen follows Derrida’s reading of Austin’s notion of the performative force of speech acts by reading them as forms of citation. Saying “I do” in a marriage ceremony gains its force from its character as a citation of a formulaic expression and also an instantiation or invocation of a prior set of conventional and ideological practices, values, and beliefs. Precisely because it is beholden to a prior form, which it cites, speech-act theory in Worthen’s view entrenches the debilitating, derivative relationship between text and performance. If performance is to text as speech act is to its cited model and code, then it is entirely dependent on that priority; it is a secondary instantiation of a primary model: it is “derivative”. There is, however, no need to read speech-act theory in this quasistructuralist way. Or to put it differently, if performative speech acts are indeed citational, then the behaviour that characterizes the theatre is citational in the same way, a fact that Worthen recognizes well enough: “As citational practice, theatre – like all signifying performance – is engaged not so much in citing texts as reiterating its own regimes of performance … Theatre goes well beyond the force of mere speech, subjecting writing to the body, to labor, to the work of production.”15 The problem with this claim, which on its face is unexceptional, is that it shifts between two distinct, but related, senses of

Text and Performance, Reiterated

55

“citation”. The “citational practice” that informs “all signifying practice” is what Derrida calls a “general citationality” – the necessary repeatability that makes every form of signification possible, including meaningful action. It is encapsulated in a different formulation by Wittgenstein’s statement that to follow a rule is to engage in a customary practice.16 But when Worthen denies that performance cites texts he means “citation” in the narrow sense of reproducing or quoting something whose originality lies outside the citing event. The difference between Derrida and John Searle in their debate about Austin lies in Searle’s refusal to see that the latter is a specific instance of the structural possibility of the former.17 One couldn’t quote someone if all language were not made possible by the general structure of its universal iterability or citationality. This confusion between the general, philosophical and the specific, quasi-pejorative notion of citation means that it is best not to talk about citation in this context. What we should, however, note is Derrida’s point that performative speech acts are not secondary or etiolated when they are used in fiction – in a play. They are not fallen or empty copies of something “real,” but continue to do their work in their new (fictional) context. So what does it mean to talk of performative speech acts in a play? What constitutes a “play”? The “text”? Or the performance? Strangely, Worthen’s refusal to countenance the citation of the “text” in performance reproduces by inverting it the structure of Searle’s argument that a speech act is secondary, etiolated, or not really serious when it occurs in fiction. Theatre, Worthen says, goes well beyond “mere speech”: “mere speech” is presumably pale, empty, and etiolated without the “work of production”. It should never usurp or direct the work of performance. But is print not an etiolated form of speech? Illocutionary vs. Perlocutionary Acts The waters are very murky here. Perhaps it helps to imagine a hierarchy of relations, moving from the “least performative” as it were, to the “fully performative,” starting with the printed text, through a silent reading of that text, its “live” reading (as in a “play-reading”), to performance “proper” (which always has to be a specific performance – “last Friday night’s performance”). What is immediately striking (and this may indicate why Worthen is wary of speech-act theory) is that the force of what Austin calls illocutionary performatives (those whose force is enacted in the saying of something, as an immediate and often irreversible consequence of the speech act, given the

56

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

right circumstances) does not seem to depend upon any necessary embodiment or expressiveness. The statement “I do” in the context of a fictional marriage ceremony carries the same force whether it is read silently or performed in the theatre. And that force is independent of the voiced and embodied expressiveness with which the speech act is performed. There are no rules for how loudly or expressively one has to say “I do”, provided one says it at the right time in appropriate circumstances. Nor are there any rules for how one should speak the words of a promise for it to be binding. There are rules of thumb governing the production of rhetorical, or what Austin calls perlocutionary, effects. One might feel that one should express the utterance of a promise with special forcefulness and gravity, in order to ensure that the person to whom the promise is directed will be persuaded of its sincerity. But that makes no difference to the fact that a promise has been made. The force of a written illocutionary act is no different from its embodied, fully “expressive” form. A promise is no less a promise if we read it than if we see or hear it embodied, if it is said with special emphasis or dispassionately.18 In this strict sense both are equally performative actions or events with illocutionary force. The same is not true of perlocutionary acts, however. The way in which “I do” is said or a promise made may well persuade or fail to persuade onlookers and hearers of the sincerity or conviction of the act, though it will not affect the force of the act. Recall that, whereas the force of a felicitous illocutionary act is the immediate, predictable outcome of the act, the effects of a perlocutionary act are contingent and uncertain, even if they may be predicated upon techniques such as Classical and Renaissance rhetoric or modern advertising methods. It is predictably certain that saying “I do” at a properly constituted marriage ceremony will render me married to another person, but not that its perlocutionary effect may be to prompt my jilted ex-fiancée to stand up and shoot me. Expression and embodiment can make a great deal of difference to the uptake or significance of the speech act. In this case performance carries a different weight and meaning, one conveyed by the embodied behaviour that, in Worthen’s argument, appropriates, transforms, and subjects the text to its own ritualized forms. At this point we should recall Worthen’s central point that theatrical performance is not merely a kind of embodiment of something else that exists prior to it and therefore in a sense governs it. It is itself a set of signifying conventions that imposes itself upon the playscript. The modes that convey sincerity at one point in history will differ from those understood in another; and in some cases the notion of conveying sincerity (or “character”) may not exist at all, or in preliminary, attenuated ways. This is one of the major

Text and Performance, Reiterated

57

reasons why performance does not simply cite something that exists already in a merely more intense or expressive way: because the iterative, historical, and conventional modes of behaviour that we call “acting” have to shape the performatives of the text in their own image. In some cases that image will have no place for signifying activities that marked the “original” performative practices of the theatre for which the play was written or improvised. It is clear that such changing conventions will play a decisive role in conveying perlocutionary force, but it is less clear that they affect illocutionary force to the same degree. If the illocutionary force of an action has been lost, that loss lies in cultural and social change much broader than theatrical convention. I am arguing that illocutionary acts do not depend for their effects on the transformative, appropriating labour of the theatre, but that perlocutionary acts do. The multiple illocutionary acts that lie at the heart of Shakespeare’s plays – from coronations and usurpations through acts of promising, declaring, marrying, swearing, imploring, cursing (and interesting case, this, as we shall see), and sentencing are as effective (in conveying and securing their force or transformation) in reading as they are in embodied performance, although they may be differently affective, depending on how they are performed or imagined to be embodied. The performative acts that are most interesting are illocutionary utterances which also have perlocutionary force, for here the illocutionary force of the act is overlaid and informed by the conventionally determined labour of the theatre at specific cultural moments. We may therefore respond to illocutionary acts differently in accordance with the specific work that goes into producing their perlocutionary effect and affect. I develop this point in due course. Let us first deal with the difference between reading and performance. Reading and Embodiment Worthen claims that performance is not “reading by another means.”19 At one level this makes perfect sense, especially if we take into account that the work performed upon the language of the text by the embodied theatre obeys its own rules and conventions that are specific to its practitioners, and so would not be shared by every reader. Here Terry Eagleton’s observation, quoted approvingly by Worthen, is apposite:

58

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10 the life of the text is one of literary significance, not a typographical “ghosting” of the flesh of production. The text is not the production “in rest,” nor is the production the text “in action”; the relation between them cannot be grasped as a simple binary opposition … as though both phenomena were moments of a single reality, distinct articulations of a concealed unity.20

Eagleton’s formulation does not deny all relations between text and performance, even though he does maintain that they are “incommensurate” because they “inhabit distinct real and theoretical spaces”. Text and performance have come to occupy distinct “spaces” historically through distinct institutional ways of valuing them and talking about them. This “distinctness” is historically specific – the result of the institutional divergence of “literature” and “theatre” that was incipient in Shakespeare’s day but not yet developed. Current arguments against the performative orthodoxy to the effect that Shakespeare wrote plays both for the theatre and explicitly to be read indicate the beginnings of this historical divergence.21 And if one heeds Weimann’s work on the tension between “actor’s voice and author’s pen” or Tiffany Stern’s scholarship on the place of the text in early modern production, one will see a fluid and unsettled relationship between text and performance in the early modern period. In Weimann’s view, this moment of the history of drama and theatre sees an active, and highly productive, negotiation between actor and author, or text and performance.22 Stern shows that, whereas the text was accommodated to the demands of acting in some circumstances, in others the actor’s textual part would have directed him on how to perform his role.23 Given both the variable relationship between the authority of text and performance, author’s pen and actor’s body, that Weimann and Stern disclose, and the historical variability of this relationship, Eagleton’s claim of an essential, theoretical incommensurability looks questionable. Nor does it seem likely that we will discover a metaphor or even a set of theoretical precepts that will capture any essential relation between text and performance. Moreover, in the face of the claim that the text gains its value and releases its meaning from within the institution of literature, we should remember that the debate for which the interchange between Foakes and Worthen is metonymic of what is happening is taking place within the institution of literature. This is not a fight between literature and the theatre; it is a fight between literary practitioners regarding the place of performance in the valuation and evaluation of the literary.

Text and Performance, Reiterated

59

Force vs. Authority In Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, Worthen entertains a philosophically complex relationship between text and performance that is flattened by the more polemical tenor of his later book, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance. In the first, for example, the ontological relationship between text and performance is mediated by the concept of the “work”, a notion that cannot be reduced to any instance of either text or performance. More significantly, in contrast to the flat denial in “Texts, Tools and Technologies” that performance might usefully be regarded as “‘reading’ by other means”,24 he reminds us in the earlier text that “reading is as much a performance, a production of the work, as a stage performance is”,25 and again, “a reading of the text is not the text itself, but a new production of the work”.26 In this context reading and performance, though distinct, bear a similarly productive relation to the text, each being an instantiation of the “work”, which is best regarded as a “type”, irreducible to any material instance, either textual or behavioural. I want to offer an exploratory analysis of this relationship in order to render more permeable the barrier constructed between reading and performance in Worthen’s later work. In “Texts, Tools, and Technologies” the radical difference between reading and performance is based on the degree to which “use”, “embodiment”, “transformation”, “action”, and its nature as an “event” belong exclusively to the domain of the theatre: however readily it might enable the reader to set the play’s hypothetical action in the theatre of the mind, a reader does not use the text as part of a regime of embodiment, a means of transforming the text into a different mode of publication, in which the words are situated within and conveyed through an event, inflected as living human action, as behaviour to an audience of spectators itself engaged in its own complex, reciprocal life.27

Everything said here about the difference between reading and acting commands assent in a straightforward, commonsense way. But recall that one of Worthen’s major points of difference from Foakes lies in the former’s claim that the “commonsense view” espoused by Foakes both does not “explain very much” and is “wrong, though … in interesting ways that command our attention”.28 One man’s “commonsense” is another’s flattening “steamroller of theory”,29 and vice versa. Theory – especially, but not only, deconstructive philosophy – prompts one to ask: to what degree are the terms that Worthen invokes on

60

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

behalf of performance radically distinct from the process (event) of reading? Is reading not a “use” of the text? And is it not a use that entails “embodiment”, “performance”, “action”, “behaviour”, or “event”? It is possible to show that none of these concepts, subjected to a rigorous theoretical analysis, can be radically differentiated from reading, and that, moreover, such analysis is implicit in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. We have seen that Worthen himself reminds us that reading is a kind of performance. Once that is conceded, it is a small matter to show that such a performance must take the character of an event (or series of events), which in turn must entail, at the most fundamental, phenomenological level, action, behaviour, and embodiment.30 The point is not the empirical platitude that readers are free to imagine the embodied action implied by the text if they so wish (which is, in effect, Foakes’s case against performance theory, and from which he derives the claim, made forcefully by Harry Berger, Jr, that reading is better than performance because it leaves different modes of expression and interpretation open).31 The point is that our language is the language of embodied beings. It carries within it, especially in its variously performative dimensions, both its embodied and its psychological nature (an embodied psychology) as part of what Wittgenstein calls its “grammar”. This is why the discussion of character in this debate and others falls so short of the mark: because “character” (for want of a better word) is implied as the informing condition of all utterances that appear to be the property of human beings, no matter how reduced they may be. We have as much choice not to see the vestiges of character in an utterance as we do to refuse to see a face and its expression in a few marks – thus: . That is to say, we have no choice; we are phenomenologically compelled to see these lines as a face.32 Reading a play involves a similar grammar of embodiment when we constitute utterances as events in consciousness. To put the point more strongly, the recognition of a speech act on the page entails its embodiment as a form of human behaviour. This means that the radical distinction that Worthen insists upon between “mere reading” and “performance” rests on a false, neo-Cartesian conception of language as, on the one hand, something that exists in the domain of a disembodied mind, and, on the other, utterance as bodily action. Merleau-Ponty offers a compelling account of the essentially embodied dimensions of language: “the thinking subject must have its basis in the subject incarnate. The phonetic ‘gesture’ brings about … a certain structural co-ordination of experience, a certain modulation of existence, exactly as a pattern of my bodily behaviour endows the objects around me with a certain significance.”33 Because the “gesture” of language is so implicated in the

Text and Performance, Reiterated

61

body, reading always bears the trace of the body in its processes, and this trace is not something added to the signifier but rather something embedded in it as a condition of its possibility:34 “There is thus, either in the man who listens or reads, who speaks or writes, a thought in speech the existence of which is unsuspected by intellectualism.”35 This “thought” is inseparable from “speech”, even in the act of silent reading, which is in turn (contrary to the “intellectualism” that Merleau-Ponty decries) founded upon an embodied “existential meaning which is not only rendered by [words], but which inhabits them, and is inseparable from them”.36 This critique has both a historical and logical dimension. Historically speaking, the disembodied act of reading that Worthen uses as his model comes after Shakespeare, both in its philosophical bifurcation of body and mind and, by all accounts, in the actual experience of reading, which had not yet secured itself as a solitary, interior, mental activity, but was still much closer to performance, as Worthen understands it. Whatever the contingencies of the history of reading may have been, however, my logical argument is that a Cartesian conception of reading can never reduce the experience to the rehearsal of a totally disembodied state: vestiges of the necessary embodied activity that constitutes human language must be retained in that event. Worthen is right to insist that performance is not reading by another means, if he means by that a process whereby an essentially disembodied string of signifying forms puts on the eventfulness of human behaviour as one puts on (or discards) a coat. The language that the actor speaks does not have body and behaviour added to it, as some ancillary supplement. The actor inhabits the language from within, in a mode which is not a merging of two separate entities but rather an expressive unity. That is how we speak: not as bodily movement plus language; rather language is the product of an embodied mind. That is what Hamlet cannot understand about the player’s “monstrous” performance: representing an incipient Cartesian split between the inner and exterior man, he believes (for political reasons, which he mistakenly takes as metaphysical causes) that he nurtures an inexpressible interior self that “passes show”, and which clothes itself in the mere forms of expressive symbolism. Having trapped himself in the model of real speech as disembodied interiority, he ironically finds that nothing he can do can convey his (hidden) passion any better than the moving expressiveness of the player’s “show”. Whereas Worthen grasps the fact that acting is not language to which behaviour is added as a supplementary kind of show, he remains trapped in Hamlet’s debilitating philosophy of language by refusing to accept that the language of the “text” is itself not removed from the embodied expressiveness that

62

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

he values in the theatre. It retains, as its phenomenological possibility, the informing embodiment that is its condition of being. That is what allows its seamless passage onto the stage – it is what marries text and performance, making them “one flesh”. Complications: “Emotives” and “Passionate Utterances” I have so far been following Austin’s uncompromising disjunction of illocutionary and perlocutionary utterances, but I now wish to complicate that distinction, especially in its relation to the theatre. Stanley Cavell analyses forms of perlocutionary speech acts, which he calls “passionate utterances”, in terms that are related to my conclusions above that, whereas illocutionary acts do not require embodiment to exercise their force, the effects of perlocutionary acts are much more open and uncertain, amenable to variations in performance and negotiations between interlocutors that are in effect unpredictable. “Perlocutionary acts make room for, and reward, imagination and virtuosity,” Cavell writes, whereas: illocutionary acts do not in general make such room – I do not … wonder how I might make a promise or … render a verdict. But to persuade you may well take considerable thought, to insinuate as much as to control may require tact, to seduce or to confuse you may take talent … passionate expression makes demands upon the singular body in a way illocutionary force (if it goes well) foregoes.37

Crucial to Cavell’s analysis is the dialogical nature of passionate utterances: a passionate utterance is an invitation to another to respond in such a mode that “a refusal may become part of the performance”;38 a “you” is singled out that: comes into play in relation to the declaration of the “I” who thereby takes upon itself a definition of itself, in, as it may prove, a causal or a fateful form. A performative utterance is an invitation to participation in the order of law.39 And perhaps we can say: A passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire.40

That is beautifully put, and I shall come back to the “disorders of desire.” But Cavell writes here as if a passionate utterance is not exactly a performative. William M. Reddy argues convincingly that what he calls “emotives” – the expression of emotions in the mode of Cavell’s passionate utterances – are themselves performative in the sense that they do not merely express an

Text and Performance, Reiterated

63

emotion that is fully formed before it is put into words: that is, the outward sign of an “inward spiritual act”41 or state. In a telling echo of Cavell’s analysis, Reddy states, “To speak about how one feels is, very often, to make an implicit offer or gift, to negotiate, to refuse, to initiate a plan or terminate it, to establish a tie or alter it.”42 In addition to such dialogical negotiation between people, emotives themselves do not merely describe feelings but also shape emotions in their expression. They are therefore performative in a way that is distinct from illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect, but no less performative for that. With this new notion of the performative aspects of emotives or passionate utterances in mind, let us return to the relation between text and performance. In his account of the “construction” of the utterance in everyday life, M.M. Bakhtin/V.N. Voloshinov argues that all utterances have the structure of an enthymeme: a formal argument that is missing one of its steps.43 No utterance means anything without recourse to the situation or context that structures it, even if the latter is not present. To understand the full force or import of an utterance, we need to understand its situation; but the situation is often absent – it has to be constructed from the utterance.44 To adopt a somewhat inappropriate but familiar idiom, the utterance is determined by an absent cause of which it is the effect. Using a term that is related to Cavell’s and Reddy’s respective accounts of the performative force of emotive utterances, Bakhtin/Voloshinov writes of the “intonation” of an utterance, which “lies on the border of the verbal and non-verbal, the said and the unsaid”.45 Weimann’s analysis of historical and sociological conditions of representation on the early modern English stage, ranging from the tension between text and performance, through locus and platea, to mimesis and self-expressive show, is marked by this Bakhtinian paradox. Because we are no longer immersed in these historically specific forces, they need to be constructed from the playtext; but the meaning of that text, in its fully performative dimensions, is not complete without such representational and performative tensions “beyond” the text. This paradox suggests that text and performance cannot be opposed to each other in anything but a provisional way; indeed, they are necessarily imbricated in each other. I now bring the strands of my argument together in an analysis of the relation between text and performance, language and body, representation and self-expressive show, and illocutionary and perlocutionary (including “passionate”) force and effect in the infamous wooing of Anne by Richard in Shakespeare’s Richard III.

64

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

The Forces and Effects of Seduction Is seduction an illocutionary or a perlocutionary act? By the usual Austinian tests, it is the latter. One can say “I promise you” or “I warn you” with immediate force, but not “I seduce you”. One has to engage in other speech acts in order to seduce, and the seductive purpose is usually concealed or at least not declared openly (otherwise the action is known as “flirting”). Seduction requires all the resources of talent, passionate negotiation, openness to and challenge by the other, as well as indirection and the uncertainty of outcome that Cavell aligns with the “disorders of desire” rather than the “order of the law”.46 But Shakespeare reveals, through the intercourse of seduction, the extraordinary complexity of the relationships among illocutionary force, perlocutionary effect and their hybrid – passionate utterance. He uses the historically specific resources of theatrical technique in its negotiations with sociological reality to reveal the subtle imbrication of law and desire through the intertwining of performative and performance. Let us trace the complex layering or embedding of Anne’s speech acts as they are affected by the relationships among perlocutionary, illocutionary, and passionate utterance, and the tension, to which Weimann directs our attention, between the imaginary world of representation and the existential act of bodily delivery, such as Brecht associated with the actor’s gestus. Given such sociological, theatrical, and historical knowledge as Weimann has made available, one can look for elements in the text (which are almost always a particular kind of performative utterance) that point to the kinds of performance-in-tension that he has excelled in delineating; one can even speculate as to how such elements might, or might have, charmed or repelled an idealized spectator. But one cannot tell what effect such elements have, had, or will have in any specific performance. This is a different way of formulating the distinction between the predictability in the read text of, respectively, illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects. Shakespeare distributes illocutionary and perlocutionary acts disproportionately between Anne and Richard. She tends to engage in utterances with illocutionary force, which he deflects and reflects with the sheer talent of his performance. Here text and performance do not part company so much as set up a productive tension that releases the power of “passionate utterance” as Cavell understands it. And the full performative power of passionate utterance, arising out of the “disorders of desire” that must be located in a specific body – here and now – can be demonstrated only in opposition to the warranty of the illocutionary act, behind which stands the abstract “order of the law”.47

Text and Performance, Reiterated

65

The point about the illocutionary is that it is finite – it comes to an end when its effect is procured. Say “I promise”, and you have promised. Say “I do”, and you are married. Raise your index finger and the batsman must walk. There is no more to be said, by either party, unless it is to engage in a different illocutionary act, or else a series of logically subsequent, perlocutionary negotiations. There is, however, no end to a passionate engagement unless a line is drawn by one of the parties; and a refusal may itself be a further, passionate entanglement. For this reason, the seduction scene requires the redoubled capacities of performance – not only of an actor revelling in his self-expressive gestus, but also of the actor showing the character as revelling in the same virtuoso performance. Worthen is right: the seduction can in this sense never be the iteration or rehearsal of something that is indifferent to the specific rhythms and intensities of embodiment in this performance. It gains its power in contrast to its other, the illocutionary, which appears to need no such locality or specificity. Yet there are certain speech acts that put this distinction between illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect into question: they require a perlocutionary investment of affective energy to muster their illocutionary force. They are perhaps the most exemplary of passionate utterances. In Richard III, such acts are given exclusively to women: they are curses. Let us examine how this works in the relationship between Anne’s performative speech acts and her situation in performance. She enters with a pure illocutionary act, a command (“Set down, set down your honourable load” – Richard III, 1.2).48 She then declares her act of mourning through the jussive plea for the legitimacy of her invocation (another illocutionary act) of Henry’s ghost as witness: “Thou bloodless remnant of that royal blood: / Be it lawful that I invocate thy ghost / To hear the lamentations of poor Anne” (1.2.7–9). Her entry, emblematized by the coffin of the slain king and the attendants, places her firmly in the represented space of the locus. But as she speaks the force of her self-expressive, perlocutionary speech acts (which register impotent rage and grief) shift her towards the platea. The referent of her speech acts is himself, as Weimann shows, the first character in whom Shakespeare would “assimilate the full thrust and surplus of performance to the semi-tragic shape of a Renaissance protagonist”.49 In the scenes leading up to Anne’s entrance, Richard has given an almost continuous, bravura performance of platea self-expression and theatrical manipulation. Those performances and his seduction of Anne are, as Weimann and Bruster remark, “platea occasions”.50 But the seduction scene embodies a struggle within the shifting, self-expressive space of the platea rather than a conventional battle

66

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

between it and the distanced locus. That change occurs through a concomitant shift between perlocutionary, illocutionary, and hybrid, passionate utterances. Anne’s weighty imperative, directed locus-like at the pall-bearers, also provides the moment or space for the absent spirit of Henry to be invoked (via a proleptic, exculpatory excuse) as the sympathetic audience to her further acts of mourning, complaint and cursing. Her invocation and excuse moreover doubles her audience: the absent ghost (as empathetic counterpart on the stage – specifically the locus) is replicated as the invocation of pity is felt by the spectators to be directed at them. Anne’s illocutionary prayer in effect invites the audience to take the part of Henry’s ghost. Perfectly intelligible through the pure act of reading, it clears the space for the mode of platea-like gestus from the place of locus-like representation. Here is an actor calling (by indirection) for the audience’s support for the character, but without using the common trick of breaking through the illusion of character. This move is the product of the stage – of performance – and it is therefore subject to the unpredictable volatility of perlocutionary and/or passionate utterance. But its action and direction (though not its effect) can be adduced through mere reading. The complexity of this single act indicates both the strengths and the limits of a certain kind of performance criticism that I have sketched above: one can read off the text the possible or even likely embodiments of representation and gestus, but one cannot say exactly what the effects will actually be. The subtle move from the personated to the personator through a speech act that leaves the representational surface entirely unruffled, is sustained until the antagonist (actor/character and actor) appears upon the scene, ironically invoked, as we shall see, by the very call to pity that goes out to absent spirit and present spectator alike. The rest of Anne’s speech consists of a sustained imprecation, as grief, rage, and hatred are united in a catalogue of curses against the Duke of Gloucester, whose humanity is questioned by her further invocation of “wolves”, “spiders”, “toads”, “any creeping venomed thing that lives” and his putative child’s “ugly and unnatural aspect” (1.2.19–23). The affective intensity of her utterances may indeed be read off the text, but its performative affect is less easy to predict. Moreover, Anne’s curses call into question an absolute divide between what I have called the performative orders of law and desire. As illocutionary acts, curses cannot be delivered without being deeply invested by perlocutionary affect. The illocutionary law that animates a curse is directly related to the perlocutionary passion that drives it. Margaret makes this clear in her response to Anne’s request to teach her how to curse:

Text and Performance, Reiterated

67

Queen Elizabeth (rising) O thou, well skilled in curses, stay a while, And teach me how to curse mine enemies. Queen Margaret Forbear to sleep the nights, and fast the days; Compare dead happiness with living woe; Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were, And he that slew them fouler than he is. Bett’ring thy loss makes the bad causer worse. Revolving this will teach thee how to curse. Queen Elizabeth My words are dull. O quicken them with thine! Queen Margaret Thy woes will make them sharp and pierce like mine. (Exit) Duchess Of York Why should calamity be full of words? Queen Elizabeth Windy attorneys to their client woes, Airy recorders of intestate joys, Poor breathing orators of miseries. Let them have scope. Though what they will impart Help nothing else, yet do they ease the heart. (4.4.116–31)

This later exchange with Margaret betrays both a hope that the intensity of personal passion (“living woe”, “client woes”, “miseries”) will “quicken” “dull” “words” with a kind of performative magic and the acknowledgement that the real effect will be merely cathartic – achieving little more than an “easing” of the “heart” of the speaker. Anne’s sustained curse against Richard is driven by hatred, as all curses are, and as such it is perhaps a sign of rage at her own impotence rather than the outcome of her real power. But her curses are displaced, as if she knows that she can do Richard no harm, and therefore her imprecations rebound upon his putative wife and child. Shakespeare leaves undecided the real illocutionary force of the curse, while mustering the power of dramatic irony to entertain the possibility of its more than merely perlocutionary efficacy. Part of the effect of Shakespeare’s irony is to demonstrate the degree to which the power of performative speech acts, which is derived not from anything in or about the speaker, but rather from a set of social and linguistic conventions (“the order of the law”) that each speaker is always negotiating and appropriating on specific occasions, is as it were only borrowed by the utterer. Once released, such authority and power are not the speaker’s to control or change. Furthermore, the mustering of the order of the law in the service of desire’s disorder frequently shows an incomplete grasp of desire itself.

68

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Cavell points out that the difference between an illocutionary and a perlocutionary act is that the former requires no peculiar talent or ability (although it may require status or office). Promises, for example, require no special genius; anyone can make them to perfectly good effect, whether proclaimed or mumbled, declared solemnly with hand on heart or affirmed matter-of-factly. To move someone with the sheer force of one’s voice, body, and rhetoric, however, requires especial abilities. They are the exemplary province of the actor, exemplified here by Richard. How are the uses of the performative in this scene related to Weimann’s spaces and modes of performance? Although expressed within the confines of a represented character, Anne’s self-expressive reflexivity, which draws attention both to the palpable histrionics of her grief and the ironic effects of her imprecations and invocations, induces a contesting platea-like performance even before Richard arrives to challenge its authority. Much of its affective force will depend on how the actor behaves in relation to the spectators, but whatever such emotional effects may be wrought by specific players, audiences will be struck by the illocutionary irony through which, in invoking Henry’s ghost, she in fact conjures up the figure of deformity that is the target of her curses. In cursing Richard’s future wife, she blights herself: “If ever he have wife, let her be made / More miserable by the death of him / Than I am made by my young lord and thee” (1.2.26–8). The ironic effects of the curse or the prophecy are the property of the theatre, or rather, the projective capacity of the dramatic text for a kind of prolepsis that is impossible in what we call “real life”: it is purely the property of Shakespeare’s play and its performative medium that an illocutionary act that has no “ordinary” felicity conditions is granted them by the unfolding action of the play, the text. By the time Anne departs, she leaves us with the horrific knowledge that she has cursed herself, and moreover that it is she who has conjured up the demon to whom she has now wedded her miserable life rather than the sympathetic spirit of her father-in-law. The play erases performatively and textually the absolute difference that Anne seeks to interpose through performative utterances between herself as “angel” and Richard as “devil” (just as Shakespeare does in Sonnet 144). Having cursed Richard as a poisonous toad, it is Anne who turns herself into a “creeping venomed thing”, spitting at her victim in the wish that it were “mortal poison” (1.2.145), willing her infecting eyes to turn to basilisks. But the interchange of passionate utterance between the two antagonists also shows the discovery or “navigation,” as Reddy puts it, of emotion that is not already formed. The overall shape of Anne’s transformation by her

Text and Performance, Reiterated

69

own passionate utterance from loathing to attraction unfolds as the dialogue progresses. She moves from the plain invective of “foul devil” (50), through the critical plea, “Vouchsafe, diffused infection of a man, / Of these known evils but to give me leave / By circumstance t’ accuse thy cursèd self” (7880), to the uncertain expression of desire in “I would I knew thy heart” (180) and the progressive capitulation of “To take is not to give” (190), followed at last by the wholehearted gift: “With all my heart – and much it joys me, too …” (207). It may seem as if Anne is the only one navigated, as it were, by a Richard totally sure of his secure insincerity and the dark reserves of his self-expressive energy expressed thyrough “the authority of the act of performing”.51 Richard certainly reoccupies the platea position that introduced him to the audience in the opening lines of the play with a triumphant directness of address: “Was ever woman in this humour wooed? / Was ever woman in this humour won?” (1.2.215–16). Weimann and Bruster see this moment as a celebration of the freedom both of the represented character from moral and social constraint and the self-expressive actor’s “game”: “a player in front of a looking-glass, an actor who counterfeits the socially counterfeiting, who descants on the ‘shadow’ of his ‘deformity’: ‘Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass, / That I may see my shadow as I pass’” (249–50). This is true. But Richard’s move into the platea position also exposes him to the critical scrutiny of the spectators to whom he now deliberately opens his performance. They may take delight in his self-conscious exuberance, expressed via player and character alike, but there is a shift in Richard’s declaration, “I do mistake my person all this while”, that marks a change, indeed a loss of complete control, over his histrionic mastery of performance and performative alike: Upon my life she finds, although I cannot, Myself to be a marv’lous proper man. I’ll be at charges for a looking-glass And entertain a score or two of tailors To study fashions to adorn my body. Since I am crept in favour with myself, I will maintain it with some little cost. But first I’ll turn yon fellow in his grave, And then return lamenting to my love. Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass, That I may see my shadow as I pass. (1.2.240–50)

70

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Who is speaking here? It seems to me that the move by which Anne moves from locus to platea in the opening of the scene is inverted in Richard’s location in its close. Richard the character usurps the position of the actor playing Richard, or even the liminal personation through which character can draw attention to and share delight in his own histrionic talent. The “glass” in question is not merely the mimetic action by which playing shows “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (Hamlet, 3.2.23–4); nor is it only the “shadow” that “reveals the performer in self-reflexive effigy”.52 It is called up, invoked performatively, by the character Richard, who has been increasingly entranced by the image of his own attractive power, and who now wishes, in a fit of uncontrolled hubris, to bask in the image of himself that he thinks is mirrored in Anne’s eyes and speech. Just as Anne transforms herself unconsciously into the venomous creature she sees in Richard through the parallels established in the text, so the text of the play takes Richard’s performance back to its opening lines, ironically and retroactively reshaping his histrionics in the light of its earlier play on “son”/”sun” and his scornful rejection of the “amorous looking-glass” and “sportive tricks” of a “lady’s chamber”. That is to say, the correspondences established through textual continuity transform the audience’s relationship to the actor/character as performance. In this case, Richard’s performative closeness to his audience is distanced by the fact that his delight at seeing his newly fashioned and fashionable shadow in the sun puts him in the position of the very objects of his uncontested scorn in the opening scene, where he disparages, in an irony that echoes through text and performance alike, “this son of York” (1.1.2). Text and performance thus share more than a “bi-fold” authority: performance and text are inextricably part of the play of perlocutionary and illocutionary utterance, both in speech and body. But who is to know what the real, actual, embodied, performed effects of this set of performatives are? I can extrapolate my reading from a combination of Austinian and Cavellian philosophical analyses and Weimanian performative ones, bolstered by the general movement of the playtext, whereby Richard is increasingly and inexorably removed from the intimacy of the platea as he assumes locuslike power, and paradoxically becomes the object rather than the subject of representation. But what happens in any actual performance must be tested purely phenomenologically, in the moment of immediate interaction that we call the theatre.

Text and Performance, Reiterated

71

Conclusion I began by presenting two arguments regarding the relationship between text and performance which, on the face of it, may seem to be pulling in two directions. On the one hand, I have argued that reading is as much a performance as acting, and that it retains an irreducible bodily dimension in the phenomenological transformation of marks on the page into signifiers and signifieds. Underlying this argument is a more basic analysis, which shows that precisely because of this phenomenological transformation it makes little sense to say that the text “disappears” or is “left behind” in performance. I have argued that embodied behaviour may affect and effect the perlocutionary force of the speech acts contained in the text, but that it cannot change the force of illocutionary acts – the very forms of behaviour and action that carry the political dimensions of drama. On the other, I have argued for a necessary dimension of embodiment in the event of reading, which is not confined to the freedom of the imagination to create a performance in the mind’s eye. Although they may seem to be in tension, these two phenomena complement each other. It is precisely because all reading events are traces of embodiment that illocutionary acts can have the same force “in” the text and “beyond” it, in embodied performance. My other argument is that the force of illocutionary speech acts escapes the distinction that Worthen draws between reading (or text) and performance. The act does not have to be turned into behaviour for it to be properly constituted as an illocutionary act or carry its performative force. Unless Worthen maintains that the multitude of promises, oaths, coronations, declarations, depositions, avowals, and marriages that are encountered in the reading of Shakespeare’s texts are not equally conveyed in reading and acting, he would need to concede that in these cases the illocutionary performative works as forcefully in reading as it does through embodied action.53 This has crucial implications for our sense of the politics of the plays, for it is primarily through such illocutionary acts, which signal the “order of the law”, that political relations are expressed and negotiated. In the second part of my analysis I substantiate my theoretical or philosophical analysis by complicating the difference between perlocutionary and illocutionary acts via Cavell and Reddy’s notions of “passionate utterances” and “emotives,” which are hybrid performatives. I explore the relations between “the order of the law” and the “disorders of desire” by applying the analysis of performative speech acts to Weimann’s notions of the bi-fold authority of text and performance on Shakespeare’s stage. I show

72

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

what difference acting does make in a reading of Richard’s seduction of Anne. I address what I call the “Bakhtinian paradox” whereby the text, incomplete without its embodied situation of performance, is the ground on which that situation must be reconstructed for the utterance to make complete sense.54 In a display of the variable interaction of the represented and presented figures embodied by the player in his shifting relation to the spectator, I argue that performance plays as much of a role in embodying the text as the text does in shaping the possibilities of performance. Finally, there is indeed something about the presence of the body and its capacity to inhabit in unexpected ways the phenomenological residue of incarnation in all language that is quite specific to the theatre (and different from film). For if it is possible to show that the things that Worthen claims exclusively for the theatre (“use”, “performance”, “action”, “event”, “embodiment”, and “behaviour”) are irreducibly aspects of the act, event, or use of the text in reading, it must also be conceded that he is right when he distinguishes acting as “behaviour to an audience of spectators itself engaged in its own complex, reciprocal life”.55 It is this embodied, powerful, but fleeting and unstable, event of community that is exclusive to the theatre (but not to film or solitary reading), and which constitutes the force of performance as communal ritual in Weimann’s earliest work. I’ll leave the last word to Kenneth Gross, who reminds us of the “radiance of individual gestures” that retain a specificity not used up through ritual iteration, and the “dream of community able to absorb and sustain such uncommon forces, to make them the means of survival, a source of increased life”, which “produces a wound capable of communicating itself to the world, like a plague, a wound whose strength binds audience and actor to the shared space of the theatre”.56 This wound of a threefold community, this unexpected radiance, is not an irreducible part of reading. Its force in performance is not illocutionary, although it may use illocutionary acts as its vehicle. More important, it calls into question the reach of performance criticism itself. For, being a communal experience that cannot be predicted or predicated from conventional ritual, it cannot be anticipated in the act of reading. It can barely be imagined. Nor can it be reconstituted retrospectively in an act of critical recollection, after the event. For by the time the performance critics sit down to write of that event, they have already lost the “shared space of the theatre”, the precise moment of which can never be recaptured or restored except as a wholly new event of communal conjunction and disjunction.

Text and Performance, Reiterated

73

Notes 1. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 59. 2. Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 3. R.A. Foakes, “Performance Theory and Textual Theory: A Retort Courteous”, Shakespeare 2, no. 1 (2006): 47–58 and W.B. Worthen, “Texts, Tools, and Technologies: A Quip Modest, in Response to R.A. Foakes”, Shakespeare 2, no 2 (2006): 208–19. 4. Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 155–91. 5. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 100 and passim. 6. Foakes, “Performance Theory”, 47 and 209. 7. W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 8. Two notable examples are Athol Fugard, Winston Ntshona and John Kani’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead (1999) and Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon’s Woza Albert (1973). 9. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 137. 10. F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983) 11. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 278–94. 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. and trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), para. 201 and passim. 13. J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 14. Worthen, “Texts”, 216 and 214. 15. Worthen, Force, 9. 16. Wittgenstein, Investigations, para. 198 and passim. 17. See Derrida, Limited Inc. 18. There is a complication. If one made a solemn promise while laughing, or winking, it will in all probability not be taken seriously. But does that mean that it has not in fact been made? Certainly, it opens the door to a claim that it was not made with the utterer’s full intention or, save the word, “seriously”. Each position is arguable. 19. Worthen, “Texts”, 213. 20. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 2006), 64–5. 21. Lucas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 22. Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice.

74

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

23. See Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). The first instance is exemplified by the attitudes to the “ownership” of a text, and the free adaptation of texts to the demands of specific performances: “some textual shortening between first and second performance seems regularly to have taken place. A play in performance was by no means textually fixed … even by the time of publication, Shakespeare’s plays were considerably distanced from what he had written” (122 and141). On the other hand, “Actors were not free to act as they wished; they were free only to act as the text wished them to … Actors’ separate texts contained all the information necessary for that actor to perform his ‘part’ well” (84–5). 24. Worthen, “Texts”, 213. 25. Ibid., 17. 26. Ibid., 21. 27. Ibid., 211. 28. Ibid., 209. 29. Foakes, “Performance Theory”, 47. 30. For an account of this in the context of materialism,see David Schalkwyk, “Shakespeare’s Ghosts”, Shakespeare 1, no. 2 (2005): 219–40. See also Anthony Dawson’s argument in favour of the “imaginary text” in “The Imaginary Text, or the Curse of the Folio”, in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 141–61. 31. Foakes, “Performance Theory,” 54 and Harry Berger Jr, Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 103 and passim. 32. The problem of character is given especially thoughtful treatment by Worthen in “Prefixing the Author: Print, Plays, and Performance”, in Hodgdon and Worthen, Companion, 212–30, at 224: “Prefixes may, now, be so fully laminated to modern notions of character – as names – as to be impossible to leverage away, even despite the Oxford edition’s considerable effort in this direction. And yet there’s an important sense in which early modern prefixes register a reality theatre: onstage, ‘character’ is not something you are, it’s something – as perhaps it was in the early modern theatre – you do. Thinking about speech prefixes as ‘names’ is a decisively literary notion, as though ‘character’ is something prior to its enactment.” 33. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 193. 34. See Wittgenstein, Investigations, para. 329 and passim. 35. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 179. 36. Ibid., 182. For a recent account of the essential embodiment of language, see Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). 37. Cavell, Philosophy, 173. 38. Ibid., 183. 39. It is important to remember that by “performative utterance” Cavell means the technical, Austinian notion of an illocutionary act, which can have no force without a law or convention to inform it. 40. Cavell, Philosophy, 185. 41. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 10.

Text and Performance, Reiterated

75

42. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 100–101. 43. V.N. Voloshinov, “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art,” in Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, ed. I.R. Titunik and N.H. Bruss (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987), 100. Cf. “The situation enters into the utterance as an essential constitutive part of the structure of its import.” 44. This absence is the burden of Derrida’s argument in Limited Inc. 45. Voloshinov, “Discourse”, 102. 46. Cavell, Philosophy, 185. 47. Ibid., 145. 48. The text used throughout is The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 49. Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 47. 50. Ibid., 48. 51. Ibid., 49. 52. Ibid., 52. 53. Tom Bishop points out to me that this was certainly the view of the Elizabethan press censorship, in such cases as the “deposition scene” in Richard II or the speeches of the rebels in 2 Henry IV. I am greatly indebted to Tom for his astute comments on earlier drafts of this essay and also to Robert Weimann, whose patient and wise engagement with my analysis and arguments has made it a much better paper. 54. Part of this paradox resides in the fact that Weimann’s trenchant demonstration of the bifold authority of text and performance can proceed so effectively via the text of the plays. 55. Worthen, “Texts”, 211. 56. Kenneth Gross, Shakespeare’s Noise (London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 197.

This page has been left blank intentionally

5

Shakespeare Performance Studies W.B. Worthen

What are we talking about when we’re talking about that slice of theatre called “Shakespeare performance”? Throughout his career, Robert Weimann has asked what writing, texts, scripts do in the various regimes of early modern performance, training an insistently dialectical imagination on the spatializing structure of locus and platea, the authorizing gestures of author’s pen and actor’s voice, and now the magisterial or ministerial relation between writing and performance in the institutions of literature and theatre. Performance is at once always changing and evanescent; the critical challenge is to find ways of conceiving performance – and perhaps especially performance using writing, dramatic performance – in ways that engage and articulate its distinctive fluidity. Weimann’s latest instigation also develops a disciplinary agenda, an open effort to suggest that the mapping of the question of dramatic performance in the text-inflected field of Shakespeare studies should draw on the resources of the adjacent “antidiscipline” of performance studies. This is a salutary – and in my view, unavoidable – move, but resistance to the distinctively “Bifold authority” of dramatic performance remains in play, despite Weimann’s leverage, across the terrain of Shakespeare performance studies, illustrated in a productive – and provocative – way by David Schalkwyk’s essay here.1 Since the 1950s or so, we’ve been saddled with a succession of relatively ineffective approaches to dramatic performance, and while I have from time to time explored the critical frontiers dividing drama studies and performance studies, it was arresting to learn “Worthen writes most often against the ‘text’” (50), to be cast as an opponent to literature, literary critique, the complex signification of writing in performance.2 What I think our three-way conversation reveals is a need to restage the question: What are we talking about when we’re talking about that slice of theatre called “Shakespeare performance”? One thing we’re talking about is an event that uses writing in the fashioning of performance. Schalkwyk rightly asks “What is a ‘text’, or, more accurately, 77

78

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

how is the word ‘text’ being used?” in discussions of text and performance (48), and there is indeed considerable slippage in the ways text, textuality, text-based and other terms referring to written documents operate in the text-oriented field of Shakespeare performance and in performance studies more widely. On the one hand, the critique of dramatic performance – “performance-oriented” Shakespeare criticism, for example – sometimes assumes that the purpose of playing is to hold the mirror up to the text, that Shakespeare performance is primarily the performance of the writing, and that the play constellated in a non-theatrical reading of the text should provide a palpable template or manifest point of reference for the play produced by stage performance. In this perspective, text generally stands in for a critical sense of what specific words, lines, scenes are about; it refers to a set of implied interpretations of the work and how it should be decanted in performance, rather than what writing might help to do, to bring about as an event onstage. As Schalkwyk points out, “the text” here does not refer to specific features of the marks on the page, nor indeed to the specific texts used in a given production. The “text” is a “multiply complex iteration” (51) both of written forms of the work and of the ways it has been represented critically and culturally. The conception of “the text” as a “multiply complex iteration” would effectively make it impossible to measure a performance against a logically prior work, even against the many different, multiply complex iterations of the text used in making a single production. Yet Schalkwyk’s meticulous engagement with performative speech acts, particularly the illocutionary “languge” stabilized by print, seems to predicate performance on the order of writing. That predication, though, should give us pause. One reason to hesitate has to do with the place of Shakespeare theatre on the wider horizon of performance. Is Shakespeare performance a distinctively archival genre, in which the ideological reiteration of meanings derived from critical encounters with the text-as-poetry forms a crucial part of the expected, legitimate (and legitimating) work of performance? Perhaps; some performance genres do foreground their dependence on writing: inaugural addresses, Spalding Gray’s monologues, Noh theatre, staged readings, academic lectures, David Hare’s recent Berlin/Wall (he holds the script in hand throughout). Although much Shakespeare performance behaves in this way, too (pumpkin pants and hose as the signifiers of scriptural fidelity), I am not yet content to concede that Shakespeare performance should be segregated in this way. As Weimann suggests, Shakespeare’s plays helped to fashion an “unfixed, largely untested encounter of literature and theatre as two different institutions”;3 perhaps the modern sense of dramatic performance – and especially, in the English-

Shakespeare Performance Studies

79

speaking world, of Shakespeare performance – as an institution secondary to literature is a waning accident of history. Moreover, while locating performance as secondary to writing provides a comforting sense of the magisterial critical and artistic precedence of literature and literary studies to the tawdry stage, from the perspective of the more urgently politicized field of performance studies this hierarchy tends to conceive dramatic performance as essentially committed to a restaging of social and cultural hegemony by reiterating its principal means of dominion, writing. I am putting this baldly here, but much as we have learned – from performance studies – not to take dramatic performance as definitive of performance per se, so we should withstand the temptation – as performance studies has often failed to do – to regard dramatic performance as the mere reproduction of textual authority on the stage. As Victor Turner might have said, it is often difficult to maintain one’s footing betwixt and between disciplinary agendas. Perhaps not surprisingly, though, Schalkwyk’s critique of my use of several key terms – derivative, illocution – strikes me as a tactical gambit for reinstating a nuanced, complex, but finally text-centred understanding of dramatic performance. I take my use of derivative from Michael Bristol’s superb book, Big-time Shakespeare, where the term “derivative creativity” is proposed as a way to understand the work of performance in the longue durée of Shakespeare’s plays’ encounter with labour and culture. Bristol rigorously locates all subsequent purveyors of the original written work as “derivative” – printers, editors as well as actors and directors are “secondary creative agents”. While I’ve struggled with this sense of “derivative creativity”, Bristol does not understand derivative – meaning secondary, derived from “an ontologically and logically prior thing” (49) – in the pejorative sense of second-rate; nor do I.4 In rescuing the notion of derivative performance from my alleged misuse, though, Schalkwyk reprises a familiar vision of theatre. Refusing to specify “whatever Hamlet is: text, play, work, type, performance” (50) appears to sidestep “deriving” performance from “the text”; yet inasmuch as he regards a new performance to “derive” principally from the artists’ creative encounter with written material, “We could therefore say without ideological prejudice” that a performance of Hamlet “is derived from Hamlet – otherwise it wouldn’t be Hamlet” (50). Where does this sense of “derivation” take us? Not very far, in part because – whether or not I am pejorative in my sense of “derivative” – the sense of the text’s logical or ontological priority in the production process easily slips in a euphemistic direction, shading from “first in line” or “antecedent” toward “first in importance”, gathering performance back into the work of reiterating writing: “It is the stability of the printed text or

80

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

playscript that allows the reincarnation of an event that would otherwise be impossible: this performance ‘of’ Hamlet” (50). Hamlet? Stable? Print and its alleged stability have nothing to do with it; neither Athenian tragedy nor the medieval mystery cycles depended on print to survive for centuries as living theatre; plays in Shakespeare’s theatre – many of which survived for decades in repertory – were not dependent on print for their lives in performance; and it might be remembered that many plays preserved in print – The Magnetic Lady, Aureng-Zebe, Cato, Strange Interlude – seem to have lost their lifelines, for the time being at least. Some written documents record the drama in ways that we might not recognize as inherently dramatic or theatrical: the papyri of some classical plays mark the change in speakers – when they mark them at all – merely with a dot. In print culture, there is Gertrude Stein. Moreover, we can only create an event by using Hamlet, and in practice a performance is less of the writing than something made with it. I do not think performances derive directly from, or reincarnate, writing, but there is a non-pejorative way to characterize performance as “derivative”: it involves de-prioritizing the text in our understanding of performance. While some text of Hamlet, and some sense of whatever Hamlet is may have been used in imagining, rehearsing, and performing a given production, the performance in the end “derives” only partially – and in some productions perhaps not crucially – from properties attributed to the text, from whatever Hamlet was before it was subjected to theatrical labour. As Weimann’s engagement of recent German productions suggests, a stage production is also assembled from – “derived from” – available strategies of directing, design, and acting; from the specificities of individual bodies and personalities; from the material constraints of a given theatre. (In textual terms, it is also “derived from” various print conventions of spelling, design, layout, the cultural signification of printforms compacted here into the word “type”.) I take the point that our ability to do a Hamlet is dependent on the existence of Shakespeare’s play; it is also dependent on our understanding of Hamlet as an instrument for performance, and on a sense that we have the means – whatever we (whoever we are) take them (whatever they are) to be. Do we think only one actor should play the lines signified by the speech-prefix “Hamlet”? That a boy should play Ophelia? That we should complicate live performance with simultaneous film and live-feed digital video? To say that performance principally “derives” from Hamlet is to locate the text in a privileged priority, as though an understanding of what performance is and does is primarily dependent on the text it uses. The Almereyda Hamlet derives from a (heavily cut, modernized, and rearranged) text of Hamlet, but the performance also clearly derives from Pixelvision,

Shakespeare Performance Studies

81

from Ethan Hawke’s pout, from an intertextual sense of literary and theatrical history (Gielgud, Mayakovsky, Nietzsche all appear alongside Shakespeare on Hamlet’s desk), from a transitional moment in the history of recording technologies, all of which play a distinctive part in identifying Hamlet as performance. A text of Hamlet is critical in unique ways to any performance, but I am still not convinced that “derivation” frames a compelling characterization of the conceptual or practical functioning of writing in dramatic performance. The collocation of “reincarnation” with print also implies that the performance “event” – and here I think reincarnation silently displaces the complex, nonliterary notions embodied in terms like Joseph Roach’s surrogation or Richard Schechner’s restoration – is conceived as a scripted one.5 This is the burden of Schalkwyk’s reading of Austin’s illocution. For Schalkwyk, “If performance is to text as speech act is to its cited model and code, then it is entirely dependent on that priority; it is a secondary instantiation of a primary model: it is ‘derivative’” (54). Yet while linguistic performatives depend on the proper deployment of words, with the correct agents, in the legitimate circumstances, to do things, to assume the status of acts (the act incorporates the words and much else in its sustaining process of citation), for Schalkwyk the words on the page, as illocution, are apparently already performing; they are always already performing, which is why actors’ performances legitimately derive from them. In Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays, this notion of textual performativity sustains a superb collocation of the sonnets with the plays’ scenic representation of the working of poetic language. Here, though, rather than using represented performances in the plays to concretize the represented scene of the sonnets, a purely textual illocution is retrained toward a theory of dramatic performance, the complex interaction between represented performance and actual doing (this move is also apparent in Speech and Performance: “Antony and Cleopatra and the sonnets both represent and perform this transformative power of language in the imaginary space of theatrical and poetic production”6). In Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, I argued that Austin’s model of both illocution and perlocution removes the signifying force of performative language from the words alone (the “imaginary space of theatrical and poetic production”, perhaps), and assigns it to the complex interplay between the words and the circumstances of their enactment. When the words are performed in the material space of theatre, they do things, but the significance of what they do is not contained in the words, but in how they are activated – and so are “transformed” – in this situation, the moment of performance. To this extent, if we are looking for a way to characterize the performative force of Shakespeare’s texts in

82

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

the theatre, we cannot assign them absolute semantic priority: they will gain their peculiar force and significance as theatrical action, do the things they do, through the ways their performance engages circumstances beyond the words themselves. Schalkwyk takes a different view of Austin’s application to dramatic performance, arguing that Shakespeare’s plays not only represent illocutionary acts but perform those acts, even without rendering them as utterance, placing them in the world of action, or lending them material agents. Unless Worthen maintains that the multitude of promises, oaths, coronations, declarations, depositions, avowals, and marriages that are encountered in the reading of Shakespeare’s texts are not equally conveyed in reading and acting, he would need to concede that in these cases the illocutionary performative works as forcefully in reading as it does through embodied action. (71 above)

I am hardly ready to concede this point, since performance is not about conveying an encounter with a linguistic performative, but about the use of words in the creation of acts. When I read a play, I “encounter” these events (promises, oaths), but they are not performed in Austin’s sense. Illocutions represented in a text are not “equally conveyed” in performance because the speech act represented on the page cannot be identical to the speech act performed on the stage, an act considerably more complex than a mere utterance of words, making a speech.7 Speech acts may be “conveyed”, but the precise act that will be created when they are “performed” lies – as in the case of “I do” or “I promise” – outside the words themselves: how the words are performed is inseparable from the act performed with them. This is an important point, and underscores the attraction and the challenges of using Austin to explore dramatic performance, difficulties I do not think either of us have quite captured. As an instrument for performance, any classic play will create the opportunity for actors to perform activities that simply have lost the sustaining social structure in which those actions signified, had their potentially performative, transformative force as speech acts. For example, any speech made while kneeling, or any business involving a hat is legible to us today, but also has very different, less complex force as action than it would have had in 1600, when these activities played a crucial role in daily social rituals of identification, legitimation, survival. So far, we are in agreement: “the iterative, historical, and conventional modes of behaviour that we call ‘acting’” at a given point in time and place may “have no place for signifying activities that marked the ‘original’ performative practices of

Shakespeare Performance Studies

83

the theatre for which the play was written or improvised” (57). There are a number of textually encoded moments of illocution that can still be made to have significant force as theatre, but a force quite distinct from any that might have been encoded in the text four hundred years ago: oaths are a useful case in point. Reading the text may convey an encounter with performative language, but the performative we encounter in performance has been altered by the act of performing it, here and now, in these circumstances. Indeed, Schalkwyk distinguishes between perlocution and illocution on this ground: while the “set of signifying conventions that imposes itself upon the playscript” (!) may “play a decisive role in conveying perlocutionary force”, it has less bearing on the represented illocutions of dramatic writing, which “do not depend for their effects on the transformative, appropriating labour of the theatre” (56, 57). In this view, the illocutionary acts represented in the script retain a kind of signifying priority apart from the transformation, appropriation, imposition of the stage (and who is being pejorative now? in what sense is the theatre’s use of writing theft, appropriation, an imposition?). An oath is an oath is an oath, and always enacts a curse, the same curse, regardless of how it is said, or when, by whom or to whom. To that, all I can say is, Zounds! This understanding of the universal force of illocution depends on the sense that for Austin there are no “rules for how one should speak the words of a promise for it to be binding” Instead, the “force of a written illocutionary act is no different from its embodied, fully ‘expressive’ form. A promise is no less a promise if we read it than if we see or hear it embodied, if it is said with special emphasis or dispassionately” (56). A promise may be a promise whether read or spoken, but it does not become an act, do things, promise until it enters the world of action, where the quality of the performance will constitute the specific act performed, the specificity of this promise as an act. How one speaks the words will govern what promise is actually performed. To take a scripted example, if my brother writes me a letter and says, “I promise, I’ll kill you if you spill our plans to surprise Mom and Dad”, a promise has been accomplished, performed in the world as well as on the page. Even here the promise is not identical with the words conveying it; I would understand him to promise to be very angry, but not actually to kill me. My brother is not Tony Soprano, a distinction illustrating the principle that the words do not determine their performative force: with a different agent, the same words produce a different promise, different speech act. Olivier vowing revenge accomplishes a different act than Branagh does. But reading a letter is to read a script that has already entered the world of action, unlike reading a promise in a literary work – Laertes’ promise to avenge Polonius’ murder, for instance.

84

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

I have many times voiced this promise, reading the speech aloud in class. In that case, though, I have used this text to accomplish the act of “illustrative reading”, a performative designed to point up, underline features of language, phrasing, for our discussion. While we’ve encountered a performative, perhaps, I have clearly promised nothing, and have not come close to performing “promising” even in the theatrical sense. Without the enabling circumstances of theatrical performance, or even of rehearsal, this classroom reading conveys an encounter with Laertes’ promise, but doesn’t enact it, even in the special way theatrical promises are enacted. Theatre uses writing differently than reading aloud, or reading silently, does. The purpose of the theatre is to signify fictive action through the process of acting, “with all the people engaged in the mimesis actually doing things,” as Aristotle put it.8 Laertes may promise “I’ll be revenged / Most throughly for my father” (4.5.134– 5), but the specific character of the promise, the specific promise created in action, is surely a consequence of how the words are spoken, of how they are transformed by embodiment into the codes of action, characterization, performance epitomizing this production.9 In a paradox Austin might appreciate (Hamlet certainly does), Laertes’ ranting vows might seem to be hollowed out, etiolated, by how he performs them, by their conventional, even “theatrical” quality.10 Laertes promises, but the act accomplished by that promise depends on how it’s done. The text might convey a “promise” to the agents of stage performance, but it is their performance that creates and signifies the specific promise. As Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler have pointed out, the performative depends on its theatrical, citational dimension: performative speech depends not simply on the “general citationality” of language, but on the use of language, in precise circumstances, to summon an available paradigm of signification, one that is fundamentally akin to the notion of conventionality in the theatre (no, I don’t mean the pejorative sense of “citation” or “conventional” here). Rather than merely continuing “to do their work in their new (fictional) context” (55), when performed as theatre, the performatives of the page are remade into, qualified as different acts on the stage. To invoke Kenneth Burke, we might even say that the agents of this event (actors), use the agency of the script, with different purposes, and in a different scene than those displayed in the fictive text. The act they perform cannot be identical to the acts represented in the play. The theatre speaks this duplicitous grammar of motives.11 Schalkwyk hesitates at my refusal to see performance as “reading by other means”, but I do not think that illocution in the text allows for the drama’s “seamless passage onto the stage” (62), a seamless passage, in other words,

Shakespeare Performance Studies

85

from the performatives we read to those enacted. First, of course, if acting were the seamless embodiment of scripted illocution, we would all be good actors; actor training, rehearsal, table-work, getting “off book” – all point to the hard work of refashioning writing as part of building a more comprehensive event, one in which the words are no longer identified solely as words, but become part of something else, speech, action, behaviour. For this reason, I think it is fair to say that the text is left behind as a text, and that while this may be an obvious point, it is not trivial in its consequences. Although there may be many texts onstage in a performance of Hamlet – Hamlet’s book, Ophelia’s poem, Horatio’s letter – the text of Hamlet has been digested into acting, movement, behavior which – while it may retain the words (now not written, and not merely spoken, but transformed into behaviour, enacted) of a text of Hamlet – is no longer a textual thing, even if, in the Geertzian sense, we can metaphorically textualize it for interpretation.12 Alluding to an image I have found useful in conceptualizing the ways writing is used in performances, Schalkwyk shrewdly observes that, if the performance uses the text as material (something to work on), then it is not quite left behind: “the language that makes up the text of Hamlet, however re-fashioned, shaped, appropriated, changed, pared down or expanded in production remains embodied in and through the performance” (53). Replacing “text” with “language” does much less work than it may appear here, for “language” is not embodied by performance: words are taken up, used in a densely corporeal activity to fashion an act of which the words are only a part. Of course, Hamlet has a semantic dimension, and to this degree it provides different challenges and opportunities than a pine plank (though the intersection of these challenges might be said to lie at the heart of Tom Stoppard’s play Dogg’s Hamlet). And yet, creating performative force with Hamlet’s language involves working it into something else: even some words will gain new meanings that exist only onstage as action. (In Hamlet, “enseaméd bed”, which means [or meant in 1600] “greasy”, now is typically performed and heard to mean “ensemened”, the word Mel Gibson actually speaks in Zeffirelli’s film; Olivier substituted “lascivious”, proving the point, I think.) According to the text, Hamlet will kill Claudius at the end of the play, but will the performance of “Hamlet killing Claudius” enact justice, retribution, revenge, or just more of Elsinore’s casual slaughter? Language, some language, is borne into performance, but that language is transformed into something that is not essentially verbal, not inherently “textual” – however “iterable, conventional” it may be as behaviour (54) – and not derivable from the text alone. Acting is not speaking by the card: the deed will be created in its doing.

86

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Even if we understand the script as a kind of illocutionary encyclopaedia, a “variety of iterable speech acts” (54), the language of a play is transformed into something else; rather than seizing the text (or the “language” that makes it up) as something the performance appropriates or imposes on, the sense that dramatic performance instrumentalizes the text, using it every evening as part of the means of making this performance, is better captured by a different image, the text-as-tool. What do we want to do with this text, what work do we want to accomplish with it, what work can we accomplish with it? What designers call the “affordance” of a given tool is partly given by its material properties, and partly given by the demands we make of it when we use it, deploy it within one of the dense structures of human work we could term “technology”. A screwdriver has specific properties – it is flat-headed or Phillips, long or short, and so on – but the work we can make it perform, its “affordance”, arises in a specific scene of objectives and relations. Yes, a screwdriver has “purposiveness” I suppose (53), but that imagined purpose may be more relevant when driving a screw than when hotwiring a car, where the affordance of the blade, its ability to do the job, is measured by the diameter of the starter cylinder rather than by the dimensions of the screw slot. Thinking about dramatic texts as tools points to a long-recognized aspect of dramatic performance, the fact that new theatrical technologies (the proscenium, rehearsing from print, electricity, moveable scenery, the royal box, plumbing, Method acting, live-feed digital video) enable old plays to do previously unimagined work in ways that redefine them as tools for performance (it took some time for us to understand the cellular phone as a small computer, the alphanumeric keypad as a linguistic instrument, or to find this affordance as essential to its identity as a “tool”). This instrumental character of dramatic writing, its agency in Burke’s terms, is particularly visible in the history of performance; once a particular affordance is discovered, it tends to persist, despite Schalkwyk’s dismissive sense that “a tool is something one discards (or puts aside or hangs up) after it has been used for the technologically designated purpose” (53). Locked out of the car – coathanger; blown electrical fuse – penny; chair too low for the table – telephone book: the object world is full of tools some of whose affordances have been orphaned by changing technologies, new door locks, circuit breakers, the internet. Yet for a while, at least, coathangers and pennies and phone books trail these erstwhile capacities, much as Hamlet still trails an Oedipal affordance pioneered or at least popularized in performance by Olivier. Since I am not “against texts”, I would say that dramatic writing retains the potentialities we discover for its use: once you’ve hotwired a car, you never look at a screwdriver the same

Shakespeare Performance Studies

87

way again, and after Brook or Luhrmann or Almereyda we see new capacities for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, or Hamlet, new ways to do the work of performance with these texts. The metaphors – material, tool – are incompatible, but complementary, dramatizing not only the “incorrigible ambiguity of the term ‘text’” (54), but the dynamic, transformational work that happens to and with writing in performance. As material, the text is worked on and worked into the performance, made into something no longer essentially verbal in its construction, an event; as a tool, the text provides a critical agency, one instrument among many for making the performance. In the Western tradition, dramatic writing is part of the “embodied, powerful, but fleeting and unstable, event of community that is exclusive to the theatre” (72). I do not quite think that Shakespeare performance studies is or should be imagined as anticipating the shape of those events or be limited to accounting for the engagement of that distinctive community. Like the range of “literary criticism”, the critique of Shakespeare performance is more broadly concerned with the ways – historical, theoretical, conceptual, practical – Shakespeare has been produced, has been imagined, has been made to work, or might be made to work in the cultures of performance. A concern for the purposes of Shakespeare performance studies is also traced out in Robert Weimann’s bold effort to set the critique of Shakespeare and performance on a new and more productive course. First, he reviews contemporary anxieties about the relationship between writing and performing, both in the sphere of Shakespeare and in the sometimes contestatory field of performance studies, arguing that the dual identity of drama – arising first in the “largely untested encounter of literature and theatre as two different institutions, two different modes of cultural production”13 – in the early modern period has continued to mark contemporary efforts to liberate performance from a merely ministerial role. This historical perspective enables a shrewd observation: that the disciplinary struggles surrounding the function of dramatic writing in performance working around the edges both of Shakespeare studies and of performance studies in the past decade have their own historicity. Sidestepping the disciplinary politics that have beset this debate, Weimann seizes more directly on the emergence – on stage and in scholarship – of a “non-representational concept of performance” generally “at odds with the theatre as an institutionalized site of rendering dramatic images of characters in worldly circumstances” (8). Deftly refusing merely to engage in the “rash reversal of hierarchies” (13) characteristic of some more polemical writing (including my own), Weimann instead proposes to take the “Bi-fold authority” (Troilus and Cressida, 5.2.144; 13 above) of “Shakespeare’s theatre” as paradigmatic – resisting, in other words a vision

88

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

of a strictly “ministerial” or “magisterial” conception of the relationship of performance to writing. Refusing, then, to “sanction any absolute resistance of performance to textual modes of signification” (13), while at the same time refusing to sanction the inherent dominion of textual to theatrical modes of signification in the sphere of dramatic performance, Weimann suggests that the Shakespeare theatre, evincing “an unprecedented degree of interpenetration between writing and playing” (15), provides a paradigm of performance, at least a paradigm for those forms of performance using writing as one instrument of performing. Shakespeare, our performance (studies) contemporary. To stand back from the essay slightly, we might say that Weimann proposes to rethink the text/performance problematic in ways that – emulating the open field of early modern theatricality – refuse to frame the question as a simple binarism. Instead, given that a “revolution in relations of text and performance is occurring under our own eyes” (15), he takes seriously the sense that dramatic performance works with writing in ways that cannot be anticipated from the writing itself. This is to take neither the “ministerial” nor the “magisterial” position, but a more difficult one, asking how performance, neither “liberated” from nor inscribed within the text, deploys writing within the changing social technology of theatrical performance. It is salutary, I think, that Weimann turns to contemporary German theatre here. Not only is there “reason to believe that on the Continent the preoccupation with performance-oriented productions of Shakespeare is most prominent and most virulent” (15), but these performances – unlike performances that implicitly gesture toward the authority of the text by framing Shakespeare in an ersatz realism – directly engage the question, Weimann’s question, our question, of the work writing affords in performance today, when both digital and social technologies are exploring newly liminal relations between writing and performance. Placing Shakespeare on the horizon of contemporary performance, then, Weimann asks not what performance has to say about Shakespeare’s writing (a question only writing can answer), but what kind of work we understand Shakespearean writing to afford in those forms of theatre most attentive to the critical work of performance today. Tracking Benno Besson, Heiner Müller, and Peter Handke through the light of Brecht, Artaud, and Grotowski, Weimann locates the contemporary use of Hamlet as part of a wider critique of representational theatre, a theatre in which the actor’s task is taken to be already prescribed in the writing, a genre perhaps cognate with “Shakespeare performance” for some audiences. More to the point, he raises the question of the extent to which contemporary communication technologies, in their ideological work, retrain and reprivilege the senses, notably affecting a “shift

Shakespeare Performance Studies

89

from letters to pictures, from reading to viewing, from verbal to pictorial perception. In this momentous move two media in the theatre are vitally involved.” And yet, “If on contemporary stages, language and show, text and performance experience a reversal in the order of which is magisterial and which is ministerial it appears only appropriate for Shakespeare’s plays in mise-enscène to put up some resistance”, at least insofar as the “pre-representational heritage” of Shakespeare’s plays appears to encode a dialectical encounter with performance that should prevent the “Shakespearean text” from being reduced to “a ministerial element in the production” (25). I am sympathetic to the notion that writing resists the mise-en-scène, and also drawn to the sense that, as a tool, writing generates friction in the mode of production, resists being merely dissolved, creates resistance as a means of doing work. Shakespeare’s texts generated this resistance in their original theatre – the boy actor’s ridicule of squeaking Cleopatras is just one sign of this friction; I would only add that the kind of resistance they provide is a function of the work we ask them to do, an affordance arising in our understanding of the mutual interplay between writing and the mise-en-scène. Since the mise-en-scène is always changing, changing in how it understands its instruments, and changing in its imagination of presentation and representation, I’m not certain that this “heritage” – if it is encoded in texts rather than in our means of employing them – is recoverable as performance. Indeed, while digital technologies have massively reordered the practices of visual, verbal, and inscribed communications, it is also possible that they have alerted us to conceptual instabilities that have been there all along. Perhaps writing and performance cannot be adequately mapped along a ministerial/ magisterial axis, like the axis between dramatic representation and theatrical presentation, an accident of print culture. Although Weimann resists the notion of a ministerial Shakespeare, an instrumental Shakespeare perhaps sustains his critique of writing in the changing technology and changing sensorium of performance, captured in the evocative phrase “thick performative”: And yet, even here this non-derivative use of performance cannot be an absolute one. As we shall see, it assumes its greatest potential wherever a “thick” performative maintains its indigenous strength and independence in the midst of a wide spectrum of multiformity between the media of representation and bodily presence. (9 above)

What is “thick” performativity? I think we might have the sense of writing whose ability to become “performative” in a given realm of doing – the early modern stage, now – is “thick”, rich with opportunity evidently related to

90

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

available practices of embodiment, acting, imagined doing. It might be noted that this “thickness” has nothing necessarily to do with literary complexity: there are many elegant, beautiful, complex texts, even dramatic texts, for which the modern theatre has little use, plays which do not seem to afford enactment, to enable an event to assume the (troubled) status of illocution in the theatre, words transformable into signifying events. So, too, there are performative structures that no longer work for us, no longer render writing “thick” with performative force. For us, it seems, adult, female Cleopatras are “thicker” with performative potentiality, more capable of using the text as a means to framing a richly evocative act, than boys. Although Weimann points to the ineluctably non-representational dimension of theatre (most of what we see happening onstage is happening, doing as well as representing something else), a mimetic or representational vision of Shakespeare performance is still very much with us, thickly enough: so many outdoor Dreams among the pines and mosquitoes.14 But theatre is no longer on the cusp of traditional modes of nontheatrical performance, and the question Weimann proposes has to do with the longevity of Shakespeare, the sense that transformations in the technology of theatre will necessarily transform our understanding of its tools, its instruments. Understanding these transformations means not only considering the work engaged by new technologies onstage, but interrogating the shape of acting, the practice of directing, the uses of writing as it develops in our theatre today, when stage performance is constantly in dialogue with media spectacle, film, television, all the tiny performances happening on your iPhone. Taken together, these essays open out toward several observations on the critical terrain of Shakespeare performance studies today. First, textuality and performance are institutional; early modern theatre companies had rope dancers, contemporary companies hire a video editor. Moreover, how texts function in different conceptions of performance identifies what texts are and what work they can do in different conceptions of theatre. Second, the disciplines of performance scholarship need to be porous and interactive, which is not quite the same thing as being interdisciplinary or antidisciplinary. Weimann several times brings recent scholarship on early modern theatricality to bear on a wider critique of performance, work known at best only to specialists in the period, and likely best known to scholars mainly working in “literature”. Yet much as theatre and performance studies have used a range of non-literary genres to expand and clarify our understanding of performance, so too the range of performance falling generally under the heading of “dramatic” or “theatrical” provides a rich and diverse archive of practice, an archive barely

Shakespeare Performance Studies

91

mined by the theoretical inquiry of performance studies. Third, Weimann’s essay also reviews one of the most contentious sites on the border between literature, theatre, and performance: authority. Authority in the theatre is a relatively modern notion, assigned to the playwright in the era of expanding literacy (print), now assigned to the director in much theatre. I recently saw a production of a new play, Architecting by TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment) that blended several narratives – hurricane Katrina, Gone with the Wind, architecture – in a performance that shifted seamlessly among them, in effect foregrounding the complexity, even the opacity, of its authorizing gestures. Hans-Thies Lehmann has considered performances that, in his words, “de-dramatize” both the play and the event; here, we might say that the event works to “de-dramatize” some assumptions about scripted dramatic performance.15 Finally, the field itself: what kind of talking are we doing when we’re talking about that slice of theatre called “Shakespeare performance”. If we imagine the “reach of performance criticism”16 to be either the predication of performance on some richly imagined textual critique, or the mere documentation of performances, then the game is surely lost. These are the purposes that have been assigned to the critique of dramatic performance from Granville Barker onward, and there is often more than a hint of antitheatrical animus when they are reasserted, as they frequently are today. But while historical reconstruction or the imagined articulation of performance possibilities are both engaging, neither is really at the centre of what we might imagine Shakespeare performance studies to be about. A much more dynamic vision emerges here in Robert Weimann’s simultaneous contemplation of past and present, text and performance, actor’s voice and author’s pen: a sense that when writing and theatre happen together, a range of significant cultural effects arise, thick performativities thick with the potential to unbind the constraints of text and performance. Notes 1. David Schalkwyk, “Text and Performance Reiterated: A Reproof Valiant or Lie Direct?”, Chapter 4 above, 47–75; hereafter cited by page number in parenthesis. 2. In addition to the texts cited in Schalkwyk’s essay, I have in mind several pieces in which I was concerned to address the problems of conceptualizing the uses of writing in performance: “Disciplines of the Text / Sites of Performance”, TDR: The Drama Review – The Journal of Performance Studies 39, no. 1(T-145, Spring 1995): 13–28; “Drama, Performativity, and Performance,” PMLA 113 (1998): 1093–107; “Antigone’s Bones”, TDR: The Drama Review – The Journal of Performance Studies 52, no. 3

92

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

(T-199, Fall 2008): 10–33. I have also considered the materiality of writing and its consequences for the imagining of performance in Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 3. Robert Weimann, “Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre: Ministerial and/or Magisterial?” Chapter 1 above, 3–29. 4. Michael D. Bristol, Big-time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996), 61, 52. 5. See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) on surrogation; on restored behaviour, see Richard Schechner, “Restoration of Behavior”, in Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 35–116. 6. David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10, 49. 7. By “speech” here and elsewhere, I mean to suggest that acting in the theatre is not merely delivering lines in speech, as though merely uttering the words prescribed by Shakespeare is what constitutes Shakespeare performance. Although scripted language is used, the transmission of words is subordinated to the behavioural systems that are used to transform scripts into acts, acting, theatre. The distinction between acting (using scripted language to perform an act) and speaking (recitation) is an important one, and should – despite Schalkwyk’s reservations (“Text and Performance”, 52) – be kept in mind when we are trying to locate the sphere of dramatic performance as opposed to other performative uses of Shakespearean writing. I return to this issue below. 8. Aristotle, Poetics 1448a, trans. M.E. Hubbard, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D.A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 53. Gerald Else’s translation perhaps offers a slightly different emphasis: “with all the persons who are performing the imitation acting, that is carrying on for themselves.” Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 18. 9. I cite from Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden, 2006). 10. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 22. 11. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 12. For a fuller articulation of this perspective, see Benjamin Bennett, All Theater is Revolutionary Theater (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 13. Weimann, “Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre”, 3. Subsequent refences in parenthesis are to this essay. 14. On the relationship between representational and non-representational dimensions of performance, see Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (London: Routledge, 2008), chap. 1. 15. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 74. 16. Schalkwyk, “Text and Performance”, 72.

6 Author’s Voice? Acting with Authority in Early References to Shakespeare William N. West

Yet take Dicke Tarlton once for thyne Authour … – Tarltons Newes Out of Purgatorie 1

In Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, Robert Weimann traces the fruitful tensions between two modes of presentation exploited on the Elizabethan stage, the textual authority of the playwright and the self-authorizing performative powers of the actor.2 I specify the “stage” because it was there, as Weimann demonstrates, that these positions were most fully shown in conversation: on its own terrain, after the theatres closed and as texts were established as the principal source for Shakespeare’s theatre, the impulse of print was generally to erase the other authority of performance.3 As Weimann has shown in his examinations of the variously bifold authority of the Elizabethan stage, many of which are revisited in Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice, it is precisely the competition of forces and the deployment of multiple and conflicting resources in Elizabethan playing that allowed its unprecedented capacity to represent, reproduce, and reshape the lived and imagined worlds of experience.4 As Weimann acknowledges, though, in early modern England the authority of the playwright was no more culturally legitimate than that of the player. While the playwright’s written words shared the authoritative, textual medium of traditional learning used by the church, the legal apparatus, and the universities, they could only mimic impotently an access to the power that supported such institutions. Recent scholarship has reiterated how unlike traditional texts, whether in print or manuscript, playhouse texts were in their 93

94

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

construction, and what efforts were required to make them into the sort of Works that Ben Jonson was ambitious to publish, or that John Hemminges and Henry Condell were eager to publish on Shakespeare’s behalf.5 Thomas Bodley’s famous exclusion of playbooks from the library he founded at Oxford in 1605 is another reminder of how far this kind of writing was from already established sources of authority, and when John Foxe allied playing with preaching and printing as the Reformers’ triple bulwark against Rome, he was more interested in the power of the actors’ share than the playwrights’, whom he does not mention.6 In the early years of public playhouses, playwrights like Robert Greene, who identified himself with the universities as a “Master of Arts”, and the anonymous scripters of plays and pamphlets against Martin Marprelate had to wrest what authority they could from the existing institutions of church, state, and university with which they cooperated and contended.7 While public playing developed a complex set of relations with such institutions over the sixteenth century, the contests between poet and player that Weimann explores in Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice were primarily local ones, fought out within the playhouses and playing companies rather than at large, with neither side privileged by any authority that they did not first appropriate for themselves. Much of the manifest power of playing was predicated on the notion that players and playwrights spoke with a shared lack of authority relative to the world outside the theatres. They were authorized but unauthoritative – permitted to speak and act, but not officially credited as sources of truth or knowledge.8 How, then, did marginal figures like these gain an authority of their own, one that, if not proper to them, was at least theirs to deploy? The conflict between poet and player that Weimann’s study details came to delineate a new ground of authority beside the recognized ones of church, law, and university, all of which claimed to draw their authority in varying ways from a textual tradition that they upheld and continued. Recognizing this casts some of the intestine broils of the profession of playing (the War of the Theatres, the rivalry of boys’ and men’s companies, even the contributions of Kemp and Shakespeare to the Chamberlain’s Men) in a different light: like modern political pundits, playing companies developed their power to speak by pitting it not against existing powers, but against each other. These skirmishes are not struggles to control authority that already exists, but an unintentionally cooperative effort to produce a new authority to speak and play beyond what was authorized to them. In the case of Elizabethan players’ pens and voices, the struggle itself is in part what produced the authority, since the contest implied that the prize for which it was fought must already be in existence. As Weimann amply shows,

Author’s Voice?

95

the authority that could be assumed to lodge in mere textuality, and in the Shakespearean text in particular, would come later – as the result of struggles distinct from those before the closing of the playhouses in 1642. Weimann’s study reminds us that for playing, at least, authority was not given but redirected from a variety of sources and capacities. Here I wish to focus on some particular passages that scholars have frequently returned to in trying to understand the particular authority of Shakespeare, and more generally of Elizabethan playwrights, during the period in which they were first making their plays. I will argue that these comments, from a variety of sources and seemingly independent of each other, are in fact better understood as attempts from a number of different directions to grasp a system of dramatic production that had no immediate institutional or traditional authority on which to rely, and yet seemed able to act with authority as if on behalf of nearly any institution whatsoever – authoritative, countercultural, disenfranchised, nationalist, even those that as yet had no proper names. What we might call criticism of individual playwrights and plays – descriptive appraisals of them rather than mere mentions, praises, or condemnations – is scarce in Elizabethan documents, and Shakespeare is no exception. Clear evaluations, for good or bad, of Shakespeare’s work in the theatre from his lifetime (rather than echoes of it, or expressions of attitudes towards his non-dramatic poems) are almost scant enough to be counted on one hand. They also tend to be frustratingly thin in their descriptions: he is “honey-tongued” (in the sources by Meres and Weever) or “honey-flowing” (Barnfield); his writing is “sweet” (Covell, Barnfield, the second and third Parnassus plays) or “sugared” (Meres and Weever again). If it can “please the wiser sort” (Harvey) as well as “please all” (Scoloker), perhaps that is because Shakespeare is a Johannes fac totum (Greene).9 The consistency of these observations suggests either an unusually single-minded reception of Shakespeare’s works – perhaps the more surprising to modern readers, who most often admire Shakespeare’s myriad-mindedness and polyvocality – or, by the same token, a petrified convention linking “sweet” and “Shakespeare” that substitutes for more varied or nuanced descriptions of what Shakespeare’s plays and poems are like. To consider the very early history of Shakespearean praise and blame raises the question of how to understand the structures of evaluation at work in the few surviving instances. As critics coming on the heels of three centuries in which Shakespeare has been central to the definitions of English literature, dramatic power, and psychological richness, we risk being misled by what can look like a steady history of talking about and, mostly, admiring Shakespeare. The (apparent, anyway) sameness of our pleasures and

96

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

those of Shakespeare’s contemporaries glosses over what may be different in those responses. There have, in fact, been different ways to like or dislike the figure currently known as “Shakespeare”. Many passages traditionally understood as positive appraisals of Shakespeare, like the ones I have cited, do not comment at all on the subject of “Shakespeare” as it has almost automatically been conceived since the late eighteenth century – that is, as a particular author of unique skill.10 They may speak to his popularity or to the wide distribution of his works in print or on stage, but even this is hard to gauge.11 Read with other comments on playing in the period, in fact, I want to argue that many of what we have understood as allusions to Shakespeare – that is, passages that can tell us something about the author we call Shakespeare, or even something about the works of the author we call Shakespeare – in fact are trying to say something different. They suggest concepts of identity, authorship, and authority other than those presupposed by the Shakespere Allusion-Book or by the contemporary critical practice of searching for allusions. It would be strange, of course, if Shakespeare had appeared in the 1590s already somehow equipped for the role he would play in the imaginative history of the next four hundred years. But works of scholarship on Shakespeare have shown a tendency to collect these early references to Shakespeare and his works as if they had anticipated their subject’s afterlife. Like many references to playing in general during the period, these familiar passages address instead the question of authority, that is, the problem of determining to whom the words and actions of the theatres belong. What I take to be the usual modern understanding of what it means to be an author is of course a writer, but more specifically a pre-scriber, one who originates a text to which other texts may respond, and especially correspond. The modern author has a literal priority over others; his or her words come before readers, interpreters, or actors, and their activities presuppose his or hers. This set of assumptions meets, if it does not actually derive from, Hobbes’ definition of the role in Leviathan (1650): Of Persons Artificiall, some have their words and actions Owned by those whom they represent. And then the Person is the Actor, and he that owneth his words and actions, is the Author: in which case the Actor acteth by Authority. For that which in speaking of goods and possessions, is called an Owner, and in latine Dominus, in Greeke kúrioς; speaking of Actions, is called Author.12

Author’s Voice?

97

An author, then, is the first mover of actions, and the point to which they ultimately refer. Actors are intermediaries for them who carry out their instructions. When I talk here about the problem of “authorship”, or, better, “authority”, I am shifting the use of either word metaphorically to address questions that are specifically theatrical rather than textual. That is, I want to consider the ways in which, in the playhouses of Elizabethan England, words and gestures were (or were not) attributed to certain people as sources of origin, and were instead attached to other kinds of persons (those we call characters), or even to particular ways of speaking or behaving, which Elizabethans called “veins”. My aim is to demetaphorize the question and ask “What does it matter who is speaking?”, where speaking is taken literally.13 By making, or undoing, this metaphorical slide from writing to speaking, I want to try to revise the almost inevitably textual bases on which we establish or critique authorship, which Weimann has surveyed in Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice. My observation of the diffused nature of theatrical authority is nothing new. It has served as a kind of concealed double of authorship studies of drama, most of which acknowledge the collaborative nature of theatrical production, thus allowing the problem of authority in playing to be first recognized and then set aside. To take only one representative example, G.E. Bentley observes: Every performance in the commercial theatres from 1590 to 1642 was itself essentially a collaboration: it was the joint accomplishment of dramatists, actors, musicians, costumers, prompters (who made alterations in the original manuscript) and – at least in the later theatres – of managers.14

Most scholars after him have taken this as a starting point, even if they have then turned their attention to other problems.15 But I contend that the centrality of the player in conveying the words of what we now call Elizabethan theatre, and the prominence of the player in the imaginations of Elizabethan playgoers, make the general modern understanding of what an author is, of who speaks and why it matters, rather different, and considerably more complex, than we generally acknowledge. Some of the earliest commentators on Shakespeare were less quick than more recent ones to move on after noticing how playing distributed and allocated authority.16 Greenes Groats-worth of Wit (1592), which purports to be the last mortal reflections of the pamphleteer and playwright Robert Greene, contains the first notice we have of Shakespeare’s career in the playhouses:

98

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10 for there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.17

The pun on Shakespeare’s name in “Shake-scene” and the distorted quotation from his 3 Henry VI – “A tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide” (1.4.137) – seem to clinch the identification.18 But Greene is not necessarily saying anything at all about writing, not the least reason for which is that the play (so far as we know) was not yet printed.19 His question seems to be the much more practical problem of who is speaking: when I hear words like these, to whom should they be credited, how, and with what consequences? This passage is from Greene’s open letter at the end of the pamphlet warning three other “Gentlemen his Quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plaies” ([E4v]) not to trust the players’ companies and to give up their professions as writers for them. Only two sentences before the one about Shakespeare, Greene describes players in terms very similar to those he uses for the upstart crow: “those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours” (Fv). Here, though, his complaint is not against unlettered authors who usurp the position of educated ones, but against actors who, perhaps ungratefully, perhaps merely unworthily, take up language that has been given to them by writers. Greene seems less to be picking out a rival than noting the possibility of a rivalry for authorship and authority between those who compose lines and those who perform them. Greene’s words “Shake-scene” and “bombast” sound more aural or performative than graphic, as does a similar phrase from Thomas Nashe’s preface to Greene’s Menaphon, which objects to those “who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse”.20 Again, it is hard to be sure, but it sounds like Nashe is pitting the imposing volume of an enacted rant against the less prepossessing rasp of better pens. It is clear that Nashe and Greene both imagine an active circulation between pen and voice: Nashe’s immediate target here, whether players or unlearned playwrights, is mediated by the collateral stupidities of others who spread their bad work around by copying it. He aims at the “idiote art-masters” (rather than the appropriate Masters of Arts, as Greene was entitled to style himself), the stupid leaders (and as such, authors) from whom bad writers copy things down “in servile imitation of vainglorious tragoedians”; and whether the idiot masters are meant to be players or writers, it is clear that the words in question pass at least once through the mouths of

Author’s Voice?

99

players. Here the writers seem to be, in Hobbes’ sense, the actors of the authorplayers, whose words they take down “in servile imitation”. Nashe introduces Greene’s pamphlet into this circulation of speaking and writing, as a stopgap to forestall the bad writing that imitates the bad speaking of the tragedians that threatens to supplant the good writing of people like Greene.21 Nashe’s Pierce Penniless (1592), published the same year as Greenes Groats-worth of Wit, offers what is usually understood to be another early reference to Shakespeare’s work, although without alluding even obliquely to his identity: How would it haue ioyed braue Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and haue his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least, (at seuerall times) who in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.22

What Nashe praises is the performance of the death of Talbot in 1 Henry VI (or something a lot like it), rather than its writer, although this passage is too often cited as an allusion to “Shakespeare”. Tellingly, modern citations of this passage looking for early recognition of Shakespeare as a playwright usually do not continue to Nashe’s discussion of the staging of “Henrie the fifth”, since (so far as we know) this play is too early to be Shakespeare’s and is more probably what we now call the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry V: what a glorious thing it is to haue Henrie the fifth represented on the Stage leading the French King prisoner, and forcing both him and the Dolphin to sweare fealty. ([F3v])

As with Greene’s remark, it is unclear in these passages whether Nashe is praising the writing, the acting, or, more amorphously still, something like a whole experience of playgoing, which is made excellent by both its content and its impact rather than by the fine points of its execution. Nashe seems to be most interested in the quality of this experience (both “How good in its kind?” and “Of what kind, what qualia?”) rather than in grounding that quality in any particular source. Are Talbot and Henry V then perhaps the authors here, the doers of deeds so great that their mere representation is glorious? Taken in isolation, the passage on Talbot seems to praise what Nashe appreciated as a great play, which we can further identify as being by our greatest playwright even if Nashe does not (the implied argument, I suppose, is that if Nashe liked a lesser play by Shakespeare this much, we can extrapolate on how much more

100

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

he would have loved something like Hamlet, King Lear, or even 1 Henry IV). But since Nashe cites in particular “the Tragedian that represents” Talbot’s “person” and a page later goes on to praise English actors, naming in particular Alleyn (twice), Tarlton, Knell, and Bentley ([F4r]–Gr) – “Not Roscius nor Aesope those admyred tragedians that haue liued euer since before Christ was borne, could euer performe more in action, than famous Ned Allen” ([F4v]) – it seems likely that Nashe is not thinking of Shakespeare as a writer in particular at all, but of the faces, voices, and bodies of the men who “performed” the “action” onstage. Francis Meres’ several mentions of Shakespeare, invariably as being excellent in every kind of composition, in Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury (1598) seem more unambiguous references to, if not detractions from, a figure of an author, in particular the author as we imagine Shakespeare ought to have been: As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweet wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c… . As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage … As Epius Stolo said, that the Muses would speake with Plautus tongue, if they would speak Latin: so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeares fine filed phrase, if they would speake English.23

In the first and third passages, Meres imagines Shakespeare as speaking; his instrument in each is the tongue rather than the pen.24 In the second, how Shakespeare communicates is left unspecified. In the first passage, the context is expressly that of written poetry, but this does not undercut the force given to Shakespeare as a voice here. Instead it suggests that the impact of Shakespeare’s written work is assimilated to that of his words as performed, raising the actor’s voice to a position at least comparable to that of the author’s pen. As with Nashe’s evaluation of Shakespeare, the tenor of Meres’ appraisal changes substantially when it is set into a fuller context. Meres’ book is a collection of commonplaces, “similitudes” which have been “digested” into various topics, as its index observes (n.p., near end). Short individual observations are gathered under appropriate topical headings: “Of God” (1r), “A wife” (130r), “A comparative discourse of our English Poets, with the

Author’s Voice?

101

Greeke, Latine, and Italian Poets” (which contains Meres’ explicit references to Shakespeare, 279r–287r), or “Vice” (304r). The headings are loosely grouped by related themes, so that “A wife” follows “Mariage” (127r) and precedes “Matrimoniall Society” (132v), and the “comparative discourse” is sandwiched between “Poets” (276v) and “Painters” (287r). The excerpting of sentences and their compilation into similar books was an elementary and widespread humanist textual practice, and by 1600 many commonplace books were available already printed and organized, both awaiting content to fill their headings and with material already “digested” like that of Meres.25 But the specific form produced by commonplacing means that the linking of Shakespeare to other writers whom Meres finds to be similar has a valence that short excerpts do not entirely capture. Palladis Tamia takes its commitment to similitudes very strictly – almost every paragraph is in the form of an analogy, “As X … so Y”. This form is noticeable in the familiar passages mentioning Shakespeare that I have quoted, but it seems to be there in the service of an attempt to say something about its second terms. When one reads over three hundred pages couched in exactly the same formula, though, it becomes more and more numbingly clear that Meres is most interested in the form of analogy itself. Meres sticks doggedly to it even when it does not really fit what he has to say. The observation that As there are eight famous and chiefe languages, Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, Syriack, Arabicke, Italian, Spanish, and French: so there are eight notable severall kinds of Poets, Heroick, Lyricke, Tragicke, Comicke, Satiricke, Iambicke, Elegiacke, & Pastoral. (282v)

is clearly not an evaluation that depends greatly on close parallels or even especially on logic; it is closer to a mnemonic. In other cases Meres is trying to offer a sententiam rather than what is properly an analogy or a similitude: As Porcus among the Indians; Masinissa among the Numidians …: so Socrates, Plato, & Pericles were famous for temperance among the Athenians, & Iulius Caesar among the Romans; so that Cato was wont to say of him, that he alone came sober to subvert the common wealth. (85v–86r)

Some paragraphs merely aim at the memorable, although they too adopt the form of an analogy: “As Actaeon was wooried of his owne hounds: so is Tom Nash of his Ile of Dogs” (286r). Nashe’s play of this name, which sent Ben Jonson to prison and Nashe in flight to Yarmouth, might serve as a textbook

102

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

example of Foucault’s claim that the author emerges as the one who is liable, except that two players were arrested, too, and it is not clear whether Jonson was arrested for playing or for writing. But Meres is making no such point about authorship or authority; he just wants to add Nashe to the short list of those whose dogs turned on them. Meres’ commonplaces about “Poetrie” (275r–276v) and “Poets” (276v– 279r) in general, and his comparisons of English poetry to the already authoritatively ranked poetry of Greece, Rome, and Italy, are especially prone to distortion by being read in excerpts, in which he may seem to be advancing critical opinions on single authors rather than exercising a much more general opinion about the sameness with which poetry within different traditions is organized, as a set of masters of particular genres. The formal consistency of the lists and comparisons that Meres employs, so clear when even a slightly larger selection from Palladis Tamia is read than only those passages which name Shakespeare, reveals that he is not trying to evaluate Shakespeare’s writings or even describe any particular qualities they exhibit. Instead, he is trying to place Shakespeare and other English writers within a system of writers and genres, in the long traditions of paragoni among arts or nations. It is not just that Meres’ tastes in poetry are not the same as ours, so that Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser jostle Michael Drayton, Gabriel Harvey, William Warner, and Thomas Legge on the same scale of excellence. It seems a bit out of place even to speak of Meres as having a particular taste at all. Rather, he is reflecting a quasi-objective organization that has less to do with what he admires than with filling in various authorial positions established by classical literature (those who write epics on civil wars; those whose poems are not in verse; those who write about Hero and Leander – to give a few more of his categories) with their English equivalents. This is underscored by his inclusion among the best poets of a number of ancient writers whose works were no longer extant – for Meres, it is not even necessary to read a poet to know where he falls on a scale or grid.26 Meres’ pages of “comparative discourse” simply reflect the status of the author as traditionally defined by both scholastic and humanist practice – that is, how to make sources into authorities, by likening them to the established authorities of the classical tradition. In this tradition, authors are not the points of origin that authorize their texts as, say, Shakespearean; rather, the authority of the written text makes its writer an author.27 Meres’ valuation of Shakespeare poses a problem opposite the one raised by Greene and Nashe, by establishing Shakespeare’s place in the canon wholly on the authority of the categories in the classical canon, almost without addressing the issue of its content. To be

Author’s Voice?

103

sure, Meres renders Shakespeare as a form of writing, but not as an individual author in the usual modern sense of the word. For Meres, the positions of authors in an economy of written works precedes whatever authorial name is put forward to fill them. Like Meres, Nashe in Pierce Penilesse is trying to place Shakespeare and other writers within a larger system – albeit a very different one than that which Meres sees – in this case, the conditions under which plays are produced rather than their classicizing reception. In these conditions, locations of authority are diffuse, but they emphatically do not rest in the figure that we would identify as the author. Of course, Nashe does not name Shakespeare at all, but he is also not even especially praising an excellent play that somehow might be authoritative itself; as I suggested above, if anything he is more interested in praising excellent players, and probably most interested in grasping the whole experience of playgoing. But further still, the plays of Talbot and Henry V that Nashe mentions scarcely count as distinct plays. In the first place, they are reduced to scenes, almost to tableaux, particularly striking to their spectators. More importantly, in the full context of Nashe’s discussion they stand in for a much richer and more complicated set of interactions that make playing and playgoing possible. They are examples that illustrate the proper functioning of playing within a particular organization of society. Nashe’s pamphlet adapts the dramatic form of a modernized pageant of the seven deadly sins (Gabriel Harvey describes it as written “according to the stile, and tenour of Tarletons president, his famous play of the seaven Deadly sinnes”28), updating their traditional activities for contemporary London. The section on playgoing is part of Sloth, as its least objectionable manifestation, edging out “gameing, following of harlots, drinking” (F3r). Nashe rehearses the unconvincing arguments that playgoing instructs in virtue, but in a different key: it is not so much that it teaches its audiences good behaviour as that it distracts them from worse: But what shall hee doo that hath spent himselfe? where shall hee haunt? Faith, when Dice, Lust, and Drunkennesse, and all haue dealt vpon him, if there be neuer a Playe for him to goe too for his pennie, he sits melancholie in his Chamber, deuising vpon felonie or treason, and howe he may best exalt himselfe by mischiefe. ([F4r])

Those who condemn playgoing have their own ulterior motives for doing so: As for the hindrance of Trades and Traders of the Citie by them, that is an Article foysted on by the Uintners, Alewiues, and Uictuallers, who surmise if there were no

104

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10 Playes, they should haue all the companie that resort to them, lye bowzing and beerebathing in their houses euery after-noone. ([F4r])

As in the case of Meres, what at a cursory or partial glance looks like a comment on Shakespeare or his work is, in fact, something more like the description of a system within which such figures gain meaning. Playing makes sense to Nashe as a part in a network of relations rather than as an expression of anything that could be assigned to a discrete individual. Its function is not an immediate social good – unlike most early defences of playing, which tepidly advance its ability to teach morals, Nashe treats playing as a small piece worked into a larger and more complex structure, which is maintained not because of its utility but because of its complicated relations to other elements. The ecologies or systems that Nashe and Meres posit are very different, with Meres outlining something like a structure of authority and evaluation into which placeholders like “Shakespeare” can be slotted, and Nashe considering the kinds of social organization that motivate playgoing as well as the resistance to it. Meres, one might say, singles out empty positions in order to fill them with individuals; Nashe resists seeing much individual agency or authority at all, instead referring choices and responses to an analysis of types or classes of people: seeking pleasure, people will select from a limited range of options; protecting various economic or political interests, others will support or oppose these choices. But for neither does a figure like Shakespeare display anything much resembling individual authority, or even identity. None of this means, of course, that Nashe, Meres, or Greene could not distinguish the different functions of parts, players, and writers within the systems they observe, but that they are not always especially concerned to do so. Nor do they seem to locate authority fully or primarily in any one position, instead dispersing it across a set of participants.29 They were emphatically not concerned with anything like the “authorship question” that has arisen in Shakespeare scholarship since the nineteenth century, because the interest of that question begins from the assumption that it is important for a text to have, or for a figure to be, an author. If for Elizabethan commentators on playing the author was not an especially interesting or useful individual, though, the character often was. In contrast to these differently organized dispersals of authority away from a single figure of an author, early modern accounts frequently reassign the authority and even authorship of early plays to one of the roles in them.30 For example, a letter of 1617 by Sir George Petry makes Falstaff an author of, or in, his own play: “(as that excellent author, Sr. John Falstaff says,) what for your businesse, news,

Author’s Voice?

105

device, foolerie, and libertie, I never dealt better since I was a man”.31 Falstaff speaks the last phrase in 1 Henry IV (2.5.155) – but what does it mean to attribute its authorship to him? To assign authority to a character reframes the question of who is speaking by distributing that authority ambiguously across the actor and the part, and away from a prior writer.32 But as my readings of Greene and Nashe suggest, to locate authority in performance seems to have been fairly common in the period in which Shakespeare began playing and writing. Early allusions to The Spanish Tragedy display an “insistent derogation, or abdication, of the author-function in favor of what might be called a ‘characterfunction’… References to The Spanish Tragedy establish Hieronimo, not Kyd, as its authorizing patronymic and metonym.”33 Tamburlaine, too, possessed a kind of personal authority – an authority of the persona, or mask – apart from either his writer Christopher Marlowe or his performer Edward Alleyn. In a dedicatory letter to his Perimedes the Blacke-smith (1588) Robert Greene recounts being mocked by two men: for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragicall buskins, everie word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bo-bell, daring God out of heaven with that Atheist Tamburlan, or blaspheming with the mad preest of the sonne: but let me rather openly pocket up the Asse at Diogenes hand: then wantonlye set out such impious instances of intollerable poetry, such mad and scoffing poets, that have propheticall spirits as bred of Merlins race.34

In one extended image, Greene compares his own position as a writer of plays to three author-like identities that are assembled on stage: the actor in “tragicall buskins”; the writer, whose name Marlowe is punned on by “Merlin”; and the “Atheist” character. In the so-called “Dutch Church Libel” – a long poem threatening violence to the immigrant Dutch community in London and posted on the doors of their church on 5 May 1593, signed at the bottom “per. Tamberlaine” – Tamburlaine literally became an author, conflating his identity both theoretically and practically with the other authorial figure of Marlowe.35 But the “Libel” is not strictly in the character of Tamburlaine of the plays, in the sense that it could be imagined as being spoken by him, however appropriate a mouthpiece the ruthless scourge of God would have been (for instance, like the Libeller, Tamburlaine also gave those he was about to conquer the chance to surrender). With lines like “Your Machiavellian Marchant spoyles the state” (4) or “Not paris massacre so much blood did spill” (40), the poem also recalls The Jew of Malta and Massacre at Paris, plays we would call Marlowe’s. Why would Tamburlaine – rather than Barabas or Guise or Marlowe – be credited

106

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

with these voices as well? Authority seems to be working differently here than modern readers might expect: while a modern view of authorship might see the inclusion of these lines as linking the Libel to Marlowe, this overlooks the attribution of the Libel itself to Tamburlaine, whose performative voice is here given something like the modern authorial position for not only the Libel, but for all three of Marlowe’s plays. The author we would call Marlowe was in fact regularly identified by his character Tamburlaine, particularly after his death, as when Gabriel Harvey recorded the wonders of 1593: “Weepe Powles, thy Tamberlaine voutsafes to die”.36 Complicating the interplay of authority further, Marlowe was not explicitly identified as author of Tamburlaine until 1609; Kyd was not named as author of Spanish Tragedy until 1612.37 The authorizing persons of these plays were instead their main characters, Tamburlaine and Hieronimo. I am not suggesting that the names of the playwrights were really unknown – witness Greene’s pun on Marlowe/Merlin or Nashe’s passage on the fate of the “Kidde in Aesop”38 – but that those names were less significant in identifying their plays than those of their characters. In effect, these kinds of references answer the question of who is speaking by referring not to what we would call an author, but to a character or role. What we see is not exactly the substitution of character for author, but their fusion or confusion into a single identity, or better, an identifiable “signature” of sorts, the boundaries of which do not correspond neatly with any given or predefined person. So too with Falstaff. We do not need to read in his name a pun on Shakespeare, a turning away from Oldcastle, an allusion to Robert Greene or a secularization of the figure of the Vice – although all of these associations have been made. Rather than being seen to derive from other sources, Falstaff authorizes others to imitate and derive from him, as in the letters with which I began, or in John Taylor’s description of a grotesque hangman of Hamburg: Wherein is more midriffe, guts and garbage then three tripe-wives could be able to utter before it stunk … Sir Bevis, Ascapart, Gog-magog, or our English sir John Falstaff, were but shrimps to this buzzeling Bombards longitude, latitude, altitude, and crassitude, for hee passes, and surpasses the whole German multitude.39

Or Richard Ligon’s recognition of an imaginary bygone Merrie England in the revolutionary new world of the Barbadoes in 1647: in comes an old fellow, whose complexion was raised out of the red Sack; for near that Colour it was … when Sir John Falstaff makes his Amours to Mistress Doll Tearsheet,

Author’s Voice?

107

Sneake and his Companie, the admired fidlers of that age, playes this tune, which put a thought into my head, that if time and tune be the Composits of Musicke, what a long time this tune had in sayling from England to this place …40

The mark of authenticity in each of these cases is set by the authority of Falstaff himself. The theatrical unfixing of the source of speech also exposes a number of figures who were less skilful at reconstituting their plumage, artfully revealing what was borrowed and what was new. Some of these representations were comic reframings of the actors by themselves, like Pistol in 2 Henry IV (1597), whose speeches recapitulate some of the most notoriously tearcat lines from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine: Shall packhorses And hollow pamper’d jades of Asia Which cannot go but thirty mile a day Compare with Caesars and with Cannibals And Troiant Greeks? (2.4.163–7)

from Peele’s Battle of Alcazar – “Then feed and be fat, my fair Calipolis” (2.4.179) – and possibly from Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, if “have we not Hiren here?” [2.4.159–60, 175] points to Hieronimo. Another example might be when William Sly, playing a playgoer who demands “Where’s W[ill] Sly?” in the Induction Webster added to Marston’s The Malcontent (c. 1603), announces proudly, and stupidly, “I am one that hath seene this play often, & can give them [the players] intellegence for their action: I have most of the ieasts heere in my table-booke” (Ind. 16–18). Other sources too express concern, and scorn, that theatres were places where those without words of their own could go to get new ones. Pistol and Sly seem to imitate the language of plays as plays; the targets of other descriptions copy the plays unreflectively and untheatrically into their lives. Who then is speaking? In The Scourge of Villainy (1598), Marston describes a playgoer who has completely absorbed the language of Shakespeare: Luscus what’s playd to day? faith now I know I set thy lips abroach, from whence doth flow Naught but pure Iuliat and Romio. …

108

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10 H’ath made a common-place booke out of plaies, And speakes in print, at least what ere he sayes Is warranted by Curtaine plaudeties, … He writes, he railes, he iests, he courts, what not, And all from out his huge long scraped stock Of well penn’d playes. (Satire 10.37–9, 43–5, 49–50 [H4r])

Luscus converts the mobile authority embodied by the actors into a fixed form in his “common-place booke”; his borrowing is inept because, instead of giving the impression of dramatic liveliness, his recitations remain locked inflexibly “in print”. In Anthony Scoloker’s Daiphantus (1604), a comically theatrical poem that narrates the staging of something like a Tudor moral play from the perspective of 1590s parts like Hamlet or Hieronimo, the problem raised by replaying somebody else’s words comes to the fore.41 Daiphantus is best known for its (apparent) praise of Shakespeare, as in this passage describing an ideal epistle to the reader: It should be like the Neuer-too-well read Arcadia, where the Prose and Verce, (Matter and Words) are like his Mistresses eyes one still excelling another and without Coriuall for to come home to the vulgars Element, like Friendly Shake-speares Tragedies, where the Commedian rides, when the Tragedian stands on Tip-toe: Faith it should please all, like Prince Hamlet.

Usually only the last phrase is excerpted, suggesting a claim for the play’s – or the character’s? – universal appeal. But “please all” itself is not unequivocal; it recalls a bawdy ballad attributed to Tarlton about the sexual insatiability of women, which closer to Scoloker’s writing Shakespeare had given to the hapless Malvolio in Twelfth Night as he tried to woo Olivia: “It is with me as the very true sonnet is: ‘Please one, and please all’.”42 Its authority thus has more immediate ties to performance than to writing. But as the rest of the sentence makes clear in its series of balanced alternatives, universality comes at the cost of loss of a distinct identity for the narrator. The narrator begins by saying that he is telling the story of somebody else, but regularly conflates himself with Daiphantus, who in his unhappy love mingles the madnesses of Tasso and Hamlet, two figures who each are both authors and characters on stages. Daiphantus

Author’s Voice?

109

Runs to his Inke-pot, drinkes, then stops the hole, And thus growes madder, then he was at first. Tasso, he finds, by that of Hamlet, thinkes. Tearmes him a mad-man; than of his Inkhorne drinks. … Puts off his cloathes; his shirt he onely weares, Much like mad-Hamlet; … ([E2v]).43

In the university play 1 The Return From Parnassus (1599/1600), a braggart soldier character in love, aptly named Gullio, painfully recycles material he has overheard at plays. Ingenioso, a poor scholar forced to be Gullio’s servant, laments as Gullio begins to warm up: We shall have nothing but pure Shakspeare, and shreds of poetrie that he hath gathered at the theators … Marke Romeo and Iuliet: o monstrous theft, I thinke he will runn through a whole booke of Samuell Daniells.44

The references to Shakespeare in these works signal a familiarity with actions, phrases, or plays, certainly, that we associate with Shakespeare, and the assumption of familiarity among others. The fact that the imitation, or perhaps even copying, in these instances is diagnosed – and condemned – in another, means that while the audience is expected to know enough of Shakespeare to understand what is being made fun of, it is also to understand that the figures on display are not appreciating Shakespeare in the right way or ways. It is also worth noting that not only Shakespeare is being imitated, but rather the practice of theatre for which Shakespeare, Hamlet (as character more than as play), or Romeo and Juliet provide an emblem. Or perhaps separate emblems, with Romeo and Juliet standing in for a performance of language that lovers are eager to copy, while Hamlet represents a kind of excessive action that they might prefer to avoid. Perhaps this is a step on the way to the later baptism and fetishization of the public performance of this time as “Shakespeare’s theatre”, by which Shakespeare first becomes a metonym, then an example of excellence, and finally the sublime and timeless transcendence of the playing culture within which he worked. By 1600 this progression has not yet gone that far. Kyd, Marlowe, players like Tarlton and Alleyn, even characters like Tamburlaine and Falstaff, have demonstrable places in it as well, and comparable – even superior – forms of authority.

110

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

None of the figures represented as speaking is as self-authorizing, in Weimann’s phrase, as he wishes he were, since each one is shown to rely more or less mechanically on models of words or actions that they draw from both print and stage. Nor are their words and identities, even borrowed, as “pure” as Luscus or Gullio imagines them to be; none of them succeeds in following their models without mixing in other sources, dictions, tones, and media. Despite Ingenioso’s predictions of “pure Shakespeare”, Gullio serves up other stuff as well. When he recites what he pretends is an original poetic speech for his mistress, Gullio produces a pastiche blending print and stage – Venus and Adonis with Romeo and Juliet, and ending with a couplet from The Spanish Tragedy (1002–1003). Scoloker’s self-representation as Daiphantus as Hamlet is intentionally ridiculous – Daiphantus has in effect swallowed whole some other actor’s performance, transferred it to his own study, and imitated it to ludicrous effect. Like Gullio, he does not distinguish sources as a modern interpreter might: he is “much like mad-Hamlet”, but his behaviour sometimes smacks more of Hieronimo than of Hamlet (who of course has a good bit of the old marshal in him anyway): “Oh eyes, no eyes, but Stars still cleerly shining …” (D3r; cf. Spanish Tragedy 3.2.1). This is not to say that Hamlet had not seemed serious or moving to Scoloker; like “Tygers hart” for Greene, Hamlet’s madness and Hieronimo’s speech must both have been memorable. But Scoloker makes fun of the same quotable quality that made the lines memorable to him in the first place, when it is recycled too precisely, without regard to its recontextualization. Tarlton’s ready indifference to “please one, and please all” may in fact be an apt emblem. In these representations of originality and interiority – and especially its misfires – playing and playgoing are shown to short-circuit the laborious processes of reading, digesting, reciting, recording, composing, translating, paraphrasing, and declaiming through which decorous, skilful behaviour was supposed to be developed. Plays regrettably presented style ready for immediate, and often unfortunate, use. After these representations of other borrowed feathers, Greene’s quip about the upstart crow looks slightly different. Greene points out the crow’s theft from him and his peers by stealing words back, reworking and reversing them against the “Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde”. Greene here practises what he preaches against, since the problem and even the metaphors Greene uses are from Horace, who remarks that a plagiarist must be cautious “lest, if the crowd of birds by chance should come looking for their plumes, the little crow might move laughter, stripped of its stolen colors”.45 Greene’s differences from the upstart crow, from Daiphantus, or Gullio, seem to be, first, that his appropriations of Margaret’s spoken lines and

Author’s Voice?

111

Horace’s written ones transform and redirect their energies; second, that they do not try to dissemble their relation to these other languages. Not merely the particular attempt, in other words, but the whole project of self-authoring is held up to mockery. In the Parnassus plays, the scholars Philomusus and Studioso are not less unoriginal in their expressions than Gullio; Ingenioso is as willing to alter his distinctive ways of speaking as the more plodding Academico. But the scholars recognize that what they are speaking is not the expression of some selfhood but the exercise of what they call “discourse”. Introduced at the end of 1 Return from Parnassus with Gullio’s protestation of how he has used “a million of times … Mercuriall and Martial discourses” (1367), in 2 Return from Parnassus (1601) “discourse” almost develops into a term of art for any jargon that because of its sterility, difficulty, opacity – and therefore also its imitability – is readily parodied. Amoretto tries to avoid university because “I finde it to hurt my ordinary discourse” (791), which, as his name suggests, is of Petrarchan love (926) and, more surprisingly, of hunting; when he offers to teach Academico, the other demurs, “Naye, I will not dye of a discourse yet, if I can choose” (897–8, also 955). Other discourses regurgitated in the play include the specialized languages of foreign medicine, Latin and English poetry, professional playing, the law, and arms. Not coincidentally, in all these cases the so-called discourses express powerful, singular desires in terms that are wholly conventional and so could be taken up by anyone. This sense of the useful imprecision and incomplete expression of playing a part – rather than being an author, or expressing an interior truth – underlies the laughable performances of Gullio, Daiphantus, Luscus, and their ilk. Their error, I want to argue, is not in copying, but in copying too closely and in pretending that they are not copying. The delusion shared by each of these imaginary aficionados of Shakespeare is that they can become something like the figure of the author as it was generally conceived during most of the twentieth century: a pure, undiluted point of origin for language and thought. Instead, though, their taste is both too fixated on a particular model to produce a distinctness that is not pathological and too jumbled in its rehearsal of that model for convincing consistency. The earliest appearances of the playwright as author, and the author as source of his own language, then, are of the author as imposter – or, as Marston more vividly puts it: Broker of anothers wit. Certes if all things were well knowne and view’d He doth but champe that which another chew’d.46

112

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

To try too hard to own one’s words – to broker another’s wit with the idea of claiming possession of it rather than sharing it – renders these speakers the opposite of authorizing, mere voices (like everyone else), but trying too hard not to be. Thomas Dekker notes that it is “the groundling and gallery commoner” who “buys his sport by the penny and like a haggler is glad to utter it again by retailing”.47 It is not only that the original is revealed as a copy. Its insistence on originality is part of what makes it inept. And this leads finally back to the question of the authority, or authorship, of the actor’s voice. In many cases, when an observer refers to Shakespeare (or to Hamlet, or Hamlet, or the acting of Hamlet, or to Romeo) the fuzziness of reference suggests that Shakespeare is not being treated as a point of origin – as an author, in other words – but as the name for a type of discourse. For instance, in 2 Return from Parnassus, as their fortunes continue to decay, the scholars Philomusus and Studioso audition with Dick Burbage and Will Kemp. Studioso is asked to recite the oft-quoted passage from Spanish Tragedy beginning “Who calls Ieronimo from his naked bedd?” (1806); Philomusus recites the opening speech of Richard III, “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by the sonne of Yorke” (1838–9). We might say that Shakespeare is the source of the second speech, and Kyd of the first. But in this scene the focus of the play is not in sources of lines but in types of acting, not in authors but in performances and characters. These speeches have, in this Parnassus play, an authority, which the Parnassus plays, like Foucault, call “discourse” or what Gullio, Falstaff, Bottom, and many other “excellent authors” call a vein. Players, roles, and playwrights may all share in a vein, as Falstaff’s shorthand of “Cambises vein” suggests, without any of them being recognized or privileged as a source and without any of them being wholly derived from (although certainly interconnected with) the work of the others. Like Hobbes’ Actors, they do not own what they say; they simply rehearse it. This way of categorizing works in the period by their vein or discourse will often overlap with ours, but often will not. “Veins” can cut across the categories that we associate with authorship, as they do here. In Daiphantus, then, there is no illogic in linking Rape and Murder from Titus Andronicus with lines alluding to The Spanish Tragedy. Similarly, when terms that sound to us as if they refer to authors – for instance, “Shakespeare” or “Kyd” or even “Seneca by candlelight”48 – appear in works like these, it is often as a type of playing or poetizing rather than as a source of particular plays or poetry. To be Hamlet, then, is not (necessarily) to be a play by Shakespeare (this must be the case anyway, since Nashe and Lodge talk about an earlier Hamlet); it is to be a cheerful confusion of tiptoe Tragedian and riding Comedian, antic disposition,

Author’s Voice?

113

and broad appeal to a spectrum of audiences. It is also to supplant what it was “to turn Hieronimo”; to turn Hieronimo instead of being Hamlet then becomes to cling to a past of theatricality, to be out of step, to have – as many plays note when they recall Hieronimo – gone by.49 To be Shakespeare is not (usually) to be the writer of Hamlet, but the “sweet” master of the arts of love. To be Tamburlaine is not to be entirely contained by one or even two plays by Christopher Marlowe, but to stalk in changing guises across the imaginations of Elizabethans for a generation. And to be Falstaff – what is it to be Falstaff? It is, as the excellent author himself says, to be “not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men”. While Tamburlainian or Hamlet-like pretensions are generally diagnosed in others, Falstaff’s wit is, almost uniquely, professed. He is sometimes invoked to characterize others, but more often he is taken up and identified with to lend his authority to the present speaker – Falstaff’s authority, not Shakespeare’s. As a reliable index to a certain type of discourse which is self-consciously cited in the form of an allusion – we are meant to recognize Falstaff and also to recognize that the speaker wants us to recognize him – Falstaff resembles the modern figure of the author, a source of wit who must be mentioned rather than appropriated. The professors of Falstaff make him an author before Shakespeare, who remains, in comparison, relatively single-note, like mad-Hamlet or pure Juliet and Romeo: sweet and sugared. But perhaps that excellent author provides a model for what Shakespeare would become, at the Restoration and after. Notes Earlier versions of this essay were presented at a seminar on “Detractors of Shakespeare” at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting and at the Renaissance Seminar of Chicago in 2008. I am grateful for the questions and comments I received from both audiences. 1. Tarltons News Out of Purgatorie (London: T. G[ubbin] and T. N[ewman], 1590), 4. 2. Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William N. West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 3. Ibid., 29. 4. For some of the many configurations Weimann’s rich sense of bifold authority can take, see (in English) his “Representation and Performance: The Uses of Authority in Shakespeare’s Theater”, PMLA 107 (1992): 497–510; “Mimesis in Hamlet”, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Routledge: 1990), 275–91; “Bifold Authority in Shakespeare’s Theatre”. Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 401–17; Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice, passim

114

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

and 62–70; and the original discussion in Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 5. On the material and conceptual distances, Peter Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks”, in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383–422; Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice. 6.  Foxe’s assertion that “players, printers, preachers … be set up of God, as a triple bulwark against the triple crown of the Pope”, is quoted by E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923) 1:242 n. 1; Bodley is quoted by Heidi Brayman Hackel, “‘Rowme’ of Its Own: Printed Drama in Early Libraries”, in Cox and Kastan, New History, 113–30, on p. 113. Weimann discusses the linking of players, printers, and preachers in Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 68–82, and in Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice, 43–53; see also Jeffrey Knapp, “Preachers and Players in Shakespeare’s England”, Representations 44 (1993): 29–59, esp. 29–34. 7. On the miming of authority for and against Martin, including its connections to theatricality, see Arul Kumaran, “Robert Greene’s Martinist Transformation in 1590”, Studies in Philology 103 (2006): 243–63, esp. 245–55; and Kristen Poole, “Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism”, Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995): 47–75, esp. 54–63. 8. On the theatre trade’s strategic assumption of a position of powerlessness, see Paul Yachnin, “The Powerless Theatre”, English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 49–74. 9. I quote Richard Barnfield, W. Covell, and John Weever from The Shakespere AllusionBook: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591–1700, ed. John Munro, preface E.K. Chambers, 2 vols (1909; London: Humphrey Milford, 1932), 51, 23, 24. The other citations I give below, where I discuss the works in question. 10. See, for example, Margreta deGazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 11. Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 6, notes that between 1598 and 1622 Shakespeare’s name “appears … on a total of forty-nine quarto and octavo editions of plays and poems … far more frequently than any other poet or dramatist, indeed, more often than most professional writers”, but a more detailed comparison would be welcome. David Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 21, offers a similar appraisal of Shakespeare’s popularity based on printed editions: “Shakespeare arguably had some competitors for theatrical preeminence, but … as a published dramatist he had none” (see also 10f., 20–22), although he also acknowledges that, at least at the start of Shakespeare’s career, “It was an actors’ theatre” (14). Kastan also notes that Shakespeare’s name does not appear on title pages before 1598, when Vickers starts counting, and further that “Shakespeare” seems to have begun to add value as time went on, as part of a larger trend to include other writers’ names as well (30–44); see also Julie Stone Peters, The Theatre of the

Author’s Voice?

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

115

Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). The strongest evidence of this is the appearance of “Shakespeare” (or other versions, including “W.S.”) on books not by Shakespeare. The Shakespere Allusion-Book records seven between 1595 and 1622 – Locrine, Cromwell, The London Prodigall, The Puritane, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Troublesome Reign of King John (twice) – as well as the poem collection The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), also misattributed to Shakespeare; to these, one can add the Pavier Sir John Oldcastle (1619, printed as 1600). Kastan observes, though, that there is no linear increase in title-page attributions, so that even the apparently popular Romeo and Juliet was republished several times without any attribution. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Kenneth Minogue (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1914), chap. 16. Sometimes overlooked in modern evaluations of the position of the author, though, is Hobbes’ observation that power is mutual – while the author owns the actions of the actor, the actor is thereby empowered to bind the author: “From hence it followeth, that when the Actor maketh a Covenant by Authority, he bindeth thereby the Author, no lesse than if he had made it himselfe; and no less subjecteth him to all the consequences of the same. And therefore all that hath been said formerly (Chap. 14.) of the nature of Covenants between man and man in their naturall capacity, is true also when they are made by their Actors, Representers, or Procurators, that have authority from them, so far-forth as is in their Commission, but no farther.” This mutuality, I suggest, is a significant component in the allusions to Shakespeare that I discuss below. Jeffrey Masten begins Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) with this quotation of Foucault quoting Beckett to suggest the theoretical as well as the practical difficulties of attribution; the insertion of the speaking body does little to reduce them! See Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the OFactor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). G.E. Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 198. I would add as well that the web of cooperative practices that supported the productions of the playhouses could reasonably be expanded to include playgoers; the vendors of food and drink who served them; the watermen who at least claimed that a substantial fraction of their business was supported by them; and even the antitheatrical writers, the relatively less visible protheatrical ones, and the pamphlet writers whose texts shaped the attitudes and assumptions which the playgoers brought with them. Similar observations about the necessarily collaborative work of theatre are made by Stephen Orgel, “What Is a Text?”, in The Authentic Shakespeare, and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1–5. Masten further points out that language itself, and not only theatre in particular, is a collaborative enterprise. Alexandra Halasz considers the negotiation of the largely performative authority of Richard Tarlton in the realm of print in “‘So beloved that men use his picture for their signs’: Richard Tarlton and the Uses of Sixteenth-Century Celebrity”, Shakespeare Studies 23 (1995): 19–38. James H. Forse, Art Imitates Business (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993), on Shakespeare the actor.

116

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

17. Greenes Groats-Worth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance … (London: William White, 1592), Fv. Whether the pamphlet is actually by Greene or by its editor Henry Chettle does not really matter to my argument – although this problem gets at the same question. 18. Ronald Knowles, in his introduction to King Henry VI, Part 2 (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1999), 110, reads the reference as grudging praise. Whether Greene liked the play, the player, the playwright, or not, and whatever he meant to say here, the reference is at least in some ways a tribute to a dangerous competitor – and in practical terms, to a line that must have been both memorable and recognizable. 19. See John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen’s introduction to King Henry VI, Part 3 (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 6. 20. Thomas Nashe, “To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities”, prefaced to Robert Greene, Menaphon (London: Sampson Clarke, 1589), **r. 21. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 1–50, sketches some of the complexities of the relations of written, oral, institutional, and personal authority. 22. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell (London: Abel Jeffes, 1592), F3r. Cox and Rasmussen note that Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI is the only play we know of that portrayed Talbot. 23. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth (London: Cuthbert Burbie, 1598), 282r. The implied “first part” may have been N.L.’s Politeuphuia (London: Nicholas Ling, 1598), published earlier that year, which used the phrase “Wits Commonwealth” as a subtitle. 24. I am grateful to Jeff Masten for calling my attention to this. 25. Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 26. Pliny’s handling of painters in Naturalis Historia presents a nearly exact parallel: “it will be enough just to give the names of some of [the artists] even in passing and in course of mentioning others”: you don’t need to see the paintings to know how to talk about the painters (quoted in Adam McKeown, “Humanist Discourse and the Idea of the Learned Painter”, Exemplaria 18 [2006]: 367–85, at 374). 27. For further bibliography on this understanding of this sense and sourcing of auctoritas in the sixteenth century, see my Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Weimann, in Authority and Representation, argues for a decisive shift from an authority that is understood to precede its instantiation in inscription or performance to one that follows and depends on its realization. 28. Gabriel Harvey, Foure Letters and Certain Sonnets (London: Iohn Wolfe, 1592), 29. 29. Jeffrey Knapp, “What Is A Co-Author?”, Representations 89 (2005): 1–29, argues that much of the work done on early modern authorship overlooks that early modern writers had a concept of the individual author. But that such a concept was available does not mean that it was applied to playwrights. It is not clear to me that the modern writers whom Knapp criticizes in fact doubt whether or not such a concept was available. As Knapp notes, the concept of the individual author certainly existed in early modernity, enshrined at least in the canon of classical works as interpreted through humanism (see my “Figures and Other Fictions in the Archive”, ELN 45 [2007]: 45–56, esp. 49–53), but a larger question is how and how far did this conception of authorship obtain within

Author’s Voice?

117

the playhouse or the pamphlet world. In his article Knapp repeatedly conflates the concept of a single author with the modern discourses of the authority that it brings, as though to assign the writing of a text to a single person automatically carried with it all the appurtenances, penalties, and privileges of authorship in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. What I am trying to suggest here is a much more widely dispersed sense of authority. 30. Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954) observes that plays from the period are often organized around a strong central character in place of a coherent plot. 31. Quoted from Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 87. Whitney includes analyses of several other examples of what (following Joseph Roach) he calls Falstaff’s “orature”, the rehearsal of distinctive speech as well as similar attributions by other letter writers (84–89). 32. Emma Smith, “Actor v. Character in Early Modern Dramatic Authorship: The Case of Thomas Kyd and The Spanish Tragedy”, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 11 (1999): 129–42, observes that, of over thirty allusions to Falstaff up to 1649, “only three associate him with his author” (139). 33. Smith, “Actor v. Character”, 129, 137. 34. Robert Greene, Perimedes the Blacke-smith (London: John Wolfe, 1588), A3r. 35. Arthur Freeman, “Marlowe, Kyd, and the Dutch Church Libel”, ELR 3 (1973): 44–52; for the way that “Tamburlaine”’s poem circled back onto Marlowe, by way of Kyd, see Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 284–9. 36. Gabriel Harvey, A New Letter of Notable Contents (London: John Wolfe, 1593), D3r. 37. David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004), 199–200. 38. Greene, Preface to Menaphon, **3r. 39. Whitney, Early Responses, 92, citing Taylors Travels to Hamburgh in Germanie (1617). 40. Whitney, Early Responses, 108, citing True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657). 41. Anthony Scoloker, Daiphantus, or the passions of loue Comicall to reade, but tragicall to act (London: William Cotton, 1604). 42. Twelfth Night, ed. Keir Elam (London: Arden3, 2008), 3.4.22; R.T., A prettie newe ballad, intytuled: the crowe sits vpon the wall, please one and please all (London: Henry Kyrkham, 1592). 43. Hamlet authors part of the Mousetrap to catch Claudius, and a play called Tasso or Tasso’s Melancholy was performed at the Rose in the autumn of 1594, as was a play called Godfrey of Bullen – the hero of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata: R.A. Foakes, ed. Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 23–8. As late as 1601 or 1602 Henslowe was paying writers to revise Tasso, Henslowe’s Diary, 187, 206. 44. J.B. Leishman, ed., The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601) (London: Ivor Nicholson, 1949), 986–7, 991–4. 45. “[N]e, si forte suas repetitum venerit olim/ grex avium plumas, moveat cornicula risum/ furtivis nudata coloribus”, Epistles 1.3.18–20. 46. Satire 1, lines 44–46.

118

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

47. Thomas Dekker, Gulls Horn-Book (1609), cited by Whitney, Early Responses, 82. 48. Greene, Preface to Menaphon, **3r. 49. For instance, in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599) one character recalls that this line is used to urge another not to persist in the past: “if I were as you, Ide cry, go by Ieronimo, go by, Ide set mine olde debts against my new driblets” (1.2.41), and in Dekker and John Webster’s Westward Ho (1604), the bawd Mistres Birdline explains the appeal of novelty by citing the counterexample of Hieronimo: “If new very good company, very good company, but if stale, like old Ieronimo: goe by, go by” (2.2.185–6).

7 The Author’s Accomplice, or the Unsearchable Complicities of Players in the Making of Elizabethan Drama John Gillies

I The notion that Elizabethan acting culminated during the late 1590s in an art of “personation” is challenged in Robert Weimann’s Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre.1 Personation did not so much leave playing behind as evolve along with it. But where personation typically suggests an ideal coincidence between the idea of the play (“author’s pen”) and the art of the actor (“actor’s voice”), Weimann prefers to think in terms of an endemic discontinuity; a tension inherent in the very culture of a theatre conjoining “learned pen” and “popular site” – and more specifically so in the Janus-faced doubleness of Elizabethan acting (with the “excellent actor” haunted by his disreputable twin, the “common player”). In order to succeed at the “popular site”, Weimann implies, “learned pens” such as Greene and Marlowe needed the common player more than they cared to admit. Hence, the “frivolous jestures” (perhaps both “joke” and gestus) inserted by the players into the text of Tamburlaine – and later filleted from it by the printer Richard Jones – may have contributed along with Marlowe’s “high astounding terms” to its stupendous success with popular audiences.2 Prior to this filleting, of course, these playerly accompaniments to Marlowe’s text must have been in some way visible to the printer as nonauthorial insertions, presumably in the form of broadly comic stage directions. In view of an intriguing reference in Henslowe’s diary to “the Readinge of that boocke at the sonne in new fyshstreate” (an actors’ reading of a newly purchased script), and in view again of the commonplace playhouse practice 119

120

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

of making “plots” from newly purchased texts, Weimann supposes the text passing through a material life-cycle corresponding to the passage from “author’s pen” (the manuscript”) to “actor’s voice” (the group reading and the plotting); and thence to a modified “author’s pen” again (the printing, from some combination of playhouse material or author’s manuscript).3 According to Weimann, the polarity between acting and playing did not disappear with Shakespeare (that actor/author whose pen is supposed to have been most coincident with the personating art of the “excellent actor”). Rather than simply banishing the players (as he did Will Kemp) or collapsing the player function into the actor function, Shakespeare declares the gap between player and actor as the condition of a dazzlingly resourceful set of dialectical conversations. Thus, in Troilus and Cressida, a personated and locus-bound exchange between the characters of Cressida and Diomed, is framed and alienated as “common playing” by the “presentational gestus” of Thersites who occupies the plataea of direct audience-address.4 (Conceivably one could also state this tension in Bakhtinian terms as between the “aristocratic” phenomenon of the personated character and the “carnivalesque” phenomenon of the common player.) Alternatively, personation and playing blend in the simultaneously “characterized” and yet ludic figure of Richard of Gloucester. Considered as a dramatic character, Richard calls for “personated” acting of a peculiarly inward and nuanced order. Considered as a sideshow freak, however, he calls for a sustained feat of “playing” – a specifically physical performance, ludicrously in excess of the written mimesis.5 While, as in the printed text of Tamburlaine, the gestural element is undeclared, it is not physically separable from the text by so simple an expedient as censorship: Rather than exploiting the display effect per se, the Shakespearean theatre makes it intensely interactive with newly absorbing modes of impersonation. In most of these cases, where performance continues to excel at playing with a difference, that difference itself is also and simultaneously transmuted into characterization, that is, into the character’s apartness, isolation, or simply an uncommon degree of social, moral, physical, spatial or ethnic difference (as in Richard Gloucester, Iago, Edmund, the Witches, Autolycus, Caliban, and Aaron) from the rest of the dramatis personae.6 II I wish to take Weimann’s powerful analytic model of the relationship between personation and playing in a slightly different direction, in the

The Author’s Accomplice

121

form of a particularly complicitous kind of interrelation between acting and playing in Shakespeare. Shakespeare is not so much engaging in a dialectical conversation across the gap between acting and playing, as collapsing each into the possibilities of the other. Rather than being framed against or in terms of the carnivalesque body of playing, the aristocratic body of personation is symbiotic with it and indeed directly invaded or contaminated by it. My metaphors (complicity, symbiosis, invasion, contamination) are tailored to Weimann’s actor/player configuration, but they are more inward with eachother – more mutually contaminating. In this kind of mutual inwardness, theatre itself comes into question, becoming anti-theatrical discourse which is simultaneously rehearsed, intensified and evacuated. To clarify, I must first describe what I mean by “complicity”, and say something about its adversion in anti-theatrical discourse. By “complicity” I have in mind something quite different to the théâtrede-complicité topos of Shakespearean theatrical possibility identified with the Chorus of Henry V; it encompasses more than the active allowance by the audience of the representational codes (“Into a thousand parts divide one man” Henry V, Prologue, 24) of Shakespeare’s stage.7 Two necessary dimensions of the word seem missing in this view of audience accedance. One is captured by the secondary sense of the French complicité in the Petit Robert.8 Where the first sense of the word (participation intentionelle à la faute, au délit ou au crime commis par un autre – “intentional participation in a fault or dereliction or crime committed by another”) corresponds to the primary sense of this word in English, the secondary sense is rather different (Entente profonde, spontanée et souvent inexprimée [entre deux personnes] – “profound, spontaneous and often unexpressed understanding [between two persons]”). This latter sense would appear to be merely latent in English (that is perhaps why the English Théâtre de Complicité has adopted a French name). What (in the Elizabethan theatrical context) I find suggestive about this secondary sense – particularly in conjunction with the first – is the depth and potential darkness of the mutual inwardness it imagines: a mutual hospitality, an opening-out, an interpermissiveness, a promiscuous hosting and guesting of each other’s thoughts, intents and words. My house, so to speak, is your house. Formalities can now be dispensed with. No claim is too great, no disclosure too outrageous, no intimacy barred. While this sense of complicity is far murkier than the fiction-enabling accedance invited by the Chorus in Henry V, it too had been virtually a defining condition of early modern English theatrical discourse, as witnessed – however partially and tendentiously – by Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse

122

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

in 1579. In exhaustively recapitulating an array of ancient attacks on the stage from Plato to Cicero, Gosson suggests that – while theatre might be legitimate in principle: educating the public in traditional virtues, reminding them of a heroic past, and so on – it is overwhelmingly mischievous in practice. Thus: “deformities are checked in ieast and mated in earnest”.9 The problem with theatre is not that it fails to live up to its social mission, but that it jests with its mission, both overtly and through a kind of constitutive disproportion between its power to represent and instruct on the one hand, and its power to distract and seduce on the other. Here is Gosson on the sheer sensual appeal of theatre: There let they a broche, straunge confortes of melodie, to tickle the eare, costly apparrell to flatter the sight, effeminate gesture to ravish the sence, and wanton speache, to whette desire to inordinate lust. [Unlike cooks and painters who flatter the senses only] … these, by the privy entries of the eare, slip downe into the heart and with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde, where reason and vertue shoulde rule the roste.10

Whatever the notional import of the scene witnessed here, the spectator is supposedly overwhelmed by the sensual force of the performance. In addition to the music, costume (“costly apparel”) and dialogue (‘wanton speache”), there is a special sexual frisson. Why would “effeminate gesture” so “ravish the sense” in the theatre? Is it because this female character is so much less discreet or demure than Gosson’s idea of female comportment, or is it because the actor is a boy (striking Gosson as a female impersonator rather than a character personator)? The ambiguity seems of a piece with another of Gosson’s suggestions, that the complicities of theatre are unsearchable: The height of heaven, is taken by the staffe: the bottome of the sea, sounded with lead: the farthest cost discovered by compasse: the secrets of nature, searched by wit: the anatomy of man, set out by experience: But the abuses of plaies cannot bee showen, because they passe the degrees of the instrument, reach of the plummet, sight of the minde, and for tryall are never broughte to the touchstone.11

Theatrical complicity is dangerous precisely because it has no definitive form, no measurable content. It cannot be shown, or plumbed or measured. It is not even (necessarily) deliberate. It can be inadvertent and as such hidden from the sight even of the actor, secret, inexpressible and ineluctable. And this is so to the precise extent that theatre is most irredeemably itself: not just when an action is represented (by personating actors) but when it is played (by common players). Gosson is careful to distinguish between acting and playing. While,

The Author’s Accomplice

123

“it is well knowne that some of them (actors) are sober, discreete, properly learned honest householders and Citizens well thought on amonge their neighbours at home”, Gosson disapproves of, “the pryde of their shadowes (I meane those hangebyes whom they succor with stipend)”.12 “Shadowes” means “players”. And as “the shadowe of a knave hurts an honest man”, so the players are the reason that actors are, “somewhat ill talked of abroade”.13 The force of Gosson’s attack, as Arthur Kinney reminds us, is to be measured not just in the spawn of follow-up anti-theatrical tracts, but in the closeness of Gosson’s argument to that of Sir Philip Sidney’s rebuttal in the Defense of Poesie.14 Having already conceded that theatre was legitimate in principle, Gosson had in a sense pre-empted the most forceful argument in defence of the stage, and left the defenders to argue that the theatre was edifying in practice (a much more difficult task). The impoverishing outcome of this discursive cleft stick is to be seen in the “character” of “An Excellent Actor”: theatre is legitimate in proportion that the actor’s art is serious, and the most patently serious aspect of that art is “personation”. What this pamphlet (probably by Thomas Heyward, a noted defender of the stage) implicitly concedes to the opposition is the whole theatrical dimension of “playing”. The anti-theatricalists had got in first with their rival “character” of “A Common Player”: here the actor/player is a scurrilous go-between, a pander to the audience’s worst proclivities.15 My point is that if the worth and dignity of the stage is exemplified in the “Excellent Actor”, then its moral dubiety, complicity and lewdness are exemplified in the “Common Player”. For this reason I see the dialogue described by Weimann between the functions of actor and player as fraught with a particular kind of danger. We can view such moments not just in Weimann’s terms as instances of Shakespeare’s promiscuous fertility of invention – of his refusal to abandon the playerly dimension of acting even while evolving the actorly function par excellence of personation – but also as moments that bring to the surface the constitutive ambiguity of theatre’s social ontology: did the theatre edify or seduce, did it enlighten or confound? At such moments the audience is no less problematized than theatre itself. When representation is challenged – undercut, emptied out, subverted – by a “presentational gestus”, then the audience is not merely called upon by the player/presenter, but also actively called into question. What is the audience doing at the theatre really? The force of Gosson’s suggestion that theatre is unsearchably complicit is of a piece with his portrait of the audience:

124

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10 In our assemblies at playes in London, you shall see suche heaving, and shouving, such ytching and shouldring, too sitte by women; Such care for their garments, that they bee not trode on: Such eyes to their lappes, that no chippes light in them: Such pillowes to ther backes, that they take no hurte: Such masking in their eares, I knowe not what: Such giving them Pippins to passe the time: Such playing at foote Saunt without Cardes; Such ticking, such toying, such smiling, such winking, and such manning them home, when the sportes are ended, that it is a right Comedie, to marked behaviour, to watch their conceites …16

If the souls of audience members are hidden from sight, their body language is all too eloquent. But eloquent of what exactly? For most of the tract Gosson leaves this question hanging. Like the question of theatre’s broader complicity, there is no “objective correlative” to this riot of complicity signifiers, this dilatory itemization. When Gosson supplies such a correlative shortly afterwards (in the claim that the audience leave the theatre in the company of prostitutes, thus making the theatre a “market of bawdrie”) he slips up. Hostile scepticism has slid over into baseless supposition and hostile fantasy. The smear (a staple of later anti-theatrical tracts) is a mistake – not just because it stretches belief (Gosson admits he has not actually tested this claim) – but because the Elizabethan reader of the tract would likely have been in a strong position to judge of it himself. Gosson is not just preaching to the converted in this tract – crammed as it is with humanistic learning and Euphuistic phrasing – but to the unconverted, including the discriminating (and no doubt class-conscious) theatregoer. Gosson did, after all, dedicate his tract to Sir Philip Sidney. If the “market of bawdrie” tactic is a mistake, however, the suggestion of an unspecified complicity is not. Gosson’s artfully inflected picture of an audience enjoying itself in the theatre is irrefutable precisely because of its mix of photographic plausibility with the rhetorical tactic of dilation, whereby details are plucked and multiplied seemingly at random. Bacon explains the effect of dilation as follows: this maketh the greater show if it be done without order, for confusion maketh things muster more … both the mind comphrehendeth less that which is set down, and besides it leaveth a suspicion, as if more might be said than is expressed.17

The suggestion is that theatre audiences are physically boisterous, “lewd”, socially indiscreet, trivial, sexually loose, loud, obvious: effectively a bunch of yobs out for a good time any way they can get it.18 And “the play” here is less

The Author’s Accomplice

125

Hamlet’s “thing to catch the conscience” than a pretext to let the conscience slip. The reader – literate by definition, probably to the point of savouring Gosson’s parade of humanist learning and style – is thus presented with a dilemma: whether to side with the values of discretion and sobriety and seriousness, or to admit solidarity with this lewd and low audience.19 The dilemma must have been very real. Unless we believe the theatricalists’ proposition that “serious” people enjoyed theatre only because of improving morals, uplifting themes, and personated acting, we must (as Weimann argues) accept that they enjoyed the full spectrum of theatrical pleasure: the broad jokes, Hamlet’s “jig or a tale of bawdy”, the playerly “disfigurings”, the clowning, the delicious sense of release from the rigours of upward social mobility, and finally the equally delicious sense of finding solidarity (rather than anxious separation from) theatricalized festivity, folk culture and folk. The point of Gosson’s tract is to sow anxiety in the heart of this demotic pleasure, to make it complicitous (a second-order wrongdoing, taint by association, precisely the meaning of Gosson’s phrase, “the shadowe of a knave hurts an honest man”). The reader is thus infected with “complicity anxiety”: anxiety that his cultural taste for the occasional walk on the Cheapside might result in a permanent stay. In what follows, I want to look at three moments of interaction between actorly and playerly functions in Shakespeare. I read them as moments in which “the purpose of playing” opens onto a version of the abyss described by the anti-theatricalists. The anti-theatrical discourse is echoed. The unsearchable complicity of theatre and its audience is even conceded, but as a way of creating an ontological vertigo in which the anti-theatricalists themselves and all of us are complicit. III The first moment I wish to view in this optic is the curious adversion by Leontes of Hermione’s banter with Polixenes in the first Act of The Winter’s Tale. Traditionally, the debate over this moment has centred on the motive of Leontes’ jealousy. Exactly when during this process – and how and why – does Leontes become jealous? Viewed in Weimann’s terms, the moment asks a different kind of question. Not unlike Thersites’ deconstructive framing of the personated passion between Cressida and Diomed within a “presentational gestus”, Leontes here forces us to adopt a double perspective on the adverted “entertainment” of guest by wife. On the one hand this is a friendly social encounter between two “characters” whose gracious personation (as aristocratic

126

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

bodies) should admit no chink for lewd observation. Simultaneously, however, it is an assemblage of carnivalized theatrical gestures – complicitous and promiscuous body language (“paddling palms and pinching fingers”, 1.2.117, “horsing foot on foot”, 1.2.290, and so on) – from which all legitimate (and aristocratic) social content has been drained, and then refilled by the liquid (and déclassé) complicities of “playing” (“Go play boy, play”, 1.2.188). Leontes’ language connotes class as well as moral disgust. To “play” in this fashion is to be “As rank as any flax-wench” (1.2.279). Tutored by Leontes’ “presentational gestus”, we understand what it was like to be Stephen Gosson. The minutest tricks of body language harbour oceans of low complicity. We view theatre both from an enchanted and a disenchanted (yet no less enthralled) perspective at the same time. My point is that we should be unsettled. We should not at this moment be able to assure ourselves that Hermione is blameless and Leontes deranged. We should be simultaneously inside the adverted personation (accepting it on its own conventional terms) and yet outside it – viewing it with so preternaturally sharp an attention to surface detail that we are obliged to refuse the conventionally legitimizing construction. What is partly at issue here is a difference in modes of attention. Where a vocal/aural mode of attention requires dialogical attunement to and sympathy with the intention of the address (as in Bakhtin’s “the speaker listens, the listener speaks”), a visual mode of attention requires no such attunement and – the further insisted upon – will lead to exteriority on the one hand and a kind of endless suppositionality on the other. Again, the opposition is between a harmlessly engaged complicity (“I hear and allow what you are saying to me”) and the disengaged mode of “delation”: the denunciation of a complicitous compact from a “superior” position of surveillance and the noting of its signs as evidence for the prosecution. Yet again, the moment forces us to be both within the charmed vocal theatre of the Prologue in Henry V (“think when we talk of horses that you see them”, 26) and outside it, refusing to “piece out” the naked visual object of the “brawl ridiculous” with the epic imaginings required by the dramatic genre. We are then unsettled, teetering over an abyss of radical scepticism, not unlike Poe’s Ussher (“search the words for their thoughts, crack them open, reveal the creatures crawling within”). The necessary counterpart to radical scepticism it would appear is a kind of endless credulity: a predisposition to see in the hollowed visual shell depth upon depth of depravity. Yet how credulous can it be to think that wives play fast and loose with husbands? Leontes does not merely delate his wife to the audience but asks the audience to judge his case by their own:

The Author’s Accomplice

127

There have been, Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now, And many a man there is, even at this present, Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm, That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence, And his pond fished by his next neighbour, by Sir Smile, his neighbour. (1.2.191–7)

The presentness of the theatrical moment is heavily insistent. Leontes suggests that his doubt – his ontological condition – is exactly that of the audience. At that very moment and place (a theatre in the licentious suburbs, Gosson’s “market of bawdrie”), a man could have no certainty of what has or has not passed between “Sir Smile” and his wife. Leontes’ insinuation is however more successful than Gosson’s suggestion that the theatre is a mere pretext for a “market of bawdrie”. It remains within the scope of scepticism. It has not slid over into fantasy. Only on such a reading, it seems to me, is the first Act of The Winter’s Tale fully answered by the last Act. The doubleness of this moment in the first Act – at once personation and gestus (or manically emptied personation, radical scepticism) – is recalled at two points in the last Act: the “wonder” of Leontes and Perdita at their mutual discovery, and the statue scene. By this stage in the drama, the original dualism of personation vs. playing has been filtered through a transfiguration of playing in the Act 4. Playing there is not a disenchanting mode (in opposition to personation) but one that is almost magically enchanted. Thus to play the goddess Flora during a “Whitsun pastoral” (4.4.134) is in some sense to become Flora (“sure methinks this robe of mine / Does change my disposition” 4.4.134–5). This brand of playing, however, is self-consciously ritual rather than theatrical. Thus when a self-conscious player like Autolycus offers a song, Perdita begs the clown: “Forewarn him that he use no scurrilous words in’s tunes” (4.4.213). The emotion proper to such a transfiguration of playing is “wonder”, an emotion that fills the visual image of the player just as oceanically as it is emptied by the scepticism of Act 1: They seem’d almost, with staring at one another, to tear the cases of their eyes; there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they look’d as they had heard of a world ransom’d, or one destroyed. A notable passion of wonder appeared in them … (5.2.11–16)

128

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Presented with the spectacle of each-other via the estranging gestus of the gentleman’s narrative, Leontes and Perdita invest it with language, meaning, authority and passion. Complicity – in the sense of an “entente profonde spontanée, souvent inexprimée entre deux personnes” – has become sacramentalized. Filled with the word, the player’s image (“their very gesture”) becomes a new creation – one that is literally beyond personation (there was such “casting up of eyes, holding up of hands with countenance of such distraction that they were to be known by garment not by favour”, 5.2.46–9). In the statue scene, these meanings are rendered explicit. Leontes is told that the statue will not speak – the image will not become animate – unless the fullness of wonder is converted to the fullness of faith (“It is required / You do awake your faith”, 5.3.94–5). Again, as in Act 1, Leontes dwells on the surface of the image (“What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?”, 5.3.78–9) but only so as to fill it the more with the affect he witheld from it – the enabling complicity he denounced in it – in the first Act. The magic of this Act is inseparable from the playerly surface, the well-worn convention, the stubborn indecorum, the old tale. IV The second moment to interest me – in which a high personation is complicitously linked with a low playerly mode – is when (in Measure for Measure) Isabella inadvertently inspires lust in Angelo. As an account of intent, “inadvertence” has meaning purely within the dimension of character and hence personation. But there is an eerily ludic dimension to Isabella’s plea, less easily seen: namely, its performative character, or more precisely its rehearsal and gestic adversion as a performance by Lucio. In this dimension, I suggest, the role (and responsibility) of Isabella for Angelo’s response is not well explained by the notion of “inadvertence”. An effective explanation must account for the nature of the dramatic and theatrical link between Isabella and Lucio, between high-minded character/performer and low-minded performance coach. To grasp this, however, it is helpful to look first at one of Shakespeare’s dramatic and theatrical sources: George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (1578). Whetstone’s play anticipates Shakespeare’s in the pleading scenes, in its low-life subplot, and (to my mind) in an implied dissonance between pleading and performance, whereby the pathos of the former becomes at risk of contamination by the gamesmanship of the latter. Cassandra is admittedly far

The Author’s Accomplice

129

less eloquent than Isabella, her rhetoric less dangerous, less cunningly targeted on the human weakness (the inherited sin) of her adversary. In Whetstone’s, as in all other versions of the story bar Shakespeare’s, it is the brother who incites the virtuous sister to plead on his behalf. And aside from the obvious instruction to “assaulte his hart, in my behalf, with battering tyre of tears” (2.2), Andrugio does not coach Cassandra in rhetorical or performative strategy.20 Accordingly perhaps, Cassandra’s plea is more clearly decorous than Isabella’s: directed at the judicial role rather than the fallible human agent. For all this, however, Whetstone betrays a certain unease about the decorum and morality of his play. The preface to the printed version is oddly guarded: “the effects … are good and bad: vertue intermyxt with vice … unlawfull desyres (yf it were possible) [were] queancht with chaste denyals”.21 Are “chaste denials” really up to the job (in life and on the stage)? Whetstone seems hesitant. At the same time he wants to assure us that the range of characters and dialogue is decorous: For to worke a Commedie kindly, grave old men should instruct, yonge men shuld showe the imperfections of youth, Strumpets should be lascivious, Boyes unhappy, and Clownes should speak disorderlye: entermingling all these actions in such sorte as the grave matter may instruct and the pleasant delight; for without this chaunge the attention would be small, and the likinge lesse.22

The tone of this is almost Sidneyan. But apart from “lascivious” females and clowns, this somewhat Plautine character range is not a close match for the teeming rogues’ gallery of Promos and Cassandra. Again we sense a hint of ambivalence. Whetstone can only hope that his play will be properly instructive. Readers should imitate the example of the Roman senators who, in visiting plays, “from these trifles wonne morallytye, as the Bee suckes honny from weedes”.23 Finally, Whetstone admits another misgiving, a fear that, “the worke (because of evel handlinge) be unworthy your learned Censure”. 24 I would like to suggest that by “evel handlinge” Whetstone is not just being modest. He seems to mean something more than flawed writing, something more like a contamination which has entered the text at the level of playing – and stayed there. Whetstone’s ambivalence is echoed by the printer. In a note from “the printer to the reader”, “I.J” or Richard Jones – the same printer who would take it upon himself to fillet Tamburlaine of its “frivolous jestures” twelve years later in 1590 – mentions the special difficulties presented to him by Whetstone’s text:

130

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10 Gentle Reader, this labour of Maister Whetstons, came into my handes in his first coppy, whose leasure was so little … that he had no time to worke it a new nor to geve apt instructions to prynte so difficult a worke, being full of variety, both matter, speache, and verse: for that every sundry Actor, hath in all these a sundry grace …25

In spite of claiming to have worked from Whetstone’s unedited “first coppy”, Jones tortuously implies that the copy was in fact full of actors’ contributions: its variety (of “matter, speache, and verse”) betraying the fact that “every sundry Actor, hath in all these a sundry grace”.26 Whetstone is said to be unhappy about this, being “in many places … driven both to praise, and blame, with one breath, which in readinge wil seeme hard, & in action appeare plaine”.27 (The source of his discomfort may not be conveyed in a reading, but it was or remains clear enough in performance.) In short, both author and printer give the strong impression of a text which has been muddied in ways that are beyond their powers to “authorize”. One suspects they protested too much. The raunchy bits of the low-life subplot were too numerous and entertaining to cut – at least, if sales were a priority. We can appreciate the personal dilemma this must have posed to Whetstone. He would shortly make the same transition as Gosson: from playwright to anti-theatricalist. Gosson’s tract would appear in 1579, the very next year. When the main plot of Promos and Cassandra was redacted in Whetstone’s Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582), it is described as “no stage toy”.28 We also find the odd suggestion that it “was never presented upon stage”.29 Two years later Whetstone would attack the stage outright in his Touchstone for the Time (1584). Reading Promos and Cassandra in the light of its preface and Whetstone’s subsequent anti-theatricalism suggests a more immediate reason for his ambivalence. Much as in Shakespeare, the pleading of the sister is accompanied by a lewd partner act (in this case centred on a courtesan, Lamia). Briefly, where Whetstone’s proto-Sidneyan tolerance of “pleasant delight” may have countenanced the introduction of the distractingly large subplot, at two moments in particular he may have been uncomfortable about the likelihood of its subverting – rather than comically underlining – the “necessary matter” of the main action. In the first moment, Cassandra has just agreed to Andrugio’s request to prostitute herself to Promos. To his argument that her crime will be cancelled by her pure intent, Cassandra answers that slander is impervious to such nice distinctions. In a matching action, Lamia is brought before Phallax (a deputy magistrate) who offers to pardon her in return for sexual favours.30 Urged by her pimp (Rosko) to “dally but do not” (3.6), Lamia puts on a show of mock modesty (pretending not to understand Phallax) before finally inviting

The Author’s Accomplice

131

him to her house. This not only mocks what in the preface Whetstone describes as Cassandra’s “chaste denyals”, but in fact bears out her fears of slander only too well. In the next scene, Cassandra appears on the way to Promos’s bed, “apparelled like a Page”: Unhappy wretche, I blush my selfe to see, Apparelled thus monstrous to my kinde: But oh, my weedes wyll with my fault agree, When I have pleasde lewde Promos fleshlie minde. What shall I doo, go proffer what he sought? Or on more sute shall I give my consent? (3.7)

Not only is Lamia’s tactic echoed here (withholding consent until further “sute”), but the costume change, too, conspires to mock this notionally piteous spectacle. In strictly performative terms, the pathos of “chaste denyal” (by a boy playing a girl dressed as a boy) must have been very difficult to sustain before an audience just tutored by Lamia in the finer points of dallying.31 What is difficult to convey in the space of this paper is the impact Lamia must have made on the audience. She is an entertainer, who enters singing (“Al aflaunt now vaunt it …”, 1.2) and breaks into song throughout her part. In view of the performative “excess” invested in the Lamia part, we must ask to what extent it represents an initiative of the players (a kind of theatrical value-adding) or was under Whetstone’s control. The likelihood must be heavily in favour of the former, which might explain Whetstone’s ambivalence about his play (as it stands, unfilleted of a riot of “frivolous jestures”) and about theatre generally.32 What difference would this reading of Promos and Cassandra make to a reading of Isabella’s performative pleading in Measure for Measure? In the first place, we gain a new perspective on Shakespeare’s use of Lucio. On the one hand, Lucio is deputized by Claudio to carry out the function (of persuading the sister to plead) that had been exclusively the brother’s in Whetstone. In this purely functional sense, Lucio can be regarded as an extension of Claudio. On the other hand, however, Lucio also appears to resume the theatrical (as distinct from dramatic) function of Whetstone’s Lamia. In this sense, he is a ludic representative, a carnivalesque celebrant, of the licentious suburbs. We should think about Lucio’s dramatic and theatrical relationship to Isabella in this context. Lucio’s rhetorical coaching is shrewd of course: Isabella should think less about formal argumentation than about passional persuasion. She

132

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

should address herself less to the role (the judge) than to the man, specifically reminding him of what theologians would call his underlying “solidarity in sin” with Claudio. But more than this, Lucio’s persuasion is – in view of his outrageously carnivalesque nature – both ludic and (an automatic attribute of common playing) lewd. Effectively, I am suggesting that Isabella’s ostensible purity of motive is doubled or shadowed or compromised by Lucio’s “evel handlinge”. The contradiction is extreme. Just as Shakespeare introduces the element of lewd playerly coaching, so too he intensifies the sister’s purity by turning her into a novice of the most uncompromising (least complicitous) of religious orders, and this in the context of what is surely the most complicitous of Shakespeare’s social worlds (a society whose members are bound not just by social bonds but also by a labyrinthine social under-text, a fathomless corruptness that can surface at any time, whether in a simple exchange of words or a single improper intimacy). In such a society, merely to speak is to be complicit in the deeper malaise, to be (in Philip Stubbes’s phrase) “communicat with other mens sinnes”.33 From the moment she is tempted to “communicate”, Isabella gets into trouble – to the point of becoming a vector of (and in some odd but real sense responsible for) Angelo’s lust. Few commentators would care to admit this line of argument (it sounds too much like the standard date-rape defence, “she led me on”). And they might go no further than citing Angelo’s own refusal to blame Isabella: She speaks, and tis such sense That my sense breeds with it … … What’s this? What’s this? Is this her fault or mine? The tempter or the tempted, who sins most, ha? Not she, nor doth she tempt. But it is I That, lying by the violet in the sun, Do as the carrion does, not as the flower, Corrupt by virtuous season. Can it be That modesty may more betray our sense Than woman’s lightness? Having waste ground enough, Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary And pitch our evils there? (2.2.168–77)

The Author’s Accomplice

133

While the possibility of Isabella’s responsibility is adverted, it is elaborately dismissed in terms of the imagery of the violet (Isabella), the carrion (Angelo), and the sun (“virtuous season” and corrupting agent). The very elaborateness of the argument however has a kind of self-deconstructing potential through what Stephen Gosson might have recognized as the ambiguity (the porosity) of language. Thus, the “virtuous season” could as easily refer to the flower as to the sun, and thus to Isabella’s own aura or activity (the virtuous, in other words, “seasons” the vicious). The “sanctuary” / “waste ground” opposition is also shakier than it looks. There is perhaps a backdoor resonance with the fact that “the place of the stage” has more in common with the “waste ground” than with the “sanctuary”. The whole theme of suburban “licence” in Measure for Measure must surely have resonated with the fact that the theatre itself occupied the same “suburbs” as the houses of ill-repute that Angelo orders to be plucked down. If the moral geography of London put theatres and brothels in the same geographic box, the adversion of such a moral geography in the play can hardly have failed to resonate with the place of the performance itself. To answer Angelo’s question, then, it is possible for virtuous “sense” (Isabella’s words) to “breed” a vicious “sense” in Angelo – if the wider performative circumstances are held in mind. Angelo’s predicament in fact is uncannily close to the predicament of the virtuous but corruptible spectator in Gosson: he whose ear is tickled with “straunge confortes of melodie”, whose sight is flattered by “costly apparrell”, whose “sence” is “ravished” by “effeminate gesture … and wanton speache”; which “by the privy entries of the eare, slip downe into the heart and with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde, where reason and vertue should rule the roste”. While Gosson might not have accused Isabella of “effeminate gesture”, he might so have accused the boy playing her. Even an auditor less haunted than Gosson was by histrionic body language (one of those “allowing” auditors who saw straight through the male histrionic body to the female character), could not be guaranteed against semiotic “leakage” from vehicle (the actor) to tenour (the character). What this in turn suggests is that the two dimensions – high actorly pathos and low playerly seduction – that we observe in Isabella during the pleading scenes may not necessarily mesh at the level of her character. In Weimann’s terms, the difference is not quite “transmuted into characterization”. Editors have drawn attention to the irony of Claudio’s confidence in Isabella’s persuasiveness: “For in her youth / There is a prone and speechless dialect / Such as move men” (1.3.172–4).34 But such suggestiveness is more in the eye of the beholder – or, for Gosson, the eye of the theatre-goer or the body of the

134

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

boy actor – than in the character of the “youth”.35 This said, it is possible to read playerly seductiveness into Isabella’s character. The 2005–06 production by Complicite (sic) at London’s National Theatre presented Isabella as a bluestocking only half aware of her sexuality and seductiveness. But we should recognize this for the naturalistic licence that it is. It is more precise and radical to see character and performance in ambiguously productive tension with each other rather than as dovetailed. This way, the moral dilemma is shifted from the character to the audience, which finds itself sharing the lewd responsiveness of Angelo and the sadistic voyeurism of Lucio. V The final instance of actor/player dialectic I wish to focus on lies in a series of passages at the heart of the temptation scene in Othello. As Weimann reminds us, Iago is one of several hybrid Shakespearean figures combining aspects of actor and player. His soliloquies function simultaneously at the levels of character-disclosing personation and also of playerly audience address. In his plataea configuration, Iago delates his own locus-bound persona as a hypocrite, the “shadow” of dutiful, knee-crooking honesty. As a player-commentator on his own “honest Iago” act, Iago provides subversive comic relief. At these moments the audience is freed from the effort of “suspending disbelief” to the point of gleefully indulging it, and indeed vicariously mocking the content of their own fictional “belief”: a blend of high-minded sentiment, romantic wish-dreaming and heroic expectation. All romantic plays require this order of fictional belief, though in this case with the added proposition (outrageous and “preposterous”) that Shakespeare has tricked them into endorsing: that this stage union between a black man and a noble white girl is to be taken positively, empathically and romantically. The residual “disbelief” in such a proposition must have required a spectacular effort for an Elizabethan audience to “suspend”. The task of breaking this thought-envelope was not all Shakespeare’s. The audience had to meet him half-way, albeit in their own way, “abused … by spells and medicines bought of mountebanks” (1.3.60–61). Iago, then, allows them to view the impossible proposition that Shakespeare has charmed them into believing from a low playerly perspective, and thus relax into their own underlying thought-world (“what visions have I seen! / Methought I was enamoured of an ass” – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.75–6). At some point in his quasi-comic complicity with the audience, Iago’s language shades over into another register, sounding less like the gleeful

The Author’s Accomplice

135

confidences of a player than the sober tones of the anti-theatricalist. To the spinelessly romantic Roderigo, Iago adopts the idiom of muscular Christianity and the voice of “discretion”. When Roderigo talks of “incontinently” drowning himself, Iago intones a Euphuistic sermon on the will: Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness or manured with industry, why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills … (1.3.320 ff.)

Laid out in their neat little plots, the Euphuistic iterations are all part of the act. But the language is uncannily complicit with that of the anti-theatricalists, the very delator/dilators of the absurd complicities of theatre. The whole speech suggests an opposition between discretion and temperance, on the one hand, and the “preposterous conclusions” (1.3.329) of “unbitted lusts” (1.3.331) of theatre, on the other. Iago’s verbal attack on Othello is not focused on Othello’s attributes as a personated character. Iago is simply not interested in Othello’s putative heroism, “noble siege”, reputation as a warrior. Instead, Iago approaches Othello as if (to use Jonson’s phrase from the title of The New Inn) he were “most negligently played” rather than as if he were a credible personation. Othello’s eloquence is thus translated into “a bombast circumstance / Horribly stuffed with epithets of war” (1.1.13–14). The voice that enabled Desdemona to see “Othello’s visage in his mind” (1.3.252), and the narrative that won over the Venetian senate, are dismissed as cheap theatrical rhodomontade: “Mark me with what violence she first loved the Moor, but for bragging and telling her fantastical lies. To love him still for prating? Let not the discreet heart think so” (2.1.223–6). The vantage is exactly that of the “discreet”, disenchanted and hostile observer of the stage. Iago’s racist comments about Othello treat him as a theatrical grotesque, more at home in one of the Othello burlesques that were to flourish on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stages than in a tragedy. Iago’s refusal to take Othello seriously, then, is not a matter of his character, but his ontological condition as a theatrical monster, a playerly grotesque, or, in Weimann’s terms, a “disfigured” theatrical show like Richard of Gloucester. In this retrospective optic, the audience’s admiration of Othello in the opening Acts will seem of a piece with Desdemona’s witlessness to have fallen in love with this “extravagant and wheeling stranger of here and everywhere” (1.1.139–40): effectively this yarn-spinning, strolling player.

136

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Iago’s usurpation of the anti-theatrial stance calls the romance, the extravagance, the erotic release – in short, the entire world of romantic theatre – into question. Yet at this point, with disillusionment apparently triumphant, a trap is sprung on anti-theatrical knowingness. As our enabling complicity with promiscuous theatrical illusion drops away, a new and unpleasantly modern complicity replaces it. We have noted that the complicity laid at theatre’s door by Gosson is without content, no more really than anxiety at an incontinent solidarity with those on the lower rungs of the moral/social ladder. The complicity partaken in the temptation scene, however, is less the doing of “theatre” as of anti-theatrical discourse: specifically its delation/dilation tactic.36 The unholy intimacy that opens up between Othello and Iago is not the common complicity of coney-catchers on the street corner. Instead it is called into being by the surveillant gaze, its traditional magisterial opposite, the discourse of delation/dilation. The darkest complicity then emerges from the denunciation of common complicity. Thus Othello takes Iago’s hints about Cassio and Desdemona, not for what they are (“tricks of custom” in a “false disloyal knave”, 3.3.125-27), but rather as “close dilations working from the heart” (3.3.128). The celebrated crux, so well unpacked by Patricia Parker, suggests both denunciation (delation) and rhetorical elaboration (dilation). They are “close” both in the sense of secrecy (the suspicions have not been given anything like full voice) and for a spring-like capacity to uncoil from their folded state. It is exactly Gosson’s tactic with the theatre audience: gather the signifiers of complicity together in a train of Euphuistic suggestion and allow the signified of complicity to unfold of its own accord. Othello touches on the same complex of foldedness and unfolding some moments later when he surmises: “This honest creature doubtless / Sees and knows more, much more, than he unfolds” (3.3.247–8). In French, pli – root of complicité – indeed means “fold”. Hence to “unfold” or declare or delate is both the opposite of complicity and in a sense its guarantee. Since foldedness is the condition of complicity, how, without this delatory moral notice and this dilation or unfolding, would we have any inkling of its presence? Othello comes close to unmasking Iago when speaking of “exsufflicate and blowed surmises matching thy inference” (3.3.186–7). The image represents another kind of opposite to “close dilations”: we now see the “dilations” for what they are, after they have been unfolded, a tawdry parade of exploded rumour. At the heart of this rhetorical mechanism, then, lies not complicity, “the thing itself”, but rather the maddening suspicion of complicity’s presence, a kind of self-haunting. Yet, however artful, Iago’s machinations are not enough of themselves to corrupt Othello’s judgement. Othello has first to invite him in:

The Author’s Accomplice

137

I prithee speak to me as to thy thinkings, As thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughts The worst of words. (3.3.136–8)

In structural terms we might see this invitation as a curious inversion of that offered by the chorus in Henry V. There, the invitation to audience complicity already concedes that (in purely practical terms) theatre is grounded in a non-equivalence between signified (“horses”), sign (talking of horses) and reception (the audience’s mental image of horses). If equivalence between signified, sign and reception were a justifiable expectation, then the audience’s complicity would not be needed. Othello’s invitation to Iago, however, works on the basis of the opposite assumption: the possibility of equivalence between Iago’s “thinkings”, his words and thus Othello’s understanding. If Iago will only say the word, then Othello will think what Iago thinks, see what he sees. Tormenting doubt about “that cunning whore of Venice” will give way to certainty. Objective knowledge will be purchased, at whatever emotional price. In strictly epistemological terms, we might characterize the difference between these two different species of invitation as theatrical and anti-theatrical/delative. In the theatrical model, understanding is achieved through an active “entertainment” by the subject, which requires a necessary faith in the mediating illusion. In the delative model, objective knowledge is simply claimed on authority. Ironically of course, the appeal to authority turns out to be no more than a covert and bad-faith version of the overtly theatrical “entertainment” of conjecture. Iago responds to Othello’s invitation with mock refusal to “utter his thoughts”: Why, say they are vile and false, As where’s that palace whereinto foul things Sometimes intrude not? Who has that breast so pure But some uncleanly apprehensions Keep lets and law-days, and in sessions sit With meditations lawful? (3.3.141–6)

Again, Iago’s ostensible reason for not doing what he is in fact doing provides a phenomenology of what is happening discursively. Just as it is unwise to enter a palace (Iago’s mind) in which foul things might lurk, or unwise to open oneself up to a judiciary that might harbour corrupt members, so Othello’s

138

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

mind (his palace) is now laid open to the “uncleanly apprehension” which will indeed corrupt the deliberations of his moral conscience. The theatrical resonance of this image is clear. It recalls the “solidarity in sin” on which Isabella bases her appeal to Angelo, and also Angelo’s image of “the sanctuary” to which evils migrate from the “waste ground” which is their proper condition. Behind that it recalls the cultural image of Elizabethan theatres: both matters of pride for London and matters of shame, pitched outside the city walls in a liminal area reserved for activities too unclean to allow within the city limits.37 And of course, it recalls the anti-theatrical topos of the theatre (stemming from Gosson) in which the “honest man” will be hurt by “the shadowe of a knave”, and potentially worthy plays and personations will be corrupted by the beggarly players who are the actors’ shadows. VI To conclude: Weimann offers us a model of Shakespeare that finds the performative within textual structures, low playing within high personation and character, and all energized with an intelligence that will (I believe) take some time yet to inform mainstream Shakespeare criticism. What Weimann reveals in Shakespeare is a creative conversation – barely reflected in the printed versions of earlier contemporaries, but an essential condition of their performative success – that is worked deeply into the plays, both as a dialectical structural motif and as a hybridity of characters who span the gap between acting and playing. My interest has been in how the playerly half of this equation interacts with the actorly half, and – as itself the focus of attacks on the stage – how it engages the complicities of theatre far more vividly than the anti-theatricalists ever could while declaring with unprecedented moral authority, our ineluctable human inwardness with evil. What Shakespeare reveals finally in Othello is that the complicity that Gosson had originally delated within the kernel of theatrical pleasure is already folded within the “discreet heart” (2.1.225), within its surveillant gaze, its strenuous moral anxiety. Like Gosson, Shakespeare does not use the word “complicity” at these moments, but the condition unearthed in the temptation scene of Othello has the shock of the real rather than the theatrical. It is no jest and we are all mated in earnest.

The Author’s Accomplice

139

Notes 1. Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 2. Ibid., 56–62. 3. Ibid., 39ff. 4. Ibid., 62–70. 5. Ibid., 88–93. 6. Ibid., 88. 7. All references to Shakespeare plays appearing in the text are from, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 8. Le Nouveau Petit Robert: Dictionnaire de la Langue Française (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1996). 9. Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (London, 1579), in Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson, ed. Arthur Kinney (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1974), 88. 10. Ibid., 88. This passage clearly echoes St Augustine’s famous description of the enticement of his friend Alypius into the Arena by the noise of the crowd (St Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 100– 101). 11. Gosson, Schoole of Abuse, 94. 12. Ibid., 96. 13. Ibid., 96. 14. Arthur F. Kinney, “Parody and its Implications in Sidney’s Defense of Poesie”, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 12, no.1 (1972): 1–20, at 1. 15. For Weimann’s discussion of these pamphlets, see Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice, 134ff. 16. Gosson, Schoole of Abuse, 92. This becomes a well-worn routine in later anti-theatrical tracts, of which Philip Stubbes’s version is perhaps most notorious: “For proofe whereof, but marke the flocking and runing to Theaters and curtens, daylie and hourely, night and daye, time and tyde to see Playes and Enterludes, where such wantone gestures, such bawdie speaches: such laughing and fleering: such kissing and bussing: such clipping and culling: suche winckinge and glancinge of wanton eyes, and the like is to be used, as is wonderful to behold. Than these goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate, every one bringes another homeward of their way verye freendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play ye Sodomites, or worse.” See: “Of Stage-playes and Enterludes, with their wickedness”, against the marginal note: “The Godly demeanoures used at playes and enterluds”, in Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London: Richard Jones, 1583). 17. Francis Bacon, “Of the Colours of Good and Evil. A Fragment”, in Essayes and Counsels, Civil and Moral. Whereunto is newly added, a Table of the Colours of Good and Evil (London, 1664), Caput 5, p. 13. 18. The OED gives some seven senses of the word “lewd”, from “lay, not in holy orders” (c .890) to “unlearned, unlettered, untaught” (c. 1225) to “belonging to the lower orders; common, low, vulgar, ‘base’” (c. 1380) to “ignorant (implying a reproach) … ill-mannered” (c. 1380), to “bad, vile, evil, wicked, base (persons)” (c. 1386) to “lascivious, unchaste” (c. 1386). The semantic shift is evidently from a technical class

140

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

term to a value-laden class term, a term ever more heavily weighted with negative implication, especially sexual. 19. For “discretion”, see David Hillman, “Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the Abuse of Rhetoric”, Studies in English Literature 36, no.1 (1996): 70–93. Citing Foucault and Cassirer to the effect that “the fundamental drive of the age … is the impulse to clear delimitation … to distinction and individuation” (70), Hillman focuses on “the ideological density of the word ‘discretion’” (71), arguing that the word undergoes a semantic shift around 1590 in the direction of “personal attributes (tact, propriety of behaviour … in explicit contrast to madness, impertinence, and rashness); a social classification (the separation of those who possess these attributes – the ‘discreet’ – from those who do not” (74–5). 20. George Whetstone, Promos and Cassandra (1578), in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 2, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). 21. Ibid., 443. 22. Ibid., 443–4. 23. Ibid., 443. 24. Ibid., 444. 25. Ibid., 444. 26. In suggesting “that every sundry Actor, hath in all these a sundry grace”, Jones is referring to stage actors. In Jones’s preface to Tamburlaine (1590), the phrase “graced deformities” certainly refers to “what times they were shewed upon the stage”. For Jones’s predilection both for editing playscripts while printing them, and for advertising his own editorial agency to his readers, see Kirk Melnikoff, “Jones’s Pen and Marlowe’s Socks: Richard Jones, Print Culture, and the Beginnings of English Dramatic Literature”, Studies in Philology 102, no. 2 (2005): 184–200. 27. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 444. 28. In a commendatory verse by “T.W. Esquier”: “So, Morall Whetstone, to his Countrey doth impart, / A Worke of worth, culd fro[m] y[e] wise, w[ith] Judgement, wit & art / No Stage Toy …”. 29. See the marginal note at the beginning of the story in Whetstone’s Heptameron of Civill Discourses (London: Richard Jones, 1582): “This Historie for the rareness thereof, is lively set out in a Comedie, by the Reporter of the whole worke, but yet never presented upon the stage.” The “reporter” here – and author of the marginal note – was surely Richard Jones. 30. The name “Phallax” seems to play on Latin “fallax”, or “deceitful”. 31. “Dally and do not” is a kind of motif in Promos and Cassandra. In Act 4, scene 7, Lamia’s maid, Dalia, is sexually accosted by Grimball (a crony of Rosko, Lamia’s man): “I love you so filthilie: law ye now”. Though Grimball is rejected, he comes up with his own version of Rosko’s saying (“maide will saye naye and take it”), and resolves, “in the darke againe ych will hir trye”. 32. It is in fact difficult to avoid the conclusion that the entire comic subplot of Promos and Cassandra was theatre-driven. No pre-Shakespearean version of the story (including Whetstone’s own prose redaction in the Heptameron) has a comic subplot. Its logic is overwhelmingly theatrical. What it adds to the main plot is not dialectical complexity (as in Shakespeare) but a whole beggar’s opera of lewd variation. This is not to suggest that the “author’s pen” was not involved in writing the subplot, but simply that it

The Author’s Accomplice

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

141

was theatre- rather than author-driven. Can we seriously imagine “Morall Whetstone” authorizing this music-hall exchange between Dalia and Grimball?: “Come smack me, come smack me, I long for a smouch, / Go pack thee, go pack thee, thou filthie fine slouch” (4.7). See, “Of Stage-playes and Enterludes, with their wickedness”, against the marginal note: “A divine premunire”, in Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses. J.W. Lever (Measure for Measure, The Arden Shakespeare [London: Methuen, 1976)], speaks of the “undercurrent of irony in the equivocal words ‘prone’, ‘move’ and ‘play’, all capable of suggesting sexual provocation” (18). Gosson’s objections to the stage are rooted squarely in Augustinian theology. In his commentary on The Sermon on the Mount (in The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, The Rev. Marcus Dodds, ed., vol.8 [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1873]), Augustine distinguishes three phases of sin: suggestion, pleasure and consent. The theatre plainly corresponds to the first phase: “the suggestion is made, as it were, by a serpent, that is to say, by a fleeting and rapid, i.e. a temporary, movement of bodies: for if there are also any such images moving about in the soul, they have been derived from without from the body; and if any hidden sensation of the body besides those five senses touches the soul, that also is temporary and fleeting; and therefore the more hiddenly it glides in, so as to affect the process of thinking, the more aptly is it compared to a serpent” (26–7). Isabella’s “prone and speechless dialect” also corresponds exactly to the phase of “suggestion” in Augustine’s typology. It is sinfully serpentine but yet only a “fleeting and … temporary movement of bodies”. Patricia Parker, “Shakespeare and Rhetoric: ‘Dilation’ and ‘Delation’ in Othello”, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 54–74. I am in Parker’s debt for her superb exposition of this crux. I prefer complicity to jealousy as a means of unpacking its relation to the play because complicity is already kin to delation/dilation. Stephen Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1988).

This page has been left blank intentionally

8

Disciplining ‘Unexpert People’: Children’s Dramatic Practices and Page/Stage Tensions in Early English Theatre Jeanne McCarthy

In his early work on the popular tradition, Robert Weimann encouraged critics to do what now seems so natural: to read extant plays as written for, and performed in, a theatrical and social context.1 Weaving several strands of criticism into skilful readings of plays, he highlighted the tension encoded in Shakespeare’s plays between page and stage, between a representational, text-dependent, plot-driven drama that treated the stage as a locus and presentational, audience-centred practices identified with the platea, to argue that “the Elizabethan synthesis” of that tension, which was begun early in the sixteenth century, gave Elizabethan theatre much of its energy. Indeed, the accommodation of “the learned tradition of rhetoric and the humanist concern for form and symmetry … to the practical requirements of the popular theatre with its greater capacity for action, spectacle, and low comedy” was “fruitful” precisely because the synthesis was “a gradual process” that took place in a “step-by-step” evolution.2 If subsequent performance criticism subjected claims about the authority of the Shakespearean page or of the stability of character and text to scrutiny, the foundations of the historical narrative of the popular tradition – something woven from the interpretive strategies employed by E.K. Chambers, Sydney Anglo, Richard Southern, Alfred Harbage, David M. Bevington, and others – has been left largely intact. As a result, one tends to find critics approaching “theatre history”, particularly as it relates to the popular playing tradition, as if it actually were that rarity in early modern studies, a reliable text. Indeed, the 143

144

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

critical parameters and boundaries are deemed so settled that, as Jean E. Howard declared in The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, one could discuss the social power of texts and the “ideological” and “discursive” work they performed without attempting to “give anything like a history of the stage in this period”.3 Since assumptions of a certain shared knowledge inform so many of our interpretations about the dramatic practices of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, it may well be time to reassess and ask what exactly it is that we all seem so certain we know. Re-examining the received narrative and the conclusions built upon it is one focus of this discussion. Much fraying around the edges of the received narrative of the medieval through the Elizabethan stage has already occurred. Many distinctions that have defined the popular tradition have already been challenged. Perhaps most familiarly, the habitual conception of theatre history in terms of binaries, including Harbage’s (and Weimann’s) notion of a rivalry between two traditions, has been replaced by a new focus on the emulative nature of the company repertory and the business of playing.4 Even as the broad gestural history of the popular stage resists major revisions, critics remain self-consciously aware of a lack of evidence for much of what they presume about the ephemeral early playing tradition. Deriving much of their clarity about popular practices, as Weimann himself repeatedly does, by positing its difference from its supposedly better-known and more stable other, the elite drama associated with both court and school, critics have concluded that an ability to exploit the power of performance itself derives from popular practice. Such an assessment glances so casually, however, at the transformative effects of humanism, print culture, and Reformation logolatry on performance practices that it invites a more critical reading and redistribution of some of the foundational claims about the academic and popular traditions – and humanism – including the status of the script and author, the comical and theatrical uses of the selfconscious and non-representational Vice, and performance practices that have informed our “historicized” understanding of popular practice. By employing a Weimann-inspired scrutiny of early playbooks within the context of a more sceptical sense of theatrical binaries, I invite here a substantial re-examination of “the humanist contribution to the drama” to explore the extent to which “the popular tradition … saved the drama from academic stiffness”.5 Such an approach will reveal that exploiting the tension between page and stage, between text and performer, is already being explored in the academic and choirboy dramatic traditions – associated with what might reflect a “ministerial” form of authorship in multiple senses – long before and alongside the dynamic interaction of pen and voice in the Elizabethan

Disciplining ‘Unexpert People’

145

drama, and well before such watershed years in professional playing and publishing as 1567, 1576, the 1580s (that is, the University Wits, the Queen’s Men, Tarlton), and 1594, or even the advent of humanism, the Reformation, or the flourishing of print culture. Ultimately, such an examination will require rethinking many of Weimann’s critical conclusions, but it will also bolster a number of his initial findings by demonstrating their previous existence in an often oversimplified context: one that encompasses the use of children as performers. Thus, in spite of the association of the children’s companies with virtually all of the major and minor dramatists of the period but Shakespeare; their dominance at Elizabeth’s court from 1558 to 1591 and prominence again from 1600 to 1603; their connection to the earliest efforts to publish play texts; their notorious but little-understood involvement in the religious debates that fuelled the Marprelate Controversy from 1588 to 1591; and their later participation in four of the five recorded censorship conflicts under James, companies of young boy actors have exerted little noticeable pressure on contemporary scholarship revising the history of the Renaissance drama. Yet, far from being merely a faddish piece of theatrical trivia in the culture that produced Shakespeare, the children’s tradition has a long history of fuelling some of the major developments, indeed the very “power of performance”, that led to the flourishing of the drama in the late Elizabethan period. As we shall see, many of the delightful elements of early plays thought to reflect popular practice may rightly be assigned to the monastic and then humanist academic traditions. Playbooks in the Adult Tradition An irreconcilable contradiction derived from the received critical tradition persists in Weimann’s narrative of the popular stage, evident early in the Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition as well as the latest work, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, in that it assumes that although the itinerant companies relied on improvisation and were unlikely to perform long plays, virtually all of the surviving plays from the early Tudor era can be ascribed to a popular auspice and deemed illustrative of popular practices. Such a view informs one of the long-held tenets of Shakespeare criticism: that Shakespeare’s approach to playwriting has its roots in a popular practice in which early playing troupes performed plays from scripts written by playwrights. And yet uncertainty regarding the auspices of early plays renders suspect claims that supposed “popular” elements within them can really be

146

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

attributed to that tradition and not to another more confidently associated with print culture. After all, E.K. Chambers “conjecture[d] that the boys’ companies were much more under the influence of their poets than were their adult rivals; it is noteworthy that plays written for them got published much more rapidly than the King’s or Prince’s men ever permitted”.6 Weimann and his recent collaborator, Douglas Bruster, thus almost, but not quite, concede that texts were not inherently part of the popular tradition when they refer to the “terra incognita of mid-Elizabethan theatre history, where as early as 1567, with the opening of the Red Lion playhouse near Stepney, we are confronted with a startling disparity between the existence of large-scale theatre and the absence of dramatic texts”.7 A scrutiny of the records in the Stationers’ Register has, in fact, yielded little evidence of a strong connection between itinerant companies and plays prior to the 1580s. Leicester’s Men, “the most prominent company of the 1570’s”, to cite one example, had neither a permanent playhouse nor play titles associated with them, but, more importantly, no conception that these were desirable.8 According to Andrew Gurr, a travelling company like Leicester’s Men could make “one play ... serve twenty towns”.9 Weimann and Bruster thus speculate that the itinerant players, like their audiences, had no use for the “‘long’ Elizabethan play”; rather, the actors seemed to flesh out their performances with knock-about improvisatory clowning, as is suggested by their inclusion of at least two prominent clowns when touring through the Netherlands: Robert Wilson, known for his “extemporal wit”, and Will Kemp, known outside Shakespearean plays for his comic jigs, morris dances, minimally scripted “merriments”,10 and physical comedy.11 Weimann and Bruster suggest that this reliance upon clowning accounts for the “remarkable paucity of textual traces” in company records.12 A similar reason is given for the paucity of texts in the repertory of the most prominent company of the next decade (a meagre nine plays), the Queen’s Men, who from 1583 to the 1590s dominated the court calendar and travelled successfully, often as two distinct troupes, covering more ground than any other rival in those years. According to Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, after the significant ushering in of a professional drama in 1576, “very few plays from the adult professional companies were published during the 1580s”;13 indeed, “the first play to be published which can be connected to the adult professional companies of the 1580s was [a Queen’s Men play] Three Ladies of London, which came out in 1584”.14 Noting the curious lack of author personae in this particular company has led them to speculate that early modern authorship in general is best studied in terms of a repertory rather than authorial biography and even to conclude that “print culture and the Queen’s

Disciplining ‘Unexpert People’

147

Men were not a good match”. 15 McMillin and MacLean conjecture that here as well, because the Queen’s Men was primarily an “actor’s theatre”, this company relied on the talents of five clowns, Robert Wilson (from Leicester’s Men), the famous Dick Tarlton, John Singer (who later joined the King’s Men), George Attwell, and John Adams, as well as rope-dancers and fiddlers – while authorship was likely collaborative in support of a house style defined as “medley”.16 An independence from the text is further suggested by evidence that well into the seventeenth century in the professional companies, the printing of plays was far less frequent in the adult companies than it was in the boy companies. Wendy Wall observes, for instance, that “Only about 30 of the 282 plays mentioned by Henslowe [in his accounts for the Rose playhouse] were ever published”, a fact that led her to question whether it is even appropriate to assume that “Renaissance playtexts had authors”.17 Wall’s observation does not lead her, it is important to note, to doubt the existence of a complete play text as the original ground for performance (usually such a text is imagined as existing as “foul papers” or in manuscript). Rather, the basic narrative that the popular early professional company, like the earlier itinerant players, had playbooks authored for their performances, and that a performance originated in a fully developed play that was written with the intention or expectation that it would be performed by a popular troupe, has held despite such challenges. Of course, some support for such a link has been adduced in title pages of playbooks appearing around mid-century that included the phrase “offered for acting” and which provided doubling prescriptions (however inaccurate) which recommended them for performance by small casts of four, five, six, or seven actors. Bevington suggests that such print-shop marketing strategies provided reliable testimony that travelling players commissioned, employed, or purchased such plays.18 However, as he noted, the imprecision in offering a given play text to four to six or more players belies a certain ambiguity surrounding marketing notions of a conventional troupe size. Occasional errors in the “division of the partes” implied a print-shop intrusion that was hardly reflective of original performance conditions for the play. Ultimately, the logic supporting an identification of surviving early plays with the itinerant popular tradition appears to be more reliant on a pre-existing narrative than it is on direct evidence. The belief that plays and interludes must have been written specifically for playing troupes prior to the emergence of certain evidence of books being produced for Henslowe’s Rose can be partially traced to another apparent indication of such a practice that surfaced in one late Elizabethan play, The Booke of Sir Thomas More (c. 1590). As Bevington

148

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

has so deftly and persuasively argued, Munday and his collaborators seemed to confirm the dependency between early itinerant players and play books, and thus the emergence of authorship within that tradition, in the scene where a touring company arrives at More’s household to offer a play for the evening’s entertainment of the Lord Mayor.19 Yet, though this fact has drawn little notice, of the play texts claimed by the fictional players in The Booke of Sir Thomas More, most can be associated directly or indirectly with a school tradition. The play More chooses, for instance, is Francis Merbury’s “the mariage of witt and wisedome” (c. 1579),20 which is a version of the young-scholar-led-astray-byvice plot explored in John Redford’s The Play of Wit and Science (c. 1534-47) and Sebastian Westcott’s The Marriage of Wit and Science (c. 1569–70), both school plays performed by the Children of St Paul’s. More to the point, as J.O. Halliwell noticed long ago, the play the players actually perform “should be nothing more than an alteration of [another play in the repertory] Lusty Juventus, ingeniously adapted so as to suit the other title”.21 That is, the players actually perform a medley drawn from two titles in their list, both of which feature a youthful protagonist. A line from the Epilogue of The Marriage of Wit and Science appears to be the only reference to an otherwise unidentified title in the repertory, “hit naile of the head” (“Yet may you say vpon the hed / The very naile is hit!”, 13–14), again suggesting that these two titles may be referring to variations of the same plot or play or that this company seems to have been able to adapt and combine plots or characters from texts written for other contexts or groups at will. Given that several of the plays claimed by the troupe appeared in print with doubling prescriptions included, this company’s “repertory” may reflect the transmission of elite plays into popular hands. If this popular troupe’s ability to make up its own medley from the various plays on hand is representative, then this fictionalized account of playing conforms to but also complicates Barbara Mowat’s observation that occasionally “print precedes performance”. 22 The school origin of several of the players’ books in the More play,23 moreover, provides grounds for a different narrative, one consistent with a mass of evidence demonstrating that authorship developed outside the itinerant tradition. Before authors like Shakespeare chose to write for the adult players, these professionals seem often to have simply borrowed or appropriated playbooks (or mere “plots” or stories) written for the elite performance tradition of child players. If we entertain this very real possibility, we will have reason to reconsider Weimann’s idea of a popular-humanist binary based on plays that have been erroneously assigned to popular auspices.

Disciplining ‘Unexpert People’

149

Plays, Players, and Authorship in the Children’s Tradition The certitude that early players performed from written plays depends on a faith that evidence is merely missing, not imagined. What actually survives, however, may tell a different story. Notably, as Greg Walker has elsewhere found, “by the very fact of their written form, all the [early Tudor] dramatic texts which we now possess are ‘elite’ creations”24 rather than “popular” ones. Other evidence suggests that playwriting developed within the children’s playing tradition while the tension between performer and text detected in the repertories of the London-based professional playing companies after 1576 reflects the fact that the adult professional troupes were, unlike the scripted boy players, uneasily adapting to the unfamiliar rigours of performing by the book. A contrast with such uneasiness can be found in two iconic plays that have long been considered early entries in the popular tradition: Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres and John Skelton’s Magnificence (c. 1519). The assignment of Skelton’s Magnificence to the popular tradition was enabled by its early critical identification as a new type of morality play containing a secular allegory satirizing the court of Henry VIII.25 By privileging this morality’s secular political subtexts, early editors initiated a chain of interrelated associations: soon it began to seem well-suited to secular auspices including a “four men and one boy” troupe, “the traditional composition of the touring company”,26 and, then, to have been performed with the court and its patronage in sight before the Merchant Taylors in their London guild hall, perhaps as “an entertainment to accompany some special banquet”.27 And yet, despite the consensus that emerged in support of such performance assignations, so little biographical or historical evidence exists to support any of them that one recent editor was forced to conclude that Skelton’s biography “is not that of a person we would expect to have written Magnificence”.28 If we attend to the author’s biography, however, a greater likelihood exists that Magnificence was written instead for chapel children or a song school, and staged originally in the exquisite monastic abbey of Westminster as part of a monastic educative dramatic tradition c. 1519. In an era when monasteries still did much of the educating, and during the years conventionally assigned to Magnificence, 1516–22, Skelton was living safe from censure in an apartment “south of the Great Belfry” within the Sanctuary in the precinct of the powerful Benedictine monastery of Westminster Abbey. He was in residence at a time when Westminster was sponsoring both secular and sacred entertainments. In 1509, for instance, its worldly Abbot Islip was entertained there by “the king’s

150

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

minstrels and players … [a] lord of misrule, and even the king’s bear”,29 and William Cornish performed with “the adult choristers of Westminster Abbey” as late as 1523 and “on occasion …. lent garments to the Churchwardens …. in Westminster, probably for performances by the parish choristers”.30 Critics have assumed that the interlude’s eighteen roles and some 2,500 lines would have been ideally suited to adult professional players, yet the peculiar casting requirements for Fancy, Folly, Liberty and Magnificence himself suggest that Magnificence was even better suited to a group of welltrained choir-school boys31 at a time when the abbey had both a well-reputed grammar school32 and a song school.33 At least one boy actor has previously been thought to be part of the cast of Magnificence: the part of the Vice Fancy, because of references to his youth and small size, has been conventionally assigned to a “boye”.34 Since Fancy is one of the largest and most demanding roles in the play, however,35 children rather than an adult troupe may have been playing most of the roles; Folly is, after all, about the same age as Fancy. Other characters are likewise youthful. Liberty is defined by his “raw” or unschooled “reason” (l. 70), his “wild insolence” (l. 85). and his childish behaviour as when he “leap[s] and run[s]” (l. 133). He chafes at Measure’s discipline (l. 131) and his rebuke of Magnificence for having “abused” his liberty (l. 2103) associates him strongly with youth. Several details also suggest the immaturity of the undisciplined and prodigal Magnificence who must be light enough to be lifted up by Poverty after his fall, wrapped in a blanket, and placed somewhere “above”, which Paula Neuss tentatively suggests is upon a “bed”.36 The action of lifting up and, in effect, swaddling, Magnificence would clearly be far easier to stage if he were played by a boy and Poverty by an adult or older boy.37 A group of child choristers is further implied by an educative subtext evidenced by frequent references to schooling, as when Fancy speaks of Folly’s “schools” (l. 1218) and the two continually put to use such “toys” from their schooldays as “writing” (l. 313), “Latin” (l. 1145), and “book[s]” (l. 1294). The Virtue Measure is also depicted as a schoolmaster, in whose “school” Magnificence’s Felicity or Wealth and his unstable Liberty are forced, initially, to enrol (ll. 181, 231). Fittingly for the two schools at Westminster, several characters are quite literally constructed as schoolboys, not unlike the rebellious youth within the St Paul’s school-boy play, Wit and Science. If all the dramatic texts which we now possess are elite creations,38 the printing of Skelton’s play would itself seem to suggest not a popular but an elite auspice. Most surviving printed interludes of the sixteenth century are, in fact, the product of schoolmasters like Nicholas Udall and John Redford,39 or of almoners or sub-almoners of household chapels who may have written

Disciplining ‘Unexpert People’

151

the interludes Youth and Hick Scorner and who typically had some charge involving the education of the chapel children;40 or even those simply with a keen interest in promoting education, like John Rastell. Surviving plays from the early Tudor era thus appear to have originated as productions by educators in noble or monastic households, while possibly having been printed initially, as E.K. Chambers once shrewdly hypothesized, to market such works to other educators.41 Indeed, among the hints of the original performance conditions buried in the texts that were printed “still bearing the signs of that initial performance in their dialogue and stage directions”,42 is the very strong possibility that one original impetus for many of these printed plays may have been a desire to teach. It is within the context of contemporary educational concerns that Magnificence too is best situated. Skelton himself was an educator: his final payment as the young Prince Henry’s tutor gives him the title of “the duc of York scholemaster”.43 Jane Griffiths has noted, moreover, that Skelton’s poetry is marked by a deep concern for audience and the “poet’s educative responsibility”: for him, the “poet’s task” was “education … redefined as and dependent on engaged, interpretative reading”.44 Her own careful reading repeatedly demonstrates Skelton’s efforts to teach his readers the art of interpretation. Learning, he suggests, is what grants the poet the authority and “the liberty to speak”, but it is also what is required of readers to read well.45 A learned play would have suited an audience at Westminster since, at a time when “academic life at Oxford and Cambridge was still lethargic”,46 a number of monks at Westminster were engaged in university studies and acclaimed for their learning.47 A learned environ is suggested in Magnificence in a cleverly instructive allegory – in which several characters are associated by name with false rhetoric and sophistic eloquence or style – that offers a lesson in the abuse of rhetoric. Much of the plot is diverted into scenes exposing the rhetorical trickery and misrepresentation employed by the impish and sinfully carnivalesque trickster Vices. Misrepresentation is also associated, via allusions to Aristotle and Horace and the allegorical character names of the Vices, to the play’s chief academic focus: the abuse of rhetoric. One Vice, for example, is named “Crafty Conveyance”, where “conveyance” suggests not just theft and sleight of hand but communication, language, and style of expression: “The carrying of a communication” (OED 2c, 5), “The conveying of meaning by words; expression or clothing of thoughts in language” (OED 9), “form of expression or utterance, style (OED 9b), and “A means or medium of communicating” (OED 14).

152

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

The critique of rhetoric continues with the introduction of the other Vices. “Collusion”, as suggested by the character named “Crafty Collusion”, has a particular association with verbal trickery as it connotes “ambiguity, in words or reasoning” (OED 3). Collusion’s corrupting effect is apparent when he “reasonably” encourages Magnificence outrageously to abandon reason for an absolute faith in “will”: “Whatsoever you do, follow your own will” (l. 1596). The name “Abusion” given to another courtly Vice, Courtly Abusion, introduces yet another rhetorical term where “abusio in Cicero” – the chief model of humanist Latin style – refers to the “misapplication or perversion of terms” (OED 3). Tellingly, Magnificence observes that Abusion’s “language” is so “Polished and fresh” (l. 1534) that his “speech is as pleasant as though it were penned” (l. 1539). Meanwhile, Abusion “modestly” wishes he were even more “eloquent” (l. 1535). Abusion is a decidedly Ciceronian Vice, then, reflecting the learned monastic Skelton’s suspicions of style and his differences with humanist contemporaries such as Dean Colet and Erasmus on Latin and education. Whereas Skelton’s Vice likely appeared in a non-popular monastic setting, Weimann regards the Vice as a “thoroughly theatrical creation” and considers it the vehicle for the most effective synthesis between the popular and “humanist” traditions. The figure, he explains, could easily adapt to “popular, humanist, or neoclassical conventions of characterization”.48 It is all the more significant, then, that many of the extant early plays bearing Vices are educative children’s plays – the Vice Haphazard is from the Chapel play, Appius and Virginia; Wit and Science (1534) by the St Paul’s schoolmaster John Redford bears several Vice figures performed by boys, as does the celebrated titular example in Jacke Juggler (1547–51) by evangelical humanist and Eton, Windsor Chapel, and Westminster schoolmaster and cleric Udall. In Magnificence, one of the largest parts, the Vice Fancy, who is the smallest and youngest in the play, is assigned to a child actor. When a child plays a Vice, the level of ‘contrariety’ that Weimann associates with popular performance in fact expands: innocence is allied with the seductive power of evil and the child’s diminutive body and voice can become a comic harbour of satanic authority and power. In Magnificence, the performative energy of the Vice, as it is in many children’s plays (see, for instance, the comic and dramatic entrance for the figure Avarice in Udall’s 1553 children’s play Respublica, performed at court, who carries his money and treasure hidden within his cloak), is indulged through the sheer multiplication of mischievous Vice figures. One Vice enters singing and then hides onstage to escape the notice of Magnificence (s.d. line 323); in a long soliloquy (ll. 401–93), he then reveals his comfort with “counterfeit” hypocrisy

Disciplining ‘Unexpert People’

153

while he brags, “This world is full of my folly” (l. 410). Another Vice, the duplicitous Cloaked Collusion, declares in his soliloquy that “Double dealing and I be all one” (l. 696). Through their particular focus on the always playful Vice, authors writing for children thus underscored an especially presentational brand of “contrariety”, that between the supposed past master in sin and the inexperienced choirboy innocent. Not unlike the popular professional clown, the boy actor in the children’s dramatic tradition, whether playing an everyman/ youth, old man, pedagogue, Vice, monarch/tyrant, Moor, woman, gallant, swaggering braggart, or a giant, had an inherently presentational mode of performance calling attention to both the expert actor’s remarkable discipline and skill while also staging the gap between image-making or representation and the audience’s recognition of a child. And so, although Weimann believes that the theatrical vitality of the Vices is the result of generically “humanist” authors assimilating the performative practices of the popular tradition, such an account overlooks an alternate lineage drawing on the Vices (or devils) in the religious-elite tradition that was didactic and educative. 49 Not only the impish Vice, but also the boy actor’s winking performance behind an ill-fitting mask, can be associated with most of the characters in plays emerging from the academic schoolboy/chorister tradition where the player’s “show” was always to some extent inherently “self-resembled”. Michael Shapiro, for one, discusses the spectrum of acting styles possible in the children’s tradition, which required an ability to employ natural, parodic, and declamatory acting styles. 50 Overall, however, an audience’s heightened “dual consciousness” was always present in children’s performances51 as the boy actors inevitably brought to mind the “gap”, to use Weimann’s formulation, between role and actor. This effect, as with the innocent Vices, is pronounced whenever the youths play against type as full-grown, even old, men and require, as a 1553 entry in the audit books for Eton school referring to school playing suggests, a payment for “Beards for players, 5s. 8d”.52 Referencing the absurd lack of verisimilitude in children “bearding it” half a century later, John Marston, in Antonio and Mellida (1599–1600), calls for the character Balurdo to enter “with a beard half on and half off”, a staging that Shapiro reads as instantiating Marston’s wish to draw his “spectators’ attention to the disparity between actor and character” and to “remind the audience that it is attending a play and that the action on stage is an illusion created by child actors”.53 Such an effect is precisely what Weimann describes when Shakespeare does not hide but rather foregrounds the gap between charismatic actor and scripted role, a mode of theatre that celebrates the power of performance and draws upon an actor’s bravura skill at “personation” rather than “impersonation”.

154

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Interestingly, in an especially moving tribute to the skilful performance of the child actor, – in this case, Salomon Pavy of the Children of the Queen’s Chapel, upon his untimely death in 1603 – Ben Jonson provides a glimpse of the delightful “contrariety” a child actor could produce on stage when he describes Pavy as having acted “Old men so duly, / As sooth, the Parcae thought him one, / He played so truly” (ll. 14–16).54 The authors writing for children were experimenting with putting highly trained children in roles for which they were otherwise “over-parted”: a tall Moor in Poetaster, the giant Barbarossa in Pestle, and Udall’s eponymous cowardly swaggerers Thersites and Ralph Roister Doister. It is also significant to a revised understanding of a page/stage hierarchy that the child actor was expected to perform such highly theatrical feats while expertly conveying the author’s words. Such an expert performance is evident early and late in the tradition. In 1378, over two centuries before the so-called war of the theatres, a petition from “the Scholars of Paul’s School” sought the king’s intervention in preventing “unexpert people” (adult guild members) from performing their Old Testament play55 and, as late as 1601, a boy impressed into the Children of the Chapel, Thomas Clifton, was kidnapped and threatened with a beating if he did not learn his lines “by harte”.56 In the children’s dramatic practice, individual authors and the use of publication (often derived from religious and classical traditions) required disciplined and expert actors, memorization, and obedience to the written play. Forcing children to learn lines “by harte” thus reigned supreme throughout the era of monastic drama, through the career of the notorious flogger Udall, to that of Jonson, the author described in Cynthia’s Revels as “sweating” and “swearing” at “everie veniall trespasse” against the playtext committed by the Chapel Children. This greater attention to the disciplining of the child actor does not necessarily imply that the adult performances were more “perfect” than the children’s, however. Quite the contrary, it suggests that the children were held to an even stricter standard of rote recitation than their adult competitors. That expectation would have both a stifling and a creative impact on authors and so, in the waning years of the tradition, even the emphasis on memorization became a source of metatheatrical playfulness. In a silly puppet play performed in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), for instance, the puppet-master Leatherhead likens his obedient puppets to child actors, “Pretty youths, sir, all children” who play all the parts “both old and young” (5.3.46). The foolish Cokes observes that they are “a civil company … They offer not to fleer, nor jeer, nor break jests, as the great players do” (5.3.83–4), while Leatherhead remarks

Disciplining ‘Unexpert People’

155

that they are a “well-governed … company” that plays “perfect” (5.3.90, 87).57 These idealized puppet-actors, Scott Cutler Shershow suggests, participate in an aesthetic ideal in which “players could be seen … as puppetlike slaves of a sovereign poet, wholly mastered by authorial intention”.58 The Power of Performance and Elite Practice An even earlier instance of an author playing with the notion of youthful actors contending with the constraints of the play text can be found in Medwall’s interlude, Fulgens and Lucres. As the first vernacular play printed, and one traditionally assigned to a popular troupe, this interlude has greatly shaped notions of popular performance practice. Weimann thought it exemplified the early synthesis of popular and learned elements, suggesting that Medwall drew on the popular tradition to enliven or make merry his academically inspired “sad” concerns. He concluded, in short, that it illustrates how an “English morality and interlude theater, in its changing forms and aspects, anticipated in several important respects the social ‘hodge-podge’ and the cultural ‘minglemangle’ that John Lyly noted just before the Elizabethan synthesis achieved its crowning glory”. 59 Though it is known to have emerged from the elite household of Archbishop Morton, this play’s date remains uncertain. Greg Walker has recently argued for abandoning earlier attempts to assign it a performance date of 149760 and embraced instead a suggestion in William Roper’s Lyfe of Sir Thomas More that a young More participated in the early performance, a possibility that requires a performance date of 1491–92.61 Previous critical refusal to regard Roper’s report that when More was a young man he would “at Christmas tyde sodenly sometimes steppe in among the players and, never studyeng for the matter, make a parte of his owne there presently among them”62 as a recollection of the interlude’s plot, Walker suggests, is “unnecessarily severe”. 63 By some accounts, More was a servant at Lambeth Palace when he would have been eleven years of age;64 others suggest that More was at Morton’s household in 1491–92 when he was fourteen and that Medwall was in Morton’s household by 1490.65 A young Thomas More’s possible participation in the early performance is supported by several details suggesting that the play itself could have been performed by young chapel players. Almost inevitably, a connection to youthful choristers rather than popular players surfaces in several characteristically underplayed details in Medwall’s biography. Interestingly enough, in the printed copies of both of Medwall’s

156

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

plays, the author is identified as the “late chapelayne” to Cardinal Morton in the title page for Fulgens and Lucres (c. 1491–98; printed c. 1512) and “Henry Medwall chapleyn” in that of Nature (c. 1491-98; printed c. 1530). Though the significance of the title has traditionally been dismissed as the printer’s erroneous assumption about Medwall’s function in Morton’s household,66 the position of chaplain would have given him, as Suzanne Westfall’s study of chapels has shown, access to a site for rehearsal and to trained performers.67 The duties of a chaplain, Nicholas Orme observes, were “twofold”: “to teach the choristers and adolescent clerks and ‘secondaries’ of the college to sing, and to organize the daily series of services, accompanied by polyphonic music, which took place in the Lady chapel in honour of the Virgin Mary”.68 The chaplains were also responsible for any pastoral duties requiring literacy.69 The fact that Medwall wrote plays at all, one of which, Nature, is particularly well suited to a chapel’s musical skills and mastery of ritual, and another, Fulgens and Lucres, that contains three-part songs, actually testifies in favour of his holding such a post, since it would have provided him with a playing group capable of performing his interludes as well as an expectation that he provide occasional plays to instruct his students. It is worth noting that a chapel’s musical performances were book-centred; surviving images, including one reproduced by Roger Bowers of musicians singing a secular song and reading from musical texts, suggest that singers read from song books.70 That ability to perform what was written appears to inform the use of chapel players in plays. Many of the traits Weimann associates with the popular tradition – such as sudden interruptions of a banquet, boisterous introductions of the actors suggestive of the beginning of a mummers’ play, improvisation, folk songs, rowdy indecorum, ridiculous rivalry for a woman, and bawdry – appear in the subplot of Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres. While we might then most expect the participation of semi-professional adult actors capable of improvisation in this subplot, it is here that the evidence points most strongly to the participation of young boys, especially if we credit the tradition that More played the part of the precocious and intrusive audience member B at the age of 11 or 14. More significantly, despite the subplot’s reliance upon improvisatory antics, and thus the seeming suitability of the roles of A and B to professional actors, their characters are youthful. They offer to become servants (not councillors) to the young suitors, are ineptly inexperienced in their romantic pursuit of Joan, and they play a game, “fart prycke and culle [arse]”, that makes them seem particularly childish. These three parts are suitable for child actors. For similar reasons, the characters in the main plot, with the exception of Lucres’ father,

Disciplining ‘Unexpert People’

157

Fulgens, who appears briefly in the beginning to empower his daughter with her choice of suitors, would be well suited to schoolboys. All are youthful: the main character is a young maiden, Lucres, and her two suitors are likewise young men. The game that A and B play, “Fart Prycke in Cule”, also suggests a connection with childhood. As Meg Twycross, Malcolm Jones, and Alan Fletcher have found, a game requiring boys to be trussed so that their legs and hands are constrained is represented in surviving misericords from the period at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and even at Westminster Abbey.71 Indeed, as they observe, there is a strong possibility that such carvings reflect a similar “schoolboy game” possibly popular at both institutions since “there were …. choirboys at Windsor, and choirboys at Westminster”, and “Medwall was in the latter vicinity, as a notary in the household of Archbishop and Lord Chancellor Morton based in Southwark, in the 1490s: but he disappears from view before the Westminster misericords were carved”.72 By invoking such playfulness, Medwall hints at a youthful cast. The metatheatricality of Medwall’s humorous incorporation of two characters who play audience members and then join the play to serve as messengers but, without any regard for the script, introduce their own romantic chase, and participate in a scatological game, could have been enhanced by casting the parts for children. The character A is a naive audience member unschooled in theatrical conventions, for on his entrance in the hall he wonders at the concentrated silence of the guests: “ye stonde musynge, / Whereaboute I can not tell” (ll. 20–21).73 B, however, has direct knowledge of the author’s intentions, having seen the plot beforehand and having been “wylled” by the author to deliver the epilogue of the play. B, however, is amply familiar with the schoolroom, ostentatiously displaying a scholarly religious education when he translates his line, “There is no wordes amonge this presse” into Latin: “Non sunt loquele neque sermones” (ll. 17–18; Psalm 19:3). A connection to school is only reinforced when B later defends A’s suitability for employment as Gayus’ servant by claiming that when “He and I dwelled many a feyre day / In one scole”, B was honest for “he bare never away / The worth of an halfe peny” (ll. 644–7). Unlike A, who has no idea what “shall we twayne do now?” (l. 2300) once Lucres chooses her husband and so feels trapped in the play’s world, B clearly knows how to move beyond its fictional stage, and simply observes that they need only “ons go” (l. 2306). When A then expresses dissatisfaction with the resolution, B instructs A how to recognize the signs of a successful conclusion. Not only has the plot been resolved – “Is not the question / Of noblenes now fully defynde?” (l. 2313–14) – but the play has

158

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

made “folke myrth and game” while offering a moral and social lesson so that “gentilmen of name / May be somewhat movyd / by this example for to eschew / The way of vyce and favour vertue” (ll. 2320–24). Conclusions: Humanists at Play In a characteristic turn, focusing on the “induction” in Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres, Weimann claims that when the characters A and B “depart from their roles, address the audience, or refer to its presence”, they are invoking a “popular technique” of “inversion” and “parody”, whereas when Fulgens, Lucres, and the suitors “create a more autonomous world” that is thematically unified, they are participating in a rigid humanist aesthetic and rhetoric which promotes an “illusion of verisimilitude”.74 Such binary distinctions are finally not merely oversimplified but untenable, not only because they presume the absence of influence from the prior church-educative tradition (which itself had long employed humour and inversion, albeit in service of the morally didactic), but because they ascribe an essential dryness and lack of humour to a humanist tradition that was certainly livelier and less rigid or naive about verisimilitude than he allows. Consistently, Weimann conflates neoclassical prejudices against comedy with a humanist movement whose authors (witness Erasmus, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Udall) were especially attracted to the humorous, producing some of the best comic and satiric works of all time. The iconoclastic sometime-polemicist and schoolmaster playwright Udall, whose lively pioneering adaptations of Roman comedy into five-act vernacular plays filled with irreverent, even scatological jokes and a low, colloquial idiom has earned him the title of “father of English comedy”, cannot rightly be described as reluctant to employ “rich idioms” and “proverbs of popular speech” or “cruder but highly theatrical effects”.75 Instead, his translations in Floures for Latine Spekynge (1533) of the heretofore revered Roman playwright Terence into the most homely, colloquial, and proverbial English folk equivalents – that of which we might say, “used … commonly, or … a commen sayinge” (10v), as in “I have stered the cooles” (17r) or “hande and foote, or with tothe and nayle” (3r) – initially earned him a rebuke from stodgy Oxford dons who actually “wanted him to promise not to translate any more Latin books into English”.76 Similarly, the oversimplification of Weimann’s monolithic anti-humanist paradigm is best illustrated by the extraordinary parody of orthodox humanist ideals and Catholic ritual in the iconoclastic humanist William Stevenson’s

Disciplining ‘Unexpert People’

159

Gammer Gurton’s Needle (Christmas/Shrovetide 1551–52), not just the first English five-act comedy but also described as the “most excremental of all Tudor plays”.77 No more can we reject as “academic”, in a pejorative sense, the contributions to the popular tradition of the prior, extremely influential monastic scholar-satirist Skelton. Famed for his colourfully humorous, “ragged” metrical line, Skelton was anything but reluctant to use “comic scenes” in a “tumbling verse” that he is, in fact, widely credited with inaugurating. Only by overlooking Skelton’s own highly educated authorial posturing could scholars blithely assign his play Magnyfiycence, as we have seen, to the popular tradition. Likewise, the earlier antics in Medwall’s play, including a scatological game of “fart pryck in cule”, but more effectively the innovatively absurdist and skilful play with scripted and supposedly unscripted action, also challenge the idea that early humanists were only “deliberately, if not mechanically” employing “a somewhat tentative and inconsequential groping toward a synthesis” of a vital popular tradition.78 Weimann’s assumption of a narrative of “step-by-step” development in humanist-inspired drama, in which Thomas Preston’s bombastically rhetorical Cambyses (c. 1569) must necessarily be defined as more “theatrical” than Medwall’s, Skelton’s, or Udall’s brilliant comic plays, preserves the sense of the popular tradition as simply redeeming learned playwrights from a deadly literariness – “enliven[ing] ‘the sad matter’ with some ‘merry conceits’”. 79 The surviving drama suggests otherwise. Whereas the tradition of popular performance derived in part from preliterary rites, children had for many decades, and indeed centuries, performed from playtexts, and many extant plays, particularly the two plays discussed above, Skelton’s Magnificence and Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres, that have informed notions of the popular tradition – and of Vices in particular – reflect practices and tensions developed within the institution of the school or choir. Long relegated to the status of theatrical trivia, remarkably, the elite schoolboy tradition instead provides a particularly early and flourishing habitation for the tensions between author, text, and disempowered player. That significant history of text and performance – as well as of “authorized” representation and, “contrariously”, both the disciplined/scripted and undisciplined presentation of the “expert” but irrepressible boy actors – contains insights into the delight of performance and theatricality, and a sense of its cultural power, to which those interested in the brilliant play-making of Shakespeare would do well to attend. “Contrariety” was especially present in the elite tradition, where a playwright could make use of the disciplined child’s training as well as the possibility for his irrepressible “imperfection” present in any performance. What the educative tradition brought to the popular tradition was, it seems, more than

160

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

a notion of playing from and within a full-scale play; it brought a history of attending to the productive tension between performer and text. The sense of lost vitality in the drama of the late Jacobean period may well be due in part, as Weimann suggests, to practices imported from the children’s tradition along with the text, such as the idea of a master-director, an authoritative playwright, the demand for expert performance and rote memorization of the text that may have encouraged a conception of the actor as a puppet-like child. But it may also be, in part, the result of a professional approach to playwriting and presentation that lost the impetus to teach, to challenge notions of verisimilitude, and to draw upon child’s play. Notes 1. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), xi. Weimann began his discussion of the popular tradition with the observation that, “compared with purely literary interpretations, recent interest in Shakespeare as a poet in the theatre involves a welcome advance beyond the limitations inherent in exclusively verbal or psychological approaches”, and then drew our attention to ways in which the plays functioned both socially and theatrically in producing meaning. 2. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 106. 3. I do not mean to single out Howard except to take her claim as representative. Her particular expression of this critical commonplace does have a greater relevance to my argument here, however, for the quote continues: “… I pay almost no attention, for example, to the boy companies …” See Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), 8. 4. See, for instance, Roslyn Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 5. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 180. 6. E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 2:50. 7. See Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8. Particularly relevant to this discussion is Robert Weimann’s earlier work, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 8. See the discussions in Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 36–41, 189–92; and in Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, 80. 9. Gurr, Shakespearean Playing Companies, 41; also see Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, 80. 10. The title page to A Knacke to Know a Knave advertises Kemp’s “merriments”, and yet the scene in which the clowns appear is too short to satisfy. The text can hardly be doing

Disciplining ‘Unexpert People’

161

justice to the performance that must have included improvisatory clowning; see John Payne Collier, The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare, 3 vols (London: George Bell & Sons, 1879), 3:336. 11. Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, 80. 12. Ibid., 80. Weimann and Bruster ascribe the lack of texts to a “discontinuity” in theatrical practice caused by the emergence of a skilled performer “for wh[om] the uses of language were either secondary or merely incidental”(8). 13. Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 84. 14. Ibid., 4. 15. Ibid., 85; also discussed in Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, 81. 16. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, 7, 85, 122, 124, 166; see also Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, 81. 17. Wendy Wall, “Dramatic Authorship and Print”, in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–11, at 1. 18. David M. Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 13–25 and passim. 19. See Bevington’s seminal discussion in Mankind to Marlowe, 18–25. 20. The 1579 title page divides the nineteen parts “for sixe to play”. 21. The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, an Ancient Interlude to which are added Illustrations of Shakespeare and the Early English Drama, ed. J.O. Halliwell (London: Shakespeare Society, 1846), 1–64; here, citing the introduction, x. 22. Barbara Mowat, “The Theater and Literary Culture”, in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 213–30, at 215. 23. Of course, playbooks associated with travelling players would have been more vulnerable to loss, and it may well be that such companies used such books as well; my point here is that the popular tradition is not accurately represented by those playbooks that do survive. 24. Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 25. 25. Robert Lee Ramsay, ed., Magnyfycence, a Moral Play, Extra Series 98 (London: Early English Text Society, 1906), xiii. 26. Walker, Plays of Persuasion, 72, 89; Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 48; and Alistair Fox, Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 237. Walker argues for five actors doubling the roles and the sponsorship by a London livery company which could reasonably hope that “word of Skelton’s efforts” would be carried to court; Walker, Plays of Persuasion, 90, 226–7. 27. Such was Paula Neuss’s speculation; see Paula Neuss, ed., Magnificence, by John Skelton, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 43, 42. All line references for the play will be cited from this modernized edition. 28. Neuss, Magnificence, 1.

162

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

29. Barbara F. Harvey and Henry Summerson, “John Islip (1464–1532)”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http:// www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/view/previous/14492/2004–09 (accessed 29 January 2010). 30. W.R. Streitberger, Court Revels, 1485–1559 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 55. 31. The presence of just such a group apparently informs Walker’s proposal of an “abbot’s or prior’s hall” at Westminster Abbey as a possible auspice for the Henrician chapel play Godly Queen Hester, which may have been performed entirely by, but certainly with, boy actors. See Walker, Plays of Persuasion, 131. 32. In the grammar school, a Novice Master taught “a variety of religious and secular subjects” to younger monks and boys from the surrounding area; Trevor Beeson, Westminster Abbey, 8th edn. (London, 1989), 42, 40–41. 33. Harold N. Hillebrand, “The Child Actors”, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 11, no. 1 (February 1926), 13; and John Sargeaunt, Annals of Westminster School (London: Methuen, 1898), 1–3. 34. Walker, Plays of Persuasion, 94; Neuss, Magnificence, 47; John Scattergood, ed., John Skelton: The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 434. 35. Peter Happé argues for a professional actor playing this part; see his “Fansy and Foly: The Drama of Fools in Magnyfycence”, Comparative Drama 27, no. 4 (Winter 1993– 94): 426–52; Ramsay also argued that one of the five actors was a professional fool; Ramsay, Magnyfycence, xlviii–l; Bevington argues for five adult actors in “Mankind” to Marlow, 132–6. 36. Neuss, Magnificence, 46, and note on line 1967.2. 37. Richard Southern translates the “puzzl[ing]” Latin stage direction accompanying Poverty’s line, “Now must I this carcase lift up” (l. 1965), “Hic accedat ad leuandum magnyfycence et locabit eum super locum stratum”, as “Here let him approach to lift up Magnificence and he shall lay him in a spread place”, and Walker suggests, “Here let him approach Magnificence to lift him, and let him put him on a bed”. See Richard Southern, “The Technique of Play Presentation”, in The Revels History of Drama in English, Vol. 2: 1500–1576, ed. Norman Sanders et al., 8 vols (London: Methuen, 1980), 2:71–99; here citing 87; and Greg Walker, ed., Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 395. 38. Walker, Plays of Persuasion, 25. 39. See Victor I. Scherb, “Playing at Maturity in John Redford’s Wit and Science”, Studies in English Literature 45, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 271–97. 40. Surviving household account books for the Tudor Percys demonstrate a lavish household (retaining 166 domestic servants) including a large Chapel, which employed an almoner who was a “maker of interludys”: Percy I, 42, 324–25; cited in Ian Lancashire, ed., Two Tudor Interludes: The Interlude of Youth, Hick Scorner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 27, 30, 82 n.122. See also Suzanne R. Westfall, Patrons and Performance: Early Tudor Household Revels (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 18. 41. The explanation that “the printed texts may well have been aimed largely at readers or ‘schoolmasters’” on the basis of the printers’ additions of doubling and casting recommendations, which appears in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 3:178–80, has been inconclusively challenged by Walker who suggests that the plays were written

Disciplining ‘Unexpert People’

163

instead for “producers of household plays” and marketed to playing companies; see Politics of Performance, 26 n.80, and 17. 42. Walker, Politics of Performance, 33. 43. Maurice Pollet, John Skelton, Poet of Tudor England, trans. John Warrington (London: J.M. Dent, 1971), 41. 44. Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 190, 186. 45. Ibid., 191. 46. Pollet, John Skelton, 13. 47. Harvey and Summerson, “John Islip (1464–1532)”, ODNB. 48. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 126. 49. Ibid., 125. 50. Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays (New York: Columbia, 1977), 127–8. 51. Ibid., 103–38. 52. James L. McConaughey, The School Drama, Including Palsgrave’s Introduction to Acolastus (New York: Columbia University Press, 1913), 26. 53. Shapiro, Children of the Revels, 129. 54. Ben Jonson, “Epitaph of Salomon Pavy, a Child of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel”, Epigram 120, in Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Alexander W. Allison, et al., 3rd edn. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983), 228. 55. See Shapiro, Children of the Revels, 10. As reproduced in Shapiro, the petition is addressed to Richard II from “the scholars of St Pauls school” and requests the prevention of “some unexpert People from representing the History of the Old Testament, to the great prejudice of the said Clergy, who have been at great expense in order to represent it publicly at Christmas”. The source for this reference, first cited by Robert Dodsley, ed., A Select Collection of Old Plays (1744), 1:xii, has never been found; see Anne Lancashire, London Civic Drama: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 80. 56. Charles William Wallace, The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597–1601 (1908; New York: AMS Press, 1970), 68–81. 57. Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. G.R. Hibbard, New Mermaids (1991; New York: W.W. Norton, 1994). 58. Scott Cutler Shershow, Puppets and Popular Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 55. 59. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 106. 60. M.E. Moeslein, ed., The Plays of Henry Medwall: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1981), 68–9. 61. Greg Walker, “Fulgens and Lucres and Early Tudor Drama,” in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 23–35, at 25. 62. William Roper, The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, Knyghte, ed. E.V. Hitchcock. Early English Text Society 197 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 5; cited in Walker, “Fulgens and Lucres and Early Tudor Drama”, 25. 63. Walker, “Fulgens and Lucres and Early Tudor Drama”, 25. 64. See Seymour Baker House, “More, Sir Thomas (1478–1535)”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

164

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

65. Alan Nelson, The Plays of Henry Medwall (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980), 17. 66. Walker, “Fulgens and Lucres and Early Tudor Drama”, 26. 67. It is a curiosity of criticism that another reference to a connection between a literary figure of the period, Alexander Barclay, and the office of chaplain has similarly been challenged. Barclay, the author of an English translation of The Ship of Fools and other educational works, was also identified as a chaplain on a title page, and the veracity of the claim was also treated sceptically; in Barclay’s case, the scepticism stemmed from the presumption that he was more likely serving in the post of schoolmaster. See Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London: Hambledon, 1989), 260. 68. Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England, 260. 69. Ibid., 264. 70. Roger Bowers, “The Music and Musical Establishment of St George’s Chapel in the 15th Century”, in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Colin Richmond and Eileen Scharf Historical Monographs relating to St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle 17 (Windsor: Deans and Canons of Windsor, 2001), 171–213; see plate 7. 71. Meg Twycross, Malcolm Jones, and Alan Fletcher, “‘Farte Prycke in Cule’: The Pictures”, Medieval English Theatre 23 (2001): 100–21, at 104. 72. Twycross, “‘Farte Prycke in Cule’”,114. 73. Henry Medwall, Fulgens and Lucres, in Medieval Drama: An Anthology, ed. Greg Walker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 305–48. All citations are from this edition. 74. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 108, 112. 75. Ibid., 105. 76. Gustave Scheurweghs, Nicholas Udall’s Roister Doister, Edited from the Eton Copy (Louvain: Librarie Universitaire, 1939), xv–xvi. 77. Quoting John W. Velz, “Scatology and Moral Meaning in Two English Renaissance Plays,” South Central Review 1, nos.1/2 (Spring–Summer, 1984): 4–21, at 8. See also Douglas Duncan, “Gammer Gurton’s Needle and the Concept of Humanist Parody”, Studies in English Literature 27 (1987): 177–96; and Robert Hornback, “Reformation Satire, Scatology, and Iconoclastic Aesthetics in Gammer Gurton’s Needle”, in A Companion to Tudor Literature, ed. Kent Cartwright (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010): 309–23. 78. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 105. 79. Ibid., 105.

9

Bifold Adam: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Actor’s Voice Nora Johnson

Robert Weimann’s work on the relation between popular traditions and professional playing in early modern England has in many ways involved the study of contrasting forms and qualities: high and low, ancient and new, audience and player, actor and author, presentation and representation, locus of course, and platea. Without reducing the study of theatrical binaries to anything that can easily be summarized as deconstruction, Weimann has nevertheless opened out these oppositions, revealing the relational forms they threaten to obscure.1 In doing so, he reveals some of the structuring conditions for the unusual and lasting cultural power of Shakespearean theatre. Locus and platea, for instance, emerge in Weimann’s work not just as divisions of the playing space that come along with contrasting expectations about theatrical decorum, audience relations, or the solidity of the theatrical scene. They become instead a set of mutually informing constructions. The locus is reinforced in its imagined stability by the sense that platea-style acting is inappropriate there; the audience-addressing clowns of the platea derive much of their theatrical energy by poking holes in the naturalistic representations of the locus-style performers.2 Of emerging importance among Weimann’s various fruitful studies of theatrical opposition has been the relation between an actor’s playing and an author’s text. The locus is not merely the space of self-contained representation; it is also the repository of a set of assumptions about political authority, about a dominant world-view, about the assumed correctness of the social order. The author becomes the implicit ruler of the territory of representational playing. Actors, on the other hand, to the extent that they call attention to themselves by improvisation, body language, even so simple a gesture as acknowledgement of applause or hissing, would seem to be building a form of platea-style authority poised to challenge the assumption of authorial dominance. Though 165

166

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

in Weimann’s various formulations such opposing categories are never absolute, the outline of the contest is clear. Actors and authors work in relation to one another on the early modern stage with virtually the whole world at stake. The structuring assumptions of the dominant order are both presented and contested through the uses of speech, gesture, space, vision, coherence, freedom, charisma, poetic skill, the beauty of a face or a body, the beauty of a line of poetry. Dramatic authorship, because it is bound up with these things, has a power that carries beyond the moment of performance itself. Such an understanding of the volatile forms of authority at play in early modern drama does much to explain not only the power of performance in the theatre but also the power of performance to signify in print. If the actor’s voice made itself heard in complicated relationship to the author’s pen, so too the work of the actor was available to help shape nascent forms of print authorship. Lukas Erne has argued compellingly, for instance, that Shakespeare’s own career must be understood as simultaneously theatrical and literary. David Schalkwyk has traced the performative language of Shakespeare’s sonnets in relation to his plays. My own work has demonstrated that actors could use their theatrical celebrity to shape careers for themselves as print authors, while Douglas Brooks has studied the energetic marketing of play texts in print.3 On many levels, from high literary discourse to common forms of marketing and textual production, the intersection between the work of the author and that of the actor constituted a generative tension in early modern England. In what follows I will trace the uses of Shakespearean theatricality, particularly noting the kinds of contests and collaborations to which Weimann has called our attention, in a text that was produced long after Shakespeare’s day. In Paradise Lost, that monumental meditation on the ethics and the politics of the poet in a period that saw immense shifts in the structures of authority, the figure of the actor does complicated work. Ultimately, I will contend, Milton uses the very relational forms of playing that Weimann has taught us to associate with the platea as a way of talking about the condition of permanent exile from the locus amoenus, from the possibility of authoritative, divinely sanctioned representation. Like Weimann, I want to argue, Milton saw in Shakespeare’s work a deeply productive tension between self-contained authority and the audience-courting, self-presenting world of improvisation. In his fascinating recent work on the Faust myth, David Hawkes has identified Milton’s Satan as a figure for “the rise of representation”, a set of cultural forces connected to magic, idolatry, theatrical performance, and a money-based economy, all of which share the premise that the signifier, divorced from the signified, has an autonomous efficacy of its own.4 Invoking

Bifold Adam: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Actor’s Voice 167

the long-observed parallels between Satan’s speeches and those of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, Hawkes traces in Satan’s lines a consistent Faustian logic. Tellingly, for instance, Satan elects to forget that he is a creature rather than a self-created being: That we were form’d then say’st thou? And the work Of secondary hands, by task transferr’d From Father to his Son? strange point and new! Doctrine which we would know whence learnt: who saw When this creation was? Remember’st thou Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being? We know no time when we were not as now; Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais’d By our own quick’ning power.5

As Hawkes argues, this sense of being self-created is a supremely theatrical formulation: “For as long as it has existed, theatrical representation has been attacked for inculcating the idea that identity is performative, and for its demand that representation be viewed as constitutive rather than descriptive of reality”.6 Actors, like Satan, are divorced from the grounds of their own signification; this is a condition of apparent freedom that Milton repeatedly connects with fallen forms of self-consciousness. It is also the sense of improvisational freedom from authorial control that Weimann associates with the platea. Among the more pointed markers that the Fall is a descent into theatricality in Paradise Lost, consider the suggestion that Satan “new part puts on”, that he performs the part of an orator in his attempt to seduce Eve into eating the fruit. The language is strangely redundant in Book Nine, as Satan with show of Zeal and Love To Man, and indignation at his wrong, New part puts on, and as to passion mov’d, Fluctuates disturb’d, yet comely, and in act Rais’d, as of some great matter to begin, As when of old some Orator renown’d In Athens or free Rome, where Eloquence Flourish’d, since mute, to some great cause addrest, Stood in himself collected, while each part, Motion, each act won audience ere the tongue,

168

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10 Sometimes in highth began, as no delay Of Preface brooking through his Zeal of Right. (9.665–76)

It seems not compromising enough simply to be an orator here, simply to be misusing rhetoric. Satan puts on a part as if he were moved to a passion as if he were an orator as if he were about to begin speaking of some great matter, as if he would brook no delay. The layers of performative fabrication multiply rapidly. The poem reaches for a way to talk about how Satan is merely acting in the role of the orator, excessively duplicitous, and preparing for his big speech, as Roy Flannagan notes, in terms that are strongly reminiscent of the stage: part, Motion, act, audience.7 Not only is there a kind of infinite regress of theatricality in the suggestion that Satan performs the part of a performer, there is also the sense that the extra joy Satan takes in presenting himself as an orator, inhabiting a role, is damning in a way that goes above and beyond the more fundamental act of misleading Eve. Pausing to “collect” himself, struggling gesturally between composure and disturbed fluctuation, Satan deftly manages the classic performative use of anticipation, winning the audience through acts and motions that postpone his speech, building up the audience’s desire even while miming a sense of frustration and an unwillingness to brook delay. The dilatory path to speech here duplicates in Milton’s writing the actor’s, and indeed the orator’s, deliberate use of deferral to build charisma. After succumbing to Satan, Eve too will take time to think about what her performances should be like. Pondering how to get Adam to eat the fruit, she wonders “But to Adam in what sort / Shall I appear?” (9.816–17). Making her entrance, finally, she comes to Adam in full theatrical mode: “in her face excuse / Came Prologue, and Apology to prompt” (9.853–4). There is a consciousness about playing a role, maybe even an interest in acting for its own sake, almost as deadly as the disobedience itself. The Fall is also accompanied by a hideous new sense of the vulnerability of self-staging. Awareness of an audience has become the very definition of shame, its structuring condition. The apparent sneaky pleasure that both Satan and Eve found in playing a role, in putting on a “part”, has become associated not with skill at multiple subject positions so much as with a horror of physical display. Instead of playing parts – or perhaps because of the self-consciousness that comes with playing parts – Adam and Eve now struggle to “hide / The Parts of each from other, that seems most / To shame obnoxious” (9.1092–4). “This new comer, Shame” now haunts their bodies, as they work to cover “[t]hose middle parts” to prevent Shame from sitting “there”, where he can “reproach

Bifold Adam: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Actor’s Voice 169

us as unclean” (9.1097–8). Should we imagine that the condemning spectator literally sits on or in their shameful bodies, and is “there” somehow also a vague gesture to Shame’s seat among the members of some half-imagined audience? The spectator’s gaze is burned into Adam and Eve, as though they were failing performers unable to remove themselves from the place of the stage.8 Adam’s shameful new costuming will only make plain his fallen theatricality: shame “cover’d, but his Robe / Uncover’d more” (9.258–9). Milton’s tragedian is bound to his viewers in a striking relationship of debased self-exposure, “naked left / To guilty shame” (9.1057–8). Hyper-aware of duplicity, of gross bodily display, of a condemning audience, experiencing shame as a quality that comes to him from spectators even while it inheres both in his acts of self-clothing and in his body, his theatrical parts and his middle parts, this actor inhabits all the most painful aspects of the theatrical mode of self-presentation. The sense of post-lapsarian theatricality takes on a local habitation and a name as Adam surveys the effects of the Fall on the natural world in Book Ten, and that name is Hamlet. In a speech that is widely understood to echo the soliloquies of the early modern theatre, Adam begins a lamentation reminiscent at several moments of Hamlet’s most famous interior speech: To sorrow abandon’d, but worse felt within, And in a troubl’d Sea of passion tost, Thus to disburd’n sought with sad complaint. O miserable of happy! is this the end Of this new glorious World … (10.717–21)

Though “troubl’d sea of passion tost” is an echo of the prophet Isaiah as well as of Hamlet’s “take arms against a sea of troubles”, the thematic and verbal links to Shakespearean soliloquy build as Adam’s speech continues. Death appears to offer the hope of rest, but Adam worries just as Hamlet does that to sleep may perchance be to dream: Yet one doubt Pursues me still, lest all I cannot die, Lest that pure breath of Life, the Spirit of Man Which God inspir’d, cannot together perish With this corporeal Clod; then in the Grave,

170

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10 Or in some other dismal place, who knows But I shall die a living Death? (10.782–8)

Even when Adam’s fear switches to an alternative possibility, that death will be a long process of miserable living, he voices his anxieties in terms that parallel the mordant deliberations of the Prince of Denmark: But say That Death be not one stroke, as I suppos’d, Bereaving sense, but endless misery From this day onward, … … … Ay me, that fear Comes thund’ring back with dreadful revolution On my defenseless head; (10.808–15)

Compare Hamlet: “Ay, there’s the rub”, and “There’s the respect / That makes calamity of so long life” (3.1.66, 69–70).9 Concluding that it will be no relief to shuffle off this mortal coil, Adam plunges into despair, lamenting “Thus what thou desir’st, / And what thou fear’st, alike destroys all hope / Of refuge”, and “O Conscience, into what Abyss of fears / And horrors hast thou driv’n me” (10.837–9; 842–3). Hamlet’s concluding sentence begins: “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all” (3.1.84). The parallels between Adam and Hamlet here are the stuff of editorial and critical commonplace.10 There are on the face of it well-established reasons not to devote more critical energy to the commonplace detailing of parallels between Milton’s language and Shakespeare’s. As T.H. Howard-Hill argued in 1995, there is little or no evidence that Milton ever attended a Shakespeare play, or that he elevated early modern drama to anything like the position of importance it now holds in scholarly discourse.11 We do know, however, that Milton was familiar with the Shakespeare folio, having published a commendatory poem to that volume in 1632 and having quoted Richard III with precise citation in his 1649 pamphlet Eikonoklastes, in which he implicitly compares the would-be holy martyr Charles I to Richard, staging himself with a prayer book between two bishops in order to make a show of piety.12 And even in the process of arguing that Milton was no lover of the drama, Howard-Hill establishes that there were many forms of theatrical performance outside the popular theatres with which

Bifold Adam: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Actor’s Voice 171

Milton, himself author of a masque, must have been familiar. It may well be true that Milton knew Shakespeare’s works only through his reading of them, that the references to “Jonson’s learned sock” and “sweetest Shakespeare, fancy’s child” who “[warbles] his native Wood-notes wild” in “L’Allegro” are not signs of an early engagement with the popular stage beyond the level of glancing familiarity or readerly participation. That Shakespeare could register as a figure for literary pleasures as much as theatrical ones is a possibility of some interest for the uses of theatre in Paradise Lost, however, and it is a possibility that Weimann’s work on acting and authorship gives us particular reason to explore. Milton knew enough about the uses of theatre, certainly, to distance himself in the preface to Samson Agonistes from the debasement of tragedy as presented by his contemporaries: This is mention’d to vindicate Tragedy from the small esteem, or rather infamy, which in the account of many it undergoes at this day with other common Interludes; happ’ning through the Poet’s error of intermixing Comic stuff with Tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons, which by all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people.13

It may be significant that Milton registers disapproval of the “Poet’s error” here rather than of the improvisations of vulgar performers. Even in “L’Allegro”, where the pleasures of the stage are advertised, there is a subtle emphasis on considering them as works imagined by a poet rather than as performed spectacles. The speaker of “L’Allegro” describes “pomp, and feast, and revelry, / With mask, and antique Pageantry” as “Such sights as youthful Poets dream” (127–9; emphasis mine). The 1632 poem “On Shakespeare”, too, stresses an evacuation of physicality in favor of an almost material intellectual response: What needs my Shakespear for his honour’d Bones, The labour of an age in piled Stones, Or that his hallow’d relics should be hid Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid? Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame, What need’st thou such weak witnes of thy name? Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thy self a live long Monument. For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavoring art, Thy easie numbers flow, and that each heart

172

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10 Hath from the leaves of thy unvalu’d Book, Those Delphick lines with deep impression took, Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving, Dost make us Marble with too much conceiving; And so Sepulcher’d in such pomp dost lie, That Kings for such a Tomb would wish to die.14

To rewrite Shakespeare as a “son of memory” and an “heir of fame” is to make him ethereal instead of bodily (5). The “Delphic lines” of Shakespeare’s writing have impressed themselves directly upon the readers’ hearts, monumentalizing them with a distinctly anti-physical “conceaving” that makes them into sepulchral statues (12, 15–16). If Milton had an interest in the early modern drama, and particularly in the plays of Shakespeare, it seems to have been an interest that tended distinctly away from staged physical spectacle. There is, however, a widespread critical sense that Milton used the soliloquy as it had been developed for the early modern stage over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech has a particular relationship to the question of textuality versus performance.15 Lukas Erne has recently argued that the varying placement of this speech was a key part of the difference between the text of Hamlet in its more “literary” and its more “theatrical” forms.16 Weimann, too, has argued that the various versions of this speech in Q1, Q2 and F1 are particularly sensitive registers of the shifting relationships between the author’s pen and the actor’s voice. In fact, for Weimann, Hamlet is a crucial study in the history of dramatic text and dramatic performance, as well as high and low culture. He asks, in terms that are suggestive for the present study, “Can it be that there was a link between the instability of a Shakespearean text like Hamlet and its openness to altogether diverse standards in poetics, performance, and production?”17 Both thematically and in terms of its textual history, Hamlet concerns itself with the “bifold authority” of player and author in ways that resonate with Milton’s concern to adopt theatricality for the purposes of high humanist literary production. To return to Adam’s soliloquy after the Fall and investigate its theatricality more fully, we should note that Adam’s speech at this moment can be called histrionic not only because it echoes a prominent moment from the history of early modern drama, but because it duplicates syntactically the complex performative traditions of the English stage. Like Satan in his own famously theatrical moments, Adam performs here as his own interlocutor:

Bifold Adam: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Actor’s Voice 173 Satan: Hadst thou the same free Will and Power to stand? Thou hadst. (4.66–7) Adam:

Yet to say the truth, too late I thus contest; then should have been refus’d Those terms whatever, when they were propos’d; Thou didst accept them; wilt thou enjoy the good, Then cavil the conditions? (10.755–9)

Satan and Adam are the only characters in Paradise Lost who divide themselves into primary speaker and addressee for the purpose of internal dialogue. Since we know that Milton knew Shakespeare’s Richard III and quoted it in relation to idolatrous forms of representation, the comparison with Richard’s famous speech of self-disintegration is particularly apt: I am a villain. Yet I lie, I am not. Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter. My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain. (5.3.191–5)

Carrying the notion that every voice within him condemns him to a theatrical extreme, in fact, Adam ventriloquizes his interlocutor in a particularly striking way: Who of all Ages to succeed, but feeling The evil on him brought by me, will curse My Head; Ill fare our Ancestor impure, For this we may thank Adam … (10.733–6)

And again: though God Made thee without thy leave, what if thy Son Prove disobedient, and reprov’d, retort, Wherefore didst thou beget me? I sought it not … (10.759–62)

174

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Here Adam engages in a style of performance that, on the early modern stage, brought high tragic soliloquy close to the platea-style improvisations often associated with the comic performer.18 Comic performers, famously, made a minor industry of speaking multiple parts in a single performance. Robert Armin, who played the clown roles for The King’s Men after 1599, specialized in such acts of super-ventriloquism. Shakespeare featured him in scenes like the Feste/Sir Topas dialogue of Twelfth Night and Armin’s own published writings recorded his skill at performing several speaking parts in a single conversation.19 Performing multiple interior voices in their moments of breakdown, the tragic protagonists of Renaissance drama came close to the ontological status of the lowly, abjected performers with whom they were never supposed to mingle on stage.20 As Weimann has memorably argued, moreover, the performances of clowns in Shakespearean theatre involve assuming multiple subject positions in relation to the audience even at moments in which a specifically polyvocal performance is not required.21 Comic performance involved a variety of strategies for communicating a relational sense of subjectivity. When tragic soliloquies mirror comic multiplicity, of course, they generally do so from an opposite sense of communal relations. The multiple voices discovered within a Richard or a Satan serve ironically to register distance from an audience, the abysm of interiority that marks a figure as isolated in tragic stature; “There is no creature loves me”, laments Richard, “And wherefore should they, since that I myself / Find in myself no pity to myself? (5.3.200, 202–3). What makes Adam’s soliloquy so tellingly unlike the usual depiction of tragic collapse familiar in theatrical performance is in fact the subtle presence of signs of connection between Adam and those of us who may imagine ourselves to be hearing him. Adam is by no stretch of the imagination assuming the position of a playhouse clown in this scene, but there are effects scattered throughout this soliloquy that prevent him from inhabiting the position of the isolated tragic speaker. Ventriloquizing his own sons, of course, gives him the power to leap forward chronologically, voicing a judgment about himself that readers in historical time will have to recognize as rightly spoken by them.22 He anticipates death, too, in terms that should strictly speaking be impossible for him to imagine: How gladly would I meet Mortality my sentence, and be Earth Insensible, how glad would lay me down As in my Mother’s lap! (10.775–8)

Bifold Adam: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Actor’s Voice 175

What does Adam remember of his mother’s lap? The image can only resonate for future generations, the children of Eve, who may indeed find themselves confused about chronological sequence while reading Adam’s speech. Looking forward to a death that he equates with a past Mother–child relationship that can only take place for people who come later, Adam has subtly crossed both the chronological and the ontological thresholds that separate him as a biblical/ literary character from his contemporary and future audiences of readers.23 Resembling as well the comic performer who joins the audience as an actor in laughing at himself as a character, Adam inhabits a form of subjectivity that is theatrical not only because of a new-found aptitude for duplicity but because he straddles the psychic worlds of the character, the spectator, and the actor. As if to underscore this theatrical confusion of subject positions, Adam addresses the readers of Milton’s text directly: Fair Patrimony That I must leave ye, Sons; O were I able To waste it all myself, and leave ye none! So disinherited how would ye bless Me now your Curse! (10.818–22)

Here he turns Milton’s perhaps solitary reader into a member of an audience, one of a vast panoply of sons present in Adam’s fictional moment to hear this forceful apostrophe. Past and present, biblical and theatrical, character and reader become effects of Adam’s self-performance. On both the thematic and the representational level, an Adam who has eaten the forbidden fruit has become endowed with the actor’s power to make ontology ludic, and he uses that power in ways that imply both his own death and the proleptic destruction of the human race. Combining the tragic actor’s performance of doomed interiority with the comic actor’s boundary-blurring sense of connection to an audience, Adam is, as Hawkes says of Satan and theatre alike, a figure for the fatal power of representation. Left at this moment of meditation on theatricality in Paradise Lost we would have to conclude somewhat unhelpfully that Milton turns out to be of the devil’s party yet again. He is of course profoundly implicated in the power of representation, and there is perhaps a parallel to be drawn between his own authorial preference for bodiless performances – marbleized spectators, closet dramas, theatrical work that becomes purely the imagining of a poet instead of a collaboration with actors – and Adam’s misguided desire to annihilate

176

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

the human race, by not begetting it, in order to save it from impurity. I want to argue, though, in light of the work of Weimann and others, that the early modern drama served ideological and ethical functions that went beyond Hawkes’s identification of it with satanic cultural forces, and that Milton’s use of Hamlet reflects that more richly indeterminate purpose of playing. Hissed by his audience and forced with them to assume the form of the serpent, Satan is at least for a time frozen, humiliated, in the part he has played. “Ye have th’account / Of my performance” he says with unsuspecting irony to the fallen angels; they will indeed see that performance accounted for two lines later when they find themselves transformed in punishment (10.501–2). But Adam and Eve are allowed a more fluid range of performative possibilities after the Fall, and ultimately the echo of Hamlet will help us to be more specific about the nature of those possibilities. Shame has clothed the fallen Adam and Eve, but Jesus will clothe them too, and in the interim, Adam himself has a hand in devising a primitive costume for them to wear. Adam’s efforts to dress himself and Eve participate in the shame of fallen theatricality, but also resonate with the coming salvation. We might further reflect that Book Ten of Paradise Lost ends by giving Adam, after he has submitted both to God’s will and to Eve’s self-abasement, a place of extraordinary preeminence in the epic’s economy of representation. “What better can we do”, he asks, than to the place Repairing where he judg’d us, prostrate fall Before him reverent, and there confess Humbly our faults, and pardon beg, with tears Watering the ground …? (10.1086–90)

Without stretching our terminology so far as to recuperate this moment as a reference to the stage, it can nevertheless be noted that this is an occasion of tremendous verbal efficacy for Adam, analogous to the fantasy of a theatrical author who can control performance perfectly. When his speech ends, famously, “they forthwith to the place / Repairing where he judg’d them prostrate [fall] / Before him reverent” and the poem goes on to repeat Adam’s instructions almost exactly for a full seven lines (10.1098–101). Here Adam performs a fully scripted, almost liturgical, “sign / Of sorrow unfeign’d, and humiliation meek” (10.1090–91; 1103–4). He controls Eve, an accomplishment dear to Milton’s heart, and he assumes control over the narration itself, since the narrating voice of the poem seems in the repeated lines simply to be doing as

Bifold Adam: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Actor’s Voice 177

Adam says, quoting his words as if it had no better way of its own to describe his actions. Giving Adam the words that are echoed by the narrator in this unique moment of Homeric repetition, in fact, the poem makes him fleetingly into an epic poet.24 Immediately after this moment, moreover, at the opening of Book Eleven, Jesus appears before the mercy seat of God, looking notably Anglican, if also biblical, as he mixes Adam and Eve’s prayers in a “Golden Censer” (11.24). Though we are told that prevenient grace has actually anticipated and thus caused Adam’s words and actions of repentance, the effect is nevertheless of extraordinary investment in Adam’s authority and in forms of worship that in other Miltonic contexts, outside of heaven, might be taken for idolatry, might be associated with Hawkes’s satanic representation.25 Adam’s moment of imitating Hamlet is part of the process by which he moves from shameful spectacle to director of ritual repentance, and we should consider Milton’s appropriation of early modern theatre accordingly, as a mediation between the satanic and the redemptive. One of the ways that the invocation of Hamlet eases the transition from satanic to redemptive is by returning Milton’s readers to the poem’s earlier understanding that spectacle is shameful, but with a wider sense of theatre’s resources for managing that understanding. Adam wants to hide from “the face / Of God”, here, and speaks of himself as “the source and spring / Of all corruption” (10.832–3). Nevertheless, when Adam echoes Hamlet he implicitly puts himself into an economy of representation different than the one that ultimately brings Satan to his shameful reptilian nadir. Recent work on shame in early modern culture has stressed the theatre’s place as an institution that both inflicts and contextualizes that emotion. Ewan Fernie argues that the period was marked by the proliferation of shame both because the standards of self-creation in a newly secularizing world are unrealistically high and because waning Christian paradigms called into question the engagement with those worldly standards in the first place. As a result, Fernie suggests: because of their accustomed pride and generally secular orientation, Renaissance people are at once far more sensitive to the goads and pricks of worldly shame and to revolutionary spiritual shame than their medieval forbears. Such was the atmosphere of raging shame in which Shakespeare plied his pen.26

Fernie contends that a play like Hamlet is a mechanism for inspiring shame, as audiences become invested in Hamlet’s queasy relationship to his own flesh and his own moral cowardice. At the same time, he argues, the play

178

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

tempers shame, registering Hamlet’s disgust as itself disordered.27 If shame and theatricality seemed to be the immediate effects of the Fall for Adam and Eve, to filter Adam’s consciousness of wrongdoing through the subjectivity of Hamlet is perhaps to begin to borrow that play’s broader range of responses toward shame, to reconfigure theatricality as more than just the experience of being a debased spectacle. Here again, Weimann’s work elucidates the function of theatre usefully, reminding us that Hamlet negotiates shame in more than just thematic ways. As an especially powerful marker of, and intervention in, the contest between high and low forms of representation, Hamlet calls the shame of theatrical work to mind with unusual specificity, as Hamlet himself moves back and forth between what Weimann calls “the wholesome mirror of representation and the distracting requirements of performance practice, between drama as defined by the humanists…and theatre as practiced by common players”.28 Ophelia laments, for instance, that Hamlet becomes “Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down!” (3.1.154). Reflecting upon the longer speech, Weimann argues that: [it] reveals the deep clash, within Hamlet, between two discourses, two poetics, two social moorings. On the surface of this utterance, we have a highly dramatic, agonistic image of the shattering impact of the “antic disposition” upon high Renaissance ideals. [Ophelia’s] speech presents in miniature what happens throughout the course of the play, whenever Hamlet under the guise of his ‘confusion’ (3.1.2) and ‘crafty madness’ (8) departs from courtly standards of “civil conversation” and “oration fairly spoke”.29

Unable to make a firm commitment either to a noble, refined theatrical practice or to an antic form of entertainment, Hamlet enacts in performance, leaving clear records of that enactment in the printed text, the very problem Fernie says it is trying to solve: the new urgency of meeting the ideals of Renaissance humanism, coupled with a lingering sense that those ideals are themselves suspect. When Milton uses Hamlet as a marker of the transition from tragic fallen self-consciousness to repentant humility, he brings Adam into a position that critics like Weimann have prepared us to understand. If Hawkes teaches us to read Satan as a figure for the newly unbounded reign of representation, Weimann reminds us that the traces of early modern drama in Paradise Lost may reflect a deeper ambiguity about the unbounded satanic signifier. Early modern theatre was after all both the censurer and the enthusiastic promoter of shameful, autonomous, self-displaying performance. Platea-style playing was

Bifold Adam: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Actor’s Voice 179

bound in an intricate if broadly oppositional relationship to the authoritative, world-mirroring power of theatrical display. What Weimann says of early modern theatre, moreover, we may readily adapt to Milton. “[T]here are”, he argues, in the larger context of England’s reconfigurations of power, “profoundly significant links between the socially complex need to discipline the popular performer and the rise of new, discursive and intellectual locations of cultural authority”.30 Like Shakespeare and his peers, indeed much more profoundly so, Milton is part of a long unstable process of cultural realignment. Like Shakespeare, too, indeed to a much larger degree, Milton worked to develop “new sources of authority, derived from universalizing uses of knowledge, form, and representation”. While those new sources of cultural power could contend with traditional authority, they also positioned themselves at times against “encroachments from ‘below’”, including the wayward cultural energies represented by the common player and the vulgar spectacle. “The need to do the latter”, Weimann argues, “emerged at a time when, as never before in European history, new forms and media of information, communication, and signification expanded beyond the ‘anchor-hold’ of any privileged or controllable registers of articulation.”31 The early modern theatre needs both the locus and the platea in order to serve its complex representational function. Similarly, Milton chastens the power of the signifier even while claiming unprecedented levels of authority for his own poetic project; Paradise Lost punishes Adam for transgressing even while ultimately taking care to clothe him with the power to signify efficaciously. Neither inherently subversive nor conservative, the early modern drama in general and Hamlet in particular are available in their very instability to negotiate major shifts of authority in early modern culture, not least among them the legitimation of authorship and the developing autonomy of representation. What makes Hamlet interesting to Milton is also what fascinates Weimann, and it is what keeps us debating the cultural politics of the early modern stage. Notes I would like to thank Abbe Blum, Elizabeth Bolton, Leslie Delauter, Lauren Shohet, and especially David Schalkwyk for invaluable assistance with this essay. 1. See John Drakakis, “Discourse and Authority: The Renaissance of Robert Weimann”, Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 83–104; David Schalkwyk, Literature and the Touch of the Real (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 165–87. 2. On the blurring of boundaries between locus and platea, see in particular Robert Weimann, “Theatrical Space in Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Revisiting locus and platea

180

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

in Timon and Macbeth,” The Shakespearean International Yearbook 2 (2002): 203–17; see also Erika T. Lin, “Performance Practice and Theatrical Privilege: Rethinking Weimann’s Concepts of Locus and Platea,” New Theatre Quarterly 22, no. 3 (August 2006): 283–98; Emily C. Bartels, “Breaking the Illusion of Being: Shakespeare and the Performance of Self”, Theatre Journal 46, no. 2 (May, 1994): 171–85; Harry Berger, “The Prince’s Dog: Falstaff and the Perils of Speech-Prefixity”, Shakespeare Quarterly 49, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 40–73; Janet Hill, Stages and Playgoers: From Guild Plays to Shakespeare (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). 3. Douglas Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); see also, among many examples, Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, eds, From Performace to Print in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 4. David Hawkes, The Faust Myth: Religion and the Rise of Representation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 81–111. Somewhat confusingly for the purposes of the present study, Hawkes and Weimann are signalling almost opposite meanings when they use the word “representation”. Weimann uses the term to describe the realm of the locus, in contrast to “presentation”, which comprises the platea-style actor’s mode of self-reference and semi-autonomous playing; see, for instance, Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 102–8. Hawkes uses the term “representation” to describe the apparent autonomy of the sign with relation to the signified. When I use the term “representation” in this essay I am using the word as Hawkes does, and connecting it with platea-style performance. 5. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957), 5.853–61. Further references are to the Hughes edition. See also Hawkes, The Faust Myth, 105. 6. Hawkes, The Faust Myth, 49–50. 7. See The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 605 n. 200, 606 n. 202. 8. For Lars Engle on the visual quality of shame, see “‘I am that I am’: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Economy of Shame”, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), 185–97. See also Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 75–102. 9. All quotations from Shakespeare are from David Bevington, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 10. Flannagan, Riverside Milton, 646 n. 258; Hughes, Milton, 426 n. 810. See also Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 85–93. 11. T.H. Howard-Hill, “Milton and ‘The Rounded Theatre’s Pomp’”, in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P.G. Stanwood (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 97. See also John T. Shawcross,

Bifold Adam: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Actor’s Voice 181 John Milton and Influence: Presence in Literature, History and Culture (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1991), 5–38. 12. Howard-Hill, “Milton and ‘The Rounded Theatre’s Pomp’”, 115. 13. Hughes, Milton, 550. 14. Ibid., 63–4. 15. See, for instance, Belsey, John Milton, 88–9; James Hirsch, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 52–61; Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 13, 220–53; David Robertson, “Soliloquy and Self in Milton’s Major Poems”, in Of Poetry and Politics, ed. Stanwood, 59–77. 16. Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 234–41. 17. Weimann, Author’s Pen, 22. See also, for a study of the multiple ways in which print and performance shaped and defined each other, Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp chap. 8, “Narrative Form and Theatrical Illusions”, 166–80. 18. As Mary Z. Maher notes, Shakespeare’s soliloquies offer “a continuum of performance choices”, from direct audience address, most often but not always associated with comedy, to entirely internal speech. Maher places Hamlet’s soliloquies “decisively” in the middle between these possibilities: Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), xv. See also Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), 42–54; Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare’s Soliloquies, trans. Charity Scott Stokes (London: Methuen, 1987); Michael E. Mooney, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Transactions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990); William E. McDonnell, “The Shakespearean Soliloquy: A Problem of Focus”, Text and Performance Quarterly 10 (1990): 227–34; Hill, Stages and Playgoers; Edna Zwick Boris, “To Soliloquize or Not to Soliloquize – Hamlet’s ‘To Be’ Speech in Q1 and Q2/F”, in Stage Directions in Hamlet: New Essays and New Directions, ed. Hardin L. Aasand (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 115–33; Hirsh, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies. 19. Johnson, The Actor as Playwright, 16–53; Richard Preiss, “Robert Armin Do the Police in Different Voices”, in From Performance to Print 208–27, eds Holland and Orgel; Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 86–9. The foundational study in this field is David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 136–63. 20. On the extent to which Hamlet’s particular relation to the Vice tradition militates against the idea that he is “the inaugural modern character”, see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 196; 158– 96. See Weimann and Douglas Bruster, however, on the strong continuities between “secretly open” forms of theatrical practice and notions of characterological depth: Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, esp. chap. 8, “Character/actor: The Deep Matrix”, 160–77. 21. See “Laughing with the Audience”, in Weimann’s Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 253–60.

182

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

22. This form of ventriloquism has a strong connection to Bernard Williams’ argument in Shame and Necessity that the person feeling shame is linked to others by an implicit bond of shared judgment, “an internalized other whose view the agent can respect” (103). The fear and expectation of judgment itself, then, begin to forge connections between Adam and his audience that would belie the sense of tragic isolation here, along with the satanic sense of self-determination. One unfallen example of such shame in Paradise Lost occurs in Book Nine, when Adam imagines the benefits of working side by side with Eve: I from the influence of thy looks receive Access in every Virtue, in thy sight More wise, more watchful, stronger, if need were Of outward strength; while shame, thou looking on, Shame to be overcome or over-reacht Would utmost vigor raise, and rais’d unite. (9.309–14) 23. See Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, 83, on the disturbances of chronological order caused by the actor’s direct address to an audience. See also ibid., 114, and de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, 200–202, on the associations between clowning and the last judgment in Hamlet. 24. I am grateful to Abbe Blum and Elizabeth Bolton for these suggestions. 25. On the uses of mediating imagery in the construction of rightful representation, and on the Son as a mediating image, a key concept for this passage, see Hawkes, The Faust Myth, 101–5. 26. Ewan Fernie, Shame in Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2002), 73. 27. Indeed, for Fernie the play’s power to stimulate shame in the audience is an important part of its cultural efficacy, part of its ability to “[reorient] its audience to the world outside the self” and “create that responsiveness which is the beginning of justice and our best hope for a better future”: Shame in Shakespeare, 110–11. My own use of the play is more narrowly focused on its power to convey a fruitful instability of attitudes about the autonomy of signification, both in performance and in print. 28. Weimann, Author’s Pen, 15. 29. Ibid., 162. 30. Ibid., 125. 31. Ibid., 125. See also Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

10

“Grose Indecorum”, “Contrarietie”, Vice-Descendants and the Power of Comic Performance: Weimann and Shakespeare Among the Neoclassicals Robert Hornback

With the publication of Shakespeare and the Power of Performance (2008), it may now truthfully be said that no critic over the last thirty years – and indeed perhaps no critic ever – has done more to value the power of comic performance in drama ranging from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance than Robert Weimann. Here, with co-author Douglas Bruster, Weimann concludes a long-term project on authority and representation addressing the fraught but vital conjuncture of playing and writing, a project which has included the preparatory studies Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse (1996), Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (2000), and Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre (2004, with Bruster), as well as his interest in the power of popular performance traditions, which traces back to Weimann’s Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (English translation, 1978). The authors announce a goal of “seek[ing] to address a renewed, or as many would say, growing rift between page and stage in Shakespeare studies”.1 Their considerable achievement is a successful mediation between the zealous extremes of stage-centred and page-centred approaches to Shakespeare in order to allow for the myriad pleasures of reading, seeing, and hearing his plays, delights too often rendered unrecognizable to those uninitiated in either of the opposed critical sects. Not altogether surprisingly, given Weimann’s long-term interest in the popular tradition, it is arguably the first six chapters, those engaging the comic, in which the authors most successfully synthesize performance studies and literary studies by addressing stage/page relations through the lens of difference, arguing 183

184

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

that Elizabethan theater used the “gap between” the objects of representation and modes of presentation to heighten the power of performance. This approach enables Weimann and Bruster to demonstrate that during a period in which neoclassical authors increasingly asserted the sovereign authority of texts and representation over the previously self-generating, improvisational agency of players in the popular theatre, Shakespeare instead habitually foregrounded the actor’s histrionic power and presence. For Shakespeare, rather than one medium (the author’s text) dominating the other (the actor’s embodiment), the relationship between the two media of “author’s pen” and “actor’s voice” was marked not by antagonism but confluence and collaboration. Moreover, by not repressing the disparity between these media, he privileged surplus performative power in his “swelling scene[s]” (Henry V, Pro. 4). Shakespeare indeed characteristically unleashes the power of performance by allowing for the boldest possible displays of stage presence, often, as in the bulk of the chapters here, comic-derived agency: evidenced by charismatic, audienceinteractive, comic “Vice-descendants” such as Gloucester in Richard III and Faulconbridge in King John,2 the popular clown whose winking “self-resembled show” and “personation” play with the line between player and fictional role,3 and highly self-conscious cross-dressing.4 In performance, the result was a two-directional, “bifold authority” conjoining in the actor’s agency, yielding a dramaturgy of doubleness combining – as well as staging the constituent “gap between” – two different cultural modes of production: scripted representation in a burgeoning print culture and the player’s traditional personation. One result was that the player – the clown especially – did not need to “speak more than [was] set down for [them]” (Hamlet, 3.2.39–40) because the text evokes what Falstaff calls “a play extempore” (2.4.280), capturing the quality of “actor’s voice” in “author’s pen”. Weimann’s criticism is most exemplary when it employs Renaissance conceptions of, and indeed language about, performance, something especially evident, once again, in engagements with the comic. To those who have read Weimann’s previous work much of this will be familiar (over half the chapters are in fact reworked from published articles), but for those who have not done so the reliance upon historically inscribed terminology will be revelatory in its reconceptualization of the power of Shakespearean performance in specific early modern terms which possess a more descriptive immediacy and relevance than the often abstruse rhetoric imposed by much modern performance theory. Vice descendants and clowns, he observes, draw upon the mode of “contrarietie”, surviving from festive rites and the morality play, and involve the recognition of double meanings and forceful opposites (a

Weimann and Shakespeare Among the Neoclassicals

185

pre-modern gap between), to which the staunchly Protestant neoclassicist Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (c. 1581) objected as prevalent among the “comedians” of the Elizabethan stage; “self-resembled show,” an originally pejorative but no less apt phrase coined by puritan neoclassical critic Joseph Hall in his satirical Virgidemiarum (1597), refers to the insistence upon the charismatic comic actor’s own persona behind the mask of fictive/scripted clown-character; “to be secretly open” is a phrase drawn from the fool Thersites in Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–2, 5.2.24); it is related to “personation,” the latter term derived from Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors (c. 1607), connoting the winking doubleness or “‘secretly open’ exposure of the actor behind the dramatic role”.5 All of these terms involve an awareness of a constitutive early modern gap between representation and presentational élan – most frequently comic showmanship. Ultimately, this marked focus on the complex power of comic and/or comic-derived modes of performance points to new areas of study. Here we must recognize, however, the degree to which Weimann’s insights about the comic continued to apply after the end-point that he has assumed in books to date; I refer to the need to extend beyond the 1590s Weimann-inspired analyses of comic performance dynamics: that is, application of historicallyinscribed concepts such as “contrarietie”, platea-like stage-positioning, and the non-representational, “presentational practices” of the “secretly open” mode of “personation” and the “self-resembled show” of Vice-derived clowns of the Renaissance at least until the retirement of Shakespearean clown Robert Armin (c. 1613). In previously published studies, focusing largely on Elizabethan drama, Weimann has downplayed late comic dynamics he illuminates in drama before the end of the 1590s. For example, in Shakespeare and the Power of Performance the authors assume that by 1599 Shakespeare tired of the stage clown Will Kemp’s non-representational performing (witness, for example, their reference to Shakespeare’s “dysfunctional relationship” with “the unruly Kemp”6) and favoured instead a far more representational mode of contained fooling supposed to have been practised by Armin. Underwriting this view are the critical tradition’s developmental narrative and assertion of a binary opposition between “humanist” and “popular” with regard to comic impulses, and the widespread assumption that Shakespeare himself became increasingly more neoclassical, so that “the humanist Prince” Hamlet’s “learned neoclassical point of view” speaks, to some extent, for the playwright in rebuking traditional clowning.7 But Shakespeare’s staunch opposition to the neoclassicism Hamlet advocates has been widely underestimated, as have the traditional clowning tactics Armin continued to employ right up to his retirement. In fact, Armin’s

186

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

clowning belies some of the latest book’s developmental conclusions, which strike this reader as somewhat forced, imposed perhaps by the need to subsume pre-existing articles into a collection of essays with a unified through-line. After all, the “deliberate reversion to the Vice as a supreme vessel of performative energy and liminality”,8 which Weimann and Bruster find representative of Shakespeare’s early career, in fact remained equally deliberate as his career progressed (witness Autolycus). Thus, if we follow Weimann’s methodology, while suspending developmental, binary-driven conclusions, we will find new applications of his work on the power of comic performance through attention to “contrarietie”, “Vice-descendants”, “personation”, and a heretofore overlooked yet fundamental aesthetic and dramaturgical principle to which I will draw attention – “grose indecorum”. “Unruly” Kemp or Shakespearean “Grose Indecorum”? In order to extend Weimann’s insights, I want to suggest ways in which, far from sharing neoclassical views of the comic and popular clowning, Shakespeare himself can be shown to have been defiant about such restraints, something evident, we shall see, in his continuing experiments with the fundamentally anti-neoclassical Vice throughout his career. For now, it must be said that little more than critical commonplace allows us to assume, as Weimann and Bruster do, that Shakespeare came to oppose an “unruly” Will Kemp’s9 postplay antics in the jig, favouring in its place a neoclassical aesthetic much closer to Hamlet’s than to his former clown’s. James Shapiro similarly claims in his study of the year 1599 that a rift existed “over the role of the clown and the nature of comedy” and, further, that “The parting of ways between Shakespeare and Kemp … was a rejection not only of a certain kind of comedy but also a declaration that from here on in, it was going to be a playwright’s and not an actor’s theatre, no matter how popular the actor.”10 In this view, a newly converted, ministerial, neoclassically oriented Shakespeare emerges in what appears to be an almost direct line that runs from Marlowe’s rejection, in the Prologue to Tamburlaine, of “jigging veins of riming mother wits / And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay” (ll. 1–3) through such Jacobean and Caroline poets as Jonson, Fletcher, and Shirley. Oddly, this conventional argument overlooks the advertising of still more Falstaff to come in Henry V (though to the audience’s disappointment this larger-than-life figure did not appear) that the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV – as delivered by Kemp-Falstaff just before his post-play jig – had promised:

Weimann and Shakespeare Among the Neoclassicals

187

One word more I beseech you. If you be not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine of France. Where, for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of sweat, unless already a’ be killed with your hard opinions … My tongue is weary; when my legs are too, I will bid you good night. (ll. 24–33)

If Kemp-as-Epilogue delivered on his promise of a jig (the last line here), the unmistakable promise of more of “the story, with Sir John in it”, was left unfulfilled, it is now understood, because Kemp had abruptly left the Chamberlain’s Men as of February or March of 1599 and the beloved part was too closely identified with his comic line/skills for him to be replaced immediately by another, less-suited actor.11 Given that Shakespeare’s Epilogue (as delivered by a scripted Kemp-Falstaff) promised the audience more of the lucrative favorite, we cannot safely assume that an “unruly” Kemp was simply “banished” with Falstaff by a company eager to be rid of him. In fact, we have little more testimony than Kemps nine daies wonder. Performed in a daunce from London to Norwich (1600), where the clown himself dismisses many speculations about his having left the company (evidently including false rumours of his being expelled) before offering that “others that guesse righter, affirme, I haue without good help daunst my selfe out of the world.”12 Here, all we know from Kemp’s remark is that he left the company; he offers no reason but hints that a “righter” interpretation is that it was the result of his own agency (“I haue without good help daunst my selfe out of the world ”), perhaps precisely to set out on solo ventures such as his dance to Norwich. Rather than assuming Kemp’s post-play jig – actually scripted, by the way, as with the published The Third and Last Part of Kemp’s Jig, Kemp’s Pleasant New Jig of the Broomman, and Master Kemp’s New Jig of the Kitchen-Stuff Woman13 – had offended Shakespeare’s sensibilities, then, let us consider the challenge the part Shakespeare penned presented to neoclassical sensibilities in the latter half of the 1590s; “author’s pen” as much as “actor’s voice” defies neoclassicism in the Henry IV plays. As Shakespeare conceived the part of Sir John, the late Philip Sidney’s now all-too-familiar neoclassical critique of that Renaissance English practice of “mingling kings and clowns” had only then very newly been printed. In fact, Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (or Apology for Poetry), written c. 1581, was first published posthumously in two rival editions in 1595, only one authorized. The result was that a relative flood of copies entered the market just before Shakespeare turned to 1 Henry IV. Shakespeare could scarcely have been unaware of Sidney’s now topical criticisms, then.

188

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Instead, it now seems, Shakespeare wrote Falstaff partly with an eye on criticisms of the professional theatre as a tongue-in-cheek provocation against the strictures of neoclassical sensibilities, particularly via what George Whetstone, writing in his influential dedication to Promos and Cassandra (1578), had called “a grose Indecorum”. By violating every decorum of time, place, rank, and what Whetstone referred to as the “order of speech” in his interactions with the prince, Falstaff enacted Shakespeare’s most daring affront to neoclassical sensibilities to date. In turn, it may well have prompted Joseph Hall’s oft-cited objection in Virgidemiarum (1597) to the mugging popular clown who “laughs, and grins, and frames his mimic face … For laughter at his self-resembled show” (ll. 34–5, 44),14 for the work appeared in print immediately after Sir John had made his successful appearance on stage as the specific kind of self-consciously performing clown to which Hall objects. Weimann himself once speculated that this “attack on the [popular] Tarleton tradition was bound to be an attack on Shakespeare as well”,15 but this insight may be taken further. Hall reacts especially to the mingling of clown and royalty (“A goodly hotch-potch: when vile Russetings / Are match’t with monarchs, and with mighty kings”), and other details recall the old knight’s particular relationship with Prince Hal, since this critique refers, oddly, to a “hungry [hence “starveling” (2.4.244)] youth” performing “princely carriage” (ll. 19, 22) and then imagines a clown as “justl[ing] straight into the prince’s place” (l. 36), evidently responding to the jostling familiarity of Shakespeare’s odd couple. After all, in 1597, whom else would readers have had chiefly in mind when imagining a thin prince with a self-conscious comic performer? In this regard, Weimann and Bruster’s discussions of Shakespeare’s experimentation with Vice-descendants in chapters 2 and 3 point to further unexplored insights. In aesthetic terms, Sir John is decidedly an anachronistic figure descended, as is well known, from a clownish dramaturgy of the aforementioned “self-resembled show” associated with the old Vice to whom he is frequently compared. Such an overtly arcane comic lineage makes him one of the era’s most indecorous throwbacks to the power of the traditional morality play. Even more than other parts written for Shakespearean clown Will Kemp, once called “Jest monger and Vice-gerent generall to the Ghost of Dick Tarlton”,16 Falstaff is characterized as resembling the figure of the medieval Vice. Falstaff himself threatens jestingly that he will beat the prince out of the kingdom with the Vice’s conventional stage prop “dagger of lath” (2.4.137), and Hal refers to him as a “Vice” (2.4.453), the personified “grey Iniquity” (2.4.454), a “villainous, abominable misleader of youth” (2.4.462), and as “that old, white-bearded Sathan” (2.4.463). Significantly, this evocative

Weimann and Shakespeare Among the Neoclassicals

189

amalgam of the Vice is “grey”, “white-bearded”, and preys on youth, since as Weimann has noted, for Shakespeare, “the Vice was the old Vice”, as with Feste’s reference “Like to the old Vice” (Twelfth Night, 4.2.120).17 For Shakespeare, then, the “old Vice” was a self-conscious anachronism. Clearly related to such determined aesthetic anachronism is what I would suggest is Falstaff’s embodiment of one of the most fruitful concepts treated in depth by Weimann and Bruster in Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, that of “contrarietie”.18 The Oxford English Dictionary defines “contrarietie” as “Opposition of one thing to another in nature …; diametrical difference, repugnancy, contrariness” (OED 1); “disagreement, discordance, discrepancy, inconsistency” (OED 2). As Weimann has frequently observed, Sidney’s Defence of Poesy speaks disapprovingly of “contrarietie” for its aesthetic and generic impurity and discordance, observing not merely “our Comediantes” and their “mingling [of] kings and clowns” but also their mixing of “delight” and “laughter,” which “in themselves … have as it were a kind of contrarietie”.19 Shakespeare and Sidney alike would have encountered contrariety in such moral plays published in the mid-Elizabethan period as the anonymous Tide Tarrieth No Man (1576), where we find Courage the Vice speaking of “Courage contrarious”, and a stage direction in Thomas Lupton’s All for Money (1577) requiring improvisation mistaking words: “Here the vyce shal turne the proclamation to some contrarie sence at everie time all for money hath read it.”20 Contrariety, then, was one thing that had made the Vice funny, and so it remains, I would add, with the “Vice-descendant” Falstaff and with what we shall see were later “Vice-derived agents”21 who continued to play “the old vice still”. Falstaff, I believe, embodies within his ample circumference extraordinary diametrical oppositions and discrepancies, to the point of making him a grotesquely comical, walking oxymoron. Much of the outrageous humour in this inherently laughable “goodly hotch-potch” centres upon the uniquely ridiculous juxtaposition of otherwise mutually exclusive opposites within him, since he is: “not only witty in [him]self, but the cause that wit is in other men” (2 Henry IV, 1.2.8–9); at once conscienceless – blithely moving “from praying to purse-taking” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.103) – and troubled by a longing to repent (hence the nickname “Monsieur Remorse”, 1.2.113); a “reverent Vice” (2.4.453) quoting scripture self-righteously in a tavern; a sanguine melancholic, lusty yet impotent, lumbering yet improbably capable of moving “nimbly, with … quick dexterity” (2.5.236), the paradoxical embodiment of perpetual carnival as if “all the year were playing holidays” (1.2.204).

190

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Rather than Kemp alone initiating anachronisms and contrariety, then, Shakespeare was complicit in authorizing “grose indecorum” in deliberate provocation against neoclassical strictures regarding genre and representation. Indeed, Shakespeare’s anti-neoclassical experiments with the anachronistic Vice, as well as the mingling of clownish indecorum and worthiness, extend beyond Falstaff to that master “personator” Prince Hal. Notably, Hal participates in indecorous violation of what Whetstone called the “order” or decorum “of speech”, for, as Giorgio Melchiori observes, “in Part One [Prince Hal] acted as a kind of link between the two linguistic registers of the play, the prose of comedy and the verse of history” speaking “over 18 per cent of the total number of words in the play, but the prose speeches which he exchanged with Falstaff and his companions prevailed over the verse he used in the court and battle scenes (60 per cent prose as against 40 per cent verse)”.22 Remarkably, in terms of the conventional decorum of prose, Hal is more clown than Prince. So, too, whereas it has been traditional (at least since J. Dover Wilson) to interpret Hal in terms of the conventions for the youthful protagonist of morality plays,23 he is hardly a true prodigal, for Hal is actually never seduced, never indeed misled, never in fact in need of any repentance. Equally inconsistent with a true prodigal is Hal’s pragmatic hood-winking of his deluded old fatherfigures; at the end of his stunning soliloquy Hal announces his plot to falsify not the persona of a Virtue but a disreputable, ‘Vicious’ image in order to stage an eventual stunning, if unnecessary, reformation: By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes, And like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation glitt’ring o’er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than which hath no foil to set it off. (1.2.211–15)

More a foil to himself than that other Harry, Harry Percy, the prince shows the world but one of the many “vizards” (1.2.128, 178) he is capable of wearing (one being a “mask of blood”, 3.2.136), the mere mask of a Prodigal, which will allow his histrionic “loose behavior” (1.2.208) in the past to serve as a “sullen” background for the final spectacular unmasking of his already extant “bright” and “redeemed” self. That surprising persona will then “show more goodly” by appearing to be “glitt’ring o’er [seeming] fault”. Unlike the wayward prince of the popular source play, The Famous Victories of King Henry the Fifth (prior to 1587), Hal does not wish to participate in

Weimann and Shakespeare Among the Neoclassicals

191

robberies, does not do so, and in fact goes so far as to pay back the stolen money “with advantage” (2.4.547). Shakespeare’s self-conscious alteration of his source in keeping his Hal above the fray is all the more pronounced in light of the fact that Famous Victories “lacks a Vice figure”24 and instead “locat[es] vice in young Hal, who later undergoes a St Paul-like transformation”.25 By contrast, far from needing to repent, Shakespeare’s anything-but-madcap prince instead puts on only a show of dissolution and repeatedly “sounds a …. persistent note of moral disapproval” about Falstaff’s character.26 Ironically, then, although Hal usurps the indecorum of the charismatic Vice, disguising his true nature while announcing his scheme to the audience in platea-like fashion, indulging in comically grotesque low-class idiom in defiance of neoclassical proscriptions about what Whetstone had called “the order of speech”, and in moralizing “two meanings into one word” (Richard III, 3.1.83), he clearly disapproves of Vices such as “Iniquity”. Hal is thus what we might perhaps understand as an “Anti-Vice” – something ironically inverted and radically new but descended from “contrarietie” and a figure of Shakespearean “grose indecorum” nonetheless. Humanist Comic Impulses and Plautine “Bifold” Authority If Weimann’s theories once again prove especially fruitful in this work when attuned to Renaissance language, they are in turn most dissatisfying when they encourage an uncritical acceptance of anachronistic conceptions involving binaries and developmental arguments arising from the unquestioned biases of longstanding critical tradition. Notably, when accounting for increasingly agonistic page/stage relations in and after the 1590s, the authors repeatedly invoke a binary of “nonhumanist” versus “humanist,” with the latter defined as antithetical to the comic, the popular, indecorum, and contrariety and in need of being “saved …. from academic stiffness”.27 Yet, when the authors refer to humanism, or invoke Hamlet “the humanist Prince”28 as its representative, what they mean is rigid theatrical neoclassicism. It is difficult to conceive of all English humanism as simply synonymous with a reductive neoclassicism insistent upon rigid decorum and the inviolable purity of genre. Here, we must instead recognize that, like the Calvinist-leaning neoclassical critic and churchman Joseph Hall (in whom Weimann found the terminology of “self-resembled show” describing traditional clowning), Sidney’s remarks on “contrarietie” and clowns – echoed by Hamlet’s own – are hardly representations of English humanism generally but rather of a

192

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

unique circle of cosmopolitan, Presbyterian neoclassicals. By contrast, other highly differentiated Protestant humanist playwrights, from the evangelical Nicholas Udall to the more orthodox Thomas Nashe, pioneered in English drama some of the very “bifold” performative modes discussed throughout Shakespeare and the Power of Performance via a habitual resort to colorfully colloquial idiom, Vice-descendants conjoined with seemingly extempore selfresembled show, self-conscious mock-classical burlesque, and attendant highlow “contrarietie.” Whereas Weimann has argued that Udall was not “prepared to use some of the cruder but highly theatrical effects, such as elaborating the comic scenes in tumbling verse and using rich idioms, pithy metaphors and proverbs of popular speech”,29 no writer of the period prior to the late 1580s did more than Udall (sometimes known as “the father of English comedy”30) to further the employment of precisely such dramatic devices, even in scholarly work. Belying the title of his influential Floures for Latine Spekynge (1533),31 Udall plucks out conversational Latin phrases, translating them into the most homely English analogues, preferring popular slang, proverbs, and that of which we might say: “used …. commonly, or …. a commen sayinge” (10v): “I have stered the cooles” (17r); “hande and foote, or with tothe and nayle” (3r); “Doest thou not see me brought in the briers” (18r); “I wol tumble thee in the myer” (26v). It likewise seems odd that, though Nashe’s brilliant play Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592) is treated at length in chapter 5 as featuring a titular figure whom Weimann and Bruster consider “[u]nrivaled by any other Elizabethan clown”, this product of Nashe’s flexible humanism cannot quell the contradictory assumption of humanist “stiffness”. This University Wit, who defended Aristotle and what was then known as “humane” education against puritan assault, called himself Juvenal, and burlesqued Ovid, found in humanism not an impediment but rather an impetus toward raucous humour and contrariety. Clearly, recognition of the extraordinary attraction “contrarious”, “bifold” dramaturgy had for many humanists would further understanding of the early modern comic performative. One reason that Weimann has dismissed humanist comic impulses is that he has long treated “the classical” as if it were monolithically at odds with the modes he deems simply “the popular”. However, classical literature, as puritan commentators raged, contained much that was profane, crude, and, in short, “pagan”. Whereas Weimann sees a binary between “pre-literary” and “extra-dramatic” rites of festivity and classical literature, the comedy of Aristophanes and Plautus had already harnessed “Saturnalian” impulses no less than the comic in medieval or Renaissance drama. Moreover, humanist attitudes toward comedy could be quite varied. What, for instance, is one to

Weimann and Shakespeare Among the Neoclassicals

193

make of the reputation and extraordinary influence of Plautus on Renaissance English comedy? Though the more refined Terence remained the idealized international humanist icon until the end of the sixteenth century, in England, grammar school and university performances, as well as popular playwrights, were already “attracted much rather to Plautus than Terence”.32 With the advent of the Reformation, English humanists defied orthodoxy in favouring Plautus over Terence, that is, in preferring the character of a Plautine Latin that John Henderson characterizes as “Latin behaving badly”, “a colourful … colloquial mixed with parodic Latin”.33 A certain strain of iconoclasm in English Protestantism undoubtedly contributed to the tendency to embrace “the rude ride”34 of Plautine Latin, for among purist Terentians, Richard Hardin notes, Plautus was indeed “a primitive”, given to archaic “obscure words” (obscuris verbis).35 Those favouring the so-called “Hellenic view of Roman comedy”, James Tatum explains, further maintained that the Roman playwrights, and particularly Plautus, “vulgarized their Greek models, coarsening what were originally refined and delicate comedies of manners”.36 Plautus was consequently stereotyped as low, popular, crude and given to gratuitous wordplay and fiction-breaking clowning in farces in which the fiction is only ever very thin to begin with.37 A longstanding recognition of Plautine comedy as more “vulgar” than Terence’s in every sense therefore clarifies how the former model authorized the use of both low idiom and low comedy in English vernacular imitations. Thus, as Wolfgang Riehle has observed, “few plays in English Renaissance drama … reveal a direct Terentian influence, [whereas] the impact of Plautine comedy is overwhelming”.38 What I want to stress here in response to misconceptions about English humanism, then, is that emulation of Plautus complemented a trajectory toward modes we now deem simply “popular” but which could also be classically derived, containing a unique “bifold authority”. Of course, the Roman playwright’s very name, Titus Maccius Plautus, alluded to clowning: “Maccius” was a stock-clown character in farce, and “Plautus” meant “flat-footed”, rendering his name as, essentially, “Titus Flatfooted Clown”. It is thought that Plautus was once a professional stage-clown himself, making him one of the first known instances of Weimann’s identification of the dynamic of “actor’s voice” in “author’s pen”. The Renaissance stageclown’s pen and its emphasis on “audience response,” “communal forms of cultural production,” the feel of improvisatory and collaborative byplay with the audience, and an unleashing of the celebrity and “personal charisma of the comic performer” have now been elaborated upon by Nora Johnson’s excellent study, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (2003).39

194

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Anticipating the remarkably similar mode of authorship by actor-authors such as stage clown William Rowley at the plebian Red Bull, over time Plautus had come to be deemed low class in being devoted to evoking what Elizabethan boy company playwright John Lyly referred to obliquely in his “Prologue at the Blackfriars” to Sapho and Phao (1584) as “loud laughing” (linked to “sport mingled with rudeness” and “unseemly speeches”), as opposed to the more refined effect endorsed by Lyly, the “soft smiling” and “inward delight” associated with Terence. Relevant to a blurring of the critical commonplace of the wholly popular and supposedly stiff humanist impulses, Plautus, Richard Hardin has demonstrated, “posit[ed] a model of classical (therefore, significant) comedy that violated Terentian decorum, bringing the highest standards of comic art uncomfortably close to those of low, clownish, popular comedy”.40 Plautus, then, authorized what I have characterized, invoking Whetstone, as “grose indecorum”. Plautus’s status in the Renaissance as “low” has special relevance to Weimann’s conception about humanist “stiffness” in opposition to the supposedly wholly “popular” impulse of “contrariety,” and particularly Weimann’s chief illustration of the concept from Sidney: But our comedians think there is no delight without laughter; which is very wrong, for though laughter may come with delight, yet cometh it not of delight, as though delight should be the cause of laughter …. nay, rather in themselves they have, as it were a kind of contrariety; …. Delight hath a joy in it, either permanent or present. Laughter hath only a scornful tickling.41

Significantly, Hardin shows that here Sidney “was surely thinking about the debate over Plautus when he contrasted the comedy of laughter with the better sort: the comedy of delight”. Hardin further observes that “When John Lyly says he sought in his comedy ‘to move inward delight’ and ‘soft smiling, not loud laughing’”, he was specifically referencing the opposition between Terence and Plautus.42 One inevitable conclusion to draw here is that Plautus inspired a redoubling of so-called wholly “popular” impulses and indecorous-decorum among English authors ranging from Udall through Shakespeare. In an era in which all grammar school children studied Plautus alongside the contrasting Terence, we cannot always be sure that the chief source of what we deem “popular” was not the product of “bifold” influences via the concentration of traditions with nearly identical performative impulses as those that Weimann has long identified solely with the “pre-literary” and “extra-dramatic”. Rather

Weimann and Shakespeare Among the Neoclassicals

195

than choosing between the “high” (Terentian “soft smiling”) and the “low” (Plautine “loud laughter”) in his comedy, Shakespeare instead embraced what we can now recognize as, in part, a “goodly hotch-potch” – the contrariety of opposing classical models. Hamlet, Vice-descendant and Prince of “Contrarietie” As with their monolithic conception of humanist notions of comedy, Weimann and Bruster have accepted several related developmental/evolutionary arguments about Shakespearean drama. The general trajectory supposed in Shakespeare and the Power of Performance is that, after early experimentation with a non-representational dramaturgy that included histrionic Vicedescendants, personation increasingly gives way to representation and the production of what the authors call “deep character” after the 1590s.43 Whereas at an “early stage in his career”, Shakespeare “continued to face” and highlight gaps between actor and character, the “space for histrionic presentation and self-display … shrank” and “engagement of the newly energized domain of the printed page with the tradition of performance led in the later 1590s and early 1600s [to] unprecedented depth of dramatic character”.44 Not surprisingly, the comic suffers as a result of such a developmental narrative in the second half of the book. That is, the authors both overtly and implicitly endorse arguments suggesting a diminution in the status of traditional clowning after 1599 (with the “unruly” Kemp’s departure), which they find Shakespeare embraced, particularly via Hamlet’s comments on clowning. In Hamlet, they adduce “traces of [the clown’s] resistance to prescribed language use” without which the “departure of Will Kemp from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men” would be “inexplicable”.45 Elsewhere, they assert that “the general direction of these changes can scarcely be doubted”, concluding that “at the turn of the century, traditional forms of clownage no doubt lost in public favor”,46 while citing, as “the best-known evidence,” “Hamlet’s strictures on clowns ‘that will themselves laugh to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too’ (3.2.40–2)”.47 In the earlier Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, Weimann likewise argued of “Hamlet’s learned neoclassical point of view” that “it seems likely that, taken in its context, the speech does indeed tell us something about Shakespeare’s own theory of drama”.48 But, taken in context, how representative was the cosmopolitan Hamlet’s point of view of “public favor” – or even, for that matter, of Hamlet?

196

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

If the advice that the stage clown should not break the fiction or distract from necessary questions of the play through laughter now sounds obviously valid, we must weigh that impression against the fact that Hamlet is anything but consistent with regard to clowning himself (that is, he himself does not “suit [his] action[s] to [his] word[s]”). Hamlet – like the play that bears his name – violates all the neoclassical decorum that he claims to favour through his own “impertinent” jesting from the outset and his later “antic disposition”. Excepting his eloquent soliloquies, few philosophical discussions with Horatio, and his final and lone decorous court scene, the neoclassically-posing Hamlet, thrust into the presence of a royal ghost and a usurper-king, acts in most of his scenes as if he were right at home on Shakespeare’s anti-neoclassical “great stage of fools” (King Lear, 4.6.183). Hamlet himself is, in fact, an extension of what Weimann and Bruster identify as Shakespeare’s earlier experimentation with figures of a hybrid clown-hero, “mingling vulgar Vice and worthy history”, in the titular figure of Richard III (1592–93) and the Bastard, Faulconbridge, in King John (1594– 96), both of which plays feature histrionic star turns who are descendants of the Vice.49 Here I refer to and extend the implications of the authors’ brief mention of the “highly differentiated appropriation of the Vice figure in Hamlet, where Shakespeare infuses certain memories of this figure into an antic, mad version of ‘graced deformities’ – one motivated by a desire to scourge the world and ‘set it right’”.50 Hamlet (like the Anti-Vice Hal before him) is frequently shown prompting “spectators to laugh”, through improvisatory, quick-wit repartee, “though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be consider’d” (3.2.42–3). Contrary to Hamlet’s espoused anti-comic acting theories, however, his own ostensibly impertinent jesting in practice scarcely distracts from the “necessary question[s]” of the play but rather it asks the audience to view those questions in rich ways, from different perspectives. The effect here is thus remarkably like that of Shakespearean comic subplots, introducing what Weimann has called a “dual perspective … encompass[ing] conflicting views of experience”.51 Here, then, the Prince enacts the supposedly contrary functions of both “worthy” main plot and “unmeet” subplot. Hamlet’s radically anti-neoclassical, “antic” performance, more so than the theory he avows but habitually violates, must be kept in mind when reassessing Shakespeare’s dramaturgy: this princely figure of “contrarietie” has been widely interpreted as Shakespeare’s endorsement of neoclassicism and as taming popular stage-clowning when, rather than containing such energies, Hamlet has instead further extended what Whetstone called “grose indecorum” through royal embodiment sometimes going well beyond even that Vice-descendant

Weimann and Shakespeare Among the Neoclassicals

197

Richard III. In this sense, Hamlet is the more experimental figure, enacting a radically inverted indecorous-decorum: expressions of dignified eloquence and elevated poetry are reserved for the Vice’s platea-like stage-positioning and the shared awareness of a “secret close intent” (Richard III, 1.1.158), which was now converted from a presentational function to representation of outward “show” of “that within” (1.2.85): that is, a paradoxical histrionic display of inwardness, while Vice-like equivocating to “moralize two meanings into one word” (Richard III, 3.1.83) is transposed to representational scenes, featuring the Prince himself performing fool-like impertinent jesting with other worthy characters at court. Generations of critics, no doubt influenced by the ultimate neoclassical victory over the comic, have nonetheless fallen into what we might call “the Hamlet fallacy” (that is, the assumption that the would-be, though failed, neoclassical Prince speaks for Shakespeare any more than other myriad characters do elsewhere), taking the indecorous, alternately (re)presentational Hamlet wholly at his word in speaking against clowns’ violation of decorum and representation, to the point of reading this Prince of contariety’s advice to the players as an uncomplicated rebuke of the traditional, anti-neoclassical clowning of Kemp. Yet, there is considerable evidence that Shakespeare’s own defiance of neoclassical strictures remained equally “grose” up until his late collaboration with John Fletcher. Armin-Autolycus’s “Personation” and “Self-Resembled Show” A related problem with a dominant narrative that Weimann has accepted in previously published work is that the roles of Robert Armin do not really become less but often, rather, more non-representational, more indeed, as Armin-Feste says, “Like to the old Vice” (Twelfth Night, 4.2.120), and thus decidedly less consistent with “deep character” as his career progressed and he became more of a well-defined, celebrity persona. As earlier in his career, Shakespeare did not subsume but instead further foregrounded the gap between representation and presentation via Armin’s “self-resembled show” and remarkable skill at “personation”. Yet, Weimann argued in Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition that “The actors [of Shakespeare’s clown] parts – Kemp and Armin – no longer re-enacted their clowning selves, but represented, at least in part, fully developed dramatic roles. In this sense Shakespeare broke away from Tarlton’s ‘self-resembled show’”.52 But the self-resembled re-enactment of Armin’s clowning persona actually expanded not in spite of burgeoning print culture (assumed in Shakespeare and the Power of Performance to have furthered

198

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

“deep character”53) but precisely because of Armin’s own publishing. In fact, comparing Armin’s roles to his own self-promoting publication in works such as Quips Upon Question (1600), Foole Upon Foole (1600, 1605), and A Nest of Ninnies (1608), Johnson demonstrates that, with Armin, “the charisma of the theatrical play and the charisma of print are one and the same”.54 Consider one of the Shakespearean parts least subsumed in representational fiction, the comic part of Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale (1610–11), a role undoubtedly written for Armin in order to capitalize on his charisma and particular skills, which included disguise/mimicry (hence “personation”), improvisation, and singing. Not classifiable as an artificial fool, Autolycus is an amoral comic rogue whose sole function in the plot is delay – that is, preventing the Shepherd from revealing Perdita’s origins/identity too early. But his chief role from the point of view of pleasure, upon his belated, superfluous appearance in Act 4, scene 3, is as a charismatic entertainer, bringing communal entertainment to the audience. He makes his entrance singing, confides in the audience that he is out of service, spies his first victim at the Clown’s entrance (“A prize, a prize!”, 4.3.31; “[Aside.] If the springe hold, the cock’s mine”, l. 35), pretends to be a poor man robbed by “Autolycus”, picks the sympathetic Clown’s pocket, receives word of a sheep-shearing festival, plans to attend, and exits singing. In the next scene, now thinly disguised as a peddler wearing a false beard at the sheep-shearing, he sings several songs, sells ballads, picks more pockets, gloats about his theft to the audience at great length, exchanges clothes with Florizel, and then, upon overhearing that Perdita was a noblyborn foundling, plots in asides to the audience, removes his scant disguise (“Let me pocket up my pedlar’s excrement. [Takes off his false beard.]”, 4.4.713), pretends to be a courtier, and frightens the Shepherd and his son with performative tales of their torture at court if caught to further his scheme to turn them in for profit. In the end, when he learns that all his Vice-like plotting has been foiled and his intended victims are now wealthy, this protean figure now opts for fawning flattery in hopes of gain in the only remaining way available to him. This supreme version of what Armin-Thersites had called “A juggling trick – to be secretly open” (Troilus and Cressida, 5.3.24) unleashes Armin’s personating skill, his almost unparalleled ability to juggle in quick succession the guises of robbed victim, peddler, courtier, Vice, and penitent. Few characters in Shakespeare so delight in improvised personation (for example, “we may do anything extempore”, 4.4.677) and in breaking any and all pretence of representation, as in his striking aside at the Shepherd’s entrance, “Aside, aside, here is more matter for a hot brain” (4.4.684), a line in which he gleefully celebrates a stage direction, emphatically calling attention

Weimann and Shakespeare Among the Neoclassicals

199

to a non-representational theatrical convention. Autolycus is, then, yet another exuberantly indecorous throwback to the histrionic “self-resembled show”, platea-like stage positioning, and disguising “personation” of “the old Vice”. The role here is scarcely as bounded by the supposed post-1599 shift toward representational, characterological strictures as critics have associated with Armin, but rather it continues much of the traditional popular clowning associated with Tarleton, with the chief difference being that the part was tailored to the particular talents of a performer skilled as a mimic/personator, singer, and, significantly, given his evident continuation of a tradition of “extradramatic” clowning “performance after the play” in the form of rhyming, Tarletonizing “quips” or “responses to the questions or jibes that members of the audience throw out”, a clowning persona no less – and probably more – known for skill as an improviser than Kemp, whose jigs were scripted.55 Appearing c. 1610–11 in a role written to foreground charismatic personating skill, Armin-Autolycus is a figure that, at this late date, must have been a neoclassicist’s nightmare – both one of Marlowe’s improvising “rhyming mother wits” and Hall’s old-fashioned “self-misformed lout” who “laughs, and grins, and frames his mimic face” and “show[s] his teeth” in order to provoke “laughter at his self-resembled show”. As with Shakespeare’s collaboration with Kemp-Falstaff in creating “grose indecorum” that richly infuses the plays in which he appears, the playwright’s upsetting of neoclassical decorum does not end with the actor-character of Armin-Autolycus but rather informs the dramaturgy of The Winter’s Tale as a whole. Here again the contrast to neoclassical ideals is deliberate. Thus, a year or two before Shakespeare’s play appeared, the neoclassically informed John Fletcher’s very different The Faithful Shepherdess had failed when the King’s Men put it on; Fletcher wrote in the preface “To the Reader” in the quarto version (undated, c. 1609–10) that “the people seeing when it was played” had expected “a play of country hired shepherds in gray cloaks, with curtailed dogs in strings”, and “missing Whitsun-ales, cream, wassail and morris-dances, [they] began to be angry”. By contrast, Shakespeare had given the people much of what they wanted through the Clown-Shepherd and Autolycus’s festive entertainment. In turn, the reactions of neoclassical critics like Ben Jonson suggest that Shakespeare had been flouting neoclassical ideals of verisimilitude, whereas Jonson claimed that he was “loth to make Nature afraid, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such-like drolleries” (ll. 124–5), and Jonson scoffed to Drummond (1618–19) about the idea of a “shipwrack in Bohemia, wher ther is no sea neer by some 100 miles”.56 But if

200

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Jonson assumed that Shakespeare had been utterly naive, the relationship of The Winter’s Tale to Sidney’s Defence of Poesy is instructive: the Player, when he comes in, must ever begin telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear news of shipwreck in the same place, then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock …. Now of time they are much more liberal. For ordinary it is, that two young princes fall in love, after many adverses she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy; he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love and is ready to get another child, and all is in two hours’ space; which, how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine, and art hath taught and all ancient examples justified ….57

Save that the lost child is Perdita (“lost one”), not her love Florizel, the resemblance between Shakespeare’s play and Sydney’s earlier hypothetical example seems too uncannily close to be accidental, from the radical shifts in place and time right down to the flower scene (4.4) and the reported shipwreck (3.3). In any event, Shakespeare could not have been unaware of the extent to which Autolycus and the entirety of his play – not to mention his (in)famous use of a bear – constituted “grose indecorum”. Fletcher’s Anti-Comic Manifesto: “I come no more to make you laugh” The contrast between Shakespeare’s heretofore preferred dramaturgy and opposing neoclassical strictures against comic indecorum is finally most evident in the delayed ascendance of Fletcher extant in Shakespeare’s belated collaboration with him. In 1613, in collaboration where Fletcher was now the dominant partner, there occurs almost a complete reversal of Shakespeare’s distinctive dramaturgy of contrariety. When the neoclassical former boy company playwright Fletcher announced, in the opening line of the Prologue to Henry VIII (1613), that the King’s Men “come no more to make you laugh” (l. 1), he meant it, at least in so far as the company would be inclined to tolerate the low laughter of “merry, bawdy” clowns (l. 14). Instead of “rank[ing] our chosen truth with such a show / As fool” (ll. 18–19), the King’s Men’s history play now left out the famed historical fool Will Somers as the company selfconsciously appealed to “gentle hearers” (l. 17):

Weimann and Shakespeare Among the Neoclassicals

201

Only they That come … to see a fellow In a long motley coat guarded with yellow, Will be deceivd. For, gentle hearers, know, To rank our chosen truth with such a show As fool … … Will leave us never an understanding friend. (ll.13–22)

The new aim of the company was to produce something more “weighty and …. serious,” something “Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe: / Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow” (ll. 2–4). So serious was Fletcher in this neoclassical manifesto that no major comic roles would appear in his plays thereafter.58 In fact, though the comic actor John Shank had joined the King’s Men between 1613 and 1619, after Armin’s retirement c. 1613, Shank is mentioned in the list of principal actors for plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, T.W. Baldwin noted, “just once”.59 Baldwin thus observes, “We have good reason to believe that this omission of the clown parts from Beaumont and Fletcher plays was not accidental. Indeed, the contemporary eulogists …. take pride in the fact that these authors, in pleasing contrast to Shakespeare, found their humor elsewhere than in the clown.”60 Whereas fellow playwright William Cartwright associated Shakespeare’s clowns with “scurrility” and “bawdry”, with Beaumont and Fletcher “mirth came unforced …. Without labour, clean, chaste, and unvex’d”, 61 a metaphor linking the laughter begotten by clowns shockingly with rape. Cartwright indeed passed judgment on the humour of Shakespearean stage clowns as old-fashioned “obsceaneness”: Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies I’ th’ ladies’ questions, and the fools’ replies, Old-fashioned wit, which walk’d from town to town In trunk-hose, which our fathers called the clown; Whose wit our nice times would obsceaneness call, And which made bawdry pass for comical …62

As extreme as such neoclassical resistance to Shakespeare’s wilful use of anachronistic comic “grose indecorum” is, Cartwright understood Fletcher’s up-to-date neoclassical banishment of clowns well enough.

202

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

As much as the atypical Fletcherian prologue to Henry VIII, Cartwright’s unfavourable comparison of Shakespeare to Fletcher has much to tell us – by way of contrast not just to Shakespeare’s clowns but a rich succession of radically differentiated figures whose occasional but insistent resort to presentational practice makes them, to some extent, “Vice-descendants” (Richard III, Falstaff, Hal, Hamlet, Feste, Edmund, Iago, and Autolycus) – about Shakespeare’s deliberate, long-term commitment to a bifold dramaturgy of contrariety that was at once popular and humanist in origin. If the Presbyterianleaning neoclassical Fletcher was like Richard Jones, the printer of Marlowe’s Second Part of Tamburlaine, in being opposed to juxtaposing Vice and the “worthiness of the matter itself”,63 Shakespeare had spent his career up until 1613 doing just that, mingling loud laughter and inward delight, impertinence and matter, vice and worthiness, king and clown, sometimes as embodied in one and the same actor-character. In the end, then, much evidence suggests that the marked shift in clowning and Shakespearean dramaturgy assumed by Weimann and Bruster via the commonplace Hamlet-as-Shakespeare fallacy, the overstated myth of Kemp’s banishment, and the monolithic stereotype of humanism are worth questioning – and thus that Weimann’s insights are worth developing after the late 1590s until at least 1613, which seems to reflect a much more radical shift in dramaturgy. Notes 1. Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 13. 2. Ibid., chaps 1–3. 3. Ibid., chaps 4–5. 4. Ibid., chap. 6. 5. Ibid., 5. 6. Ibid., 112. 7. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Popular Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 199; Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, 211. 8. Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, 61. 9. Ibid., 112. 10. James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (New York: Harper, 2005), 39, 37. 11. John Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court (Thrupp, Stroud, Glos.: Sutton Publishing, 1998), 132.

Weimann and Shakespeare Among the Neoclassicals

203

12. Will Kemp, Kemps nine daies wonder. Performed in a daunce from London to Norwich … [etc.] (London, 1600; STC 14923), sig. A4.) 13. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 224–5. 14. Joseph Hall, Collected Poems, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1949), 15. 15. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 192. 16. Thomas Nashe, Dedication in An Almond for a Parrot (1589), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R.B. McKerrow, 5 vols (London: A.H. Bullen, 1904–10), 3:331. 17. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 151. 18. On the relation of the Vice to “contrarietie”, see Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, esp. 27–34, 47, 49. 19. Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 10. 20. Ibid., 10. 21. Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, 65, 56. 22. Giorgio Melchiori, ed., The Second Part of King Henry IV (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 24. 23. J. Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Macmillan Co., 1944), 21–3. 24. Melchiori, Second Part of King Henry IV, 11. 25. Alan Lutkus, “Sir John Falstaff”, in Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, ed. Vicki K. Janik (Westport: Greenwood, 1998), 176–84, at 178. 26. David Ellis, Shakespeare’s Practical Jokes: An Introduction to the Comic in His Work (Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2007), 99. 27. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 180. 28. Weimann and Bruster Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, 211. 29. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition , 105. 30. Edwald Flügel, ed., Ralph Roister Doister, in Representative English Comedies, vol. 1, gen. ed. C.M. Gayley (New York: Macmillan, 1903), 98, 99. 31. Nicholas Udall, Floures for Latine Spekynge, selected and gathered out of Terence (London, 1533; STC 32899). 32. Wolfgang Riehle, Shakespeare, Plautus and the Humanist Tradition (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), 18. 33. John Henderson, trans. and ed., Assinaria: The One about the Asses (Madison: University of Wisconsin PRESS, 2006), vii–viii. 34. Ibid., viii. 35. Richard Hardin, “Encountering Plautus in the Renaissance: A Humanist Debate on Comedy”, Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 789–818, at 794, 806. 36. James Tatum, ed. and trans., Plautus: The Darker Comedies: Bacchides, Casina, and Truculentus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 86. 37. Ibid., 8. 38. Riehle, Shakespeare, Plautus and the Humanist Tradition, 18–19. 39. Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 14, 17, 21, 20, respectively. 40. Hardin, “Encountering Plautus in the Renaissance”, 813.

204

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

41. Michael Payne and John Hunter, eds, Renaissance Literature: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 524. 42. Ibid., 813. 43. Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, 182. 44. Ibid., 179. 45. Ibid., 43. 46. Ibid., 110. 47. Ibid., 110–11. 48. Weimann. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 199. 49. Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, 59. 50. Ibid., 65. 51. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 243. 52. Ibid., 192. 53. Weimann and Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance, 182. 54. Johnson, The Actor as Playwright, 26. 55. Ibid., 149, 20. 56. “Induction” to Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (1631), ed. Suzanne Gossett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), ll. 131–33; Notes of Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden: January M.DC.XIX, ed. David Laing (London: n.p., 1842; repr. Elibron Classics, n.p., Elbiron Classics, 2006), 16. 57. Quoted in Hallett Smith’s Introduction to The Winter’s Tale, in The Riverside Shakespeare (1974; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1567. 58. T.W. Baldwin, Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927), 217. 59. Ibid., 217. 60. Ibid., 218. 61. Ibid., 218. 62. Ibid., 218. 63. Ibid., 56–7.

Part II

This page has been left blank intentionally

11 Rusting, Bright, and Resting Weapons: A Textual Crux, and Closure in Romeo and Juliet Richard Levin*

But at her feet her sword was likewise layde, Whose long rest rusted the bright steely brand – The Faerie Queene (5.9.30)

In the final scene of Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet wakes in the family tomb and sees Romeo lying dead beside her, she takes his dagger from its sheath on his back and stabs herself with it while she says, according to Q2 (1599), “O happy dagger, / This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die” (5.3.169–70).2 In Q1 (1597) her last lines read “O happy dagger, thou shalt end my fear; / Rest in my bosom. Thus I come to thee”; but I want to focus here on the choice between the verbs “rust” and “rest”, since this is the only difference between the two versions that has elicited any significant editorial disagreement, and the only one that has a significant effect on our response to Juliet’s death. Anyone depending on editions of the play published after 1900 would have a hard time finding out about this choice, because almost all of them print “rust”,3 and almost all these (including the one I am following in this article) do not even mention Q1 “rest” and therefore do not explain why they are rejecting it. This was not always true, however, because almost all the editions published before 1900, even though they regularly print the Q2 version of 

*  Editors’ Note: This article was completed and submitted to the Yearbook by Professor Levin. However, he was prevented from revising it by his death in October 2009. We have printed it as he left it, aware that he might have preferred to make changes had he been able.]

207

208

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Juliet’s last line, substitute Q1 “rest” for “rust”, and most of these, similarly, do 4 not mention the Q2 “rust” or tell their readers why they reject it. This striking change is the result of what we now recognize as a paradigm shift in editorial theory and practice. Editions of Shakespeare produced during the nineteenth century were what we now call “eclectic”, which meant that the editors felt free to choose whatever readings they preferred from the early quartos and first folio, and almost all of them preferred “rest” to “rust”, which is a point I will return to later. But the early 1900s marked the advent of the New Bibliography, which required editors to adopt what was regarded as a “scientific” approach to their task by first examining the nature of all the early texts and their relationships to an authorial or playhouse manuscript and to each other, in order to determine which text is the most “authoritative” and therefore should serve as the basis of a modern edition. This was a relatively easy task in the case of Romeo and Juliet, because Q1 is clearly an inferior text or what came to be called a “bad quarto”, while Q2 (whose title page announces that it is “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended ”) is just as clearly a superior text and is the one from which all the subsequent early editions descend,5 so that it must be the most “authoritative”. This explains why all modern editors base their editions on Q2 and, therefore, why almost all of them have Juliet say “rust”, and it also explains why most of them do not mention Q1 “rest” or try to justify their rejection of it, because once Q2 is established as their “copy text”, they see no need to record every one of the many variants in the “bad” Q1, or to explain in every instance why the Q2 reading is preferable, which quite literally “went without saying”.6 Indeed, it would be impossible for editors to record all these rejected Q1 variants, and no one expects them to do it. The superiority of Q2 to Q1, however, is not an absolute. All the editors acknowledge that some passages in Q2 derive from Q1, and that Ql itself must derive ultimately from an authorial manuscript, although the line of transmission may have been indirect and contaminated, and they all admit a number of the Q1 readings into their texts, which must mean that they believe these readings are superior to those in Q2.7 What we have here, then, would seem to be a textual crux that is similar to the Indian/Judean crux in Othello, 5.2.347, where we also have to choose between two readings, each of which makes some sense, and each of which is found in a text (Q1 and F1 in the case of Othello) that has some authority. (Another similarity, which I think is simply a coincidence, is that the two passages in question both appear in a death speech, delivered just before or while the speaker stabs her/himself.) Yet everyone recognizes that the Indian/Judean choice is a crux that calls for

Rusting, Bright, and Resting Weapons

209

some extended commentary and argument, while we do not usually speak of the rest/rust choice as a crux, and it has attracted very little attention, which leads me to suggest that in this sense cruxes are created by textual scholars and editors, who define some passage as a crux when they decide to enter into a debate about it.8 An obvious explanation of this difference in treatment is that the Indian/ Judean choice, as I have tried to show elsewhere,9 is both determined by and helps to determine two very different interpretations of Othello and his tragedy, so it became a crux because it is crucial to our understanding of the play, while no one would claim that the rest/rust choice has a comparable effect on our interpretation of Juliet or her tragedy. But another explanation of this difference lies in the situation I just described, since almost all recent editors prefer Q2 “rust”, and while a few give very brief arguments to justify their preference, which will be discussed below, most of them see no need to do this, because Q2 is universally acknowledged to be the superior text, as we noted, and because no one is now presenting arguments for Q1 “rest”, so that there does not seem to be anything to debate about. I will try to rectify this imbalance by rising to the defence of the undefended “rest” and examining the grounds for choosing between these two readings, which I hope may contribute to the elevation of this choice to the status of cruxhood. If the choice between Q1 “rest” and Q2 “rust” cannot be settled on bibliographical grounds alone, we are forced to turn to literary arguments, which ultimately lead to some form of artistic judgment. I think we can quickly pass over the kind of rush to judgment exhibited (and recommended) by editors who assert that we should prefer the Q1 reading because it is more “poetic”, or the Q2 reading because it is more “vivid”,10 since these criteria are much too abstract to be of any help here. Some of the most powerful lines in Shakespeare are not “poetic” at all, in the usual sense of that term, and some of them are not particularly “vivid” either.11 Vividness is not in itself a virtue in drama, since it all depends on what is being vivified and whether this is appropriate for the speaker’s immediate situation and for the overall effect of the play. This concept of appropriateness is in fact the basic dramatic criterion, as we will see when we address the problem of judgment. I would like to begin, however, on the much more humble and concrete level of the actual facts of authorial usage by looking at Shakespeare’s other references to the rusting of weapons, in order to determine when and why this happens in his plays. With only one exception, to be discussed later, the proponents of Q2 “rust” have ignored this question, and it is easy to see why, because there is no passage in Shakespeare where any weapon is said to rust

210

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

in the wound it has made. On the contrary, if we ask what causes weapons to rust in his plays, the answer is that they never rust when they are put into use to strike someone, but always when they remain out of use, and the longer they remain out of use, the more they rust. We are told that Petruchio came to his wedding wearing “an old rusty sword ta’en out of the town armory” (The Taming of the Shrew, 3.2.46–7). After they decide to abandon their military careers (or, rather, their pretensions to these careers), Don Armado says, “Adieu, valor, rust, rapier, be still, drum, for your manager is in love” (Love’s Labor’s Lost, 1.2.181–2), and Parolles says, “Rust sword, cool blushes, and, Parolles, live / Safest in shame” (All’s Well that Ends Well, 4.3.337–8). Prince Escalus complains that the feud has “made Verona’s ancient citizens / … wield old partisans, in hands as old, / Cank’red with peace, to part your cank’red hate” (Romeo and Juliet, 1.1.92–5), where the first “Cank’red” means “rusted”. King Richard is informed by Scroop that in support of Bullingbrook “distaff-women manage rusty bills / Against thy seat”, and later is assured by Northumberland that Bullingbrook will dismiss his soldiers, if his demands are met, and “His glittering arms he will commend to rust” (Richard II, 3.2.118–19, 3.3.116). In 2 Henry VI, when Suffolk is accused by Warwick of complicity in the death of the good Duke Humphrey, he answers, “[H]ere’s a vengeful sword, rusted with ease, / That shall be scoured in his rancorous heart / That slanders me with murther’s crimson badge” (3.2.198–200). And this idea is certainly not limited to Shakespeare. In John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, for example, Ferdinand warns his sister, the Duchess, in terms that are similar to Suffolk’s threat: “This was my Fathers poyniard: doe you see, / I’ll’d be loth to see’t looke rusty” (1.1.370–71);12 and in the passage from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene that serves as my epigraph, which is taken from a description of Mercilla seated on her throne, the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two variants in our crux demonstrates that a weapon became “rusted” when it had a “long rest” – that is, when it has been out of action for an extended period. This also applies to military armour. According to Grandpre’s description of the English forces, “Big Mars seems bankrout in their beggar’d host, / And faintly through a rusty beaver peeps” (Henry V, 4.2.43–4). In Troilus and Cressida Ulysses explains to Achilles that: Perseverance, dear my lord, Keeps honor bright; to have done is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mock’ry. (3.3.150–53)

Rusting, Bright, and Resting Weapons

211

And Claudio, similarly, says that an unused law is “like unscour’d armor, hung by th’ wall”, that has not been worn for many years and so would be covered with rust (Measure for Measure, 1.2.167). This corrosion was also envisioned in general terms, as in the lament of one of Aufidius’s servingmen that “This peace is nothing but to rust iron” (Coriolanus, 4.5.219), which presumably 13 includes armour as well as arms. The adjective “rusty” could also be used metaphorically at this time, as it still is today, to refer to people or things that are not actually corroded but are weakened or impaired by lack of activity.14 Aeneas says that Hector “in this dull and long-continued truce / Is rusty grown” (Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.262–3); when Hamlet is told that the players are no longer popular, he asks, “Do they grow rusty?” (Hamlet, 2.2.337); and Falstaff speaks of “the rusty curb of old father antic the law” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.61), apparently because it has not been enforced, much like the law that Claudio compares to “unscour’d armor” in the passage quoted from Measure for Measure. This meaning can also be found in the works of contemporary authors, such as Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Captain, where Jacamo, the titular hero, complains about “This cold dull rusty peace” (2.1.8),15 because there is no employment for soldiers like himself, or for their armament. And it seems likely that Suffolk is drawing on this metaphor when he says, in the statement quoted above from 2 Henry VI, that his sword is “rusted with ease”, because he probably does not mean that it has real rust on it, like the old sword taken by Petruchio from the town armoury of Padua or the old partisans wielded by the ancient citizens of Verona. On the basis of these passages, therefore, we would expect to find that in Shakespeare the weapons and armor that are being put to use in combat will be described as bright, beaming, shining, sparkling, glittering, glistering, or lustrous – that is, in terms that are seen as the exact opposite of rusted. Scroop tells King Richard that Bullingbrook is “covering your fearful land / With hard bright steel”, and Aumerle tells his challengers that, if he does not respond to them, “may my hands rot off, / And never brandish more revengeful steel / Over the glittering helmet of my foe” (Richard II, 3.2.110–11, 4.1.49–51). When Salisbury draws on Hubert de Burgh, the Bastard says, “Your sword is bright, sir, put it up again” (King John, 4.3.79), and, similarly, when his followers and Brabantio’s draw on each other, Othello says, “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them” (Othello, 1.2.59). Parolles boasts that the swords worn by him and his comrades are “Good sparks and lustrous” because they have just been used in battle (All’s Well that Ends Well, 2.1.41). Antony tells Cleopatra that Italy “Shines o’er with civil swords” (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.3.45); Gloucester tells the mourning nobles that King Henry’s “brandish’d

212

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

sword did blind men with his beams” (1 Henry VI, 1.1.10); the English Herald reports that King John’s soldiers marched off to battle with “armors” that were “so silver-bright” (King John, 2.1.315); and Lucrece studies a tapestry that depicts the Trojans marching off with “bright weapons” (The Rape of Lucrece, 1432). We also saw that a contrast between shining and rusting is constructed in the statements by Northumberland in Richard II about the “glittering arms” of Bullingbrook and “rust”, and by Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida about the “honor bright” of Achilles and “rusty mail”, and in the description in my epigraph of the royal sword whose “bright steely brand” has been by “long rest rusted.” This same contrast even takes on a figurative meaning when the repentant Leontes acknowledges that Camillo was right to disobey him: “How he glisters / Through my rust!” (The Winter’s Tale, 3.2.170–71). Moreover, after one of these weapons has actually pierced somebody, it never becomes rusted but is always said to be “bloody”, “bloodied”, “bleeding”, or “gory.”16 And whenever this action is located in the future and the speakers envision what effect it will have on their weapons, which is what Juliet is supposed to be thinking about according to the defenders of the Q2 reading, they regularly assume, not that it will “rust” these weapons, but that it will “stain” them. When Hotspur prepares for the battle of Shrewsbury, he says, “Here draw I / A sword, whose temper I intend to stain / With the best blood that I can meet withal” (1 Henry IV, 5.2.92–4). When the Constable prepares for the battle of Agincourt, he complains that the English soldiers have “Scarce blood enough in all their sickly veins / To give each naked curtle-axe a stain, / That our French gallants shall to-day draw out” (Henry V, 4.2.20–22). When King Philip prepares to attack Angiers, Constance urges him to “Stay for an answer to your embassy, / Lest unadvis’d you stain your swords with blood” (King John, 2.1.44–5). When Bagot accuses him of murder, Aumerle replies that he “will maintain what thou hast said is false / In thy heart-blood, though being all too base / To stain the temper of my knightly sword” (Richard II, 4.1.27–9). When Warwick and Salisbury hail him as king, York replies, “I am not your king / Till I be crown’d, and that my sword be stain’d / With heartblood of the house of Lancaster” (2 Henry VI, 2.2.64–6). And when Coriolanus is attacked by the Volsces, he defies them to “Stain all your edges on me” (Coriolanus, 5.6.112). (This term can also be used for past actions, as we see in Antony and Cleopatra when Decretas shows Caesar the sword with which Antony killed himself and says, “I robb’d his wound of it; behold it stain’d / With his most noble blood” – 5.1.25–6.)17 The only exception I could find is in 3 Henry VI, where Clifford, after killing Rutland, thinks of confronting York:

Rusting, Bright, and Resting Weapons

213

Plantagenet, I come, Plantagenet! And this thy son’s blood cleaving to my blade Shall rust upon my weapon, till thy blood, Congeal’d with this, do make me wipe off both. (1.3.49–52)

But this is an exception that actually does prove the rule because the circumstances are so exceptional, since Clifford wants his weapon to rust and so is planning to depart from standard swordly procedure in order to make this happen, which certainly cannot apply to Juliet’s plan for the dagger, if she can even be said to have any plan for its future. This line of argument against the rusting dagger of Q2 is strengthened, moreover, by the few references to resting weapons that I could find in Shakespeare. In Troilus and Cressida, Hector, after he has killed the nameless Greek warrior for his armour, says, “Rest, sword, thou hast thy fill of blood and death”, and Achilles, after he and his Myrmidons have killed Hector, says that his sword “thus goes to bed” (5.8.4, 20); in Antony and Cleopatra, Agrippa says that Cleopatra “made great Caesar lay his sword to bed” (2.2.227); and in 2 Henry VI, Jack Cade tells his sword (which he addresses as “Steel”) that it must kill Alexander Iden “ere thou sleep in thy sheath” (4.10.56–8). In all four of these passages the sword is (or will be) put to rest or to sleep only after it has been put into action to kill opponents. (In all but the first we are told that this resting/sleeping occurs in a “sheath” or a “bed”, which seems to be a metaphor for “sheath”, and in the first I believe this is assumed.) And there is no suggestion that the sword is going to rust there, or do anything else except rest or sleep. Placing the sword in its sheath, therefore, is regarded as the ending of its activity (that is, killing), and not as the beginning of a new activity (that is, rusting), a point I will return to later. I think we can conclude, therefore, that our survey of Shakespeare’s use of the words “rust” and “rest” in connection with arms and armour gives us some very persuasive evidence in favour of Q1 “rest” and opposed to Q2 “rust” in Juliet’s final sentence. I would now like to proceed from the examination of the two individual words in order to consider the actual meaning of this sentence in which they appear. The “rest” of Q1 presents no problem on this level, because this word does not call for any further activity – in fact, it means the cessation of all activity, as we saw in the other Shakespearean passages where “rest” (or “sleep”) is applied to weapons. But the “rust” of Q2 clearly does call for more activity, and that poses a serious problem, although as far as I know no editor who prefers this reading has addressed it. For Juliet could

214

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

not say that the dagger will “there rust” in her bosom unless she assumed that it will remain “there” for an extended period of time after her death. But surely she knew, as did the audience, that it will be removed as soon as her body is discovered – certainly before she is reburied – and therefore will not have any opportunity to rust “there”. A kind of confirmation of this argument can be found, moreover, in the time sequence implied in Juliet’s sentence in Q2. When she says “This is thy sheath; there rest/rust, and let me die”, the conjunction “and” would normally mean that the action described in the third clause will occur at about the same time or shortly after the action described in the second clause, and not that it will occur before that action – certainly not a long time before it.18 Again we would have to say that this clearly works for “rest”, because the dagger will come to rest as soon as it is sheathed in her bosom and she will die then, or very shortly thereafter, but it just as clearly does not work for “rust”, because, as we noted, the dagger will not rust “there” until long after she dies, if indeed it is allowed to remain in her bodily sheath. Therefore, if that is actually what she has in mind, we would expect her to say “This is thy sheath; let me die, and there rust”. Since our inquiry has been limited so far to the literal meaning of “rust” and “rest” as they are used by Shakespeare in relation to weapons and armour and in Juliet’s final sentence, we should also consider the emotional connotations of these two words in his plays and, presumably, in his day. Such an investigation is especially important in the case of “rust”, which is usually employed today in a more or less neutral manner as an objective description of a physical phenomenon, but which in Shakespeare always seems to carry a strong negative charge, since it is regarded as something deleterious that is to be avoided whenever possible or removed as soon as possible.19 This is evident in the quotations assembled above that refer to the rusting of weapons and armour, which is supposed to spoil them, but it is not confined to military hardware. In Henry V, 5.2.46, Burgundy laments that, because of the war, the farms of France are neglected and “the coulter rusts”, so that here rust is very bad, not just for the ploughs, but for agriculture itself and thus for the welfare of the state; in Venus and Adonis, 767, Venus speaks of the general damage caused by “Foul cank’ring rust”; and we saw that in Romeo and Juliet, 1.1.95, Prince Escalus calls the old, unused partisans “Cank’red”, which defines rust as a malignant growth or infection that he immediately associates with the “cank’red hate” of the feud. We have also encountered two kinds of indirect evidence that confirm and reinforce the negative connotations of “rust” through the positive connotations

Rusting, Bright, and Resting Weapons

215

of a term that is opposed to it. One kind can be found in our list of the adjectives that Shakespeare employs as antonyms of “rusted”, words such as “beaming”, “bright”, “glittering”, and “shining”, which always name good qualities and so make rust seem even worse by contrast – a contrast that Leontes draws on, as we noted, when he realizes that Camillo “glisters / Through my rust” (The Winter’s Tale, 3.2.170–71). The second kind involves the verb “scour” that Shakespeare regularly uses to describe the strenuous process of removing rust, which means that the scouring is viewed as necessary and therefore desirable, and so, again, makes the rust seem even worse, since so much effort must be expended to get rid of it.20 Indeed, the positive connotations of scouring could be extended to include the forcible removal of anything that has strong negative connotations, as we see in 1 Henry IV, 3.2.136–7, where Hal promises his father that in the coming battle he will “stain my favors in a bloody mask, / Which wash’d away shall scour my shame with it”. It seems clear, then, that in Shakespeare’s plays very unpleasant feelings are associated with rust, and that this is another reason that Juliet would not use the word to describe the fate of Romeo’s weapon, which she has just addressed as “O happy dagger”, or the fate of her bosom, in which she is sheathing the dagger and in which the rusting would occur. One consequence of these negative connotations of “rust” that is especially relevant here is its possible role in acts of aggression against the body of an enemy. There may be an example of this in the speech of Suffolk quoted above from 2 Henry VI, 3.2.197–200, in which he threatens that his “rusted” sword will be “scoured” in the heart of his accuser, although this rust is probably metaphorical, as I pointed out, and, even if it is real, Suffolk seems to be less interested in depositing it in his accuser’s heart than in removing it from his own sword. A much clearer example is the passage in 3 Henry VI, 1.3.49–52, where Clifford, after he has killed Rutland, says that he will let Rutland’s blood “rust upon my weapon” and will not “wipe [it] off” until this weapon has also killed York, who is Rutland’s father. I cited this speech earlier as the one exception to the Shakespearean rule that weapons rust only when they are not put to use to strike someone and never when they are put to this use; but the explanation is that Clifford deliberately plans to produce the rust so that it will be inserted into the body of York when he is killed, which will make his defeat seem even worse, and thus will make Clifford’s triumph seem even greater. And these effects of the negative associations of rust in general will be substantially enhanced by the fact that this particular rust was produced from the blood of York’s son.

216

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

We should look, however, at an apparent exception to this exception that is found in Alexander Iden’s very different plan for his sword when he discovers that the man he has just killed with it is Jack Cade: Sword, I will hallow thee for this thy deed, And hang thee o’er my tomb when I am dead. Ne’er shall this blood be wiped from this point, But thou shalt wear it as a herald’s coat, To emblaze the honor that thy master got. (2 Henry VI, 4.10.67–71)

What is so significant about this speech from our perspective is that Iden’s bloody and unwiped sword, in striking contrast to the bloody and unwiped sword of Clifford, will not become rusted but will remain bright red – bright enough to serve as a herald’s coat – even after it has been left hanging over his tomb for an indefinite period. This also contradicts the testimony quoted earlier from Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida and Claudio in Measure for Measure, who assume that any armour will rust if it hangs long enough in a monument or by the wall. I do not believe that we can resolve this problem by consulting a palaeo-metallurgist to determine whether early modern iron and steel actually rusted as a result of contact with blood, or with the atmosphere around tombs and monuments, or (in Othello’s sardonic version) with the night-time dew, since the explanation is to be found, not in any physical facts, but in the speaker’s state of mind. Clifford thinks of his sword rusting because he plans to use it to kill York, and therefore wants plenty of rust on it, whereas Iden does not think of his sword rusting because he plans to use it as a trophy over his tomb, and therefore does not want any rust on it. Thus both of these examples depend on and demonstrate the powerful negative connotations of rust, although it would appear that sometimes in Shakespeare the rust, like beauty, lies in the eyes of the beholder, who, as Helena reminds us, looks not with the eyes but with the mind. The last example of this aggressive use of rust is still more explicit and more pertinent for our purposes, although it does not come from Shakespeare or even from his period. In Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved, Aquilina draws a weapon on Antonio and demands that he save Pierre from execution, “Or may this poniard / Rust in thy heart” (5.1.p.351).21 The play was written almost ninety years after Romeo and Juliet and so may not qualify as an example of contemporary usage, but this is the only passage known to me where we are told that a weapon will rust in the wound it has made, which is what Juliet

Rusting, Bright, and Resting Weapons

217

is supposed to say to the dagger in her last line in Q2. While this may seem at first glance to be evidence for Q2 “rust”, it is actually very impressive evidence against it, because what we have here is a threat directed at an enemy, similar to Suffolk’s threat in 2 Henry VI that was quoted earlier, and it clearly depends on the negative associations of the rust that will form in Antonio’s heart. But Juliet cannot regard herself as her own enemy and certainly cannot be threatening herself. Therefore, if the negative connotations of “rust” make it very unlikely that she would use this word to describe the fate of the dagger in her body, as we noted earlier, then the exploitation of the same connotations in these hostile threats or actions against the body of an enemy would make this even less likely. The emotional connotations of the word “rest”, on the other hand, do not seem to have undergone any significant change from Shakespeare’s day to our own, since they were then and still are very positive. Like its close relative “sleep”, it suggests a very pleasant, peaceful, and beneficial physical and mental state that gives us a welcome relief from labour or stress. In fact, it is sometimes regarded as a reward for past exertions, as we can see in our own phrase “a well earned rest” and in the passages quoted above where the swords of Hector, Achilles, Caesar, and Jack Cade are allowed to rest in their sheaths, or to sleep in their beds, after they have put in a hard day’s work (or a life’s work, in Caesar’s case) killing people. For a great many years, moreover, the word has also been invoked to express a comforting vision of death, or to serve as a comforting euphemism for it, in such common expressions as “laid to rest”, “gone to one’s eternal rest”, “final resting place”, and, of course, “requiescat in pace” or “rest in peace”, which often appeared in the abbreviation “R.I.P.” on our tombstones. Shakespeare also uses the word “rest” frequently to convey this peaceful view of death,22 and all his other references to resting carry a very powerful positive charge. Aemilia speaks of “life-preserving rest” (The Comedy of Errors, 5.1.83); Jachimo testifies that “man’s o’erlabor’d sense / Repairs itself by rest” (Cymbeline, 2.2.11–12); Hamlet says to the Ghost, “Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!” (Hamlet, 1.5.182); and Julia tells us that when she finds Proteus “there I’ll rest, as after much turmoil / A blessed soul doth in Elysium” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.7.37–8). Conversely, all Shakespeare’s references to the lack or loss of rest carry a powerful negative charge. Brakenbury says that princes “often feel a world of restless cares” (Richard III, 1.4.81); Leontes reports that because of Hermione’s infidelity he has “Nor night, nor day, no rest” (The Winter’s Tale, 2.3.1); Macbeth believes that it is better to be dead “Than on the torture of the mind to lie / In restless ecstacy”

218

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

(Macbeth, 3.2.21–2); and Claudio constructs a very uncomforting (and very unchristian) picture of death in which we are “blown with restless violence round about / The pendant world” (Measure for Measure, 3.1.124–5). Many more examples of both kinds could be cited, because in these plays it always seems to be a very good thing to rest and a very bad thing to be deprived of rest, just as it always seems to be a very bad thing to rust and a very good thing to have the rust scoured off. Before her final speech, the word “rest” is used four times by Romeo and Juliet, always in this same positive sense, and always in direct relation to their love.23 Toward the end of the first balcony scene, she says to him, “Good night, good night! as sweet repose and rest / Come to thy heart as that within my breast” (2.2.123–4), and when she leaves, he says, “Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast! / Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest!” (186–7), so that the similarity of their language (and of their rhyme) suggests that they make a perfect “fit”, as did their joint composition of a sonnet during their first dance (1.5.93–110). The next morning, when Friar Lawerence guesses that he has not been to bed, Romeo answers, “That last is true – the sweeter rest was mine” (2.3.43). And when he enters the tomb where she is interred, and where he plans to drink the poison, he says, “O, here / Will I set up my everlasting rest” (5.3.109–10).24 These lines spoken by Romeo within the tomb seem to have a special relationship to the last line that Juliet speaks there because they too announce the suicide of the speaker, and because only a short time elapses between them, which means that his use of “rest” can resonate with hers – that is, if she says “rest” rather than “rust”. It is true, of course, that he refers to the resting of his body (which he calls “this world-wearied flesh”) in another one of those euphemisms for death, while she would refer to the resting of the dagger inside her body, but in both situations the word has essentially the same meaning and also the same positive connotation, since it signifies a benignant cessation of all activity, which is just what we want in her final speech, whereas if she said “rust” this would not make any verbal connection to his speech and would signify the beginning of a new and malignant activity, which is just what we do not want at this point. If we then ask why we want or do not want a certain emotional effect to be produced by Juliet’s last speech, we must move up to the level of appropriateness, which I said at the outset is the basic criterion for judging these choices. This really involves two levels of judgment, since we must ask what is appropriate for the speaker and her immediate situation and what is appropriate for the overall effect of the play. In fact, we have already touched

Rusting, Bright, and Resting Weapons

219

on the first level in the earlier argument involving the positive emotional connotations of “rest” and negative connotations of “rust”, since we concluded that Juliet does not see her suicide as a hostile action directed against herself, and so it would not be appropriate for her to tell the dagger to “rust” in her bosom. And, conversely, telling it to “rest” there would be appropriate for her because she believes that by committing suicide beside Romeo’s body she will bring a peaceful and permanent end to all her troubles, which we saw is essentially the same reason that Romeo believes that by committing suicide beside her body he will “set up my everlasting rest”. It is necessary to determine, however, not only which would be the right word for her to speak at this point in her life, but also which would be the right word for us to hear from her at this point in the play. That obviously depends on what kind of effect we desire and need here, and this effect can be summed up in very simple terms – it is closure, and, more specifically, tragic closure. It is true that the play continues for 140 lines after Juliet’s death before it finally reaches its conclusion, but that is an arrangement that Shakespeare never repeated. I am not aware that anyone has taken the trouble to compile these statistics, but I have calculated that in the seven major tragedies that followed – Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus – the average distance between the death of the protagonist and the conclusion is 31 lines, and even if we include the atypical Timon of Athens, this average is only 38 lines. These tragedies continue after the protagonist’s death just long enough to settle the future government of the state (if it has been at issue), and prepare an honourable state funeral for his body, and deliver a eulogy over it, usually spoken by the highest-ranking survivor (sometimes his principal adversary), who tells both the onstage and the offstage audiences that a rarer spirit never did steer humanity, that he was great of heart, the noblest Roman of them all, who was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royally, who now makes a great decay, the most noble corse that ever herald did follow to his urn, and that no grave upon the earth shall clip in it a pair so famous. (The obvious exception is Macbeth, since after his death the survivors, instead of preparing for his honourable funeral, display “Th’ usurper’s cursed head”, and then call him “this dead butcher” instead of delivering a eulogy over him, which are very clear indications that this is a very different kind of tragedy.) That is not, of course, what happens after Juliet’s suicide. Instead of proceeding directly to the political settlement and the funeral preparations and eulogy, Shakespeare presents a very long, retroactive, and redundant exposition (amounting to almost half of the remaining lines) in which Friar

220

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Lawrence and then Balthasar and then Paris’s Page tell Prince Escalus in great detail what we already know about the events leading up to the deaths of the two protagonists.25 This is anticlimactic and uninteresting, and is a mistake that Shakespeare was not to make again until Cymbeline. It is also significant, I think, that there have been attempts to rectify this situation in the theatre, for Jill Levenson reports that “some acting editions and many productions” of the play end with Juliet’s suicide,26 which is pretty good evidence that something really is wrong with Shakespeare’s resolution. This does not mean, however, that nothing will be lost if the play is cut off at Juliet’s death. We still need the essential components found in the resolutions of the tragedies that followed, although they have been modified here because Romeo and Juliet, unlike the later protagonists, are very young, and are not heroic, and are presented as pathetic victims of external circumstances, primarily, of course, of the feud. This explains why in the reactions to their deaths Shakespeare has obviously made a special effort to emphasize the advanced age of the survivors – Lady Capulet says that “this sight of death is as a bell / That warns my old age to a sepulchre”;27 Montague asks, “What further woe conspires against mine age?”; and Friar Lawrence begins his account of the preceding events by wondering if “my short date of breath” will be long enough for him to finish, and concludes it by saying that, if he has been guilty, then “let my old life / Be sacrific’d some hour before his time”. And the reason for this emphasis is equally obvious: Shakespeare wants to set up a poignant contrast between these very old people, whose lives are nearing their natural ends (hastened by grief), and the very young lovers they stand over, whose lives were unnaturally cut off before they had really begun. Then in the last moments of the play, after the extended exposition is finally completed, he provides what I called the essential components of his tragic resolutions, altered to accommodate the special nature of this tragedy and its protagonists. Because the Prince’s reign was never threatened, the political settlement is reduced to ending the feud, which was the principal cause of the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, and because they were not heroic figures, the honourable state funeral and hyperbolic eulogy are reduced to the plans to memorialize them in two statues “in pure gold”. Thus at the very end we do get these components of a Shakespearean tragic closure, the difference being that in the later tragedies they follow so soon after the protagonist’s death that the death itself becomes part of a single closure, whereas in this play the death of Juliet is separated from the final resolution, which means that we have, in effect, two closures, which in turn means that there is a special need to incorporate some of the elements

Rusting, Bright, and Resting Weapons

221

of closure in her death. And we saw that the “rest” of Q1 provides these elements, because it signifies the peaceful end of all activity, and therefore of the protagonists’ tragedy, whereas the “rust” of Q2 signifies the beginning of an entirely new (and very unpleasant) activity within Juliet’s body, which is not appropriate for her to contemplate at this point in the play, and not appropriate for us to contemplate either – that is, if we hope to experience the feeling of tragic closure. We can point to a kind of corroboration of this argument in the ending of Antony and Cleopatra, which is the only other Shakespearean tragedy that has dual protagonists, both of whom also commit suicide. It is significant, I believe, that Antony and Cleopatra associate their suicides with sleep, just as Romeo and Juliet (in Q1) associate their suicides with rest, because in Shakespeare the word “sleep”, like the word “rest”, is often used to convey a comforting view of death or to serve as a comforting euphemism for it.28 Thus when Antony prepares to ask Eros to kill him, he says that “the long day’s task is done, / And we must sleep” (4.14.35–6), and when Cleopatra takes up the poisonous asp, she asks Charmian, “Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, / That sucks the nurse asleep?” (5.2.309–10). (Their suicides are conventionally gendered, while Juliet’s stabbing herself may seem more “masculine” than Romeo’s drinking poison.) It is true, of course, that Antony and Cleopatra are not at all like Romeo and Juliet, nor are their dramatic situations, but that is my point, because, despite these striking differences in character and situation, we find this striking verbal similarity in the speeches announcing their suicides, where within each play both of the protagonists invoke the same word – that is, if Juliet says “rest” – and both of these words are clearly meant to evoke the feeling of closure, so that this can be seen as yet another indication that Juliet really does say “rest”. It is important to recognize, however, that these final arguments based on what is or is not appropriate for Juliet to say in her last speech in order to produce the feeling of dramatic closure are themselves based on the assumption that closure is what we desire here, and that this assumption is not shared by a number of critics and editors today. Apparently it was widely shared in the past, because if we ask why the nineteenth-century “eclectic” editors, who felt free to choose between Q1 “rest” and Q2 “rust”, almost all opted for “rest”, the answer must be that they preferred it, and if we ask why they preferred it, I think we can conclude that, while a few of them may have felt, like Dover Wilson, that it was more poetic (or less “unpoetical”) than “rust”, the main reason was probably that “rest” gave them the sense of closure that they expected and wanted to find at the death of a tragic protagonist. It seems to me

222

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

that this expectation can be inferred, for example, from some of the comments on the passage that are recorded in the Variorum, especially those of Alexander Dyce and Charles Cowden Clarke.29 The principal cause of the more recent shift to Q2 “rust”, as I stated at the outset, is the rise of the New Bibliography with its distinction between “good” and “bad” quartos; but I suspect that at least some editors may also have been influenced by a tendency to reject closure that developed in the second half of the twentieth century, and that is not just limited to tragedy but seems to include all drama. I have called this tendency in criticism “refuting the ending”,30 because it seeks to undermine the sense of finality that older critics found in the ending and to transform it into a non-ending. Thus around 1950 we began to encounter a number of what were known as “new readings” of Shakespeare that undertook to prove that the marriages celebrated in the conclusions of the comedies and romances were really unstable and would not last, and that the resolutions that concluded the tragedies did not really resolve anything. And we were also seeing the results of this operation in productions of Shakespeare in the theatre and the movies – for example, in final scenes of The Merchant of Venice where Jessica is left feeling miserable because she has deserted the faith of her fathers, or Antonio feels miserable because he has been deserted by the man he loves,31 and final scenes of Macbeth where Donalbain rides off to consult the witches or Malcolm makes it clear that he will be just as bad as Macbeth. There is no way to prove, of course, that this tendency had any influence on the recent editors of Romeo and Juliet who prefer the “rust” of Q2, and I present the idea here only as a very tentative hypothesis that we should be aware of, just as I am aware that my own preference for the “rest” of Q1 may have been influenced by my antediluvian fondness for closure, although I hope that most of my arguments for this reading do not depend on that fondness and can stand on their own. It would seem, then, that this examination of an editorial dispute about a single word (actually a single letter) has brought us finally to this larger question about the significance of the ending of the play, and therefore of the actions leading up to that ending. Unlike the Indian/Judean crux in Othello, it is not crucial to our understanding of the protagonist’s tragic career, but our view of the play as a whole does affect, and is in turn affected by, our decision here and helps to explain why I believe that we should decide in favour of “rest”. We cannot rest at this point, however, since the decorum of collegial debate requires that we also confront the arguments advanced by worthy opponents who favour Q2 “rust”, even though this will prove to be anticlimactic and

Rusting, Bright, and Resting Weapons

223

anticlosural. By far the most popular of these is the claim, noted earlier, that “rust” is preferable to “rest” because it is more “vivid”.32 The basic fallacy here will become clear if we conduct what scientists call a “thought experiment” by imagining that after Juliet thrust the dagger into her bosom she delivered a few more lines in which she described in gory detail the wound in her bosom and the blood pouring from it. That would be very vivid – certainly much more vivid than the simple “there rust” which is all that Q2 gives us – but I do not think that most of the recent editors who invoke the criterion of vividness would consider it an improvement. Of course, a few of the more extreme enemies of closure might feel that what I am presenting here as a reductio ad absurdum of the vividness argument is not absurd at all, and they might even welcome Juliet’s description, not because it is more vivid than “rust”, but because it serves their critical agenda by contributing to the refutation of the ending. But, in fact, there is no necessary conflict between vividness and closure, as we can see in Cleopatra’s death speech where she compares the asp to a baby sucking at her breast, which is very vivid but is also very restful and even comforting and so enhances the tragic closure. George Walton Williams advances a different kind of argument in his article on this choice, which is the only extended defence of “rust” that I could find, and which may seem to be more promising since it is based on Shakespeare’s actual usage.33 He begins, as I do, by collecting the references to “rust” and “rest” in a Shakespeare concordance, and demonstrates that “rust” is connected to weapons much more often than “rest” is, which he presents as evidence for the Q2 reading. The pertinent question, however, is not how frequently Shakespeare refers to the rusting or resting of weapons, but when and why the weapons rust or rest in these references. The answer, we found, is that they never rust when they are put to use by piercing someone, but always when they are not put to this use, which obviously cannot apply to the dagger wielded by Juliet, and that they always rest in their sheaths (or figuratively sleep in their beds) after they have been put to this use, which obviously does apply to the dagger we are concerned with. That is why any argument based on Shakespeare’s usage should favour Q1 “rest”. The three remaining arguments presented by proponents of Q2 “rust” all attempt to relate this word to specific passages in the play. Gibbons claims that it “bear[s] traces of Juliet’s earlier attentiveness to the factual details of physical decay in death”,34 which refers back to her soliloquy in 4.3.30–58 where she drinks Friar Lawrence’s sleeping potion and thinks of what might happen if she awakens in the family tomb before Romeo arrives. It is true that in this passage she imagines smelling the “foul” and “loathsome” odours

224

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

of the place, and handling her “forefathers’ joints” and a “kinsman’s bone”, and seeing “bloody Tybalt …. fest’ring in his shroud”; but this decaying of dead bodies is not at all like the rusting of metals, and Juliet does not suggest that there is any connection between them. Indeed, she never mentions rust here, even when she has the opportunity, since she says, “[M]ethinks I see my cousin’s ghost / Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body / Upon a rapier’s point”, but does not imagine that Romeo’s rapier is rusting in that spitted body, as his dagger is supposed to do in her bosom according to the Q2 reading. Much more troublesome, however, is the obvious difference in the emotional tone of these two passages. Gibbons resorts to the neutral term “attentiveness” to describe Juliet’s feelings in her soliloquy in 4.3, but this conveniently passes over the inconvenient fact that she actually attends there to the “details of physical decay and death” with horror and terror, which cannot be what she feels when she addresses the “happy dagger” in her death speech. A similar argunent for “rust” is advanced by Evans, who says that it “recalls the ‘discoloured’ swords of 143”.35 He is speaking of Friar Lawrence’s reaction when he sees the weapons of Romeo and Paris lying near the tomb and exclaims: Alack, alack, what blood is this, which stains The stony entrance of this sepulche? What mean these masterless and gory swords To lie discolour’d by this place of peace? (5.3.140–43)

But this argument faces the same kind of difficulty that was found in the previous one, because a sword discoloured by blood is very different from a sword corroded by rust (and these two swords, of course, had no time to rust, since the fight between Romeo and Paris took place just a few minutes before the Friar arrives). In fact, the word “discolour’d” in this passage is simply a synonym for “stained”, which is used as a verb in the first line, and which we saw earlier is one of the standard adjectives, along with “bloody”, “bleeding”, and “gory” (also used by the Friar here), that Shakespeare regularly calls on instead of “rusted” to describe weapons that have pierced someone. There are also other passages in his plays where blood is said to “discolor” the land: in 2 Henry VI the Lieutenant demands that his prisoners pay a ransom “Or with their blood stain this discolored shore” (4.1.11); in King John the French Herald says that English soldiers “lie scattered on the bleeding ground / …. Coldly embracing the discolored earth” (2.1.304–6); and in Henry V King Henry tells

Rusting, Bright, and Resting Weapons

225

the French Herald that “We shall your tawny ground with your red blood / Discolor” (3.6.161–2). It is obvious that in these passages the “discoloring” caused by blood cannot possibly be rusting, or even include it, because land does not rust. The last and most intriguing of these arguments is Gibbons’s claim that Juliet’s sentence in Q2, where she tells the dagger to rust in its sheath in her bosom and let her die, “completes the motif of Death as rival to Romeo” so that “Death lies with Juliet”, which is endorsed by Evans, who says that “Gibbons suggests a kind of phallic fulfilment in Juliet’s action”, and by Levenson, who explains that “the dagger in its spoken and material forms has most impact as part of the sexual wordplay in Juliet’s last lines”.36 They have no trouble demonstrating the existence of this sexual motif in some earlier passages, especially in Juliet’s predictions that “My grave is like to be my weddingbed” (1.5.135) and “death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead” (3.2.137), and in Capulet’s lament that “Death [hath] lain with” Juliet and “deflowered” her (4.5.35–6), and in Romeo’s reaction when he sees Juliet lying in the tomb and wonders if Death “keeps / Thee here in dark to be his paramour” (5.3.104–5). The problem is that there is no explicit sexuality in Juliet’s final speech and suicide, and so the only way to uncover it there is by making some major transformations of the actual facts of the scene. Romeo’s literal dagger must become his metaphorical penis, according to Freud’s universal law of the phallicity of long, slender objects, and Juliet’s literal breast, which she calls the dagger’s “sheath”,37 must become her metaphorical vagina, according to Freud’s universal law of displacement from below upwards, so that the dagger will become invaginated, according to David Lodge’s useful adaptation of the term, which will give a whole new meaning to Juliet’s “O happy dagger”. Even if these transformations were accepted, however, it is still not clear how they would support the case for “rust” in Juliet’s final line. I do not claim any special expertise on the subject, but, as far as I can ascertain, the male sexual organ does not normally – or even abnormally – rust when it is inserted into the female sexual organ, no matter how long it lingers there. It does not normally rest then either, at least at first, but after it has put in a hard night’s work it may take a well-earned rest there for some time, like those swords of Hector, Achilles, Caesar, and Jack Cade, and will still remain utterly rustless. In fact, if we adapt Ulysses’s analogy in the passage quoted above from Troilus and Cressida, we would have to say that the male organ metaphorically grows “rusty” only when it is not removed from its own literal sheath (the early modern codpiece) and inserted into a metaphorical female sheath, and that this operation must be repeated over and over again, with heroic “Perseverance”, in

226

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

order to keep the organ “bright” (that is, rust-free), like the mail and the honour of Achilles. Or, to adapt Suffolk’s analogy in the passage quoted from 2 Henry VI, we might even say that the male organ becomes “rusted” when it is not put into use, and that this rust will be “scoured” off when it is put into the female organ. Or we could simply avoid all these complexities by allowing Romeo’s literal dagger to come to a literal rest in Juliet’s literal breast, according to yet another universal law announced by Freud when he finally had to rein in some of his more overenthusiastic followers by reminding them that “Manchmal ist ein Dolch nur eine Zigarre”.38 Notes 1. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr, and C. Patrick O’Donnell, Jr (London: Penguin, 1987). 2. All quotations of Shakespeare follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 3. The only exceptions I found are the editions of J. Dover Wilson and G.I. Duthie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar (New York: Washington Square, 1959), George Lyman Kittredge (Boston: Ginn, 1936), and Irving Ribner’s revision of Kittredge (Waltham: Xerox, 1971), although Ribner hedges in his note: “The Q2 reading generally has been rejected as unpoetical in its context, but the notion of the dagger rusting in Juliet’s body may have been what Shakespeare had in mind” (1005). In fact, it is the Q1 reading that is generally rejected by recent editors. 4. The Variorum Romeo and Juliet, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1871), 288, cites an impressive number of nineteenth-century editors and commentators who prefer Q1 “rest” (as Furness does) and only one who prefers Q2 “rust”. 5. Q3 (1609) is based on Q2, Q4 (undated, c. 1623) on Q3, Q5 (1637) on Q4, and F1 (1623) on Q3 (see R. Carter Hailey, “The Dating Game: New Evidence for the Dates of Q4 Romeo and Juliet and Q4 Hamlet”, Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 367–87). 6. The New Bibliography was rejected by what Edward Pechter calls the Newer Bibliographers, but his critique of their critique of their predecessors suggests that we may again be able to speak of “bad quartos” (“Crisis in Editing?”, Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006): 20–38). 7. Wright and LaMar, eds, 108–11, list 86 readings from Q1 that they adopt; T.J.B. Spencer lists 54 in his edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 287–89; Evans, ed. (1974; updated 2003), 1093, says that he does this in “some 60 cases”; George Walton Williams reports in a letter that he accepts 64 in his edition (Durham: Duke University Press, 1964); and even Jill L. Levenson’s edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) adopts about 25. I argued for another one in “A Good Reading from the Bad Quarto of Romeo and Juliet”, Review of English Studies 23 (1972): 56–8. 8. The Variorum Othello, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1886), 327–31, devotes almost five pages to the Indian/Judean choice, while only half

Rusting, Bright, and Resting Weapons

227

a page in the Variorum Romeo and Juliet, ed. Furness, 288, is given to the rest/rust choice. 9. “The Indian/Iudean Crux in Othello”, Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 60–67, esp. 66–7. 10. The “poetic” criterion is invoked in Wilson and Duthie, eds, 218, where the Q2 “rust” is called “hideously unpoetical”, and in Kittredge and Ribner, eds, 1005, and the “vivid” criterion in Spencer, ed., 275–6, and in the editions of Brian Gibbons, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1980), 230, and G. Blakemore Evans, New Cambridge Shakespeare, updated ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 203. 11. For a striking example, see Norman Maclean, “Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word: The Madness of Lear”, in Critics and Criticism Ancient and Modern, ed. R.S. Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 595–615. 12. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. F.L. Lucas, The Complete Works of John Webster, 4 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), vol. 2. I am indebted for this citation to Rene Weis, who is preparing the new Arden edition of Romeo and Juliet and says he is leaning toward “rust”. 13. In Twelfth Night, Sir Toby speaks of Viola’s sword and Sebastian’s dagger as “iron” (3.4.252, 4.1.39), and in other plays “iron” or “steel” can stand for weapons (1 Henry VI, 4.2.11; 2 Henry VI, 4.10.28, 56; Richard III, 5.3.110; Henry V, 2.1.8; Titus Andronicus, 5.3.112; Romeo and Juliet, 1.1.82, 3.1.159; Macbeth, 1.2.17; The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.725; The Tempest, 2.1.283), or for armour (1 Henry VI, 1.1.85; 2 Henry VI, 3.2.234; 3 Henry VI, 2.1.160; 1 Henry IV, 5.1.13; 2 Henry IV, 1.1.150, 4.2.8; Troilus and Cressida, 4.5.195; Hamlet, 1.4.52; Antony and Cleopatra, 4.4.3), and are associated with war itself (1 Henry IV, 2.3.48; Othello, 1.3.230). 14. The earliest quotation in the OED under this sense of “rusty” (I.5.a) is dated 1508. 15. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Captain, ed. L.A. Beaurline, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–96), vol. 1. 16. See 1 Henry VI, 4.7.6; 3 Henry VI, 2.5.132; Richard III, 1.3.211; Henry V, 5.2.355; Troilus and Cressida, 1.2.233; Julius Caesar, 3.1.109, 155–6; and Hamlet, 2.2.491. The dagger that Macbeth sees before him has “gouts of blood” and the daggers of Duncan’s servants are “badg’d with blood” or “breech’d with gore” (Macbeth, 2.1.46, 2.3.102, 116). 17. This effect is not limited to weapons, since we are often told that other objects were or will be “stained” by blood, including a handkerchief (3 Henry VI, 1.4.79; As You Like It, 4.3.93), a mantle (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.143, 283), the land (King John, 2.1.357; Richard II, 5.5.110), a tomb (Titus Andronicus, 1.1.116), and animals (2 Henry VI, 3.1.259; 3 Henry VI, 2.3.21), but are never told that any object was or will be “rusted” by it. 18. This point is made by Wilson and Duthie, eds, 218, who say that “rust” is not only “hideously unpoetical” but also “literally preposterous with ‘and let me die’ following”. Later editors sometimes cite (and reject) the first objection, but never seem to notice the second, which is much more telling. 19. The connotations of “stain” have changed in the opposite direction. Today it is almost always used, both literally and figuratively, in a negative sense, but in Shakespeare it could also be positive. Hotspur, the Constable, and York all desire to “stain” their weapons with the blood of an enemy, as we saw in the passages collected earlier

228

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

under that word, and in All’s Well that Ends Well, 1.1.111, Helena tells Parolles: “You have some stain of soldier in you.” This is not relevant here, but I mention it to show the importance of being sensitive to any changes in the connotation as well as the denotation of early modern words. 20. When Pericles enters the tournament at Pentapolis wearing armour corroded by seawater, a sarcastic spectator says that he “on set purpose let his armor rust / Until this day, to scour it in the dust” (Pericles, 2.2.54–5); Peter, the armourer’s man, recalls the night when “we were scouring my Lord of York’s armor” (2 Henry VI, 1.3.192); and see the references to scouring in the passages quoted above from 2 Henry VI, 3.2.197200, and Measure for Measure, 1.2.157. The two processes are contrasted in Falstaff’s comment that it “were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scour’d to nothing with perpetual motion” (2 Henry IV, 1.2.318–20). 21. Ronald Berman, ed., The Signet Classic Book of Restoration Drama (New York: New American Library, 1980). This is cited in George Walton Williams, “A Note on ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ V.iii.170”, Notes and Queries 9 (1962): 332–3, as evidence for Q2 “rust”. 22. See The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.7.37–8; Titus Andronicus, 1.1.133, 150–51, 156, 349; Romeo and Juliet, 1.3.18; Julius Caesar, 5.5.41; Hamlet, 5.1.135, 237, 5.2.360; King Lear, 5.3.151; Macbeth, 4.3.227; and Sonnet 66. 23. The first two passages are cited by Bernice Kliman in the New Kittredge Shakespeare (Boston: Focus, 2008), 117, although she prefers Q2 “rust”, and the fourth by Edward Snow, “Language and Sexual Difference in Romeo and Juliet”, in Shakespeare’s “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C.L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppelia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 168–92, esp. 190. This is the only argument for Q1 “rest” I have seen, but it is based on gender stereotypes, including a malefic “male principle” dominated by “male anxieties” that “‘Rust’ also tends to confirm, …. while ‘rest’ grants them a reprise”. 24. “To set up one’s rest” was a proverbial phrase (derived from primero) which meant to stake everything or to be firmly resolved – – see R.W. Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), R86.1, and the citations there. Romeo’s insertion of “everlasting” changes the meaning of “rest” so that it explicitly refers to death. 25. David Thatcher argues that this is necessary because Prince Escalus has what is now called a “need to know” what happened (“‘The Manner of Their Deaths’: Causality in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Newsletter 57 (2007), 43, 48, 52, 58, 60, esp. 52); but we have seen what happened and therefore have no need to know it all over again. 26. Levenson, ed., 349. 27. She told Juliet earlier “I was your mother much upon these years / That you are now a maid” (1.3.72–3), which would make her about 28. 28. See Richard III, 4.3.38; Titus Andronicus, 1.1.91, 155, 173, 2.4.15; Romeo and Juliet, 5.1.18; Macbeth, 3.2.23; Henry VIII, 3.2.398, 433, 5.1.32; and Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language, S527. In Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy this comforting idea of the “sleep of death” is interrogated (3.1.59–67). 29. See n. 4. 30. I discuss this tendency, with many examples from the critics, in New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 102–25, and Maynard Mack cites an amusing

Rusting, Bright, and Resting Weapons

229

theatrical example in King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 38–40. 31. For an effective refutation of this idea, see Joseph Pequigney, “The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice”, English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 201–21. 32. See n. 10. Evans, ed., New Cambridge, 203, adds that “rest” is “blander”. 33. Williams, “A Note”. Levenson, ed., 349, cites this article to support Q2 “rust”. 34. Gibbons, ed., 230. Evans, ed., New Cambridge, 203, citing Gibbons, says that “‘rust’ carries with it a vivid sense of the physical decay attendant on death”. 35. Evans, ed., New Cambridge, 203. 36. Gibbons, ed., 211, 230; Evans, ed., New Cambridge, 221; Levenson, ed., 200, 349; and see Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language, G426. 37. Capulet sees no sexual meaning when he repeats Juliet’s metaphor: “This dagger hath mista’en, for lo his house / Is empty on the back of Montague, / And is mis-sheathed in my daughter’s bosom” (5.3.203–5). Elsewhere in Shakespeare the metaphor is always applied to sheathings in which the weapon is or will be inserted by a man into a man (Titus Andronicus, 2.1.53-54, 5.3.112; King John, 4.3.80; Henry VIII, 1.2.210), except for 3 Henry VI, 5.5.70, where Queen Margaret asks the victorious King Edward to “sheathe thy sword” in her, and The Rape of Lucrece, 1723–4, where Lucrece, like Juliet, “sheathed in her harmless breast / A harmful knife”, but no one has found any “kind of phallic fulfilment” in either of these passages. 38. Of course in Shakespeare an appropriately shaped weapon can become phallic (see Love’s Labor’s Lost, 4.1.108–39; Much Ado about Nothing, 5.2.11–22; and 2 Henry IV, 2.4.48–52, 111–20), but in these passages the bawdry is usually meant by the speaker and meant to be comic. Some critics claim that the line quoted above from Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.227, where we are told that Cleopatra “made great Caesar lay his sword to bed”, has a sexual meaning because the next line is “He ploughed her, and she cropp’d”, but this would require a biblical beating of his inactive sword into a very active ploughshare, which therefore could not be laid “to bed”.

This page has been left blank intentionally

12 Circes in Ephesus: Civic Affiliations in The Comedy of Errors and Early Modern English Identity Atsuhiko Hirota

In the final scene of The Comedy of Errors, as Antipholus of Ephesus denies allegations about his extraordinary behaviour, Solinus, the Duke of Ephesus, says, “Why, what an intricate impeach is this! / I think you all have drunk of Circe’s cup” (5.1.269–70).1 This direct reference to the Odyssean sorceress who changes men into beasts by her drug is one of only two in Shakespeare’s plays (the other being in Henry VI, Part 1).2 Although the direct references are scarce, Shakespeare was by no means unfamiliar with Circe because she appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of the classical texts he knew well.3 Circe is one of the classical figures who appear repeatedly throughout the history of Western literature. Leonora Leet Brodwin classifies the temptations Circe poses to men into three categories: the degeneration of will, that of masculinity, and the appeal to carefree happiness, while Karen Britland paraphrases these three as “bestiality, effeminacy and idleness” and adds “hospitality” to them.4 What is remarkable about Solinus’s speech is the absence of these characteristics. It also lacks in other usual associations which characterize Circe, such as sexual allurement and changing of shape. Although the direct reference to Circe in Errors does not fit in the literary tradition, this play abounds in speeches about transformation and enchantment, which are much less common in its Plautine source Menaechmi. In the light of the importance of Diana’s temple for the image of Ephesus in the early modern period, it is natural that critics have focused more on Diana, another pagan deity, than on Circe in relation to Errors. Elizabeth C. Hart, for example, studies the Abbess Emilia in the rich classical and Christian traditions about the Ephesus-Diana connection.5 Gareth Roberts, however, 231

232

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

discusses the “pervasive” presence of Circe in Errors in his study about the early modern ubiquity of Circe as a symbol of witchcraft.6 Patricia Parker points out that Luce the kitchen-maid is associated with the Great Harlot or Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation, the figure “long linked with Circe as her Odyssean counterpart”.7 There is, I think, more significance in the allusions to Circe in Errors than these critics observe. I think we can read the Circean presence in Errors in contemporary discourses about English nation. Such writers as Roger Ascham and Richard Stanihurst refer to Circe to express their anxieties about the vulnerability of English identity in relation to Italy and Ireland respectively. In this essay I attempt to locate associations with Circe in Errors in relation to these anxieties. Attempts have been made to locate Errors in early modern contexts. Curtis Perry compares the networks of exchange in this play’s Ephesus with the credit-based economy in early modern England and sees “Shakespeare’s engagement with contemporary anxieties about the commercialization of social bonds”.8 Martine van Elk explores the intertextuality between Errors and the cony-catching pamphlets, with focus on misidentification in the play.9 The relationship of Errors to contemporary anxieties about English identity, however, is not a concern of these studies. I will argue here that the Circean associations in Errors reveal the problems of characters’ civic affiliations and link this play with Elizabethan discourses about the vulnerability of English identity. As the characters’ affiliation is not particularly a problem in Menaechmi, Shakespeare’s introduction of this theme into Errors suggests that it is to be understood in relation to contemporary concerns about English identity. For this purpose, I first explore the Elizabethan representations of Circe as an embodiment of the vulnerability of English identity in the texts of Ascham and Stanihurst. In the second section I discuss the Ephesus of Errors as a land of the Circean enchantress. Ephesian women’s threatening of the masculinity of the wandering Antipholus and Dromio is presented in terms which associate these women with Circe. Then, in the third section, I contend that Errors can be located in the early modern anxiety about English identity. Elizabethans and the Lands of Circe Circe’s threat to men includes that to national identity. Britland observes that the relationship between Circe and nationhood was already in The Odyssey. She writes, “The drug offered to Odysseus’ men by Circe strips them of their sense of origin; they lose their sense of nationhood and become tamed members of

Circes in Ephesus

233

Circe’s domestic community”.10 We find that Elizabethan writers employ this motif in association with English national identity. Roger Ascham associates Italy with Circe in The Schoolmaster.11 He writes of the dangers facing young English gentleman travelling in Italy: Some Siren shall sing him a song, sweet in tone, but sounding in the end to his utter destruction. … Some Circes shall make him, of a plain Englishman, a right Italian: and at length to hell, or to some hellish place, is he likely to go; from whence is hard returning, although one Ulysses, and that by Pallas’s aid, and good counsel of Tiresias, once escaped that horrible den of deadly darkness.12

The Sirens and Circe appear side by side as enchantresses of an Englishman. The reference to Ulysses confirms that the image is Odyssean. Using Circe, Acham observes the danger of transformation of “a plain Englishman” to “a right Italian”. What is at stake here is the Englishman’s national identity. English identity is not secure in the face of Italian enchantment. In another reference to the Sirens and Circe, Ascham suggests that English identity is related to Protestantism: I know divers noble personages, and many worthy gentlemen of England, whom all the Siren songs of Italy could never untwine from the mast of God’s Word, nor no enchantment of vanity overrun them from the fear of God and love of honesty. But I know as many, or mo[re], and some sometime my dear friends …, who parting out of England fervent in the love of Christ’s doctrine, and well furnished with the fear of God, returned out of Italy worse transformed than ever was in Circes’ court.13

While Ascham names other dangers of Italy to be associated with Circe, his emphasis on “God’s Word” and “Christ’s doctrine” reveals that his comparison of Italy to the Sirens and Circe is primarily against the Roman Catholicism threatening the “plain” English Protestant identity. The reference to a “mast” again shows a comparison with the Odyssean Sirens. He provides more concrete explanation for “the enchantments of Circes”: That is to say, for religion, papistry, or worse; for learning, less commonly than they carried out with them; for policy, a factious heart, a discoursing head, a mind to meddle in all men’s letters; for the experience, plenty of new mischiefs never known in England before; for manners, variety of vanities, and change of filthy living.14

234

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Ascham again names “papistry” as the first of the Italian threats to Englishmen. The connection between Catholicism and Circe is not unique in Ascham. The Elizabethan Protestants particularly liked to link Roman Catholicism with Circe. Roberts observes that this association extends from William Fulke’s A Sermon Preached at Hampton Court (1570) and the English translation of Heinrich Bullinger’s A Hundred Sermons vpon the Apocalypse (1573) to Duessa in The Faerie Queene and Samuel Harsnet’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), especially in relation to the figure of the Whore of Babylon of the Apocalypse with reference to the cup.15 While emphasizing religion, Ascham writes that the enchantments of Italy comparable to the Sirens and Circe cover more broadly “learning”, “policy”, “experience”, and “manners” as well. Criticism of Italy as a source of corruption was a commonplace in early modern England. In Richard II, when the Duke of York is criticizing Richard II for not listening to the counsel of his uncles, he says to his brother John of Gaunt that Richard’s ear is “stopped with other, flattering sounds” including “[r]eport of fashions in proud Italy, / Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation / Limps after in base imitation” (2.1.17–23). Here York mentions Italy as the country of new fashions in contrast with the backwardness and imitativeness of the English nation (“our tardy-apish nation”). The image of stopping of ears suggests a variant of the Odyssey-Siren episode. As Odysseus himself listens to the Sirens’ songs in The Odyssey, an alternative tradition sees Odysseus stopping his ears against them. Harry Vredeveld, for example, points out that Antipholus of Syracuse introduces the figure of Odysseus with his ears stopped into this play by saying, “I’ll stop mine ears against the mermaid’s song” (Errors, 3.2.169).16 The speech of York hence links Richard II to Errors as well as to The Schoolmaster. Odysseus stopping his ears is a symbol of resistance against temptation. Richard II, on the contrary, listens only to temptations. Shakespeare makes his Richard an anti-Odysseus and highlights his lack of prudence using the trope of Italy as the Sirens. We have seen that Ascham calls the Englishman exposed to the ItalianCircean threat “plain”. Plainness is also presented in Richard II when John of Gaunt recalls his brother Thomas of Woodstock, for whose death King Richard is allegedly responsible, as “My brother Gloucester, plain well-meaning soul” (1.2.128). The lack of sophistication of Englishmen in comparison with the Italian is converted to a virtue. Shakespeare thus highlights the contrast between the Italianated Richard’s un-Englishness and the dead Thomas’s English honesty.17 Similarly, Ascham shifts the negative association of incivility with the English to the nation’s traditional virtue of

Circes in Ephesus

235

honesty, paradoxically associating the civilized but stereotypically treacherous Italy with Circe. The Elizabethans had an ambivalent feeling toward Italy: attraction for its sophistication and abhorrence of its Catholicism. The ItalyCirce/Siren nexus emerges in this ambivalence, which made Italy particularly dangerous for the Elizabethans. The trope of Circe emerges closer to England, too. Near the end of The Description of Ireland, included in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), Richard Stanihurst writes, “Againe, the very English of birth; conuersant with the sauage sort of that people [the Irish] become degenerate, & as though they had tasted of Circe’s poysoned cup, are quite altered. Such a force hath education to make or marre” (D4v, italics added).18 “Circe’s poysoned cup” may refer to Roman Catholicism because it was part of the Irish problem for the Elizabethans. The threat Ireland posed for English settlers, however, was not limited to Catholicism. This passage reflects other aspects of the Irish threat for the Elizabethan settlers’ English identity. “Degeneration” is the term Elizabethan writers often use to describe the Hibernicization of English settlers. This term is used in the meaning of “the falling off from ancestral or earlier excellence” but etymologically includes the sense of “departing from its race or kind”, hence recalling the transformation into beasts by Circe.19 This concept includes the problem in “generation”, in the senses both of procreation and breeding, in Ireland through Irish women as well as the giving up of Protestantism and falling into Catholicism.20 In A View of the State of Ireland Edmund Spenser – though Eudoxus, one of the speakers of the dialogue, is disparaging against Stanihurst21 – observes the female factors of the “degeneration” of English settlers such as intermarriage to an Irish woman and the use of Irish nurses. “Circe’s cup” in Ireland is also a threat to English identity by Irish women. Although Spenser does not mention Circe in his Irish tract, we know he was familiar with this sorceress because Acrasia in The Faerie Queene is one of the most prominent Circean descendants in English literature.22 Stephen Greenblatt aptly points out the association between Gyon’s destruction of Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss (described in Book II canto XII) and the Elizabethan attempt to colonize Ireland (together with the European response to the cultures of the New World and the Reformation attack on images) in the sense that both Ireland and the Bower of Bliss threaten “civility” (and Protestantism) with their dangerous attractiveness.23 Circe and Ireland are linked again in the Elizabethan imagination through the Circean Acrasia. Irenius’s fierce dislike of the Irish women’s mantle expressed in A View of the State of Ireland 24 suggests the strength of their sexual attraction, which, as Acrasia emasculates Verdant, “degenerates” English settlers. Spenser’s tract gives voice to the Englishmen’s

236

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

anxieties about the Irish female threat to their English, Protestant, and “civilized” identity. While Irish “barbarity” threatens the English, Italy enjoys the “civilized” status in the early modern period. Yet Italy and Ireland share Roman Catholicism and dangerous feminized attraction to Elizabethan men’s imagination. Circe represents the threats which are all the more dangerous because they are attractive. Wanderers, Enchantresses, and Transformations in Errors While Solinus’s reference to Circe is the only direct mentioning of her in Errors, this play includes several speeches reminding us of this enchanting sorceress. Shakespeare explores in Errors two senses of the term “error”: mistaking and wandering. Characters’ mistaking and wandering are inseparable in this play. In the opening scene, when narrating his life’s story to Solinus, Egeon says, “Five summers have I spent in farthest Greece, / Roaming clean through the bounds of Asia …” (1.1.131–2).25 Egeon’s tale introduces the theme of wandering to this play. Antipholus of Syracuse is another wanderer, in search of his brother for seven years as Egeon reveals in the final scene of the play (5.1.310, 321). This Antipholus himself talks about wandering, but more locally that within Ephesus. He says to an Ephesian merchant with whom he first appears on stage, “I will go lose myself, / And wander up and down to view the city” (1.2.30–31). He also says after the initial “error” in which Dromio of Ephesus mistakes him for his master, “The gold I gave to Dromio is laid up / Safe at the Centaur, and the heedful slave / Is wandered forth in care to seek me out” (2.2.1–3). His servant and companion through seven years of wandering is now wandering in Ephesus. The comedy of mistaken identities occurs during their wandering. Still later in the play, as the confusion deepens, Antipholus of Syracuse says about his Dromio and himself, “The fellow is distraught, and so am I, / And here we wander in illusions” (4.3.42–3). These characters wander both in the framework story of the play and in the main plot: in the Eastern Mediterranean in the former and in Ephesus in the latter. Parker observes that Egeon’s tale of wandering is “evocative of Aeneas or Odysseus and drawn from the Apollonius narrative of Greek romance” and that the decision of Antipholus of Syracuse to wander through Ephesus “unwittingly echoes the wandering of his Syracusan father”.26 Wandering links Errors to Circe because Odysseus, the arch-wanderer in the Mediterranean, meets her during his voyage after his men are transformed into beasts by her magic.27 Antipholus of Syracuse also meets women whom he compares with

Circes in Ephesus

237

enchanting sorceresses and his Dromio says that he is transformed into a beast. The experience of Antipholus of Syracuse in Ephesus thus parallels that of Odysseus on Circe’s island. Before actually meeting the women of Ephesus, this Antipholus refers to witches. He says after the initial mistaking of identity by Dromio of Ephesus: Upon my life, by some device or other The villain is o’er-raught of all my money. They say this town is full of cozenage, As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye, Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind, Soul-killing witches that deform the body, Disguisèd cheaters, prating mountebanks, And many suchlike libertines of sin. (1.2.95–102; italics added)

Antipholus fears that Dromio has been deceived and lost money. This speech echoes Messenio the slave’s warning to Menaechmus the Traveller about Epidamnum. In Warner’s translation of Menaechmi, Messenio says: For, this assure yourself: this town Epidamnum is a place of outrageous expenses, exceeding all riot and lasciviousness and, I hear, as full of ribalds, parasites, drunkards, catchpoles, coneycatchers, and sycophants as it can hold. Then, for courtesans, why, here’s the currentest stamp of them in the world. (2.1.32–6)

We see the danger of Errors’ Ephesus is not the same as that of Epidamnum of Menaechmi. The possibility of Dromio’s being “o’er-raught” (circumvented, outwitted, cheated in dealing) reminds Antipholus of the reputation of Ephesus as a place of deception and trickery. “Cozenage” means deception and fraud. The eye-deceiving nimbleness of “jugglers” indicates trickery by sleight of hand. These two species of troublemakers may correspond to “sycophants” and “coneycatchers” in Messenio’s speech. “Soul-killing witches” may refer to prostitutes who enchant travellers. Similarly, in Menaechmi’s Epidamnum “courtesans” are “the currentest stamp” – most flourishing – “in the world”. Then the deforming of the body that Antipholus worries about signifies the venereal disease they carry.28 “Dark-working sorcerers” paired with “Soulkilling witches”, however, attaches a supernatural quality to the Ephesus of Errors, suggesting an occult weirdness from which Epidamnum of the Roman comedy is free. This occult association links Antipholus’s reference to

238

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

“deforming” to Circe’s magical power to change men into beasts. Roberts writes about line 100 in the above quotation, “particularly in the fear of transformed minds and bodies, the first symptoms of Circe’s pervasive presence can be felt in the play”.29 This speech provides a link between the wandering Antipholus and Circean magic. The Syracusan master and servant speak about their experience in terms reminiscent of Odysseus and his companions transformed into beasts by Circe. It is noteworthy that their initial reference to “transformation” coincides with their first experience of hospitality by Adriana and Luciana because hospitality is, as Britland observes, one of the characteristics of Circe’s threat.30 After the first mistaking of identity by Luciana and Adriana, Dromio of Syracuse asks his master, “I am transformèd, master, am not I?” As Antipholus of Syracuse replies “I think thou art in mind, and so am I”, Dromio says, “Nay, master both in mind and in my shape”. Then, despite his master’s affirmation that he has his “own form”, Dromio insists that he is an ape. Luciana interrupts the conversation between the master and the servant and says to Dromio, “If thou art changed to aught, ’tis to an ass” (2.2.198–202). As the master and the servant exchange these remarks, Adriana calls Antipholus in for dinner. Dining is particularly dangerous with Circe. Her transformation of victims is inseparable from feasting. Yet Antipholus follows Adriana to be entertained saying: Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell? Sleeping or waking? Mad or well advised? Known unto these, and to myself disguised? I’ll say as they say, and persever so, And in this mist at all adventures go. (2.2.215–19)

Antipholus is still wondering what is happening. His wondering involves whether he has been “disguised”. He starts to doubt his own identity and thinks he might have been transformed.31 The hospitable women of Ephesus who invite a wanderer to dinner have power to transform him. Although Antipholus of Syracuse is not disfigured actually, he is enchanted by one of them. Dromio’s obsession with being transformed into a beast continues. After running away from Luce the kitchen-maid, Dromio asks, “Do you know me, sir? Am I Dromio? Am I your man? Am I myself?” and says, “I am an ass, I am a woman’s man, and besides myself” (3.2.73–4, 77–8). Dromio speaks as if Luciana’s remark that he is transformed into an ass (2.2.202) were realized. Dromio’s being “besides himself” means that he is out of his mind

Circes in Ephesus

239

but it also suggests that he is something other than himself as a result of this transformation. About Luce he remarks confusedly, “she would have me as a beast – not that, I being a beast, she would have me, but that she, being a very beastly creature, lays claim to me” (3.2.86–8). This primarily signifies that she is behaving bestially as if in heat. It also opens the way to the possibility of his being transformed, especially because here he says, “I being a beast”, and later in this scene this Dromio admits that this “diviner” and “witch”, as he calls her, “had transformed [him] to a curtal dog” (3.2.151). Now he thinks that he is transformed into yet another beast. As a tail symbolizes a male member, the term “curtal” suggests castration.32 Since the traditional dangers of Circe include emasculation and bestiality, the transformation into a “curtal dog” Dromio experiences with Luce reveals that this kitchen-maid is also qualified as one of the Circean women in Ephesus.33 The transformation into an ass links the two Dromios and the confusion of their identities by other characters. Antipholus of Ephesus complains that his Dromio talked about the encounter on the mart which he does not know (3.1.6– 9). What Dromio of Ephesus talked about is his encounter with Antipholus of Syracuse staged in Act 1 scene 2 (41–94). Naturally unaware of his servant’s mistake of identity, the Ephesian Antipholus says to his Dromio, “I think thou art an ass.” To this insult, Dromio of Ephesus replies: Marry, so it doth appear By the wrongs I suffer and the blows I bear. I should kick being kicked, and, being at that pass, You would keep from my heels, and beware of an ass. (3.1.15–18)

As Luciana calls Dromio of Syracuse an ass, Dromio of Ephesus is called an ass by his master and he, assuming a defiant attitude, speaks about the potential danger of an ass. The Ephesian Dromio’s obsession with asses continues in this scene.34 Later in this scene Antipholus of Ephesus, furious at being shut out from his house, says, “What art thou that keep’st me out from the house I owe?” As Dromio of Syracuse replies from within the house, “The porter for this time, sir, and my name is Dromio”, Dromio of Ephesus rages: O villain, thou hast stol’n both mine office and my name! The one ne’er got me credit, the other mickle blame. If thou hadst been Dromio today in my place, Thou wouldst have changed thy place for a name, or thy name for an ass. (3.1.44–7)35

240

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

The villain who stole the office and the name of Dromio has also become an ass. Thus both of the Dromios have become asses. This mentioning of “ass” serves as a cue for Luce’s entrance on stage. The only entrance of this kitchenmaid in the play is at the moment when the two Dromios are both identified as asses and their respective identities are eroded. In The Odyssey the victims of Circe are not transformed into asses. An ass, however, came to be connected to Circe in the long cultural tradition of this sorceress. Deborah Baker Wyrick points out the particular relationship between asses and Circe in Boethius and in Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems and Other Devices (1586).36 Wyrick points out that an “ass” confirms the farcical bawdiness and the metamorphic theme with its attendant Circean animal imagery. Luce’s entrance with the reference to the transformation into an ass further suggests this character’s Circean association. Although she does not change the Dromios into asses, Luce’s harsh refusal to let Dromio of Ephesus enter the house also reminds us of Circe’s expulsion of her victims from her house into the sty. Dromio of Syracuse calls Luce “Nell” (3.2.111).37 This name is used to introduce the following speech including a pun with “an ell” (“But her name and three-quarters – that’s an ell and three-quarters – will not measure her from hip to hip”, 3.2.111-13) indicating this woman’s fatness. She is also “swart” (black) like Dromio’s shoe (3.2.103). The name Nell, however, attaches a further characteristic to this kitchen-maid for, as Laurie Maguire points out, Shakespeare uses it as an abbreviation for Helen. Maguire also writes of Shakespeare’s characters named Helen: “One dominant pattern stands out, that of the sexually assertive female who pursues her chosen mate”.38 LuceNell of Errors is by no means a beauty but she is certainly sexually assertive. Her aggressive sexuality threatens the Syracusan Dromio’s masculinity. This kitchen-maid’s emasculating power reminds us of Shakespeare’s later presentation of the archetypal Helen of Troy in Troilus and Cressida. Paris reveals Helen’s emasculating power on one of the occasions in which he calls her Nell. He says to Pandarus, “I would fain have armed today, but my Nell would not have it so” (3.1.133–4). Paris wants Helen to exercise this power to Hector as well. He says: Sweet Helen, I must woo you To help unarm our Hector. His stubborn buckles, With these your white enchanting fingers touched, Shall more obey than to the edge of steel Of force of Greekish sinews. You shall do more Than all the island kings: disarm great Hector. (3.1.146–51)

Circes in Ephesus

241

“Unarming” symbolizes emasculation. Paris has been emasculated and expects Helen’s “enchanting” fingers will emasculate Hector as well. The enchanting Helen is thus linked to Circe.39 The name Nell, in turn, associates Luce with Circe through Helen of Troy together with the threat of bestial transformation she poses to Dromio of Syracuse. Antipholus of Syracuse also uses expressions reminiscent of the OdysseyCirce episode in his courtship to Luciana. His courtship proceeds simultaneously with his servant’s bestial experience with Luce. He says to Luciana after their first meeting: Against my soul’s pure truth why labour you To make it wander in an unknown field? Are you god? Would you create me new? Transform me, then, and to your power I’ll yield. (3.2.37–40)

Antipholus’s soul wanders just as Odysseus and his men do.40 The deification of Luciana in line 39 sounds Petrarchan but Antipholus’s reference to the transformation and his yielding to Luciana’s power further likens her to Circe and himself to the enchantress’s victims. In The Odyssey Circe is a daughter of the Sun-god and in Boece Chaucer calls her “the faire goddess, dowhter of the sonne’ (Book 4, Metrum 3, 4–5).41 Antipholus also says, “O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note / To drown me in thy sister’s flood of tears. / Sing, siren, or thyself, and I will dote” (3.2.45–7).42 He compares Luciana with a “mermaid” and “siren”. In The Odyssey Odysseus sails by the Sirens after leaving Circe’s island (Book XII).43 The reference to “siren” after the terms related to Circe suggests that this Antipholus compares himself to Odysseus. This impression is endorsed by his soliloquy later in this scene. He says about Luciana: Possessed with such a gentle, sovereign grace, Of such enchanting presence and discourse, Hath almost made me traitor to myself. But lest myself be guilty of self-wrong, I’ll stop mine ears against the mermaid’s song. (3.2.165–9)

Here he again compares the “enchanting” Luciana to a “mermaid”. By referring to the stopping of ears, as we have seen in the first section, Antipholus again

242

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

introduces the double comparison of himself to Odysseus and of Luciana to a Siren.44 Just as Italy was the Sirens and Circe for Ascham, Luciana is both a Siren and a Circean witch of Ephesus with the power of transformation for this wanderer. Luciana and Luce the kitchen-maid share a name. This is noteworthy in light of the importance of names in the confusion in Errors. These two female characters are related to each other as they may be regarded as Circe’s associates.45 In addition to them, Roberts regards Adriana as Circean in her characterization as an impatient and rebellious wife because he observes that female rebellion is one of Circe’s characteristics.46 A conversation between Dromio of Ephesus and Adriana after Dromio’s initial encounter with Antipholus of Syracuse further suggests Adriana’s potential to transform her husband into a “horned” beast. When Dromio is reporting to his mistress the failure of mutual understanding with the man who he believes to be his own master, he says, “Why, mistress, sure my master is horn-mad”. Adriana asks, “Horn-mad, thou villain?” and Dromio replies, “I mean not cuckold-mad, but sure he is stark mad” (2.1.57–9). Dromio uses the term “horn-mad” in the sense that he believes his master is “stark mad”. However, this term evokes the image of cuckoldry – of Antipholus enraged at being cuckolded. Here we glimpse the anxiety of being made a cuckold by Adriana. Antipholus of Syracuse says, “There’s none but witches do inhabit here” (3.2.161). He also says when he sees the Courtesan, “Thou art, as you are all, a sorceress” (4.3.66; italics added). This line may mean that courtesans are all like sorceresses. He, however, says to the Courtesan, “Avaunt, thou witch!” (4.3.78). Earlier he called the women in the house of Antipholus of Ephesus “witches”. He also says later, at seeing Adriana and Luciana, “I see these witches are afraid of swords” (4.4.148). These remarks suggest that Antipholus of Syracuse calls all the women he sees in Ephesus sorceresses. As we have seen, he had described Ephesus as a land of witches killing the soul and deforming the body (1.2.100). It is as if his initial fear is confirmed and Ephesus is indeed a land of Circean witches. Problems of Affiliation in Errors Like the Circes in early modern England, who represent foreign and female attractions threatening English identity, the Ephesians entice Dromio of Syracuse to shed his Syracusan identity. This Dromio says to his master, “Methinks they are such a gentle nation that, but for the mountain of mad

Circes in Ephesus

243

flesh that claims marriage of me, I could find my heart to stay here still, and turn witch” (4.4.154–7). Two things are worth noting of this speech. First, Dromio calls the Ephesians a “gentle nation. The term “nation” used here has yet to gain the senses grown up with the development of modern nation states. This term, originating from nasci (to be born), however, signifies a group more distinct than civic differences as we see in other uses of this term in Shakespeare’s plays such as Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice (“[Antonio] hates our sacred nation”, 1.3.46) and Macmorris’s questioning in Henry V (“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).47 Second, he wishes to stay in Ephesus and become a witch if there were not Luce-Nell. Here the transformation Dromio wishes signifies that of national identity rather than of outward shape. Dromio’s wish to “turn witch” locates the Circean associations of this play in the early modern discourse of the vulnerability of English national identity. Dromio’s introduction of the national perspective suggests that Antipholus of Syracuse’s challenge to Luciana to create him new and to transform him (3.2.39–40) may contain the implication of becoming an Ephesian. As we have seen, in this speech he refers to the Sirens – Odyssean enchantresses that Ascham uses as a metaphor for the Italian threat to English identity together with Circe. What, then, is Syracusan identity? How is it defined in this play? Syracusan identity in Errors is not easily definable because, firstly, the political status of Syracuse is ambiguous and, secondly, two systems of affiliation – based on birthplace and on parentage – are operative. The second reason enables us to compare Syracusan identity with early modern English identity. Here I firstly explore the problems of Syracusan identity of this play and then, secondly, I compare it with the English identity Shakespeare presents in Henry V. The Syracusan affiliation of Egeon and Antipholus of Syracuse is mentioned repeatedly early in the play. Solinus begins his speech calling Egeon “Merchant of Syracusa” (1.1.3). He then explains the “mortal and intestine jars” between Syracuse and Ephesus (1.1.11) which result in the death sentence for this Syracusan merchant. The term “intestine” used by the Duke of Ephesus suggests that Ephesus and Syracuse belong to the same political unit. The errors and confusions of the play are caused because an Ephesian is indistinguishable from his twin from Syracuse. This reveals the lack of outward markers – such as clothes – to distinguish the Ephesians from the Syracusans, suggesting the uniformity between the two peoples.48 Linda McJannet argues that the Levantine cities of Errors and Pericles present the urban emphasis of the polis based on the “Greek notion of a

244

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

decentralized, cosmopolitan empire of the world”.49 Solinus also calls Ephesus and Syracuse “our adverse towns” (1.1.15). The First Merchant who hosts Antipholus of Syracuse in Ephesus refers to “the statute of the town” according to which Egeon is sentenced to death (1.2.6). The Syracusan Antipholus says to this merchant, “I’ll view the manners of the town” and “What, will you walk with me about the town …?” (1.2.12, 22) and confirms Ephesus’s urban character. He also says, “I will go lose myself, / And wander up and down to view the city” (1.2.30–31). The emphasis on Ephesus as a city recurs at the beginning of Act 5, where the Second Merchant says, “How is the man [Antipholus of Ephesus] esteemed here in the city?” and Angelo the goldsmith replies, “Of very reverend reputation, sir, / Of credit infinite, highly beloved, / Second to none that lives here in the city” (5.1.4–7). In this scene Angelo also mentions “the laws and statutes of this town” (5.1.126).50 While Errors’ Ephesus gives an impression of a town or a city, it is at the same time part of Solinus’s dukedom. Solinus’s refererences to his own “crown” (1.1.143) and to himself as “your Duke” (1.1.6) reveal that Ephesus and Syracuse are twin dukedoms as well as cities. Solinus’s speech includes a phrase suggesting stronger autonomy and larger difference between these two cities. He calls the Syracusans “seditious countrymen” (1.1.12); Syracuse and probably Ephesus are “countries” as well.51 While the political status of Syracuse is not altogether clear, Syracusan identity is particularly important in Errors. Egeon says, “In Syracusa was I born” (1.1.36). He defines his Syracusan identity based on his birthplace. The affiliation based on birthplace is crucial for his destiny because Solinus says: if any born at Ephesus Be seen at Syracusan marts and fairs; Again, if any Syracusan born Come to the bay of Ephesus, he dies, His goods confiscate to the Duke’s dispose, Unless a thousand marks be levièd To quit the penalty and ransom him. (1.1.16–22; italics added)

The penalty is mutually to be applied to those who are born in the adverse dukedoms. The repetition of this condition emphasizes its importance in this regulation. Although Egeon is “born at Syracuse”, his “Syracusan” son does not belong to the same category. Egeon reveals that his sons were born in Epidamnus. He tells Solinus that his wife followed him to Epidamnus and

Circes in Ephesus

245

“[t]here had she not been long but she became / A joyful mother of two goodly sons” (1.1.48–9). Antipholus of Syracuse – if he can be called so – is a Syracusan only because his parents are Syracusans. He is hence immune to the danger of the death penalty according to this law. Two systems of affiliation work in this family: birthplace and parentage. The second scene reminds us of the vagueness of identity by the coexistence of these two systems. An Ephesian merchant says to Antipholus of Syracuse, “therefore give out you are of Epidamnus, / Lest that your goods too soon be confiscate” (1.2.1–2). This Ephesian merchant gives this warning presumably because he is worried that his “Syracusan” guest may have his “goods confiscate”. He believes that this Antipholus was born in Syracuse or that the penalty applies to all those who are from Syracuse no matter where they were born. The coexistence of the two systems of affiliation by which Egeon and his sons are defined was significant to English identity. Shakespeare explores extensively the two systems of defining English identity in Henry V. Henry says to the yeomen in his force assaulting Harfleur, “And you, good yeomen, / Whose limbs were made in England, show us here / The mettle of your pasture” (3.1.25–7). The emphasis on “made in England” in this speech is striking in contrast to the king’s similar speech to the “noblest English” (presumably English aristocrats, rather than Englishmen in general, in the light of his reference to “yeomen”) just before this: On, on, you noblest English, Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof, Fathers that like so many Alexanders Have in these parts from morn till even fought, And sheathed their swords for lack of argument. (3.1.17–21)

Here Henry focuses on the paternal bloodline in defining the “noblest English”. They are those who inherit blood from their warrior fathers. Henry thus defines English identity according to two different principles: the yeomen by their birthplace and the nobles by their paternal blood. These two systems confuse Fluellen, who praises Henry saying, “Ay, he was porn at Monmouth” and later “All the water in Wye cannot wash your majesty’s Welsh plood out of your pody” (4.7.11, 104–5). In Fluellen’s soaring imagination, Henry’s “Welsh” identity based on his birth at Monmouth is replaced by the fictional Welsh bloodline. Although the conditions of English national identity Shakespeare explores in Henry V may seem irrelevant to the grossly fictional Levant of Errors,

246

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

I argue that Errors is Shakespeare’s earlier dramatization of this issue. McJannet writes that Errors’ “Greek setting is the chief and most consistent marker of its otherness from Elizabethan London, but this otherness is not very marked”.52 While exoticism is emphasized with the Ephesian location as a Levantine city state with biblical associations and in trade with the Orient (most prominently presented by the characters’ references to Persia, “balsamum”, and “Turkish tapestry”, 4.1.4, 89, 104),53 Elizabethan England is present in this play. Antipholus of Syracuse lists Ireland, Scotland, France, England, Spain, “America, the Indies”, and “Belgia, the Netherlands” as he talks with his Dromio about parts of Nell’s “spherical” body in a mock blazon (3.2.116–44). These countries and regions present the neighbours and enemies of Elizabethan England and the New World to which England was ambitious to expand. They introduce Elizabethan diplomatic and military realities into the seemingly distant and timeless world of Errors, thus creating a dual perspective in this play. It is remarkable that Luce-Nell introduces this list into the play. As we have seen in the previous section, she is one of the Ephesian Circes. Dromio calls Luce a “diviner” and “witch” and says, “She had transformed me to a curtal dog” (3.2.145, 148, 151) immediately after this mock blazon. Parker argues that Luce-Nell’s body links the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation to Circe in The Odyssey.54 Again, Luce-Nell is a key figure: she links the Circean themes of enchantment and transformation to the English perspective, too. The English perspective thus introduced in this play urges us to overlap English identity with Ephesian and Syracusan identities in Errors. Furthermore, it should be noted that the obsession with identity related to civic/national affiliation is Shakespeare’s and not found in Menaechmi. When Antipholus of Ephesus says, “I ne’er saw Syracusa in my life” (5.1.326), Solinus backs him up, saying to Egeon, “I tell thee, Syracusan, twenty years / Have I been patron to Antipholus, / During which time he ne’er saw Syracusa” (5.1.327–9). This is an interesting change from Plautus with reference to the residential twin’s memory of his life. Menaechmus the Citizen, the Plautine counterpart of Antipholus of Ephesus, says (in Warner’s translation), “I am of Syracuse in Sicily” (5.1.367). In this scene, this Menaechmus repeatedly confirms his Syracusan identity.55 Earlier in the play, Erotium the courtesan says to Menaechmus the Traveller, “Why, think ye I know ye not to be Menaechmus, the son of Moschus, and have heard ye say ye were born at Syracuse …?” (2.1.191–2). Here Erotium believes she is speaking to Menaechmus the Citizen and reveals that this Menaechmus’s Syracusan birth is known in Epidamnum. Antipholus of Ephesus’s lack of memory about his birth places

Circes in Ephesus

247

him in a less secure position in terms of his identity. Together with the opening story of Egeon’s death sentence, Shakespeare creates the situation in which his characters have to contemplate about their identity deriving from civic/ national affiliation. The Abbess recalls: By men of Epidamnus he and I And the twin Dromio all were taken up. But, by and by, rude fishermen of Corinth By force took Dromio and my son from them, And me they left with those of Epidamnus. (5.1.356–60)

This speech reminds us of the “non-Syracusan” identity of the Antipholi. Hearing it, Solinus says to Antipholus of Syracuse by mistaking him for his twin, “Antipholus, thou cam’st from Corinth first” (5.1.363). The overt discussion of affiliation ends here, shifting the focus of the rest of the play to the reunion of family. They leave the problem of Antipholus of Ephesus’s affiliation unconcluded. The topic of this Antipholus’s affiliation, however, has been treated allusively throughout the play. He was born in Epidamnus from Syracusan parents, came to Ephesus from Corinth, and has lived in Ephesus with an Ephesian wife under the Duke of Ephesus’s patronage. The confirmation of his identity by the Abbess’s speech and the family reunion imply that, with this family, bloodline prevails over birthplace in the end.56 When he wrote Errors, Shakespeare made his Plautine source Menaechmi more complicated. The doubling of the twins by adding Dromios is a most conspicuous complication. Errors also presents a more complex situation than Menaechmi in the characters’ civic/national affiliation. Shakespeare’s play begins with the presentation of the importance of birthplace-based affiliation and ends with the recovery of the family tie and re-establishment of the bloodline-based affiliation. Conclusion Vulnerability and ambiguity of identity permeate Errors. The confusion caused by the unexpected presence of the two sets of twins in Ephesus at the same time highlights the complexity of affiliation and the fear of losing one’s identity. Solinus’s reference to Circe in the final scene seems a casual remark

248

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

on the nightmarish confusion in the farcical plot, which has just come to an end. There are, however, speeches referring to transformation of shape in this scene. Egeon says when Antipholus of Ephesus (whom he believes to be his other son) fails to recognize him, “O, grief hath changed me since you saw me last” (5.1.297). More remarkably, the Abbess says to Adriana as the latter demands her husband’s return: Be patient, for I will not let him stir Till I have used the approved means I have, With wholesome syrups, drugs, and holy prayers To make him a formal man again. (5.1.102–5)

The term “formal” in the last line means “normal in intellect, sane”.57 This line, however, suggests that Antipholus is de-formed or trans-formed like the victims of Circe. The “syrups” and “drug” the Abbess is using are also associated with Circe’s cup though they are benign. It is as if the Abbess is also one of the Circes in Ephesus specializing in restorative power. These speeches show that Solinus’s reference to Circe is not merely casual. As we have seen, the Circean imagery persists in this play and the Duke’s remark occurs in the network of this imagery. Also, Errors is Shakespeare’s only play in which both Circe and the Sirens are mentioned. This suggests that Errors has as its subtext the literary tradition about these enchantresses in addition to Plautine comedies. Errors ends with a suggestion of marriage between Antipholus of Syracuse and Luciana. This marriage enhances the play’s sense of comedic ending. Both of the Antipholi and one of the Dromios marry Ephesian women. The other Dromio has expressed his willingness to stay in Ephesus and become a witch. The intermarriage between Englishmen and Irish women is one of the most grievous causes of English settlers’ degeneration in Spenser’s tract about the Irish problem in Elizabethan England. Like Irish women, the women of Ephesus are so attractive that they drive men into intermarriage and “degeneration” into witches. Errors’ characteristic as a play dealing with the problems of identity, its associations of Ephesus with sorcery, and its references to Odyssean enchantresses lead us to contemplate the rich tradition of Circe inherited from classical literature. These combined, make us view the confusion of identity explored in this play in association with the dangerous attraction of Circe for early modern English identity. Elizabethan writers present Circe with references to Italy and Ireland. The feminized and demonized attractions of

Circes in Ephesus

249

these countries make them appropriate for being called Circes. In this sense, the insecurity and ambiguity about identity Shakespeare explores in Errors can be regarded as reflecting similar uncertainty about English identity for the Elizabethans. The identity crisis Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse experience in Ephesus is comparable to that which Elizabethan Englishmen feared. Notes An earlier version of this essay was presented at “The Return of the Early Comedies in Shakespearean Scholarship” seminar of the 2009 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America at Washington, D.C. I would like to thank the members of this seminar and especially Bill Carroll, the leader, for valuable feedback. I also wish to thank Liza Bobo and Cary DiPietro for their comments and suggestions. 1. All quotations from The Comedy of Errors (henceforth Errors) are taken from Charles Whitworth’s Oxford Shakespeare edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Quotations from other works of Shakespeare are from The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 2. Richard, the Duke of York, says to the captured Joan la Pucelle: Damsel of France, I think I have you fast. Unchain your spirits now with spelling charms, And try if they can gain your liberty. A goodly prize, fit for the devil’s grace. See how the ugly witch doth bend her brows, As if with Circe she would change my shape. (5.4.1–6) York’s reference to Joan’s “spirits” and “spelling charms” recalls her necromancy staged just before her capture. She says, “Now help, ye charming spells and periapts, / And ye choice spirits that admonish me / And give me signs of future accidents” (5.3.2–4). While necromancy is not traditionally associated with Circe, York links this witchcraft with the Circean power to change men’s shape. An “ugly witch” does not seem an appropriate epithet for the sexually enchanting Circe, either. The French noblemen, however, do not think her ugly. Joan allures the Dauphin and the Bastard of Orléans. In this sense, Joan is in the tradition of the Circean enchantress. This speech, however, may not have been written by Shakespeare, leaving the possibility that Solinus’s speech is the only Shakespearean reference to Circe. 3. In Shakespeare’s works, The Tempest has been the centre of critical focus in relation to Circe. In his introduction to this Oxford Shakespeare edition of The Tempest (1987; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 19 , Stephen Orgel argues that the Medea story – though related to the Circe story – is more relevant to this play. According to Apollonius Rhodius, Circe is an aunt of Medea; see Judith Yarnall, Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 80. For the relationship between Circe and Medea, see also Diane Purkiss, The Witch in

250

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996), 258–60. 4. Leonora Leet Brodwin, “Milton and the Renaissance Circe”, Milton Studies VI (1974), ed. James D. Simmonds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), 21–83, at 23–6; Karen Britland, “Circe’s Cup: Wine and Women in Early Modern Drama”, in A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Convivality in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Adam Smyth, Studies in Renaissance Drama 14 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 109–25, at 114. 5. Elizabeth F. Hart, “‘Great is Diana’ of Shakespeare’s Ephesus”, SEL 43 (2003): 347– 74, at 354–8. On the tradition of Ephesus and Diana, see also Laurie Maguire, “The Girls from Ephesus”, in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert S. Miola (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 355–91, at 360–66. 6. Gareth Roberts, “The Descendants of Circe: Witches and Renaissance Fictions”, in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief, ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 183–206, at 194–9. 7. Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 67. 8. Curtis Perry, “Commerce, Community, and Nostaligia in The Comedy of Errors”, in Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 39–51, at 48. 9. Martine van Elk, “Urban Misidentification in The Comedy of Errors and the ConyCatching Pamphlets”, SEL 43 (2003): 323–46. 10. Britland, “Circe’s Cup”, 114. 11. Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, in The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, 3 vols (London: John Russell Smith, 1864–65), vol. 3. The possibility of Shakespeare’s reading of the Schoolmaster is noted by Stephen Doloff, “Shakespeare’s Othello and Circe’s Italian Court in Ascham’s The Schoolmaster (1570)”, Notes and Queries 48 (2001): 287–9, at 288. Circe is associated with Italy in The Aeneid. In Book 7 of The Thirteene Bookes of Aeneidos, trans Thomas Phaer (London, 1596, STC 24803), we find this marginal gloss: “He [Aeneas] saileth along the coast of Circes a famous enchantress or witch, then dwelling in Italy, which turned men into beasts” (K7v). Mihoko Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 129, points out the “references to Lavinia’s descent from the sorceress Circe and Italy’s close ties with Circe” presented in The Aeneid. 12. Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 151. 13. Ibid., 152. 14. Ibid., 156. Ascham refers to “Circes’ court” in Italy three more times in his criticism of Italianized Englishmen: ibid., 155 and 165. 15. Roberts, “The Descendants of Circe”, 201–3, and “Three Notes on Uses of Circe by Spenser, Marlowe and Milton”, Notes and Queries 223 (1978): 433–5, at 433. 16. Harry Vredeveld, “‘Deaf as Ulysses to the Siren’s Song’: The Story of a Forgotten Topos”, Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 846–82, at 846. For other examples of Elizabethan playwrights’ uses of the deaf Odysseus figure, see ibid., 850–51. 17. A conspicuous literary and theatrical representation of this shift is seen in Woodstock. This play presents the conflict between Thomas, Duke of Gloucester and Richard II in terms of the “plain” Thomas who champions England in frieze versus the French-born Richard who favours European fashions. Edition referred to is Thomas of Woodstock or

Circes in Ephesus

251

King Richard the Second, Part One, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester University Press, 2002). 18. This passage is also included in the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1586) with the term “poisoned” omitted. See Holinshed’s Chronicles England, Scotland, and Ireland, vol. VI (1808; New York: AMS Press, 1965), 69. Sir John Davies repeats this image and compares the “degenerate” English settlers to “those who had drunk of Circe’s cup and were turned into very beasts, and yet took such pleasure in their beastly manner of life as they would not return to their shape of men again”: A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued … (1612), ed. James P. Myers, Jr (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 171. 19. See The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd edn., CD-ROM (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), “degenerate” v. and “degeneration” n. 20. See OED, “generation” 1 and 6. 21. Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland: From the First Published Edition (1633), ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 60. 22. For a comprehensive study of the cultural tradition of Circe, see Yarnall, Transformations of Circe. About the relationship of Acrasia and the Circe tradition, see esp. chap. 6, 127–44. 23. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 172–9. Editon referred to here is The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987). 24. Spenser, A View, 56–9. 25. In William Warner’s translation of Menaechmi (1595), Messenio says to his master Menaechmus the Traveller when they arrive at Epidamnum, “Six years now have we roamed about thus – Istria, Hispania, Massilia, Illyria, all the Upper Sea, all high Greece, all haven towns in Italy” (2.1.12–14). Egeon wanders around the Mediterranean far more extensively than Menaechmus the Traveller. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Menaechmi are taken from this translation reprinted in Whitworth’s Oxford Shakespeare edition (Appendix C). 26. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 59. 27. See The Odyssey, Book X, for this episode. 28. A later conversation between the Syracusan master and servant endorses this connection between venereal diseases and transformation: Antipholus of Syracuse (AS): Why is Time such a niggard of hair, being, as it is, so plentiful of excrement? Dromio of Syracuse (DS): Because it is a blessing that he bestows on beasts, and what he hath scanted men in hair he hath given them in wit. AS: Why, but there’s many a man hath more hair than wit. DS: Not a man of those but he hath the wit to lose his hair. AS: Why, thou didst conclude hairy men plain dealers, without wit. DS: The plainer dealer, the sooner lost. Yet he loseth it in a kind of policy. (2.2.78–90; italics added) While Antipholus of Ephesus begins this conversation with men’s natural loss of hair, it turns into loss by venereal diseases. The “plain dealing” in the last line suggests an incautious sexual relationship with a woman carrying venereal diseases resulting in the early loss of hair. In the Folio this line ends with the term “iollitie” instead of

252

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

“policy”, indicating sexual pleasure. Dromio’s reference to “beasts” suggests further the association of this conversation to the Circean transformation of men. As Circe transforms men into beasts, female carriers of venereal diseases transform men into baldness. 29. Roberts, “The Descendants of Circe”, 195. 30. Britland, “Circe’s Cup”, 114. 31. See OED, “disguise” v. 3, for the sense of “to transform, to alter in appearance, to disfigure”. 32. Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary & Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary (1947; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), 200. 33. For Circe’s emasculation of her victims as well as transformation into beasts, see Brodwin, “Milton and the Renaissance Circe”, 21–5; Britland, “Circe’s Cup”, 114; and Purkiss, The Witch in History, 258–9. 34. Dromio of Ephesus yet later admits that he is an ass. Antipholus of Ephesus says, “Thou art sensible in nothing but blows, and so is an ass”, and he replies, “I am an ass indeed. You may prove it by my long ears” (4.4.28–31). 35. The Folio reads the last line of this quotation as: “Thou wouldst have changed thy face for a name, or thy name for an ass”. Editors of Errors have emended this line variously. 36. Deborah Baker Wyrick, “The Ass Motif in The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 432–48, at 435–6. 37. This instability of Luce’s name reminds us of the fluidity of the names “Antipholus” and “Dromio”. Egeon says: My youngest boy, and yet my eldest care, At eighteen years became inquisitive After his brother, and importuned me That his attendant – for his case was like, Reft of his brother, but retained his name – Might bear him company in the quest of him. (1.1.123–8; italics added) Although the transfer of names is part of the plot Shakespeare takes from Menaechmi, it causes confusion and threatens the twins’ identities. Also note that Luciana is also named “Iulia” in the First Folio. 38. Laurie Maguire, Shakespeare’s Names (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 168. Maguire devotes the third chapter of her book to the analysis of the Helens in All’s Well That Ends Well, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Troilus and Cressida, Luce-Nell and Mistress Quickly (Nell). Although Maguire concludes, “Nell is both loose and Luce” (169), this Luce-Nell is not altogether loose; she merely does not realize that this Dromio is her man’s twin. 39. In Metamorphoses of Helen, Suzuki observes the resemblance of Helen to Circe and the Sirens seen in The Odyssey. She argues that Helen’s allure, and her impersonation of the wives of the Greeks hidden in the Wooden Horse recalled by Menelaus in Book IV, link her to Calypso and Circe. Suzuki also writes that “Helen’s seduction … parallels that of the Sirens” (69). 40. In the lines just before these, Antipholus of Syracuse refers to “earthy gross conceit, / Smothered in errors, feeble, shallow, weak” (3.2.34–5). Although “[s]mothered in errors” means “having committed mistakes”, the use of the term “errors” here is reminiscent of his wandering, too.

Circes in Ephesus

253

41. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn., gen ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Circe is a daughter “to heauens man-enlightning fire” in Chapman’s translation (O2v) and “Phoebus’ imp” in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 14, 12). Editions referred to are Homer’s Odysseus. Translated Acording to Ye Greeks by Geo: Chapman (London, 1614), STC 13636; and Madeline Forey Ed., Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Translated by Arthur Golding (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 42. This is one of the three references to the Sirens in Shakespeare’s works. In Titus Andronicus, Aaron calls Tamora “this queen, / This goddess, this Semiramis, this nymph, / This siren that will charm Rome’s Saturnine / And see his shipwreck and his commonweal’s” (2.1.21–4); and Sonnet 119 begins, “What portions have I drunk of siren tears / Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within” (1–2). Katherine Duncan-Jones observes that the examples in Errors and Titus “lie within the received convention” in comparison with that in Sonnet 119: “‘Syren Teares’: Enchantment or Infection in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 119”, Review of English Studies new ser. 48 (1997): 56–60, at 56–7. While Kent Cartwright’s “Language, Magic, the Dromios, and The Comedy of Errors”, SEL 47 (2007): 331-54, discusses Antipholus of Syracuse’s references to Luciana as “a thing ‘divine,’ a ‘mermaid,’ a ‘god’ with the power to change men” in his study about magic in Errors (339), he does not read this scene in association with the literary tradition about Circe. 43. Although, as Whitworth points out in his introduction to the Oxford Shakespeare edition (53), in The Odyssey XII Circe gives to Odysseus a warning against the Sirens, Roberts observes that “the sirens … are often the attendants of Circe in poetry and mythography”: see “The Descendants of Circe”, 198. Roberts quotes from William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608), “there were the same Witches that are now, as the Circes and Syrenes …” (“The Descendants of Circe”, 187). Vredeveld points out that Horace praises Ulysses in mastering the Sirens’ songs and Circe’s drugs in Epistles: You have often heard of the Sirens’ song and Circe’s cups; If he had been foolish and greedy enough to drink, like his comrades, He’d have fallen under the brutish degrading spell of a whore, Living in the life of a filthy dog or a wallowing pig. (1.2.23–6; quoted in Vredeveld, “Deaf as Ulysses”, 857) Ascham may well have had this association in mind when he pairs the Sirens and Circe in The Schoolmaster. 44. See Vredeveld, “Deaf as Ulysses”, for a thorough study of the tradition of Odysseus being deaf to the Sirens. The comparison between Antipholus of Syracuse and Odysseus is further suggested by Dromio of Syracuse’s reply to Adriana when she asks where his master is: “… he’s in Tartar limbo, worse than hell” (4.2.32). Dromio saw Antipholus of Ephesus arrested and led to prison but he believes it was his master Antipholus of Syracuse. Urged by Circe, Odysseus journeys to the underworld (The Odyssey, Book XI). 45. On the close relationship between Luce and Luciana, see Maguire, Shakespeare’s Names, 165–6: “The common root of these two women’s names … shows that the demonic female … and the divine female … are but two sides of the same female stereotype”. 46. Roberts, “The Descendants of Circe”, 202.

254

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

47. For the etymology of “nation”, see OED n1. According to Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1: “In the early Tudor period, nation more often means race, or kind – the kith and kin of a common nativity, or birth, nation. Yet it also hovers near the meaning we have given it, and … in the course of the sixteenth century it comes to denote that principle of political self-determination belonging to a people linked (if nothing else) by a common government”. 48. The uniformity of the peoples includes Epidamnus. An Ephesian Merchant’s first advice to Antipholus of Syracuse when he first appears on stage is, “Therefore give out you are of Epidamnus, / Lest that your goods too soon be confiscate” (1.2.1–2). This advice implies that visitors from Epidamnus and Syracuse look identical to the Ephesians. 49. Linda McJannet, “Genre and Geography: The Eastern Mediterranean in Pericles and The Comedy of Errors”, in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, ed. John Gillies and Virgina Mason Vaughan (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: United University Press, 1998), 86–106, at 92– 100. For an argument that Errors is one of Shakespeare’s city comedies together with The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, see Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 185–94. 50. Although Whitworth attributes the speech including this phrase to Angelo, the goldsmith of Ephesus, the First Folio designates it to Mar[chant] and many editors attribute it to the Second Merchant following Dyce. Other references to Ephesus being a town or city include two remarks made by Antipholus of Syracuse – “In Ephesus I am but two hours old / As strange unto your town as to your talk …” (2.2.151–2) and “I will not stay tonight for all the town” (4.4.158) – and Adriana’s mention of her husband “[d]oing displeasure to the citizens” in madness (5.1.142). 51. Errors’ Ephesus – a dukedom, town, city, and country at the same time – may have inherited this complex characteristic from Menaechmi. In the recognition scene of the Plautine comedy, Menaechmus (the Citizen) says, “Siculus sum Syracusanus” (I am a Sicilian– a Syracusan), and Menaechmus the Traveller (Menaechmus Sosicles) replies, “Eadem urbs et patria est mihi” (That’s my city and my country, too)(1069). Syracuse is both a city and a country here. The quotations from the Latin text and the English translation are from Plautus II, trans. Paul Nixon, The Loeb Classical Library (1917; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1988). 52. McJannet, “Genre and Geography”, 90. 53. Constance C. Relihan, “Liminal Geography: Pericles and the Politics of Place”, Philological Quarterly 71 (1992): 281–301, points out the liminality of Greece in the early modern period. She writes, “The fundamental impression obtained from contemporary texts about Greek, North African, and Aegean cultures is of their liminality – that is to say, of their function as thresholds connecting the European West and the Asiatic/African East” (282). 54. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 66–8. 55. Messenio: Are you a Syracusan? / Menaechmus the Citizen (MC) I am. (5.1.369–70); and Messenio: … You are of Syracuse? / MC: True (5.1.405–6).

Circes in Ephesus

255

56. Curtis Perry, “Commerce, Community, and Nostaligia in The Comedy of Errors”, 48, observes that the “celebration of kinship” at the end of Errors makes this play appropriate for the Innocents Day festivity. 57. OED, “formal” a and n1, 4c.

This page has been left blank intentionally

13 “If imagination amend them”: Lucretius, Marlowe, Shakespeare R. Allen Shoaf

I Bottom’s famous speech upon waking from his enchantment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (MND) represents an engagement with Lucretius (c. 99–c. 55 bce), the great Latin Epicurean epic poet,1 as important as the probable allusion to De rerum natura in King Lear’s moving lament over human birth: King Lear: Thou [Gloucester ] must be patient. We came crying hither. Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air We waul and cry. I will preach to thee. Mark. … King Lear: [removing his crown of weeds] When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools. (KL 4.5.174–6, 178–9)2 Tum porro puer, ut saevis proiectus ab undis navita, nudus humi iacet, infans, indigus omni vitali auxilio, cum primum in luminis oras nixibus ex alvo matris natura profudit, vagituque locum lugubri complet, ut aequumst cui tantum in vita restet transire malorum. (5.222–7)3 Then further the child, like a sailor cast forth by the cruel waves, lies naked upon the ground, speechless, in need of every kind of vital support, as soon as nature has spilt 257

258

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10 him forth with throes from his mother’s womb into the regions of light, and he fills all around with doleful wailings – as is but just, seeing that so much trouble awaits him in life to pass through.4

But the story of this allusion cannot be told without the earlier chapter, in MND, that narrates Shakespeare’s disengagement from the Elizabethan Lucretius, Christopher Marlowe.5 That chapter begins with Bottom’s amazed and amazing speech: Stolen hence, and left me asleep? – I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had – but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream”, because it hath no bottom … (MND 4.1.201–13; emphasis added)

This very famous passage, we know, is dependent upon St Paul’s 1 Corinthians 2.9: “But as it is written, The things which eye hath not seen, neither ear hath heard, neither came into man’s heart, are, which God hath prepared for them that love him.”6 It is important to keep in mind that Shakespeare is crafting a play that closely involves this particular Pauline epistle. At the same time, St Paul’s is not the only major text informing Bottom’s speech. In particular, Shakespeare recalls another extraordinary passage – in this case, of secular literature – as he writes the speech. This passage is from De rerum natura, book 4, in part of Lucretius’s explanation and powerful defence of Epicurean epistemology. I provide next a copy of this passage in book 4 of DRN. My claim is that it is likely a source for Bottom’s speech – or, at the least, an indispensable parallel to Shakespeare’s thinking in and around 1595. Let me immediately address the probable concern over the length of the quotation: Lucretius is a difficult (as well as powerful and brilliant) writer; he is writing philosophy in epic poetry, compounding the difficulty; the philosophy is Epicurean epistemology (on which more later), compounding the difficulty even further; therefore, the full context of the passage I am adducing is necessary. quid maiore fide porro quam sensus haberi debet? an ab sensu falso ratio orta valebit

“If imagination amend them”

259

dicere eos contra, quae tota ab sensibus orta est? qui nisi sunt veri, ratio quoque falsa fit omnis. an poterunt oculos aures reprehendere, an aures tactus? an hunc porro tactum sapor arguet oris, an confutabunt nares oculive revincent? non, ut opinor, ita est. nam seorsum cuique potestas divisast, sua vis cuiquest, ideoque necesse est et quod molle sit et gelidum fervensve seorsum et seorsum varios rerum sentire colores et quaecumque coloribu’ sint coniuncta videre. seorsus item sapor oris habet vim, seorsus odores nascuntur, sorsum sonitus. ideoque necesse est non possint alios alii convincere sensus. nec porro poterunt ipsi reprehendere sese, aequa fides quoniam debebit semper haberi. proinde quod in quoquest his visum tempore, verumst. … non modo enim ratio ruat omnis, vita quoque ipsa concidat extemplo, nisi credere sensibus ausis praecipitisque locos vitare et cetera quae sint in genere hoc fugienda, sequi contraria quae sint. illa tibi est igitur verborum copia cassa omnis, quae contra sensus instructa paratast. (4.482–99; 507–12) What, moreover, must be held to be of greater credit than the senses? Shall reasoning, derived from false sense, prevail against these senses, being itself wholly derived from the senses? For unless they be true, all reasoning is false. Will the ear be able to convict the eye, or the touch the ear? Will the taste of the mouth again refute the touch, will nose confound it, or eye disprove it? Not so, I think. For each has its own separate function, each its own power, and it is therefore necessary to decide what is soft and cold or hot by a separate sense, and by a separate sense to perceive the various colours of things and to see whatever is involved in colour. For the taste of the mouth has power on a separate sense, smell arises for a separate sense, sound for another. Therefore it is necessary that one sense cannot refute another. Nor furthermore will they be able to convict themselves, since equal credit must always be allowed to them. Accordingly, what has seemed to these at any given time to be true, is true … For not only would all reasoning come to ruin, but life itself would at once collapse, unless you make bold to believe the senses, avoiding precipices and all else that must be eschewed of that sort,

260

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10 and following what is contrary. Therefore, believe me, vain is all that array of words which has been prepared and marshalled against the senses. (Rouse, 315–17; emphasis added)

Even on cursory glance, the passage from MND appears to show more than casual relationship to the one from DRN. If, initially, we do no more than contrast the two passages, we see that Bottom’s speech contradicts Lucretius’s pleading: where, above all, Lucretius insists on the separateness and distinctness of the senses, in Bottom’s speech the senses are thoroughly confused, but, even more significantly, their confusion serves as actual testimony to the gravity, importance, and wonder of the vision that Bottom has had – their indistinctness underscores the distinctiveness of Bottom’s vision (and such rhetorical flourish is what we mean by ‘shakespearean”). In support of my proposal, I provide a simple chart, setting out in columnar form what Bottom has said, in parenthetic parallel to the SENSE that presumably would be relevant apart from his speech:7 MEDIA eye ear hand tongue heart

BOTTOM heard seen taste conceive report

SENSE seeing hearing touching tasting feeling

My central point is the crossing we easily see: Shakespeare, I propose, goes out of his way to cross the senses and their functions as he repudiates Lucretius and Epicurean epistemology, where the distinct separateness of each sense is all-important. What we see, then, in Bottom’s speech is a celebration of a completely deranged set of senses relative to their alleged media: the eyes would hear, the ear would see, the hand would taste, the tongue would conceive, the heart would report. Recall also that late in the play, as he performs the part of Pyramus before the Duke, Bottom exclaims, “I see a voice. Now will I to the chink / To spy an I can hear my Thisbe’s face” (MND 5.1.191–2; emphasis added). I suggest that part of what Shakespeare achieves in such speeches is a rebuttal of Epicurean epistemology. The poet who wrote, in the last line of Sonnet 23, “To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit”, is the poet, I will propose, who has an anti-Epicurean, anti-Lucretian, anti-materialist (/Marlovian-materialist) agenda in MND.

“If imagination amend them”

261

To demonstrate this will now require my moving, after a necessary transition through certain historical data, into the second section of my essay. There, I will be demonstrating a number of issues, first, about Lucretius and his representation of Epicurean epistemology. I will then turn to MND, with particular focus on several relevant passages. The summary result, I hope, will be a demonstration of just how close the relationship between Shakespeare’s play and Lucretius’s poem actually is. In the third section, my conclusion, I will offer an argument as to why there might be such a close relationship between these two works, an argument that will depend on certain readings of Elizabethan history in the 1590s and on the developments, on the one hand, of the Scientific Revolution and, on the other, in Elizabethan politics and their relationship to Protestantism, especially as these focus attention on the life and death of Christopher Marlowe. *    *    * Before I can proceed, there are two points that require clarification. First, as all historians know, history’s representation of Epicurus should rather be called history’s misrepresentation of Epicurus. Most of the things he is said to have espoused or to have done are actually fictions invented by his enemies to slander him and to discredit his teachings. He himself was anything but what history has (mis)represented him to be. This goes a long way towards explaining why he had so many faithful followers in the classical world and in the pre-modern world, as well, when the pre-moderns came upon his works, studied them, and adapted them to their own lives.8 Contrary to history’s slanders, he was a powerful philosopher dedicated to what he saw as the alleviation of human suffering by the removal of fear and anxiety. The second point is that, if Epicurus is remarkable in the tradition of Western philosophy for many reasons, not least among them is his development of a rule of epistemology, or theory of knowledge, that is known by the term the canonic (τό κανονικόν), the canon of how men know.9 The Epicurean canonic and its crucial axiom of the criteria of knowledge – it is probably Epicurus who introduces criteria into technical epistemological discourse and initiates its spread10 – had powerful influence in its own right on the subsequent development of Greek philosophy. The core of this theory of knowledge is just that basic datum, which Lucretius so forcefully defends in the passage quoted earlier: that the senses cannot deceive, the senses are the source of truth, the senses are the only thing we have to rely on. The fourth book of DRN time and

262

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

again shows Lucretius defending his master’s teaching on the reliability and the authenticity of the senses. The senses cannot be refuted. But the mind can err – and with disastrous consequences. II Lucretius’s DRN is one of the most important epics in the Latin tradition. Early, of course (before 55 bce), it is known to have influenced such writers as Horace and Virgil and Ovid and to have influenced them profoundly.11 DRN is also known to have aroused the ire of Christians in the early formation of Christianity in the West.12 And it is also famous for having almost disappeared for many centuries until a manuscript of it was rediscovered in the early fifteenth century by Poggio Bracciolini.13 In those times when it has been known, however, it has been a poem that one could hardly afford to ignore. It is the greatest statement of Epicurean philosophy ever to have been written in poetic form, possibly in any form. When Lambinus’s famous edition appeared in the mid-sixteenth century,14 DRN can fairly be said to have changed the rules of the game, especially, as I hope to show, in England in the 1590s. I now turn to a brief list of passages from the fourth book of DRN, the book in which Lucretius accounts for the senses and their indispensability to humankind. This list will help us to understand just what is at issue in Shakespeare’s rebuttal of the Epicurean canonic. Just a few lines before the passage quoted earlier in contrast with Bottom’s speech, Lucretius writes the finest summary we have of the core of the Epicurean canonic: Cetera de genere hoc mirande multa videmus, quae violare fidem quasi sensibus omnia quaerunt – nequiquam, quoniam pars horum maxima fallit propter opinatus animi quos addimus ipsi, pro visis ut sint quae non sunt sensibu’ visa. nam nil aegrius est quam res secernere apertas ab dubiis, animus quas ab se protinus addit. (4.462–8) We see in marvellous fashion many things besides of this kind, which all try as it were to break the credit of our senses; but all in vain, since the most part of them deceives because of opinions of the mind which we bring to them ourselves, so that things are held to be seen which have not been seen by our senses. For nothing is more difficult

“If imagination amend them”

263

than to distinguish plain things from doubtful things which the mind of itself adds at once. (Rouse, 313; emphasis added)

It is difficult to overemphasize how important this paragraph is in the history of Epicurean thought and its influence. It is the clearest and most straightforward statement I know of about not only the reliability of the senses, but also the unreliability of opinion, the deceptiveness of the mind, which adds things that in most instances have absolutely nothing to do with what the senses have perceived and communicated to the mind. *    *    * A brief clarification is needed at this point to facilitate the understanding of Lucretius’s language and his argumentation. We know that Epicurus was a follower but also a critic of Democritus.15 In particular, he continued Democritean teaching about atoms, but with his own differing emphases. From Lucretius we learn that his master Epicurus taught that there exist only two things, bodies (composed of atoms) and the void (DRN 1.418ff.). With these two things, Epicurus could explain many, many phenomena. In particular, he had a ready-to-hand and relatively simple explanation of motion, which, we know, is a problem that has bedevilled philosophy from its beginnings. Motion is simply the swerve of atoms, the notorious clinamen (DRN 2.216–93). This swerve causes the random formations that we see all around us, be they trees or stars or rivers or chimpanzees or human beings or what have you: as the atoms move through the void and collide with each other, formations emerge. From this brief summary derive two important points: information comes to the senses from the movement of atoms, and the senses must communicate this information to the mind, which, however, just because it is constantly subject to the influx of atoms, may independently construe data contrary to what the senses have reported. The mind may have been deceived or brainwashed or conditioned, or may be starved for sleep or simply starved, for example, so as to think that X is Y or A is B, when, in fact, the senses relay that X is clearly X and A is clearly A. *    *    *

264

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Thus Lucretius will continue in the next several passages to explain phenomena that apparently cannot be accounted for by the Epicurean canonic in such a way as to demonstrate, on the contrary, that they are simply fictions of the mind, and thus no challenge to the canonic at all. To take a particularly vivid example: nam certe ex vivo Centauri non fit imago, nulla fuit quoniam talis natura animalis; verum ubi equi atque hominis casu convenit imago, haerescit facile extemplo, quod diximus ante, propter subtilem naturam et tenvia texta. cetera de genere hoc eadem ratione creantur. quae cum mobiliter summa levitate feruntur, ut prius ostendi, facile uno commovet ictu quaelibet una animum nobis subtilis imago; tenvis enim mens est et mire mobilis ipsa. (4.739–48) For certainly no image of a Centaur comes from one living, since there never was a living thing of this nature; but when the images of man and horse meet by accident, they easily adhere at once … on account of their fine nature and thin texture. All other things of this class are made in the same way. And since these are carried about with velocity because of their extreme lightness … any given one of these fine images easily bestirs our mind by a single impression; for the mind is itself thin and wonderfully easy to move. (Rouse, 335; emphasis added)

This last line is important, and we should not lose sight of Lucretius’s conviction that the mind is highly and perilously impressionable. Again and again in book 4 of his poem, Lucretius is at pains to defend the Epicurean epistemological position, the Epicurean canonic, and so he proceeds, as here, with image after image, case after case, example after example, to demonstrate the reliability of the senses, their trustworthiness, but the unreliability of the mind; it is imperative that he affirm that the senses can be invested with faith and trust, even as it is also imperative for him, at the same time, to show how the mind itself is a problem for human beings because it adds to the data of the senses notions, ideas, fictions, fantasies, religions, philosophies, morality, physics, and so forth, all of which and any of which can and usually do interfere with the simple truth that the senses, each in its utterly distinct way and all in concert together, are trying to convey. This truth, in its highest

“If imagination amend them”

265

Epicurean formulation, is simply this, to live in accordance with nature, as the senses encounter nature, a life of peace amongst one’s friends, practising moderation in all things. This is the highest good a human being can aspire to, ataraxia.16 It is this teaching – “philosophy in the garden”, it has been called – that made Epicurus, contrary to the image his enemies caricature of him, one of the most ardently admired philosophers in the Greek and Roman worlds.17 In the process of defending the senses in book 4, Lucretius finds himself necessarily having to account for dreams since all sorts of things emerge in dreams that appear to contradict the Epicurean canonic. If the senses are what Lucretius says they are, what Epicurus says they are, then dreams appear to present a problem. But Lucretius argues strenuously to the contrary: hoc ideo fieri cogit natura, quod omnes corporis offecti sensus per membra quiescunt nec possunt falsum veris convincere rebus. (4.762–B4) This [our apparent recognition when we are asleep and dreaming of someone who has died] nature compels to happen, for the reason that all our senses are obstructed and quiet throughout the frame, and unable to refute the false by the true. (Rouse, 337)

So, if I am dreaming and I think that I have encountered my grandfather in my dream, this is, on the one hand, the result of fragmentary atomic formations remaining in my brain from my encounters with my grandfather when I was a boy, and, on the other, it is the result of the obstruction of my senses which are “quiet throughout [my] frame, and unable to refute the false by the true”. In other words, if I were to wake up, I would know that what I am seeing in my mind’s eye is but the atomic residue of the memory of my grandfather – at least, if I had not taken leave of my senses. As he works through these challenges to the senses, Lucretius comes to the point late in book 4 where, arguing about the nature of dreams, he adduces the experience of a young boy’s nocturnal emission as a case that he must address in order to win assent to his position. tum quibus aetatis freta primitus insinuatur semen, ubi ipsa dies membris matura creavit, conveniunt simulacra foris e corpore quoque nuntia praeclari voltus pulchrique coloris, qui ciet inritans loca turgida semine multo,

266

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10 ut quasi transactis saepe omnibus rebus profundant seminis ingentis fluctus vestemque cruentent. (4.1030–36) Next, for those into whose choppy straits of youth the seed is stealing for the first time, when the ripeness of time itself has created it within the limbs, images come together from outside from whatsoever body, announcing a shining countenance and beautiful complexion, which stimulates and rouses the places swollen with much seed, so that often, as if the whole business had been carried out, they pour out mighty floods of seed and stain their clothes. (Brown, 148–9)

As most will already know, the phenomenon of nocturnal emission is a frequent problem in Western thought, theology in particular, and for St Augustine especially.18 And, although it is not my concern to enter here into the debates about the so-called “wet dream”, I do think it is important to recognize, as I proceed, that what Lucretius has effected at this point, almost certainly deliberately, is a strategic deployment of a very charged and problematic issue in order to help him to produce one of the most important transitions in book 4, indeed arguably one of the most important transitions in his entire poem – the transition from his defence of the senses in dreams to his argument for the reliability of the senses in human sexuality. For the very next passage of book 4 inaugurates the concluding 200-odd lines of the book, which comprise one of the most extraordinary discourses on human sexuality to have come down to us in the antique Latin tradition. So important are these lines that an entire scholarly monograph has been devoted to them, in the 1980s, an edition of just these lines, not the entire DRN, with a prefatory essay nearly 150 pages long and a commentary apparatus some 200 pages long.19 When we enter the last 200 lines of book 4 of DRN, we enter into one of the most brilliant and, at the same time, highly fraught discussions of human sexuality in the Western literary tradition. With the event of nocturnal emission as his transitional bridge, Lucretius proceeds to write his fundamental Epicurean position on human eros. That position, as many will already know, is simple. Whatever you do, do not fall in love. The worst mistake you can make is to fall in love. Sex is fine, sex is sweet, sex is natural, sex makes babies, who are good and necessary, wet dreams, even, are natural, as Lucretius has just explained, but do not fall in love.20 If you fall in love, your mind is going to be the most perturbed scene in all the vast cosmos of bodies (/atoms) and the void. There is no peace in love. There is no quieting of disturbance and perturbation in love. Love is a

“If imagination amend them”

267

maelstrom. Lucretius goes out of his way, following Epicurus, to say: sex is natural, love is madness. Famously – or notoriously, depending on one’s persuasion – Lucretius argues: Nec Veneris fructu caret is qui vitat amorem, sed potius quae sunt sine poena commoda sumit; nam certe purast sanis magis inde voluptas quam miseris. (4.1073–6) Nor does he who avoids love lack the fruit of Venus, but rather chooses goods which are without penalty; for certainly the pleasure from this is more pure for the healthy than for the wretched. (Brown, 150–51)

It is for this kind of writing that St Jerome and other Christians thoroughly castigate Lucretius. At the same time, it is this kind of writing, this philosophical position, that almost certainly attracted antique writers – such as Ovid, for example. Lucretius wants to try to help all human beings, in this like his master Epicurus, to a life of peace and tranquility, not to fear the gods, not to fear death, and to live according to nature, which is, amongst other things, to enjoy sexual intercourse as the great physical pleasure it is – but do not fall in love. Thus Lucretius argues: sic igitur Veneris qui telis accipit ictus, sive puer membris muliebribus hunc iaculatur seu mulier toto iactans e corpore amorem, unde feritur, eo tendit gestitque coire et iacere umorem in corpus de corpore ductum. namque voluptatem praesagit muta cupido. Haec Venus est nobis; hinc autemst nomen Amoris, hinc illaec primum Veneris dulcedinis in cor stillavit gutta et successit frigida cura. (4.1052–60) In this way, therefore, he who receives blows from the weapons of Venus, whether a boy with his womanish limbs transfixes him or a woman casting love from her whole body, he strains in that direction from which he is hit and yearns to join together and

268

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10 to cast the liquid drawn from his body into the other body. For dumb desire has a presentiment of pleasure. This is “Venus” to us; from this furthermore comes the name of “Love”, from this that drop of Venus’ sweetness first trickled into the heart and after rose up chilly care. (Brown, 148–51: emphasis added)

We should be vigilant against under-reading this passage. Lucretius etymologizes the Latin word amor, “love” (4.1058), from the Latin word umor, “moisture” (4.1056). Love is at best a humour – he would argue, were he in a good humour, a bad humour. Thus it is that Lucretius would try to relieve the suffering of love and replace it with the actual physical attraction each person feels for the other, with the legal and social amenities of the married state, with the necessary upbringing of children, and, in short, all the things that make a society functional – but without the madness of love: Nec Veneris fructu caret is qui vitat amorem, sed potius quae sunt sine poena commoda sumit; nam certe purast sanis magis inde voluptas quam miseris. etenim potiundi tempore in ipso fluctuat incertis erroribus ardor amantum nec constat quid primum oculis manibusque fruantur. quod petiere, premunt arte faciuntque dolorem corporis, et dentes inlidunt saepe labellis osculaque adfligunt, quia non est pura voluptas et stimuli subsunt qui instigant laedere id ipsum, quodcumque est, rabies unde †illaecermina† surgunt. (4.1073–83) Nor does he who avoids love lack the fruit of Venus, but rather chooses goods which are without penalty; for certainly the pleasure from this is more pure for the healthy than for the wretched. For indeed, in the very moment of possession, the hot passion of lovers fluctuates with uncertain wanderings and they are undecided what to enjoy first with eyes and hands. They tightly press what they have sought and cause bodily pain, and often drive their teeth into little lips and give crushing kisses, because the pleasure is not pure and there are goads underneath which prod them to hurt the very thing, whatever it is, from which those (torments?) of frenzy spring. (Brown, 150–51; emphasis added)

“If imagination amend them”

269

Thus we see that Lucretius, believing that “the couplings of Venus are seen to vary much” (nam multum harmoniae Veneris differre videntur – 4.1248; Brown, 160–61) and seeing that “familiarity creates love” (consuetudo concinnat amorem – 4.1283; Brown, 162–3), does what he can to free his fellow human beings from the madness of love. A faithful Epicurean, he seeks for all and for each, literally, a life of the senses, not as the master’s detractors abusively misrepresented such a life, but as a life in accord with what the senses tell us: pleasure is good, pain is not. And love is a bottomless pit of pain. *    *    * My next transition could hardly be more predictable: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” (MND 3.2.115). Let us suppose for the moment that Lucretius is a time-traveller (the science of the science-fiction would appeal to him, I imagine – the idea of teleporting his atoms through space-time). He is sitting in the audience in 1595 when MND is being performed.21 We can see him readily and vehemently agreeing with Robin Goodfellow, our Puck: “Lord, what fools these mortals be”. We can imagine him agreeing with Lysander, too: “The course of true love never did run smooth” (MND 1.1.134). Lucretius would probably harrumph and gloat, “Well, I told you that”. If he were to listen to Helena, Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. Nor hath love’s mind of any judgement taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste (MND 1.1.234–7; emphasis added)

time-traveller Lucretius, on the one hand, would probably raise an eyebrow about this confusion of the mind and the senses, but he would tend to agree that the problem with love is adequately analysed in this speech – namely, love is crazy, it cannot be trusted, the last thing on earth love is capable of is judgment, and so forth. Moreover, if he were listening to other lines of the play, he would see many an argument that he would probably find consonant with his own position: do everything you can not to fall in love. After all, “the boy Love is perjured everywhere” (MND 1.1.241). But if, on the other hand, time-traveller Lucretius were to speed ahead about 15 years to see a performance of King Lear, the tragedy, say, around

270

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

1610 or so, he might have a very different reaction to some of the passages in that play: King Lear: O ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light; yet you see how this world goes. Gloucester: I see it feelingly. (Lear 4.5.141–5)

Time-traveller Lucretius would exclaim, “Well, no, you don’t! You can’t do that, not at all, you cannot see feelingly, because no sense ever trespasses on the domain of another sense, nor can any sense ever contradict itself.” We have encountered this Epicurean axiom, this indispensable element of Epicurean epistemology, throughout this essay. Something perhaps is amiss, the timetraveller begins to infer, as he holds his head in perturbation of his spirit at Shakespeare’s play.22 But we actually left him observing MND, ready to listen to one of the most famous speeches that Shakespeare wrote in the early part of his career. And we can all but hear his exclamation of triumph – “At last, a real, a true Epicurean philosopher!” – as Theseus speaks: More strange than true. I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination That if it would but apprehend some joy It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

“If imagination amend them”

271

Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear! (MND 5.1.2–22)

“I had begun to wonder,” we may imagine Lucretius saying to himself. “But here at last is the real thing, a man who understands, this noble Duke, that it is the senses that matter, and that the mind with all of its additions is not to be trusted. Now, this seems to be more like it,” we can almost hear him affirm with real satisfaction. But, I want to argue, the time-traveller must be careful not to get too comfortable and content. For what Shakespeare has done here, I propose, is to prepare and brilliantly stage a systematic deconstruction of the Epicurean canonic. Before our eyes, in the famous scene that follows Theseus’ speech, Epicureanism dissolves and gives way to Shakespeareanism. First, note that immediately Hippolyta disagrees with Theseus: But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable. (MND 5.1.23–7)

This “something of great constancy” is the first signal we have of Shakespeare’s device, to suggest that the mind’s additions are more “than fancy’s images”. Theseus next hears of the entertainments that are available for his wedding night. One of them is oddly self-advertising: Lysander: “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus And his love Thisbe: very tragical mirth.” Theseus: “Merry” and “tragical”? “tedious” and “brief”? – That is, hot ice and wondrous strange black snow. How shall we find the concord of this discord? (MND 5.1.56–60)

The particular entertainment on offer sets up the coming dissolution of Epicurean epistemology, not least with its insistence on concordia discors, which, for all that it is utterly commonplace in Renaissance art, nonetheless does work here that is much more than commonplace. Note, finally, that we

272

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

have here the rhetorical crossing so distinctive not only of concordia discors but also of the very way in which MND is written, including Bottom’s famous speech when he wakes from his dream.23 Theseus goes on to choose this particular entertainment over the protests of others around him. In particular, his bride Hippolyta complains: I love not to see wretchedness o’ercharged, And duty in his service perishing. (MND 5.1.85–6)

Theseus immediately disagrees with her, and she, in turn, argues with him. But then Theseus declares: The kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing. Our sport shall be to take what they mistake, And what poor duty cannot do, Noble respect takes it in might, not merit. (MND 5.1.89–92)

We have here some of Shakespeare’s most important lines early in his career. For, as we know, what we all do when we go to the theatre is take what they mistake. I know very well that that is not Queen Elizabeth on the stage or the screen; it is Cate Blanchett, a very accomplished actress, but definitely not Queen Elizabeth, although for a brief time I am willing to believe that she is. Notice then that this is not only Coleridge’s famous “willing suspension of disbelief”, this is also an anti-Epicurean, anti-Lucretian contravention of the senses in favour of the mind: our sport shall be to take what they mistake – we will not obey or believe or trust our senses for the next hour or two; we will contravene our senses and trust our minds, in particular our imaginations. The play of Pyramus and Thisbe unfolds then, and it is altogether a quite ludicrous and, to quote Peter Quince’s marvellously exact malapropism, “disfiguring” performance (MND 3.1.55). So much so that Hippolyta is finally forced to exclaim, “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard” (MND 5.1.209). To which Theseus famously responds with one of Shakespeare’s most searching meta-textual commentaries on his art, but, I am arguing, famous, also, for more than has hitherto been recognized or understood: “The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them (MND 5.1.210–11). Time-traveller Lucretius, at this point, we might well imagine, is beside himself with dismay. This is not the nature of things. This is as far, in fact, from the nature of things as you probably can get. Here we have someone

“If imagination amend them”

273

saying that the imagination should amend the products of the senses; here someone is agreeing with the mind’s additions to the senses, even its edition of the senses; and, in doing so, this individual is exposing mind and body alike to perturbations of the spirit, the exact opposite of ataraxia. Hippolyta rejoins: “It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs” (MND 5.1.212–13). And the time-traveller simply cringes to hear Theseus chime in with “If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men” (MND 5.1.214–15). This, I suggest, is Shakespearean imagination. In this suggestion, I am certainly not original. Probably everybody would agree that this or something close to it is Shakespearean imagination: something like – humane, outgoing, observant, shrewd, reconstructive, canny, alert, exact, charitable, forgiving. What I do offer, however, what I am seeking to claim and defend, is that this Shakespearean imagination is in direct refutation of Epicurean and Lucretian materialism and the epistemology that it would support and that in turn supports it. If Theseus begins Act 5 as a sort of Lucretian apologist, he concludes as a Shakespearean theatrist (theorist and dramaturge in one term, itself deriving from Greek θεα [thea], show, the root of theory and theatre alike24). Theseus is de-Epicureanized in the process of the act’s unfolding, as his respect and his affection for his people compel him to a different understanding of imagination – and the Epicurean canonic dissolves before our eyes. Strong imagination does indeed have tricks, but these tricks can lead to very meaningful sport: they can lead to the tropes that free the imagination from the senses and the extreme limits on the senses that nature imposes. MND, after all, is a play exquisitely about not not falling in love; it is one of the most beautiful plays in our tradition about falling in love and triumphing even “when the course of true love does not run smooth” (see MND 1.1.134). And if its companion play, written in the same year and also containing a version of the Pyramus and Thisbe story, namely Romeo and Juliet, should be a memorial of the tragic consequences of falling in love, we still do not hesitate to admire and celebrate its language of love and, in it, Shakespeare’s love of language. III Now to the third part of my essay and so to my conclusion. An interlocutor – or, let me be more realistic than that, let us say, a critic in my audience, disposed to be hostile – might interrupt at this point, “Well! I say. Harrumph. So. Why would Shakespeare bother to write a play in rebuttal of Epicurean

274

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

and Lucretian materialism? Everything here seems to be an effrontery to Occam’s razor. Why multiply all these entities to explain something that can be explained otherwise and more simply?” To this critic I would respond in concert with a number of scholars who have recently demonstrated the extraordinary impact of materialism and atheism on Elizabethan culture in the 1590s. I would respond in concert with those who have shown that, although it is the seventeenth century that will reveal the great flowering of Epicurean and Stoic thought in England and among English thinkers, the end of the sixteenth century is nonetheless vital for understanding how this came about and what exactly Epicurus and Lucretius were doing in English culture at this time.25 But, more, if I were striving for maximum efficiency and concision, I would respond to my critic with just two words – Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe died a violent death, murdered by a dagger stabbed through his eye, for a number of vexed and at best only partially understood reasons; nonetheless, among them seem to be the fact that he was an atheist, and, as at least one scholar has said, “the Lucretius of the English language”26 – a thorough-going materialist. Indeed, if time-traveller Lucretius had for a moment “channelled” Kit Marlowe and had he been able to sit in the theatre watching MND, I imagine he himself would have said also, “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard”. Even had he lived, Marlowe would not have written MND, I conjecture; it would have been beneath his contempt – faeries and rude mechanicals, and the whole damn silly business. Because of constraints on space, I offer, so as to be as efficient as possible, two passages from recent scholars, biographers, who have written about Marlowe’s death. “Was Marlowe a bona fide atheist?” asks David Riggs: the extent of Marlowe’s atheism only becomes legible within the state security apparatus[;] its appearance there registers a larger crisis within sixteenth-century Protestantism.27

Riggs goes on to detail the crisis in terms of Calvinism.28 Marlowe, it seems quite clear, was in reputation if not in fact an atheist. Park Honan, whose excellent biography of Shakespeare I consider to be perhaps the best written in our time, in his recent companion biography of Marlowe concurs with Riggs: Certainly [Frizer, Marlowe’s murderer] had a strong motive. Early in the year, Parliament had ensured that heresy was akin to treason; dissidents were being hanged. The royal court, thereafter, was unlikely to reward any sponsor of heretics. How could the law

“If imagination amend them”

275

tolerate atheism, or the queen herself continue to favour Walsingham as the patron of the heretic, if, in law, all heresy was treasonous? Marlowe the famous “atheist” had become an intolerable, ruinous, and deadly burden for anyone who hoped to profit at Scadbury. As patron of the well-known, flagrant “atheist”, Walsingham risked damaging his own reputation and so depriving his agent of profits and security.29

In sum, this great playwright, this author of the magnificent, mighty “Marlovian” line, this exquisite lyricist (“Come live with me and be my love”), this firebrand impugned with having allegedly complained that all “that love not tobacco and boys be fools”, was a living embodiment of the materialism, atheism, and heretical scorn that was associated with Epicurus and Lucretius in the late sixteenth century in England, especially in light of the reactions to the publication of DRN by Lambinus in the middle of that century. Moreover, we know that Marlowe associated with members of the group that gravitated around the Earl of Northumberland and his follower Harriot; Northumberland was known as the “wizard earl” because of his interest in science, and he and Harriot both were interested in the atomic theory of motion and matter.30 We also know, by the way, that Northumberland and Raleigh (with whom Harriot also associated) both spent the latter part of their lives imprisoned in the Tower of London because they were perceived as threats to the monarchy as much perhaps in their alleged atheism and materialism and scientism as in their ambition. In sum, and in conclusion, the 1590s in England, particularly the early and middle 1590s, were a time of great unrest, uncertainty, famine, inflation, and fear – fear above all for the royal succession as the aging queen grew older and weaker. The laws in place against atheism, and those who in any way might be perceived as atheistic, materialistic, anti-Christian, and so forth, strongly suggest that it was not a good time to be an Epicurean. After the succession, and with England enjoying a Protestant monarchic stability under James Stuart, matters changed and changed rapidly; they had to change, of course, because something else was also happening, namely the Scientific Revolution, the triumph of the atom, to this day triumphant still; and in only a few decades would … well, permit me to quote the version of what I should say next that was composed by Alexander Pope: “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night; / God said, Let Newton be, and all was Light.”31 The change happened quickly. Change cannot always be predicted. In the early to mid-1590s, many in England would hardly have been willing to be caught talking about atoms and the void and atheism. Marlowe, who had actually been reported to make jokes about Moses and to scorn people’s belief

276

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

in gods as fictions intended to suppress and exploit them,32 had become, we are now reasonably certain, not only an embarrassment to those who had employed him but also a liability. So, at the end of May 1593, in a boarding-house in Deptford, there befell “a great reckoning in a little room”, as Shakespeare remembers it in As You Like It (3.3.11–12), and Christopher Marlowe was murdered. Approximately two years later, in the midst of the year that I think of as his annus mirabilis – the year of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and MND – Shakespeare writes a drama that is not only not materialistic or atheistic in its impulse, but is also completely open to mystery, the unknowable, the unpredictable, and, above all, the imaginative. In the second chapter of 1 Corinthians, which Bottom quotes and “disfigures” in his famous speech, St. Paul goes on to write, in the very next verse, verse 10, “But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God”. In the Greek, we read, “καὶ τὰ ßάθη τοῦ θεοῦ”, in the Latin, “profunda Dei”, that is, the lowest or the bottommost things of God – which we do not know and which we do not understand, which it is very difficult for human beings to convince themselves do not matter and therefore they need not worry about them, these deepest things, bottom-most things, of God. If, as I suspect, Shakespeare had read in 1 Corinthians 2 not only verse 9 but also verse 10, and read them probably – at least in his youth – more as a Catholic than as a Protestant (for I do think of him as emotionally Catholic though both socially and politically Protestant in his maturity33), I think, then, we might have here one more very important way of understanding the name of Nick Bottom the Athenian Weaver, especially since the Tyndale Bible translates τὰ βάθη as “bottom”.34 But let that be as it may. I think we can see that there is more to Bottom’s speech than meets the eye – or the ear or the nose or the tongue or the touch. There is to Bottom’s speech, as he says, no bottom, and it is this speech, such a speech, with which I imagine the playwright saying, to any who are willing to listen, “I am not the English Lucretius, I am not Kit Marlowe, I am Will Shakespeare”.35 Notes I would like to express my gratitude to a former student, Kristen D.G. Smith, for her help in preparing the final version of this essay, after it had been accepted for publication. All errors or infelicities remain my responsibility. 1. Shortly after I submitted this essay, I learned of Jonathan Goldberg’s new book, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations

“If imagination amend them”

277

(New York: Fordham, 2009). I subsequently read this fine study; it does not bear on the arguments or findings of my essay, although it is an important contribution to our ongoing re-evaluation of Lucretius in the Renaissance. 2. My text of Shakespeare throughout is The Oxford Shakespeare, ed. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005). 3. Titus Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura (hereafter DRN), trans. W.H.D. Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith. Loeb Classical Library 181 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); here 5.222–7, at 394–7. A special note: Complaints against using a Loeb edition are irrelevant to this essay since for all crucial readings of Book 4 of DRN, in particular, I follow Brown’s excellent edition (see n. 19 below); the relatively wide availability of the Loeb justifies using it for the other passages cited from DRN; then, too, the recent Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (see n. 8 below) also uses the Loeb, which I take to be prudent as well as a warrant for my use of it. 4. For the probable allusion in King Lear (KL) to DRN, see George D. Hadzsits, Lucretius and His Influence (1935; New York: Cooper Square Publishing, 1963), 106, and L.C. Martin, ‘Shakespeare, Lucretius, and the Commonplaces”, The Review of English Studies 21, no. 83 (1945): 174–82, at 179. Of equal importance to understanding the relationship between KL and DRN, as Martin also observes (178), is Lucretius’s insistence that “nil posse creari / de nilo” (DRN, 1.155–56, at 14) – Shakespeare’s “nothing” is probably indebted to Lucretius’s “nothing”, and it is my sense that this connection wants much more study. See, too, Jonathan Gil Harris, “Atomic Shakespeare”, Shakespeare Studies 30 (2002): 47–51. More generally on Lucretius and Shakespeare, see Julian C. Rice, “Julius Caesar and the Judgment of the Senses”, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 13, no. 2 (1973): 238–55. Other scholars have called attention to the extraordinary evidence of Lucretius and his writing in the works of Michel de Montaigne; see M.A. Screech, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius (Geneva: Droz, 1998), esp., xix–xxi, “To the Reader”. We know that Florio’s translation of Montaigne was available by 1603, and many scholars assume that Shakespeare was familiar with it. I myself think that he was very familiar with it: see Shakespeare’s Theater of Likeness (Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2006), esp. 329–35. For connections among Harvey, Ramus, and Lucretius, see Gerard Passannante, “The Art of Reading Earthquakes: On Harvey’s Wit, Ramus’s Method, and the Renaissance of Lucretius”, Renaissance Quarterly 61 (2008): 792–832. Finally, although his book covers more the seventeenth than the sixteenth century, still one should consult Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 5. So U.M. Ellis-Fermor, “the Lucretius of the English language”, quoted in Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 83. 6. Here I cite the Geneva Bible (1599) because of the connections between Lucretius and Calvin that form a periphery to my arguments. See nn. 26 and 27 below. 7. My chart is distinct from that offered by Paul W. Gooch, “Margaret, Bottom, Paul and the Inexpressible”, Word & World 6 (1986): 313–25, at 322 n.19, and supports a different view from his.

278

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

8. On the fortunes of Epicurus, see Howard Jones, The Epicurean Tradition (London: Routledge, 1989), esp. chap. 4, “The Christian Reaction”, 94–116. Further, see the several essays in Part III, “Reception”, in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 9. On the canonic, see André Laks, “Epicurus”, in Greek Thought. A Guide to Classical Knowledge, ed. Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd with Pierre Pellegrin, trans. under the direction of Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2000), 586–605, at 589. 10. Laks, “Epicurus”, 589. See, also, Gisela Striker, “The Problem of the Criterion”, in Epistemology, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 143–60, esp. 149–50. Consult, as well, the helpful website, Epicurus.info, “Epicurean Philosophy Online” at URL http://www.epicurus.info/etexts/themes.html. 11. See Philip Hardie, “Lucretius and Later Latin Literature in Antiquity”, in The Cambridge Companion, 111–27. 12. See Leofranc Holford-Strevens’s informative and lively study “Horror vacui in Lucretian Biography”, Leeds International Classical Studies 1, no. 1 (2002), at URL http://www.leeds.ac.uk/classics/lics/volumes.html, which quotes the infamous (as well as wholly unfounded) dismissal of Lucretius by St Jerome. Parenthetically, it is useful to remember the relationship, distant as it may be, between Epicurean philosophy and St Paul (Acts 17.18): “Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoics, disputed with him and some said, What will this babbler say? Others said, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods (because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection).” 13. See The Cambridge Companion, 206, 208, 214; see, also, Hadzsits, Lucretius and his Influence, 249ff. 14. 1563. See The Cambridge Companion, 228–9. Here, I would be remiss if I did not mention that Lambinus’s was the edition which Montaigne famously annotated: see Screech, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius. 15. See esp. James Warren, Epicurus and Democritean Ethics: An Archaeology of “Ataraxia” (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6–7. 16. For a fine brief overview, see ibid., 3–5, with substantial quotations from Epicurus’s writings. 17. “… his friends, who used to throng to him from all quarters to live with him in his garden, as we are told by Apollodorus … [from his Will] … provided that they place my garden and all that pertains to it in the care of Hermarchus of Mitylene, son of Agemarchus, and his companions, and to whomsoever Hermarchus leaves as his philosophical successors, so that they may live and study there, dedicated to the practice of philosophy”. See URL http://www.epicurus.info/etexts/Lives.html#122. 18. For a straightforward statement, see Vern Bullough, “Masturbation: A Historical Overview”, in Masturbation as a Means of Achieving Sexual Health, ed. Walter O. Bockting and Eli Coleman (New York and London: Haworth Press, 2002), 17–34, at 26. See also Sarah Salih, “When is a Bosom not a Bosom?” in Medieval Virginities, ed. Ruth Evans, Sarah Salih and Anke Bernau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 14–32, at 31 n. 44, for a list of relevant studies. 19. Robert D. Brown, Lucretius on Love and Sex: A Commentary on “De Rerum Natura” IV, 1030–1287, With Prolegomena, Text, and Translation (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1988).

“If imagination amend them”

279

20. Ibid., 36: “For Lucretius, I will argue, interprets love as an addition of erroneous opinion to the real experience of sexual perceptions and feelings”. See also ibid., 113. 21. See ibid., 84: “The lover, then, is less like the awake than the dreaming drinker, who is teased – just as he is – by elusive and exacerbating images. In fact, he is a “waking dreamer’”. Here, study of Lucretius, as it were, “scripts” an important element of Shakespeare’s comedy – lovers as waking dreamers. See also ibid., 122: “… it would appear that no Epicurean had incorporated the subject of sex and love with that of illusion before Lucretius, and herein lies the chief originality of his treatment”. 22. By 1610, Shakespeare had gone beyond both Marlowe and Lucretius, to a “place” they could never reach, but I do think his struggle with their thinking was necessary to his reaching that “place”. 23. I discuss this crossing at length in Shakespeare’s Theater of Likeness, esp. 120–22. 24. OED II, “theory”1. 25. Barbour’s English Epicures and Stoics is the best guide here. See, further, Stuart Gillespie, “Lucretius in the English Renaissance”, in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, 242–53, esp. 242. Consult now, too, Goldberg’s book, The Seeds of Things, esp. chap. 2. 26. See n. 5 above. 27. David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Holt, 2004), 330. 28. See, further, on Calvin’s response to and refutation of Epicurean/Lucretian influence, W.J. Torrance Kirby’s helpful paper, “Stoic and Epicurean? Calvin’s Dialectical Account of Providence in the Institute”, International Journal of Systematic Theology 5 (2003): 309–22. 29. Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 348–9, and Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 30. See the helpful collection of essays in Robert Fox, ed., Thomas Harriot (London: Ashgate, 2000), which carefully and judiciously assesses such fragmentary evidence as currently obtains; in particular, see Scott Mandelbrote, “The Religion of Thomas Harriot”, 246–79, at 266. Note that there seems to be now some question about Harriot’s alleged “atheism” although Baines’s testimony against Marlowe still mentions Harriot. 31. Alexander Pope, The Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 242. 32. See Honan, Poet and Spy, esp. 237; also, The Jew of Malta, Prologue, Machevil: “I count religion but a childish toy / And hold there is no sin but ignorance” (14–15) in The Complete Plays, ed. Frank Romany and and Robert Lindsey (London: Penguin, 2003), 248. 33. On the issue of Shakespeare’s relation to Catholicism, a topic of immense scholarly interest in recent years, there is far too much work to cite for any sort of summary. In my own reading so far, I have found helpful Richard Dutton, Alison Gail Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds, Lancastrian Shakespeare: Region, Religion and Patronage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), as well as their Lancastrian Shakespeare: Theatre and Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); see, too, Dennis Taylor and David Beauregard, eds, Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003).

280

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

34. http://wesley.nnu.edu/biblical_studies/tyndale/1co.txt – 1 Cor. 2.10: “But God hath opened them vnto vs by his sprete. For ye sprete searcheth all thinges ye the bottome of Goddes secretes.” 35. I choose to conclude on the following note even though I realise some might spurn it as “precious”. Like many trained in the second half of the twentieth century, I early learned to think of Spenser as the English Virgil, Marlowe, the English Lucretius, and Shakespeare, the English Ovid – convenient labels, we were taught. In the four-plus years I have worked on this essay, however, I have come to think of them as more than convenient labels and most especially in the case of Shakespeare: it now seems to me that we speak of an entire world and its culture when we speak of Shakespeare as the English Ovid – a world and a culture of unlimited Eros.

14 Twice-telly-ed Tales Ruth Morse

Television Shakespeare Nothing is so strong as an idea whose time has come: the inertia which began to build in the early 1980s with Stanley Wells’s lecture on television Shakespeare has subsequently gathered momentum on both sides of the Atlantic. There is, of course, much more television, if no more Shakespeare on it. “No more” is easy to assert, but hard to know, given the variety of special-interest channels, on-demand viewing, repeated repeats. Let me assert that there are certainly more television adaptations as well as more fictional modernizations of more different classic texts, as well as that we have come to a more relaxed acceptance that recycling, appropriation, and gap-filling offer not just new stories, but creative rereadings as a kind of criticism. Academic criticism was slow to find “offshoots” of interest, perhaps due to a failure to think beyond “derivative” as an insult; perhaps, more simply, because mass culture, and popular productions, tend to bring out an unfortunate condescension, especially where “the box” is concerned. Thus it is only in recent years that popular-performance “small-screen Shakespeare” has begun to enjoy serious and extended attention beyond morning-after reviews. This essay focuses on the BBC’s ambitious five-part series Shakespeare Re-told, broadcast in 2005, and, within that series, the three romantic comedies, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “Much Ado About Nothing”, and “The Taming of the Shrew”. The context of such studies is larger than just Shakespeare, or just performance, or just television, and encompasses craft-technical as well as social-political periodization. Technology is one of the changes which has made this enlargement possible: the immediate release of television series and serials on DVD; the recovery and reissue of archival material; as well as the information now available – for shorter or longer periods – through internet sites. While many of these sites are underwritten by institutions, it 281

282

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

is part of the rapid democratization of technology that fanzines or specialinterest sites can enlist many in unpaid labours of love. Otherwise the three modernizations discussed below would have shared the ephemeral fate of theatrical Shakespeare, leaving only the spoor of newspaper reviews behind. In what follows I shall look at three of the programmes, emphasizing the complex context of contemporary production for mainline British television. Modernized Retelling Shakespeare has always elicited high production values from television companies, especially – appropriately – from writers. Serious drama has long had a special place on Britain’s Radio 3 (music and drama) and Radio 4 (“talk”, including new drama), but it has not always had the same exposure on British television. The BBC has in recent years specialized in televisual adaptations of both much-loved and less-known novels (and as I write Andrea’s Levy’s Small Island airs in a good two-part serial), but reinterpretative modernizations of classic novels or plays have been much rarer. In 2001/2, ITV (in the US “Masterpiece Theatre”) showed Andrew Davies’s modernized London-set Othello (updated and reinterpreted, with Othello himself as a black Metropolitan police commissioner). ITV is the more “popular” of Britain’s two commercial terrestrial channels. The London Metropolitan police force (“the Met”) had been – indeed it continues to be – the subject of serious and extended public criticism over its handling of racially-motivated crime, and its own institutional racism, so the political references in Davies’ choices were clear, in Britain, and largely recognizable elsewhere (mutatis mutandis accelerated promotions for “minority” candidates concomitantly faced with increased resentment); what remains unclear is why this was the only production in what had been announced as a new series. Such plays receive reviews which follow predictable patterns. A brief extract from David Lister’s earlier reaction in The Independent (20 September 2003), grouped the six BBC “Chaucerian” modernized retellings with ITV’s modernized Shakespeare to make a general point about the failures of television programmers. Despite his ostensible professional viewpoint, his review combined several contradictory attitudes: [The Chaucer modernization] worries me because I can sense the BBC feeling rather pleased with itself. It worries me because it may well tell the Government at charterrenewal time that it has delivered upmarket programmes, not least in the cultural arena,

Twice-telly-ed Tales

283

and even had on a successful version of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. It worries me because, excellent as last Thursday’s programme was, it had very little to do with Chaucer. It worries me because no television station in a million years would risk putting on an adaptation containing Chaucer’s original language. That would be almost as radical an idea as using the language of, say, Shakespeare. For, yes, we’ve been here before. A couple of years ago ITV was immensely proud of itself for putting on an adaptation of Othello. Andrew Davies’s script, set in the present day, made Othello a black police commissioner. It was a diverting drama and was to be the first of a whole series of dramas based on Shakespeare’s plays. Thankfully, that idea seems to have been dropped. For all ITV’s crafty and frequent use of the word Shakespeare in its publicity at the time, this Othello gave viewers no sense of Shakespeare at all. Neither Shakespeare, nor indeed Chaucer, is just the sum of their plots, which in Shakespeare’s case were largely “borrowed” anyway. The vital ingredients are the language, the verse and the prose on which the tragedy, comedy, romance and character depend.

Television reviewers have long specialized in lofty condescension in the service of breakfast-reading amusement, in part because before DVDs and i-players their readers were unable to see the programmes at the expense of which the journalists attempted to lay down the law and/or to provoke controversy. Lister’s worried combination of contradictory attitudes continues to inform much television criticism of such productions. Inevitably, “universal” Shakespeare (in tights) collides with confusions over “commercialism and dumbing down”; as “elitism” struggles with “popular appeal”; and, almost inevitably, crass arguments about authenticity turn out to be remarkably close to “what I rremember from exams at school”. Lister surely had compulsory Canterbury Tales to study for A levels. What is more worrying is how much Shakespeare criticism is similarly worried. That the political context for the BBC Shakespeare series two years after the Chaucer series involved institutional issues for the Corporation was perfectly clear. It was produced and aired at a moment when the BBC was two years closer to that review (and renewal) of its charter, the legal basis which defines and guarantees its public-service status, and which has implications for its funding through the television licence fee. Newspaper reviewers were well aware that more was at stake than the particular merits (or lack of them) of the plays. The links between the two series were obvious – and much discussed – at the time. Website discussions were characterized by familiar attitudes which ranged from delight (these plays justify the licence fee), to certainty that particular contemporary references were intended (“Dream Park” in the

284

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

BBC’s Dream was “recognized” as eco-warriordom) to the inevitable, perhaps perennial, Blimpish “this isn’t Shakespeare”. Let a brief extract suffice, this time from columnist Benji Wilson writing in The Observer (Sunday, 27 November 2005): Beeb-bashers will have noted that the sparkling array of new work on BBC1 coincides with the corporation’s charter renewal. The spate of quality dramas, the cynics would maintain, is a multi-billion-pound version of buffing up your CV. Having Poliakoff alongside Shakespeare Re-Told and Bleak House on your flagship channel ticks that “public-service” box rather better than Ground Force. Whether this spurt of creative elan continues after 2007 remains to be seen.

BBC1 is the “mainstream” BBC channel, so the Corporation’s intentions of capturing a large audience were clear. This is not the place for an analysis of the serious socio-political questions television criticism invites; these reach beyond the usual questions of craft, and have recently been interestingly analysed elsewhere as well as in this journal. For the craft analysis which follows, it will be clear that I have depended upon the technical analyses and hyper-links easily available through the Internet Movie Database as much as on the BBC’s own materials. The DVDs of the series do not include their new commission, probably because it contained “adult content”. When, in November 2005 the BBC broadcast five contemporary plays, four were short modernizations of familiar (or “safe”) works by Shakespeare but one was William Boyd’s “A Waste of Shame”, a biographical episode hypothesized from the Sonnets and Shakespeare’s life, like Shakespeare in Love. The four “retold” plays were neither televisual adaptations nor modern-dress productions, but, like ITV’s Othello, new plays using old ones as templates. The series included one tragedy, Macbeth, and three romantic comedies, and it is on those three that I shall concentrate. One reason for this concentration is generic, but the other might be described as socio-political: Boyd’s play – not “safe” for children or schools – was available separately, but with difficulty, since no law-abiding academic writer would use a bootleg copy. As we shall see, the BBC took advantage of the attraction of “name” actors, whose fame from other roles invited and fulfilled audience expectations, playing upon typecasting, so that roles which in Shakespeare are categorized as “clowns” were played by broad-comedy actors from contemporary sitcoms, while more complex challenges were offered to Britain’s apparently endless supply of fine character actors. These are initiative choices, which – whatever else they do – encourage audience confidence by relying on what they know

Twice-telly-ed Tales

285

of type casting. Stylistically, all the plays were modernized (including the fairies), in contemporary prose (I shall discuss the exceptions), and took advantage of the staples of film romcom as well as small-screen conventions. Just as they played upon familiarity with actors, they all offered considerable metatheatrical allusion and quotation, while embedding either actual lines from their sources or referring by paraphrase: the characters of the new plays seemed spontaneously to reinvent what spectators might – but equally might not – recognize from their knowledge of the source plays. The plays were of their moment, including current British theatre’s colour-blind (and not so blind) casting and the BBC’s comprehensive policy towards variety of local accents rather than ideas of “trad” RSC or RP (“received pronunciation”) voices. Above all, however, the challenge to the rewriters, the directors, and actors, was in the strict sense critical rereading: that is, they reflected upon the plots and characters Shakespeare invented, asking not just the knowledgeable in their audiences to think again about the problems he addressed. They did not duck Shakespeare’s habit of allowing characters the variety of their individual opinions. Interviews on the DVDs accent the writers’ discovery of Shakespeare’s craft when solving technical problems. All four plays were suitable for family viewing, before the “nine o’clock watershed” (until which time the sensibilities of children are taken into account and there are restrictions on content, for example no swearing); and we all know how families – or any group of viewers – tend to talk in the sitting room. We are increasingly alert, too, to the hyper-texts of press or Net weekly programme publicity; to the availability of pre-broadcast hype or post-broadcast reviewing; and to the fast-growing participatory comments on websites such as the BBC’s interactive commentary boards or the ever-increasing invitations to converse – or harangue – on blogs or more restricted discussion groups. If home recording or DVD has made some aspects of television less ephemeral, the URLs of broadcasting or special-interest sites remain temporary, as – perhaps in accents yet unknown – readers of this journal will find should they at some future date try to chase some of the references which follow. More large topics immediately present themselves than can be dealt with here, but a short survey may help account for the range of choice and interpretation currently open to Anglophone television writers and directors. One might, first, consider (along with other forms of verbal and visual art) the broad, deep, and apparently inexhaustible desire and delight in reusing old materials, because these retellings emerge from a context which already contains similar efforts. We may recognize that appropriations or retellings of earlier texts can be, largely, divided into two main tendencies. The easier

286

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

approach might be termed the catalogue, which lists aspects of plot and character and tries to match them point for point, ticking the boxes on a list; or the more ambitious identification of one or more themes or problems identified in the first text, to which its successor then returns, with its own ideas (that The Tempest is about legitimate succession and who you can marry or that Dream might focus on the older, and not the younger, generation). Both categories are concerned with cultural and linguistic equivalence, in ways familiar from discussions of translation; to take three examples: magic, legal assumptions, or – particularly acute with Shakespeare – paronomasia. Evidently, rewritings can use both methods, good rewritings often do, and the best are characterized by a willingness to take risks. Second, generic conventions themselves offer stimulus for rethinking and rewriting. In an international context, audiences are open to recognizing parallel styles from other countries, other languages, other kinds of text. Mass audiences are now able to recognize the mixture, or combination, or recategorization of multiple sources (with apologies to Polonius: romanticcomedy thriller; road-movie buddy animation animal caper or even politicosatirical drag-gag position-reversing romantic comedy). Generic shifts in the BBC Shakespeare Re-Told included the risk of moving the unconscious Hero into a hospital, with a series of hospital-drama stereotypes, including the sudden eruption of the ICU emergency buzzers; turning A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s wood outside Athens into a holiday centre called “Dream Park” or its travestied classical play into a modern revue or variety entertainment, with Bottom as an incompetent stand-up comedian; and, most implausibly, the farce of “The Taming of the Shrew” addressed the problems of a Shrew as potential Tory Leader, incorporating the much loved Whitehall satire Yes, Minister. It is not an accident that two of these examples play with the conventions of gender roles. One important equivalence here is what I have already labelled “implausibility”, which has the advantage of evading traditional arguments over the veritable and the verisimilar, and which must be at the heart of any interpretation of Shrew or Dream. Who cares, given the givens of either play, that Katherine Minola is inconceivable as Leader of the Conservative Party, or that Oberon has only forty-eight hours to save the marriage of Theo and Polly Moon? These transpositions are certainly international, wherever they are located. Third, in my earlier discussion of the socio-political context of the modernizations, I stressed the need for the BBC, as for ITV, to programme ambitiously; the risk of high-culture drama is that audience-figures do not reward it. Casting well-known actors is not, however, merely instrumental. The

Twice-telly-ed Tales

287

opportunities inherent in the casting of “name” actors, of finding something not entirely removed from the advantages of the repertory system of traditional theatrical companies, allows actor-recognition to create audience expectation. Actor-recognition gives pleasure; and, let it be stressed, good actors transcend audience recognition, especially when not all viewers can attribute the correct names. The use of powerful, well-known actors shifts the balance of different plots or subplots in the plays; increases the correspondence to the theatre’s ability to exploit audience familiarity with the actors; Shakespeare’s metatheatricality and reference; as well as typecasting within the early modern repertory system. Additionally, different kinds of audience are attracted by different actors; the multiplicity of the television audience is easy to assert but difficult to analyse. Part of attracting viewers depends upon our use of weekly programming and publicity in newspapers, in journals, and on television itself. Television stations’ internal marketing includes coming attractions, which often identify actors by name. Within the plays, characters occasionally referred to television programmes, and, when they did – for example, Holby City and Little Britain – it was clear they watched BBC channels, not the competition. Fourth, at that micro-level which has so often wrong-footed discussions of translation into other languages, there are words, words, words – the verbal integrity around which arguments about impossibility circle like raptors waiting to pounce on any fool who observes that Shakespeare is, in practice, eminently translatable. I shall focus on some words or phrases which might be familiar to many Anglophones, and which, in Shakespeare Re-told, offer one among several bases of allusion, which I shall return to in section IV. In what follows I shall presume, with the BBC producers and directors, that “re-told” has its own integrity, that “re-told” presumes recognition sometimes, for some of a mass audience, containing different knowledges and experience. Fifth, there is the medium-specific approach, in which television becomes an increasingly independent focus of performance studies, related to, but separate from, theatre and cinema. The series was nominated for several of Britain’s BAFTA “craft” awards in 2006, but this is not the place to discuss the technicalities of production. While this article concentrates on our shared familiarities, I must repeat the caveat that no such “we” was the main target audience. Viewers who asked themselves, or whoever was sitting with them in front of the box, “But what are they going to do about the [fill in the blank]?”, enjoyed a pleasure derived from familiarity with the “safe” plays. It may have been a minority pleasure.

288

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Maintaining a Balance The move from full-length theatrical performance to even a long television programme of 90 minutes involves concentration; the question of what to retain works in multiple ways. The influence of television series, with casts which offer something for everyone (the police precinct from front desk to captain, the hospital staff’s clerks, medical staff, and administrators), made itself felt in the degree of comprehensiveness in the little societies of the plays, and, with one exception, the Christopher Sly prologue to The Taming of the Shrew, there were no wholesale cuts. All three plays emphasized the adults, rather than the young lovers, at their core. But series have the luxury of development from week to week, and the plays – like good short stories – had to imply more than they could show. This is not always a disadvantage. The most obvious subject, in all three plays, must be love: the mystery of passionate sexual attraction benefits from economy. Perhaps the most important lesson learned from studying Shakespeare was an attempt to orient each character in a recognizable point of view: Tim, Katherine’s assistant in Shrew, began as a down-trodden parliamentary aide, but was shown, after the wedding, walking along the Thames with his wife and child. The deepening effect this had was to present him as an adult, with parental responsibility, and from that scene – a matter of seconds – he acquired greater dignity, but dignity because he had achieved what the play was about: marriage. This character orientation, multiplied through each play, also imitated Shakespeare’s habit of repeating, with variations, the central problem of the play: Katherine’s marriage; Tim’s; the Crick parents’ separation; Bianca’s disrupted engagement; and Harry’s potential happiness with Mrs Minola. It seems clear from the interviews included with the DVDs that, like translators whose close attention increases their admiration, the four writers found themselves impressed, in moments of difficulty, when they went back to Shakespeare’s structural solutions. Such interviews are short, and neither writers nor producers discuss the reasons for their choices, their emphases, or their interpretations of character. Nor do the executive producers give any hint about how the teams might have collaborated to create unity among the four plays, though this is a question I shall return to again below. Questions one might hope would be addressed are left to viewers, raising that perpetual question, which is that of the various knowledgeabilities of audiences. Shakespeare Re-Told was, of course, not the BBC’s first venture in modernized retellings, and it continued some of the policies which had been successful with Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales two years previously, made by the same

Twice-telly-ed Tales

289

producer. Laura Mackie, the Executive Producer, worked with people she had worked with before on other productions for the BBC, but especially the Chaucer series, for which Sally Wainwright (Shrew) wrote “The Wife of Bath” and Peter Bowker (Dream) “The Miller”s Tale” (starring Billie Piper). Those members of the mass audience who are very cognizant of current television will have recognized that it is unlikely to have been a coincidence that Bill Paterson has been cast twice as a version of Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s Duke Theseus. In the Chaucer modernizations his Theseus in “The Knight’s Tale” was reduced to the prison governor; his role in Dream was expanded to combine Hermia’s widowed father, Egeus, and Duke Theseus of Athens (married here to “Polly”). Paterson, a character actor of great gifts, is a Scot. Serious fans may have noticed that, in a 2003 period reconstruction, Rufus Sewell played Charles II to Shirley Henderson’s Catherine of Braganza. The conviction or convincingness of actors’ interpretations are often a function of audiences’ familiarity with their previous roles. Chief, perhaps, among the choices the collaborators might have labelled the “no-brainers” was the casting of actors well known from television (not from film). Britain is, traditionally, rich in character actors, and figures familiar from other high-quality BBC series make appearances in Shakespeare ReTold. “High quality” does not exclude popular, and the combination of Sarah Parish and Billie Piper in Much Ado seems to have had a startling effect on viewing figures. In addition to the Chaucer modernizations, there is previous collaboration, too, in other BBC series among other cast members (particularly, for example, Sharon Small, who plays Titania, and her fellow Scots, Bill Paterson and Shirley Henderson). Imelda Staunton, another outstanding character actor (the comic Nurse in Shakespeare in Love, and Vera Drake in the eponymous film), has worked on stage, in television, and in film. Audience acquaintance with these actors offers the writers a certain economy. Let me press this question of balance-shifting a little further, because it was one of the most striking features of these romantic comedies that they did so. Critics have long opined that Shakespeare’s romantic heroines are far more mature than his male leads. Here, viewers from the thirty-somethings and older had the lion’s share of interest. The young lovers of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” were billed as that, as “the young lovers”; the other lovers of all three plays were cast as older than they seem to be in the originals, or were played by better-known, older actors, or had more share of the writers’ attention. The question of who watched these plays cannot have been the only determinant, although one assumes, gloomily, that freely choosing to watch Shakespeare may belong to older and better educated viewers. The

290

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

thematic explorations of “men and women” acknowledged the mystery, but actualized, modernized, and modified the relations between them. Katherine Minola was an MP about to become leader of a never-named Conservative Party; her sister was a multi-millionaire “personality”; Beatrice was a news anchor in local television and Hero the weather presenter; only Polly (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and Mrs Minola (“The Taming of the Shrew”) seemed not to have jobs. Claude, Theo and Oberon come in the course of “Much Ado About Nothing” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to recognize their thoughtlessness and responsibility for what has gone wrong. Among the shifts is Polly finally losing her temper at Theo over a lifetime of overbearing, controlling, alpha-male behaviour; or Hero’s brave and stubborn refusal to forgive Claude and marry him. This “Much Ado About Nothing” shows her, as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” shows Hermia, breaking out of girlhood subservience in a rebellion which their fathers acknowledge and accept. Even Oberon recognizes his proud abuse of power: “My anger did this. Not her.” In the “The Taming of the Shrew” the crisis which provokes Katherine’s crucial last speech comes in a discussion about pre-nuptial agreements, when Bianca insists upon a pre-nup which Vincentio will not sign. The quality of the writing, combined with the quality of the acting, ensured that the farce was never out of control; that, for example, despite their high implausibility, the lovers of “Much Ado About Nothing” (as in Much Ado About Nothing) were equally mordaunt (and equally unhappy), almost terminally ironic. The thirtyeight-year-old Katherine’s early self-conscious loneliness, in “The Taming of the Shrew”, gave depth to the farce of the final quarrel, to her awareness of the legal uncertainty of such agreements, and that – under the force of her sudden, mysterious passion for Petruchio Crick – she never thought about one. What she is serious about is their mutuality: she can be as certain that she would put her hand under her husband’s foot as she is certain that he would never ask it of her; that he returns her esteem and respect. (Among other proofs of this are his clothes, this time correct for the occasion.) None of this would work had it not been prepared for: Petruchio has an exchange, in Shakespeare’s words, with Katherine’s assistant, which includes not only Elizabethan English, but an embarrassed reaction from Tim Agnew: the “young budding virgin” speech provokes a “stop it” from Kate, and then a little joking participation – “Yes, indeed, a fresher looking chicken I never saw”. David Mitchell looks at Rufus Sewell and says, “I’m not gay”, which is met by the reply “Keep telling yourself that, kid”. We may interpret this as knowing if we know; uncomprehending if we do not comprehend. The mix of registers, which simultaneously calls upon us to recognize Shakespeare and

Twice-telly-ed Tales

291

sexual multiplicity, works also to extend the play’s metatheatricality. That Bianca and Lucentio cannot understand each other’s language, and that their fight involves the necessity of a translator, keeps the level of farce present through the more serious discussion of law and love. Hero and Katherine also share a concern which both male characters offend: not to be asked about their previous sexual lives or lovers – also crucial at Law. Claude’s never-withdrawn offence, at the altar, is public and irreparable (did she or did she not have a lover the night before the wedding? or at all?); Petruchio’s pillow-talk-question of whether it is true that Katherine was a virgin until the previous night provokes not a tantrum, but her first dignified demand of him (“it’s inappropriate of you to ask, and I’m disappointed that you feel the need to”), which he – also for the first time – accepts, before turning to their new game of trading absurdities. The older lovers all know – and fear – what it is to be incomplete. Since none of them knows they are characters, or that there are two other comedies, it seems logical that these assertions (and acceptances) of women’s right to privacy (not to be defined by their sexual experience), to being independent people, and not some man’s property, come from collaboration among writers and directors. The twists and turns of pace are as slick as one would expect of good sitcom writers, and the sillier the main characters are, the more they seem able to move us – with the exception of the rude mechanicals, because the actor Johnny Vegas, alas, is fat and ugly. There are vulgarities: first, when he introduces himself to Titania, “… Bottom, but you can call me Booty”; when he wakes, finding an elegant pair of knickers in his pocket; and when, in the last scene, after responding to a heckler with aggressive, and unfunny, insults. When Titania saves him by intervening to make his jokes amusing, she simultaneously seals her reconciliation with Oberon by spontaneously offering the help he earlier tried to enforce by command. Even the Dogberry-equivalent security officer from Wessex television has a characteristic self-concern (had he only been taller he could have been a policeman) which sees the whole plot from his point of view; and it is, of course, from his dedication to his job that the unravelling comes. The mélange of genres takes full advantage of audiences’ abilities to feel more than one emotion at a time. Speaking of Love Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s, Shakespearean: it is difficult to write about any kind of modernization without striking the rock of the secular scripture,

292

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

our veneration for The Word. Thus far I have treated seriously tele-cultural phenomena which are constantly evolving. In this last section I wish to consider Shakespeare Re-Told’s use of embedded quotation. David Nicholls, the writer of “Much Ado About Nothing”, uses the word “sacraligious” to describe people’s discomfort with changing what Shakespeare wrote. Nicholls rightly evokes the centuries-old traditions of adaptation. I prefer to argue that it is possible to evoke shared culture without assimilating key texts to religion. I opened by calling the BBC’s choice of plays “safe”, and one of their “safe” advantages the widest possible recognition. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is often the first play by Shakespeare that anglophone children see, or read; Much Ado About Nothing has the advantage of a very popular film adaptation by Kenneth Branagh; and The Taming of the Shrew is one of those stories everyone knows, if only because of its wild political incorrectness, its ridiculous plot, unconvincing characters, and – for some – for John Cleese as the BBC’s Petruchio, or the musical, Kiss Me, Kate. Given the actors’ usual roles, our knowledge of the Shakespeare stories, our sense of genre, it seems hard to imagine that anyone, of any part of the audience watching these plays, is going to be lost. I have already mentioned a number of examples which refer directly to the source plays, and which the audience are expected to recognize. So what of words, words, words? Readers have long argued that they are everything, but they are not: actors, action, music, sets, costume, lighting – even on the radio words come with other things. Everything we know about Shakespeare in translation is how little gets lost, how much finds resonance wherever audiences freely choose to watch his plays – whatever the ticket price. As I have already suggested, audiences feel, see, understand, and interpret different things simultaneously. There is no mystery in this: sometimes we see Mrs Minola, and sometimes Twiggy Lawson; sometimes we remember when there is no such character in Shakespeare, but only a Pantaloon father. If reference to other kinds of television programme or our awareness of actors’ other roles occasionally manifest themselves, that is not interruption, but part of our metatheatrical experience. What embedded quotation gives us is a remarkable kind of archaeology: not just the theatrical history of our cultural experience (or bored years at school), but a strong change of register, in which our everyday language is somehow, suddenly, made to coexist with something deeply rooted, even if just out of reach. Shakespeare Re-Told used paraphrase, direct quotation, and mixture to create its multiple effects. In “The Taming of the Shrew” Petruchio Crick quotes “I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua” and says “Kiss me, Kate”; he starts a quotation, “it’s me you’re marrying …”, but does not continue “and not

Twice-telly-ed Tales

293

my clothes”; he adapts “Believe it or not, I am a gentleman”. By paraphrase I mean such moments as Theo’s judgement in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that Helena and Hermia are, in effect, sisters, or Oberon’s “Why do you think the weather’s so weird nowadays? You think it’s global warming? It’s me and Titania”; or, in “Much Ado About Nothing”, the wise-cracks which continue when it is, finally, Beatrice and Benedict standing at the altar. We may presume the wit is there for fun. Quotation is used for staginess, but sometimes to raise the register, as when the inarticulate James Demetrius suddenly finds himself telling Theo and Polly “By some power my love for Hermia has melted like snow.” In addition to a kind of distancing, or reminders that it is all only a play after all, all three comedies used direct quotation at moments of intensity. Oberon and Titania use it to explain the disruption in Nature – global warming to us, a failure of love in them. In the church after the repudiation of Hero, Beatrice and Benedict finally confess they love each other, and at the moment in which Benedict’s devotion reaches the heights of willingness to do anything for her, Beatrice simply says, “Kill Claude”. In the original there is a good deal of warning before this injunction; in both Benedict reels away, not certain how serious she might be. In the twenty-first century he promises that he will make everything all right. Neither he nor his Elizabethan original perform what they promise, but they go some way. In a much more artificial import, Claude has asked Benedict to read a Sonnet at his wedding, which Benedict has Beatrice explain to him (Sonnet 116 “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments”). As elsewhere in Shakespeare Re-Told, the man speaking does not realize what the woman he is speaking to sees clearly: that what he is saying applies to him. But we do. Television has long had a tendency to small-scale realism or to sitcom farce. Much Ado About Nothing tends in the first direction, The Taming of the Shrew in the second. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is odder – as it is odder in the theatre (something its familiarity allows us to forget), with its larger than life Fairies concocted of medieval Continental rather than ancient Athenian lore. Its Shakespeare Re-Told counterpart contains more quotation, more paraphrase, from its model than either of the other two plays. The rough, northern-accented Puck, is particularly prone to give the gist of what his ancestor, Robin Goodfellow, had to say – perhaps appealing to those in the audience (whom he addresses directly) who half remember some of those lines. Throughout the play it is Oberon who has the greatest share of Shakespeare’s poetry, particularly at moments of strong feeling. Thinking of the source of the love juice he needs, he goes on, “O maiden meditation … fancy free … yet marked where the bolt of Cupid fell … it fell upon a little western flower

294

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

before milk white, now purple with love’s wound and maidens called it ‘love in idleness’.” His creativity culminates in a cento, an assemblage of two lines each from Sonnets 39 and 56 with three lines from Juliet’s declaration of love from Act 2, scene 2, the Balcony Scene. He addresses the reconstituted poem, which rhymes and makes perfect sense, to his newly reconciled wife, who answers with lines that come from her original declaration to Bottom, “How I love thee, how I dote on thee”: Oh, how thy worth with manner may I sing, When thou art all the better part of me? Sweet love, renew thy force, be it not said Thy edge should blunter be than appetite. My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.

By contrast, Theo, in his reconciliation with Polly, gets to recite his own amusing, but ultimately cringe-making, doggerel. It is, however, Theo, whose human declaration of weakness, self-knowledge and love manages to transform Oberon’s advice that what one needs to say to women is, “I’m sorry. I love you. You were right” – phrases which the king uses without Theo’s success. Perhaps, within his limits, Oberon has learned the noblesse oblige which comes with his stature as King of the Fairies, committed, as he puts it earlier, to reconciliation: “it’s an obligation, a duty, to spread peace and love and happiness”. Certainly both he and Theo have learned some degree of humility from their own neediness, their recognition that it is their pride which has abused the women they love. Implausibility remains close: that after so many years in Theo’s case, or aeons in Oberon’s, they are going to change their behaviour, is as ridiculous as the snapshots of the Minola/Crick family outside 10 Downing Street. Will Hero ever marry Claude? Is her love gone forever? A modern interpretation can take advantage of options unavailable to Shakespeare. But surely the questions are misplaced, and when the click of the remote has signalled the end, we do think that we are supposed to believe. All three plays assert the power of love’s bond, but they do not reassert the status quo ante, which has so troubled recent critics of Shakespeare’s festive comedies, in which women rebel and men quell. Seeing better is what romantic comedy hopes for; and not romantic comedy alone.

Twice-telly-ed Tales

295

The Art of the Possible As we saw in the references to hospital drama in “Much Ado About Nothing”, television’s rich background of contextual reference can be played with for the connoisseur of television serials, precisely as any other dramatic form. Further, the updating of modern psychologies and situations changes the arbitrary plot-solutions of Shakespeare’s comic endings which have come to seem, especially to young viewers, so unsatisfactory, so lacking in closure. Yet, something remains still to be acknowledged, about older viewers. As we saw in the solution to Kate’s last act speech in “The Taming of the Shrew”, or the surprise of the underlying steel in Hero’s proud refusal to go on with Claude as if nothing had happened, the thirty-somethings have economic and psychological independence as never before. The independence which comes with a salary and a room of one’s own is a far cry from the surveillance of Shakespeare’s world, as we are reminded by the women’s refusal to be defined by their sexual histories. Yet, if we contrast their hopes of autonomy with the change from Polly’s well-timed anger to her mature forgiveness of Theo – coached, after all, by the king of the fairies – a certain acceptance of the limits of the possible, the rubbing together, the going on, offers quite another viewpoint, one more familiar, more concerned with stability, with the compromises and sacrifices which come with a lifetime’s marriage: if more conservative, perhaps also more plausible for the generation married in the Stockport Registry Office in 1979. The three romantic comedies of the BBC Shakespeare Re-Told offered more than life up to marriage. Like the best series, there were different kinds of characters for different viewers: the PC Plods of detective precincts, the orderlies and nurses of hospital drama, wide boys with love juice, all those second- and third-rank assistants of such exceptional successes as The West Wing. Like the commercial writers who cater for the mass audiences of world television, the teams who made Shakespeare Re-Told exploited a range of stereotype and character, of the possible, the plausible, and the passionatelywished-for, a range that seems, now, through global sales, video and DVD, residuals and demand-led provision, to have found something with which the sharers of the Globe or the Swan, Drury Lane or 42nd Street, would have had more than sympathy. They might even have allowed that perhaps, sometimes, occasionally, the ideas of a playwright might, indeed, continue to have universal appeal.

296

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Appendix: Production Credits for Shakespeare Re-Told (BBC, 2005) Executive Producers: Laura Mackie and Patrick Spence “Much Ado About Nothing” (7 November 2005) Written by: David Nicholls Directed by: Peter Moffat Produced by: Diederick Santer Cast: Beatrix Sarah Parish Benedick Damian Lewis Hero Billie Piper Claude Tom Ellis Leonard Martin Jarvis Margaret Nina Sosanya Ursula Olivia Colman Peter Michael Smiley Don Reid Derick Riddell “The Taming of the Shrew” (21 November 2005) Written by: Sally Wainwright Directed by: David Richards Produced by: Diederick Santer Cast: Katherine Minola (later Countess of Charlbury) Shirley Henderson Petruchio Crick, 16th Earl of Charlbury Rufus Sewell Harry Kavanagh Stephen Tompkinson Tim Agnew David Mitchell Bianca Jaime Murray Mrs Minola Twiggy Lawson Vincentio Bentivoli Alex Giannini

Twice-telly-ed Tales

297

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (28 November 2005) Written by: Peter Bowker Directed by: Ed Fraiman Produced by: Pier Wilkie Cast: Polly Moon Imelda Staunton Theo Moon Bill Paterson Oberon Lennie James Titania Sharon Small Puck Dean Lennox Kelly Bottom Johnny Vegas The Young Lovers: Hermia Moon Zoe Tapper Helena Michelle Bonnard James Demetrius William Ash Zander Rupert Evans Notes A previous version of this essay appeared as “Twice-told, Re-tooled: The BBC Shakespeare Retold”, in N. Vienne-Guerin and S. Hatchuel, eds, Shakespeare on Screen. Television Shakespeare: essays in honour of Michèle Willems (Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre), 199–218. We are grateful to the Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre for permission to republish this material.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Notes on Contributors

Tom Bishop is Professor of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge University Press, 1996), the translator of Ovid’s Amores (Carcanet, 2003), and the co-editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook. He has published articles on Elizabethan music, Shakespeare, Jonson, Australian literature and other topics, and is currently working on Shakespeare’s Theatre Games. Graham Bradshaw is co-editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook. He has now retired as Professor of English at Chuo University in Tokyo, but is still an Honorary Professor of English and Fine Arts at the University of Queensland. His publications include Shakespeare’s Skepticism (St, Martin’s Press, 1987), Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists (Cornell, 1993), the Connell Guide to The Tempest (Jolyon Connell, 2009) and numerous essays. He is co-author, with Tetsuo Kishi, of Shakespeare in Japan (Continuum, 2005) and co-editor, with Michael Neill, of J. M. Coetzee’s Austerities (Ashgate, 2010). John Gillies is Professor in Literature in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge University Press, 1994), coauthor of several multimedia packages on theatre history, including, with Ruru Li, Performing Shakespeare in China, 1980–1990 , and co-editor of Performing Shakespeare in Japan (Cambridge, 2001) and, with Virginia Mason Vaughan, Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in Early Modern Drama (Associated University Presses, 1998). He is currently working towards two books: Complicity, a Genealogy and Poetics: 1640–2010 and Shakespeare and the Question of Complicity. Atsuhiko Hirota is Associate Professor of English at Kyoto University, Japan. His publications include “The Partner of Empire: Literacy and Imperialism in Titus Andronicus,” in The Shakespearean International Yearbook 6 (Ashgate,

299

300

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

2006). He is currently working on Shakespeare and early modern international relations. Robert Hornback, Associate Professor of English at Oglethorpe University, has authored articles focused on the comic in Shakespeare Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England and English Literary Renaissance, and in collections such as A Companion to Tudor Literature (Blackwell, 2010). Having published The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare (Boydell & Brewer, 2009), he is currently at work on a book entitled Early Blackface and Proto-Racism: From a Metaphysics of Race to Othello and Jim Crow. Nora Johnson is Professor of English at Swarthmore College. She is the author of The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and essays on the history of sexuality, the history of authorship, and the uses of melodrama. She is currently at work on a book about high and low cultural uses of Shakespeare in nineteenth-century America. Dennis Kennedy is Beckett Professor of Drama emeritus in Trinity College Dublin. His books and edited works include, for Cambridge University Press, The Spectator and the Spectacle (2009), Looking at Shakespeare (2001), Foreign Shakespeare (1993), Shakespeare in Asia (with Yong Li Lan, 2010) and Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre (1989); and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance (Oxford University Press, 2003). He is also a playwright and director. Richard Levin, who died in October 2009, was Professor emeritus at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He was 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: Critical Encounters with the New Approaches to the Criticism of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2003). Jeanne McCarthy, Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Core Programs at Oglethorpe University, is currently at work on a book entitled Early Modern Playing: Playwrights, and Patrons in the Children’s Company Tradition before Shakespeare. She has published articles on authorship, early patronage, and staging of children’s drama in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England,

Notes on Contributors

301

English Literary Renaissance, Studies in Philology and Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies. Ruth Morse is professeur des universités at the University of Paris-Diderot. She has taught at the universities of London, Sussex, Leeds and Cambridge. Her books include Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Reality, and Representation (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Imagined Histories: Fictions of the Past from Beowulf to Shakespeare (forthcoming). She is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. K. Ludwig Pfeiffer is Professor of English at Jacobs University, Bremen. He has also taught at Bochum University and Siegen University, and been a visiting professor and fellow at universities in Germany, Japan, Brazil and the USA. He has published six monographs on the theory of interpretation, George Meredith, science and literature, media anthropology, and the anthropology of culture, and edited or co-edited fourteen books on a broad range of topics in the humanities. David Schalkwyk is a Professor of English at the University of Cape Town, and currently holds the position of Director of Research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington in Washington D.C. He is also editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. His books include Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Literature and the Touch of the Real (University of Delaware Press, 2004) and Shakespeare, Love and Service (Cambridge University Press, 2008). R. Allen Shoaf, former Marshall Scholar and Danforth Fellow, and recipient of two Fellowships of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is the author or editor of twelve books, including Chaucer’s Body (University Press of Florida, 2001), Shakespeare’s Theater of Likeness (New Academia, 2006) and Milton, Poet of Duality (Yale University Press, 1995). He is also the author of nearly ninety papers and reviews. Over the past twenty years in the University of Florida, he has won six teaching awards as well as the Alumni Professorship in the Department of English. With the late Julian Wasserman, he co-founded the prize-winning journal Exemplaria. Robert Weimann, Professor emeritus in The University of California, Irvine, is member of the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin. Among his recent publications in English are Authority And Representation In Early Modern Discourse (Johns

302

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Hopkins University Press, 1996); Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2000); and, with Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and The Power Of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2008). William N. West is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He co-edited, with Helen Higbee, Robert Weimann’s Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Writing and Playing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and, with Bryan Reynolds, a collection of essays exploring Weimann’s work, Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage (Palgrave, 2005). He also wrote Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and is working on a book on theatrical cognition and experience in the 1590s called Understanding and Confusion in the Elizabethan Theaters. W.B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, and Chair of the Department of Theatre at Barnard College, Columbia University, is the author of several books, including The Idea of the Actor (Princeton University Press, 1984), Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (University of California Press, 1993), Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and most recently Drama: Between Poetry and Performance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). His current project concerns contemporary Shakespeare performance and models of disciplinary engagement.

Bibliography Editions of Shakespeare are not listed in this Bibliography and can be found in notes to individual essays. Adorno, Theodor W. “Trying to Understand Endgame,” New German Critique, 25 (1982): 119–150. Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Gerald F. Else. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970. Aristotle. “Poetics.” Translated by. M.E. Hubbard. In Classical Literary Criticism. Edited by. D.A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom. 53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Ascham, Roger. The Whole Works of Roger Ascham. London: John Russell Smith, 1864–65. Astington, John. “The London Stage in the 1580.” In The Elizabethan Theatre XI, Papers given at the Eleventh International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre held at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, in July 1985. Edited by A.L. Magnusson and C.E. McGee. 19–32. Port Credit: P.D. Meany, 1990. Augustine, St. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Augustine, St. The Sermon on the Mount. In The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Vol. 8. Edited by The Rev. Marcus Dodds. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1873. Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bacon, Francis. “Of the Colours of Good and Evil. A Fragment.” In Essayes and Counsels, Civil and Moral. Whereunto is newly added, a Table of the Colours of Good and Evil. London, 1664. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Baldwin, T.W. Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927. 303

304

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Barba, Eugenio. Beyond the Floating Islands. New York: PAJ, 1986. Barbour, Reid. English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Bartels, Emily C. “Breaking the Illusion of Being: Shakespeare and the Performance of Self.” Theatre Journal 46, no. 2 (1994): 171–85. Beaumont, Francis. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Edited by John Doebler. Regents Renaissance Drama Series. London: Edward Arnold, 1967. Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. “The Captain.” Edited by L.A. Beaurline. In The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon. Vol. 1. Edited by Fredson Bowers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–96. Beckerman, Bernard. Theatrical Presentation: Performer, Audience, and Act. Edited by Gloria Brim Beckerman and William Coco. New York: Routledge, 1990. Beeson, Trevor. Westminster Abbey, 8th ed. London: FISA, 1989. Belsey, Catherine. John Milton: Language, Gender, Power. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. London and New York: Routledge, 1985. Bennett, Benjamin. All Theater is Revolutionary Theater. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Bentley, G.E. The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Berger, Harry. Imaginary Audition. Shakespeare on Stage and Page. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Berger, Harry. Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Berger, Harry. “The Prince’s Dog: Falstaff and the Perils of Speech-Prefixity.” Shakespeare Quarterly 49, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 40–73. Berman, Ronald. ed. The Signet Classic Book of Restoration Drama. New York: New American Library, 1980. Bevington, David M. From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Bible. Translated by William Tyndale http://wesley.nnu.edu/biblical_studies /tyndale/ Bible: Geneva. http://www.genevabible.org/Geneva.html

Bibliography

305

Blayney, Peter “The Publication of Playbooks.” In A New History of Early English Drama. Edited by John Cox and David Scott Kastan. 383–422. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Boris, Edna Zwick. “To Soliloquize or Not to Soliloquize – Hamlet’s ‘To Be’ Speech in Q1 and Q2/F.” In Stage Directions in ‘Hamlet’: New Essays and New Directions. Edited by Hardin L. Aasand. 115–33. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. Bowers, Roger. “The Music and Musical Establishment of St George’s Chapel in the 15th Century.” In St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, in the Late Middle Ages. Edited by Colin Richmond and Eileen Scharf. Historical Monographs relating to St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, Vol. 17. Windsor: Deans and Canons of Windsor, 2001. Brecht, Bertold. Brecht on Theatre. The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willett. London: Methuen, 1978. Bristol, Michael D. Big-Time Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Britland, Karen. “Circe’s Cup: Wine and Women in Early Modern Drama.” In A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Convivality in Seventeenth-Century England. Edited by Adam Smyth. 109–25. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004. Brodwin, Leonora Leet. “Milton and the Renaissance Circe.” Milton Studies Vol. 1. Edited by James D. Simmonds. 21–83. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 1975. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Athenaeum, 1969. Brook, Peter. The Shifting Point, 1949–1987. New York: TCG, 1987. Brooks, Douglas A. From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Brown, John Russell. “Learning Shakespeare’s Secret Language: the Limits of ‘Performance Studies.’” New Theatre Quarterly 24 (August 2008): 211–21. Brown, Robert D. Lucretius on Love and Sex: A Commentary on ‘De Rerum Natura’ IV, 1030–1287, With Prolegomena, Text, and Translation. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1988. Bruster, Douglas, and Robert Weimann. Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre: Performance and Liminality in Early Modern Drama. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Bullough, Vern. “Masturbation: A Historical Overview.” In Masturbation as a Means of Achieving Sexual Health. Edited by Walter O. Bockting and Eli Coleman. 17–34. New York and London: Haworth Press, 2002.

306

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Butterworth, Philip. Magic on the Early English Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Campbell, Lily B. Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930. Carter Hailey, R. “The Dating Game: New Evidence for the Dates of Q4 ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and Q4 ‘Hamlet.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 367–87. Cartwright, Kent. “Language, Magic, the Dromios, and ‘The Comedy of Errors.’” Studies in English Literature 47 (2007): 331–54. Cavell, Stanley. Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Chambers, E.K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923. Chapman, George. Homer’s Odysses. Translated According to Ye Greeke by Geo. Chapman. London, 1614. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Edited by Larry D. Benson. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Cheney, Patrick. Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, CounterNationhood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Clemen, Wolfgang. Shakespeare’s Soliloquies. Translated by Charity Scott Stokes. London: Methuen, 1987. Collinson, Patrick. From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation. Reading: The University of Reading Press, 1986. Collinson, Patrick. The Birthpangs of Protestant England. London: Macmillan, 1988. Corbin, Peter, and Douglas Sedge, eds. Thomas of Woodstock or King Richard the Second, Part One. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Cox, John D., and David Scott Kastan, eds. A New History of Early English Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Davies, John. A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued … (1612). Edited by James P. Myers, Jr. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988. Dawson, Anthony. “The Imaginary Text, or the Curse of the Folio.” In A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Edited by Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen. 141–61. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.

Bibliography

307

de Grazia, Margreta. Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. de Saussure, F. Course in General Linguistics, Translated by Roy Harris. London: Duckworth, 1983. de Grazia, Margreta. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Dekker, Thomas. The Shoemaker’s Holiday. London, 1599. Dekker, Thomas, and John Webster. Westward Ho. London, 1604. Dent, R.W. Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. 278–94. London: Routledge, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Diamond, Elin, ed. Performance and Cultural Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Mimesis and Theatre. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Dodsley, Robert ed. A Select Collection of Old Plays. 1744. Doloff, Steven. “Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ and Circe’s Italian Court in Ascham’s ‘The Schoolmaster’ (1570).” Notes and Queries 48 (2001): 287–9. Donington, Robert. The Rise of Opera. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1981. Doran, Madeleine. Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954. Drakakis, John. “Discourse and Authority: The Renaissance of Robert Weimann.” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 83–104. Duncan, Douglas. “‘Gammer Gurton’s Needle’ and the Concept of Humanist Parody.” Studies in English Literature 27 (1987): 177–96. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “‘Syren Teares’: Enchantment or Infection in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 119.” Review of English Studies new ser. 48 (1997): 56–60. Dutton, Richard, Alison Gail Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds. Lancastrian Shakespeare: Region, Religion and Patronage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

308

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Dutton, Richard, Alison Gail Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds. Lancastrian Shakespeare: Theatre and Religion. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso, 2006. Ellis, David. Shakespeare’s Practical Jokes: An Introduction to the Comic in His Work. Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2007. Engle, Lars. “‘I am that I am’: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Economy of Shame”. In Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays. Edited by James Schiffer. 185–97. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Fernie, Ewan. Shame in Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 2002. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain. London: Routledge, 2008. Flannagan, Roy, ed. The Riverside Milton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Flügel, Edwald, ed. Ralph Roister Doister. In Representative English Comedies, Vol. 1. Edited by C.M. Gayley. New York: Macmillan, 1903. Foakes, R.A. “Performance Theory and Textual Theory: A Retort Courteous.” Shakespeare 2, no. 1 (2006): 47–58. Foakes, R.A., ed. Henslowe’s Diary. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Forey, Madeleine, ed. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Translated by Arthur Golding. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Forse, James H. Art Imitates Business. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993. Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). Fox, Alistair. Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Fox, Robert, ed. Thomas Harriot. London: Ashgate, 2000. Freeman, Arthur. “Marlowe, Kyd, and the Dutch Church Libel.” ELR 3 (1973): 44–52. Fugard, Athol, Winston Ntshona, and John Kani. Sizwe Banzi is Dead. London: S. French, 1999.

Bibliography

309

Gillespie, Stuart.“Lucretius in the English Renaissance.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. Edited by Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie. 242–53 Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uniersity Press. Gillespie, Stuart, and Philip Hardie, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Goldberg, Jonathan. The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations. New York: Fordham, 2009. Goldberg, Rose Lee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988. Gooch, Paul W. “Margaret, Bottom, Paul and the Inexpressible.” Word & World 6, no. 3 (1986): 313–25. Gosson, Stephen. “The Schoole of Abuse.” In Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson. Edited by Arthur Kinney. Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1974. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Greene, Robert. Greenes Groats-Worth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance … Edited by Henry Chettle. London: William White, 1592. Greene, Robert. Menaphon. London: Sampson Clarke, 1589. Greene, Robert. Perimedes the Blacke-smith. London: John Wolfe, 1588. Griffiths, Jane. John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Gross, Kenneth. Shakespeare’s Noise. London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. Preface by Peter Brook. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Playing Companies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Hackel, Heidi Brayman. “‘Rowme’ of Its Own: Printed Drama in Early Libraries.” In A New History of Early English Drama. Edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. 113–30. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Hadzsits, George D. Lucretius and His Influence. 1935. New York: Cooper Square Publishing, 1963. Halasz, Alexandra. “‘So beloved that men use his picture for their signs’: Richard Tarlton and the Uses of Sixteenth-Century Celebrity.” Shakespeare Studies 23 (1995): 19–38. Hall, Joseph. Collected Poems. Edited by Arnold Davenport. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1949.

310

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Hall, Joseph. “Virgidemiarum [1597], 1.3.34.” In The Works, Vol. 9. Edited by Philip Wynter. Oxford: AMS Press, 1969). Halliwell, J.O, ed. The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, an Ancient Interlude to which are added Illustrations of Shakespeare and the Early English Drama. London: Shakespeare Society, 1846. Handke, Peter. Kaspar and Other Plays. Translated by Michael Roloff. New York: Farrar, 1969. Happé, Peter. “Fansy and Foly: The Drama of Fools in ‘Magnyfycence.’” Comparative Drama 27, no. 4 (Winter 1993–94): 426–52. Hardie, Philip. “Lucretius and Later Latin Literature in Antiquity.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. Edited by Gillespie, Stuart and Philip Hardie. 111–27. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Hardin, Richard. “Encountering Plautus in the Renaissance: A Humanist Debate on Comedy.” Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 789– 818. Harris, Jonathan Gil. “Atomic Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Studies 30, (2002): 47–51. Hart, F. Elizabeth. “‘Great is Diana’ of Shakespeare’s Ephesus.” Studies in English Literature 43,(2003): 347–74. Harvey, Barbara F. and Henry Summerson. “Islip, John (1464–1532).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Harvey, Gabriel. A New Letter of Notable Contents. London: John Wolfe, 1593. Harvey, Gabriel. Foure Letters and Certain Sonnets. London: John Wolfe, 1592. Hawkes, David. The Faust Myth: Religion and the Rise of Representation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Hawkes, Terence. Shakespeare in the Present. London: Routledge, 2002. Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Henderson, John, ed. and trans. Assinaria: The One about the Asses. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Herford, C.H., Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, eds. Ben Jonson: The Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52. Hill, Janet. Stages and Playgoers: From Guild Plays to Shakespeare. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Hillebrand, Harold N. “The Child Actors.” University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 11, no.1 (February 1926): 13.

Bibliography

311

Hillman, David. “Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the Abuse of Rhetoric.” Studies in English Literature 36, no. 1 (1996): 70–93. Hirsch, James. Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Kenneth Minogue. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1914. Hodgdon, Barbara. “Introduction.” In A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Edited by Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen. 1–9. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Höfele, Andreas. “Humanity at Stake: Man and Animal in Shakespeare’s Theatre.” Shakespeare Survey 60 (2007): 118–29. Holford-Strevens, Leofranc. “Horror vacui in Lucretian Biography.” Leeds International Classical Studies 1, no. 1 (2002), http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ classics/lics/ volumes.html. Holinshed, Raphael. Holinshed’s Chronicles England, Scotland, and Ireland. New York: AMS Press, 1965. Holinshed, Raphael. The firste volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande…. London: 1577. Holland, Peter. “On the gravy train: Shakespeare, memory and forgetting.” In Shakespeare, Memory and Performance. Edited by Peter Holland. 207–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Holland, Peter, and Stephen Orgel, eds. From Performace to Print in Shakespeare’s England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Honan, Park. Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Honan, Park. Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hornback, Robert. “Reformation Satire, Scatology, and Iconoclastic Aesthetics in ‘Gammer Gurton’s Needle.’” In The Blackwell Companion to Tudor Literature and Culture, 1485–1603. Edited by Kent Cartwright. Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming. Hortmann, Wilhelm. Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. House, Seymour Baker. “More, Sir Thomas (1478–1535).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Howard, Jean E. The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 1994. Howard-Hill, T.H. “Milton and ‘The Rounded Theatre’s Pomp.’” In Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World. Edited by P.G.

312

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Stanwood. 95–120. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995. Hughes, Merritt Y., ed. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957. Hume, Robert D. The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Innes, Christopher. Avant Garde Theatre, 1892–1992. London: Routledge, 1993. Iser, Wolfgang. How to Do Theory. Malden, MA, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell, 2006. Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Johnson, Nora. The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jones, Howard. The Epicurean Tradition. London: Routledge, 1989. Jonson, Ben. “Epitaph of Salomon Pavy, a Child of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel. Epigram 120.” In Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd ed. Edited by Alexander W. Allison, et al. New York: W.W. Norton, 1983. Jonson, Ben. Bartholomew Fair. Edited by G.R. Hibbard. New Mermaids. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. Kastan, David Scott. Shakespeare and the Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kemp, Will. Kemps nine daies wonder. Performed in a daunce from London to Norwich … [etc.] London, 1600. Kennedy, Dennis. The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Kernan, Alvin B. The Playwright as Magician. Shakespeare’s Image of the Poet in the English Public Theater. New Haven: Yale University Press,1979. Kinney, Arthur F. “Parody and its Implications in Sidney’s ‘Defense of Poesie.’” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 12, no. 1 (1972): 1–20. Kirby, W.J. Torrance. “Stoic and Epicurean? Calvin’s Dialectical Account of Providence in the Institute.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 5 (2003): 309–22. Knapp, Jeffrey. “Preachers and Players in Shakespeare’s England.” Representations 44 (1993): 29–59. Knapp, Jeffrey. “What Is a Co-Author?” Representations 89 (2005): 1–29. Knutson, Roslyn. Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Bibliography

313

Koller, Hermann. Die Mimesis in der Antike. Bern: Francke, 1954. Kumaran, Arul. “Robert Greene’s Martinist Transformation in 1590.” Studies in Philology 103 (2006): 243–63. Laing David, ed. Notes of Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden: January M.DC.XIX. London: n.p., 1842; repr. Elbiron Classics, 2006. Laks, André. “Epicurus.” In Greek Thought. A Guide to Classical Knowledge. Edited by Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd with the collaboration of Pierre Pellegrin. Translated under the direction of Catherine Porter. 586–605. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2000. Lancashire, Anne. London Civic Drama: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Lancashire, Ian, ed. Two Tudor Interludes: The Interlude of Youth, Hick Scorner. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980. Le Nouveau Petit Robert: Dictionnaire de la langue française. Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1996. Lee, Hyunseon. Günter de Bruyn – Christoph Hein – Heiner Müller. Drei Interviews. Siegen: Universität Siegen Fachbereich 3, 1995. Leishman, J.B. ed. The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601). London: Ivor Nicholson, 1949. Levin, Richard. “A Good Reading from the Bad Quarto of ‘Romeo and Juliet.’” Review of English Studies 23 (1972): 56–58. Levin, Richard. “The Indian/Iudean Crux in ‘Othello.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 60–67. Levin, Richard. New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Lin, Erika T. “Performance Practice and Theatrical Privilege: Rethinking Weimann’s Concepts of Locus and Platea.” New Theatre Quarterly 22, no. 3 (August 2006): 283–98. Lucretius. De rerum natura. Edited by Denis Lambin [Dionysius Lambinus]. Paris, 1563. Lucretius. De rerum natura. Translated by W.H.D. Rouse. Revised by Martin Ferguson Smith. 1975. Loeb Classical Library 181. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

314

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Lutkus, Alan. “Sir John Falstaff.” In Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Edited by Vicki K. Janik. 176–84. Westport: Greenwood, 1998. Mack, Maynard. King Lear in Our Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Maclean, Norman. “Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word: The Madness of Lear.” In Critics and Criticism Ancient and Modern. Edited by R.S. Crane. 595–615. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952. Maguire, Laurie. “The Girls from Ephesus.” In The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays. Edited by Robert S. Miola. 355–91. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997. Maguire, Laurie. Shakespeare’s Names. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Maher, Mary Z. Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Mandelbrote, Scott. “The Religion of Thomas Harriot.” In Thomas Harriot, Edited by Robert Fox. 246–79. London: Ashgate, 2000. Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays. Edited by Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey. London: Penguin, 2003. Martin, L.C. “Shakespeare, Lucretius, and the Commonplaces.” The Review of English Studies 21 (1945): 174–82. Masten, Jeffrey. Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. McConaughey, James L. The School Drama, Including Palsgrave’s Introduction to “Acolastus.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1913. McDonnell, William E. “The Shakespearean Soliloquy: A Problem of Focus.” Text and Performance Quarterly 10 (1990): 227–34. McEachern, Claire. The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. McJannet, Linda. “Genre and Geography: The Eastern Mediterranean in ‘Pericles’ and ‘The Comedy of Errors.’” In Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama. Edited by John Gillies and Virgina Mason Vaughan. 86–106. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. McKeown, Adam. “Humanist Discourse and the Idea of the Learned Painter.” Exemplaria 18 (2006): 367–85. McMillin, Scott, and Sally-Beth MacLean. The Queen’s Men and Their Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Bibliography

315

Medwall, Henry. “Fulgens and Lucres.” in Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Edited by Greg Walker. 305–48. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Melchiori, Giorgio, ed. The Second Part of King Henry IV. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Melnikoff, Kirk. “Jones’s Pen and Marlowe’s Socks: Richard Jones, Print Culture, and the Beginnings of English Dramatic Literature.” Studies in Philology 102, no. 2 (2005): 184–200. Meres, Francis. Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth. London: Cuthbert Burbie, 1598. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. Metzger, Bruce M., and Roland E. Murphy, eds. The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Moeslein, M.E., ed. The Plays of Henry Medwall: A Critical Edition. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1981. Mooney, Michael E. Shakespeare’s Dramatic Transactions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990. Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Mowat, Barbara. “The Theater and Literary Culture.” In A New History of Early English Drama. Edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. 213–30. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Mtwa, Percy, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon, Woza Albert. London: Methuen, 1973. Müller, Heiner. Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage. New York: PAJ, 1984. Müller, Heiner. Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preußen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei; Ein Greuelmärchen (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1982). Mullaney, Stephen. The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England. Chicago University Press, 1988. John, Munro, ed. The Shakespere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591–1700. With preface by E.K. Chambers. 2 vols 1909; London: Humphrey Milford, 1932). Myers, Robin Manson. Handel, Dryden, and Milton. London: Bowers & Bowers, 1956. N.L. Politeuphuia. London: Nicholas Ling, 1598. Nashe, Thomas. Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell. London: Abel Jeffes, 1592.

316

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Nashe, Thomas. “To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities (Preface).” In Menaphon. By Robert Greene. London: Sampson Clarke, 1589. Nashe, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Nashe. Edited by R.B. McKerrow. 5 vols. London: A.H. Bullen, 1904–10. Nelson, Alan. The Plays of Henry Medwall. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980. Neuss, Paula, ed. Magnificence, by John Skelton. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980. Nicholl, Charles. The Reckoning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Orgel, Stephen. “Introduction.” In The Tempest, By William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Orgel, Stephen. “What is a Text?” In Staging the Renaissance. Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. Edited by David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. 83–7. London: Routledge, 1991. Orgel, Stephen “What Is a Text?” In The Authentic Shakespeare, and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage. 1–5. New York: Routledge, 2002. Orme, Nicholas. Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England. London: Hambledon, 1989. Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds. Performativity and Performance. New York and London: Routledge, 1995 Parker, Patricia. “Shakespeare and Rhetoric: ‘Dilation’ and ‘Delation’ in ‘Othello.’” In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. 57–74. New York and London: Methuen, 1985. Parker, Patricia. Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955. Passannante, Gerard. “The Art of Reading Earthquakes: On Harvey’s Wit, Ramus’s Method, and the Renaissance of Lucretius.” Renaissance Quarterly 61 (2008): 792–832. Paster, Gail Kern. The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Pavis, Patrice. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. Translated by Loren Kruger. London: Routledge, 1992. Payne Collier, John. The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare. London: George Bell & Sons, 1879. Payne, Michael and John Hunter, eds. Renaissance Literature: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Bibliography

317

Pechter, Edward. “Crisis in Editing?” Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006): 20–38. Pequigney, Joseph. “The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘The Merchant of Venice.’” English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 38–40. Perry, Curtis. “Commerce, Community, and Nostaligia in ‘The Comedy of Errors.’” In Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism. Edited by Linda Woodbridge. 39–51. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Peters, Julie Stone. The Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text and Performance in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pfeiffer, K. Ludwig. The Protoliterary: Steps Toward an Anthropology of Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Phaer, Thomas, and Thomas Twine. The Thirteene Bookes of Aeneidos. London: 1596. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked. The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Plautus II. Translated by Paul Nixon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1988. Pollet, Maurice. John Skelton, Poet of Tudor England. Translated by John Warrington. London: J.M. Dent, 1971. Poole, Kristen. “Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism.” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995): 47–5. Pope, Alexander. The Major Works. Edited by Pat Rogers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Preiss, Richard. “Robert Armin Do the Police in Different Voices.” In From Performace to Print in Shakespeare’s England. Edited by Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel. 208–27. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. London: Routledge, 1996. Ramsay, Robert Lee, ed. Magnyfycence, a Moral Play. Extra Series 98. London: Early English Text Society, 1906. Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Relihan, Constance C. “Liminal Geography: ‘Pericles’ and the Politics of Place.” Philological Quarterly 71 (1992): 281–301 Rice, Julian C. “‘Julius Caesar’ and the Judgment of the Senses.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 13 (1973): 238–55. Riehle, Wolfgang. Shakespeare, Plautus and the Humanist Tradition. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990.

318

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Riggs, David. The World of Christopher Marlowe. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Roberts, Gareth. “The Descendants of Circe: Witches and Renaissance Fictions.” In Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief. Edited by Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts. 183–206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Roberts, Gareth. “Three Notes on Uses of Circe by Spenser, Marlowe and Milton.” Notes and Queries 223 (1978): 433–35. Robertson, David. “Soliloquy and Self in Milton’s Major Poems.” In Of Poetry and Politics. Edited by P.G. Stanwood. 59–77. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995. Roper, William. “The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, Knyghte.” Edited by E.V. Hitchcock. In Early English Text Society, Vol. 197. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935. R.T. A prettie newe ballad, intytuled: the crowe sits vpon the wall, please one and please all. London: Henry Kyrkham, 1592. Salih, Sarah. “When is a Bosom not a Bosom?” In Medieval Virginities. Edited by Ruth Evans, Sarah Salih, and Anke Bernau. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. 14–32. Sargeaunt, John. Annals of Westminster School. London: Methuen, 1898. Scattergood, John, ed. John Skelton: The Complete English Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Schabert, Ina, ed., Shakespeare-Handbuch. Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt. 4th ed. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2000. Schalkwyk, David. Literature and the Touch of the Real. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. Schalkwyk, David. “Shakespeare’s Ghosts.” Shakespeare 1, no. 2 (2005): 219–40. Schalkwyk, David. Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Schechner, Richard. Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Scherb, Victor I. “Playing at Maturity in John Redford’s ‘Wit and Science.’” SEL. 45, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 271–97. Scheurweghs, Gustave. Nicholas Udall’s “Roister Doister”, Edited from the Eton Copy. Louvain: Librarie Universitaire, 1939.

Bibliography

319

Schmidgall, Gary. Shakespeare and Opera. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Schücking, Levin L. Shakespeare und der Tragödienstil seiner Zeit. Bern: A. Francke, 1947. Scoloker, Anthony. Daiphantus, or the passions of loue Comicall to reade, but tragicall to act. London:William Cotton, 1604. Screech, M.A. Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius. Geneva: Droz, 1998. Shapiro, James. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. New York: Harper, 2005. Shapiro, Michael. Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays. New York: Columbia, 1977. Shawcross, John T. John Milton and Influence: Presence in Literature, History and Culture. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1991. Shershow, Scott Cutler. Puppets and Popular Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. Shoaf, R. Allen. Shakespeare’s Theater of Likeness. Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2006. Skura, Meredith Anne. Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Smith, Bruce. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Smith, David Nichol. Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare. New York: Russel & Russel, 1962. Smith, Emma. “Actor v. Character in Early Modern Dramatic Authorship: The Case of Thomas Kyd and ‘The Spanish Tragedy.’” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 11 (1999): 129–42. Snow, Edward. “Language and Sexual Difference in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’” In Shakespeare’s “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C.L. Barber. Edited by Peter Erickson and Coppelia Kahn. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985. Southern, Richard. “The Technique of Play Presentation.” In The Revels History of Drama in English, Vol. 2: 1500–1576. Edited by Norman Sanders et al. 71–99. 8 vols. London: Methuen, 1980. Southworth, John. Fools and Jesters at the English Court. Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1998. Spenser, Edmund. A View of the State of Ireland: From the First Published Edition (1633). Edited by Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997.

320

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Edited by Thomas P. Roche, Jr and C. Patrick O’Donnell, Jr. London: Penguin, 1987. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. A Reader. Edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Stern, Tiffany. Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Stern, Tiffany. Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Streitberger, W.R. Court Revels, 1485–1559. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Striker, Gisela. “The Problem of the Criterion.” In Epistemology. Edited by Stephen Everson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 143–60. Stubbes, Philip. The Anatomie of Abuses. London: Richard Jones, 1583. Suzuki, Mihoko. Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Tarltons Newes Out of Purgatorie. London: T. G[ubbin] and T. N[ewman], 1590. Tatum, James, ed. and trans. Plautus: The Darker Comedies: Bacchides, Casina, and Truculentus. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Taylor, Dennis, and David Beauregard, eds. Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. Taylor, Gary. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Thatcher, David. “‘The Manner of Their Deaths’: Causality in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Antony and Cleopatra.’” Shakespeare Newsletter 57 (2007). Twycross, Meg, Malcolm Jones, and Alan Fletcher. “‘Farte Prycke in Cule’: The Pictures.” Medieval English Theatre 23 (2001): 100–21. Udall, Nicholas. Floures for Latine Spekynge, selected and gathered out of Terence. London, 1533. Van Elk, Martine. “Urban Misidentification in ‘The Comedy of Errors’ and the Cony-Catching Pamphlets.” SEL 43 (2003): 323–46. Velz, John W. “Scatology and Moral Meaning in Two English Renaissance Plays.” South Central Review 1, nos.1/2 (Spring–Summer 1984): 4–21. Vickers, Brian. Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Bibliography

321

Voloshinov, V.N. “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art,” in Freudianism: A Critical Sketch. Edited by I.R. Titunik and N.H. Bruss. 100. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987. Vredeveld, Harry. “‘Deaf as Ulysses to the Siren’s Song’: The Story of a Forgotten Topos.” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 846–82. Walker, Greg. “Fulgens and Lucres and Early Tudor Drama.” In Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion. Edited by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield. 23–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Walker, Greg. John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Walker, Greg, ed. Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. Walker, Greg. Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Wall, Wendy. “Dramatic Authorship and Print.” In Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion. Edited by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield. 1–11. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Wallace, Charles William. The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597– 1601. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Warren, James. Epicurus and Democritean Ethics: An Archaeology of “Ataraxia”. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Webster, John. “The Duchess of Malfi.” In The Complete Works of John Webster, Vol 2. Edited by F. L. Lucas. London: Chatto & Windus, 1927). Weimann, Robert. Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse. Edited by David Hillman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Weimann, Robert. Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Edited by Helen Higbee and William West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Weimann, Robert. “Bifold Authority in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 401–17. Weimann, Robert. “Doubly Encoded Representations in Modern Drama and Fiction: Rupturing Coordinates of (Re)Semblance and Meaning,” Symbolim 6 (2006): 97–136. Weimann, Robert. “Mimesis in ‘Hamlet.’” In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. 275–91. London: Routledge: 1990.

322

THE SHAKESPEAREAN INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK: 10

Weimann, Robert. “Playing with a Difference: Revisiting ‘Pen’ and ‘Voice’ in Shakespeare’s Theatre.” Shakespeare Quarterly, 50 (1999): 415–32. Weimann, Robert. “Representation and Mimesis: Towards a New Theory”, Symbolism 6 (2006) 3–36. Weimann, Robert. “Representation and Performance: The Uses of Authority in Shakespeare’s Theatre.” PMLA 107 (1992): 497–510. Weimann, Robert. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Edited by Robert Schwartz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Weimann, Robert. “Shakespeare on the Modern Stage: Past Significance and Present Meaning.” Shakespeare Survey, 20 (1967): 113–20. Weimann, Robert. “Theatrical Space in Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Revisiting locus and platea in ‘Timon’ and ‘Macbeth.’” The Shakespearean International Yearbook 2 (2002): 203–17. Weimann, Robert. “Thresholds to Commodity and Memory in Shakespeare’s Endings.” Representations 53 (1996): 1–20. Weimann, Robert, and Douglas Bruster. Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. West, William N. “Figures and Other Fictions in the Archive.” ELN 45 (2007]) 45–56. West, William N. Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Westfall, Suzanne R. Patrons and Performance: Early Tudor Household Revels. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whetstone, George. “Promos and Cassandra.” In Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. 2. Edited by Geoffrey Bullough. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. Whetstone, George. Heptameron of Civill Discourses. London: Richard Jones, 1582. Whitney, Charles.Early Responses to Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Wiles, David. Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Williams, George Walton. “A Note on ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ V.iii.170.” Notes and Queries 9 (1962): 332–3. Wilson, J. Dover. The Fortunes of Falstaff. Cambridge: Macmillan, 1944.

Bibliography

323

Winn, James Anderson. John Dryden and His World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Edited and translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. Worthen, W.B. “Antigone’s Bones.” The Drama Review – The Journal of Performance Studies 52, no. 3 (T-199, Fall 2008): 10–33. Worthen, W.B. “Deeper Meanings and Theatrical Technique: The Rhetoric of Performance Criticism.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 441–55. Worthen, W.B. “Disciplines of the Text / Sites of Performance.” The Drama Review – The Journal of Performance Studies 39, no. 1 (T-145, Spring 1995): 13–28. Worthen, W.B. “Drama, Performativity, and Performance.” PMLA 113 (1998): 1093–107. Worthen, W.B. “Prefixing the Author: Print, Plays, and Performance.” In A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Edited by Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen. 212–30. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007. Worthen, W.B. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Worthen, W.B. Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Worthen, W.B. Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Worthen, W.B. “Texts, Tools, and Technologies: A Quip Modest, in Response to R.A. Foakes.” Shakespeare 2, no. 2 (2006): 208–19. Wyrick, Deborah Baker. “The Ass Motif in ‘The Comedy of Errors’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 432–48. Yachnin, Paul. “The Powerless Theatre.” English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 49–74. Yarnall, Judith. Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Index (Note: only references in the main body of essays are indexed) A Knacke to Know a Knave 160 Abbot Islip 149 Actaeon 101 Adams, John 147 Adorno, Theodor W. 33 Aeneas 211, 236, 250 Agnew, Tim 290 Alleyn, Edward 7, 100, 105, 109 Almereyda, Michael 80, 87 Anglo, Sydney 143, anti-theatricalism 9, 121, 123, 124, 125, 130, 135–9 Apocalypse, the 234 Appia, Adolphe 16 Appius and Virginia 152 appropriation 83, 110, 177, 196, 281, 285 Aristophanes 192 Aristotle 84, 92, 151, 192, and mimesis 8 Armin, Robert 174, 185, 197, 198–9, 201, Artaud, Antonin 19, 21, 88 Ascham, Roger 232–4, 242–3, 253 Astington, John 6 atheism 105, 274–76, 279, Attwell, George 147 Augustine, St 139, 141, 266, Auslander, Philip 11 Austin, J.L. 3, 8, 28, 47–8, 52, 54–6, 62, 64, 70, 74, 81–4, avant-garde 4, 8, 19, 21, 25 BAFTA awards 287 Bakhtin, M.M. 13, 63, 72, 120, 126 Baldwin, T.W. 201 Barba, Eugenio 23–4 Barclay, Alexander 164 Barish, Jonas 9 Barker, Clive 11 Barnfield, Richard 95

BBC 281–9, 292, 295–7 Beaumont, Francis 201, 211, Beckerman, Bernard 5 Beckett, Samuel 21–2, 33,115 Benedictine monastery 149 Benjamin, Walter 8 Bentley, G.E. 97 Bentley, John 100 Berger, Harry, Jr. 5, 60, Berliner Ensemble 17–18 Besson, Benno 17–18, 23, 88 Beuys, Joseph 10–11 Bevington, David M. 143, 147 Bible 276, 277 Corinthians (I), 258, 276 Ezekiel 42–3 Isaiah 169 Moses 275 Revelation 232, 246 Blanchett, Cate 272 Blau, Herbert 11 Bleak House 284 Bloom, Harold 34, 36 Blum, Abbe 179 Bobo, Liza 249 Bodley, Thomas 94 Bolton, Elizabeth 179 Bowers, Roger 156 Bowker, Peter 289 Boyd, William 284 Bracciolini, Poggio 262 Bradbrook, M.C. 36 Branagh, Kenneth 83, 292 Brecht, Bertolt 17–19, 21, 64, 88 gestus in 18, 41, 64–6, 119–20, 123, 125–8 Bristol, Michael 79 Britland, Karen 231–2, 238 Brodwin, Leonora Leet 231 325

326

the shakespearean international yearbook: 10

Brook, Peter 19 Brooks, Douglas 166 Brown, John Russell 5 Brown, Robert D. 266–9 Bruster, Douglas 31, 37, 65, 69, 146, 161, 181–4, 186, 188–9, 192, 195–6, 202 Bullinger, Heinrich 234 Burbage, Richard 7, 112 Burke, Kenneth 84, 86 burlesque 6, 135, 192 Butler, Judith 3, 84 Calderwood, J.L. 36 Calvinism 191, 274, 280, Campbell, Lily B. 36 Carlson, Marvin 11 Carroll, Bill 249 Cartesian philosophy 61–62 Cartwright, William 201–2 Castorf, Frank 41 Catherine of Braganza 289 Catholicism 158, 233–6, 276, 279, Cato 80, 101 Cavell, Stanley 48, 62–4, 68, 70–71, 74 Centaur 236, 264 Cervantes, Miguel de 158 Chambers, E.K. 143, 146, 151, 162 Charles I 170 Charles II 289 Chaucer, Geoffrey 241, 282–3, 288–9 Children of the Queen’s Chapel 154 Christianity 135, 177, 218, 231, 262, 267, 275 Cicero 122, 152, Clarke, Charles Cowden 222 Cleese, John 292 Clifton, Thomas 154 clowns and clowning 12, 26, 125, 127, 129, 146–7, 153, 160–61, 165, 174, 182, 184–202, 284 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 272 Colet, Dean 152 Collinson, Patrick 10 Complicite 134 complicity 121–6, 128, 134, 136–8, 141 Condell, Henry 94 Conservative Party 286, 290 Cornish, William 150

Covell, W 95 Craig, Edward Gordon 16 Curtain, The (Theatre) 6, 108 Daniel, Samuel 109 Dante, Alighieri 35 Davies, Andrew 282, 283 deconstruction 41, 165 Dekker, Thomas 112, 118 Delation/dilation 126, 136 Democritus 263 Derrida, Jacques 8, 51–2, 54–5, 60, 84 Diamond, Elin 8 Drayton, Michael 102 dreams 265–66 Drummond, William 199 Dryden, John 35 Dyce, Alexander 222 Eagleton, Terry 57–8 Epicurus and Epicureanism 257–79 Erasmus, Desiderius 152, 158 Erne, Lukas 166, 172 Eton School 152–3 Euphuism 124, 135–6 Famous Victories of Henry V 99, 190–91 Fernie, Ewan 177–8 Festa, Angelika 10–11 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 10 Flannagan, Roy 168 Fletcher, Alan 157 Fletcher, John 185, 197, 199, 200–202, 211 Foakes, R.A. 12, 47–8, 53, 58, 59 Foxe, John 94 Freud, Sigmund 225–6 Fulke , William 234 Garrick, David 34 German Democratic Republic 33 Gibbons, Brian 223–5 Globe, The (Theatre) 21–295 Goffman, Irving 3 Goldberg, Rose Lee 10 Goldberg, Jonathan 276 Goldman, Michael 5 Gone with the Wind 91

Index Gosson, Stephen 121–7, 130, 133, 136, 138 Granville-Barker, Harley 5, 91 Gray, Spalding 78 Greenblatt, Stephen 235 Greene, Robert 9, 94–9, 102, 104–06, 110, 119 Griffiths, Jane 151 Gross, Kenneth 72 Grotowski, Jerzy 23–4 Gurr, Andrew 13, 146, 160 Hall, Joseph 26, 188, 191, 199 Halliwell, J.O. 149 Handel, George Frideric 35 Handke, Peter 22–3, 88 Hanmer, Sir Thomas 10 Harbage, Alfred 36, 143–4 Hardin, Richard 193, 194 Hare, David 78 Harriot, Thomas 275 Harsnet, Samuel 234 Harvey, Gabriel 95, 102, 103, 106 Hawke, Ethan 81 Hawkes, David 166–7, 175, 177, 178 Hemminges, John 94 Henderson, John 193 Henderson, Shirley 289 Henry VIII, King 149 Henslowe, Phillip 119, 147 Heyme, Hansgünter 40 Heywood (aka Heyward), Thomas 123, 185 Hick Scorner 151 Hobbes, Thomas 96, 99, 112 Hodgdon, Barbara 5, 11, 12 Holby City 287 Holinshed, Raphael 235, Homer 177, 253, 262 Honan, Park 274 Horace 110, 111, 151, Hortmann, Wilhelm 16 Howard, Jean E. 144, Howard-Hill, T.–H. 170 Huxley, Aldous 36 illocutionary acts/ illocution 8, 48, 55–7, 62–8, 70–72, 74, 78–9, 81–6, 90 imitatio vitae 17

327

Indies, the 246 Ingram, William 6 Innes, Christopher 19 Internet Movie Database 284 Ireland 232, 235–6, 246, 248 Iser, Wolfgang 31, 33 Italy 102, 211, 232–6, 242, 248 ITV 282–4, 286 Jacobean period 160, 186 Jacobson, Roman, 39 Jennens, Charles 35 Jerome, St 267 Johnson, Nora, 193, 198 Jones, Malcolm 157 Jones, Richard 119, 129, 130, 202 Jonson, Ben, 7, 94, 101–102, 135, 154, 171, 186, 199–200 Bartholomew Fair 154 Cynthia’s Revels 154 Poetaster 154 The New Inn 135 Juvenal 192 Karge, Manfred 17 Kastan, David Scott 14, 114–15 Kemp, Will 94, 112, 120, 146, 160, 185–8, 190, 195, 197, 199, 202 Kernan, Alvin B. 5, 36 King’s Men, the 147, 174, 199–201 Kinney, Arthur 123 Kiss Me, Kate 292 Kliman, Bernice 228 Knapp, Jeffrey 116–17 Knell, William 100 Knowles, Ronald 116 Koller, Hermann 8 Kyd, Thomas 6, 105–7, 109, 112 la langue (text) 52 la parole (performance) 52 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 8 Lady Chapel 156 Lambeth Palace 155 Lambinus 262, 275, 278 Lawson, Twiggy 292 Legge, Thomas 102 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 91

328

the shakespearean international yearbook: 10

Leicester’s Men 146–7 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 21–2 Levenson, Jill 220, 225 Levy, Andrea 282 Ligon, Richard 106 liminality 8–9, 12, 186 Lister, David 282–3 Little Britain 287 locus and platea see Weimann, Robert locus amoenus 166 Lodge, David 225 Lodge, Thomas 112 London Metropolitan police force 282 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the 195 Lucretius 257–8, 260–72, 274–6, 280 Luhrmann, “Baz” 87 Lupton, Thomas 189 Lusty Juventus 148 Lyly, John 155, 194 Mackie, Laura 289, 296 MacLean, Sally-Beth 146–7 Maguire, Laurie 240 Marin, Louis 8 Marlowe, Christopher 6, 102, 105–7, 109, 113, 119, 167, 186, 199, 202, 257–8, 261, 274–6, 279–80 Dr Faustus 167 Massacre at Paris 105 Tamburlaine (play) 106–7, 119–20, 129, 186, 202 Tamburlaine (character) 105–6, 109, 113 The Jew of Malta 105 Second Part of Tamburlaine 202 Marprelate Controversy 145 Marquardt, Fritz 17 Marston, John, 19, 107, 111, 153 Antonio and Mellida 153 Histriomastix 9 The Malcontent 107 The Scourge of Villainy 107 Marx, Karl 8 Masten, Jeffrey 115–6 Masterpiece Theatre 282 materialism 273–5 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 81 McJannet, Linda 243, 246

McMillin, Scott 146–7 Medwall, Henry 149, 155–9 Melchiori, Giorgio 190 Merbury, Francis 148 Merchant Taylors, the 149 Meres, Francis, 102–4, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 60–61 metadrama 36 metatheatricality 157, 287, 291 Milton, John, 35, 165–79 Eikonoklastes 170 “L’Allegro” 35, 171, “On Shakespeare” 171 Paradise Lost 35, 166–7, 171, 173, 175–6, 178–9, 182 Samson Agonistes 171 mise-en-scène 13, 15, 21, 25, 89 Mitchell, David 290, 296 Monasticism 145, 149, 151–2, 154, 159 Montaigne, Michel de 277, 278 More, Thomas 148, 155–6 Morton, John, Cardinal 155–7 Mowat, Barbara 148 Müller, Heiner, 20–21, 23, 33, 36, 40, 88 Gundling 21 Hamletmachine 20–21, 41 Munday, Anthony 148 Nashe, Thomas 7, 98–106, 112, 192 Isle of Dogs 101 Pierce Penniless 7, 99 Summer’s Last Will and Testament 192 neoclassicism 17, 152, 158, 183–93, 195–201 Netherlands, the 146, 246 Neuss, Paula 150 New Bibliography, the 208, 222, 226 new criticism 5 new historicism 32 Nicholls, David 292, 296 Nietzsche, Fredrich 18, 81 Noh Theatre 78 Olivier, Laurence 83, 85–6 Orme, Nicholas 156, 164 Otway, Thomas 216 Ovid 100, 192, 231, 262, 267, 280

Index Oxford Shakespeare, The 47 Oxford University 151, 158 Parish, Sarah 289, 296 Parker, Patricia 136, 141, 232, 236, 246 Parnassus plays, The 95, 109, 111–12 Paterson, Bill 289, 297 Pavis, Patrice 19 Pavy, Salomon 154 Peele, George 107 Pequigney, Joseph 229 Percy, Harry 190 performance studies/criticism 5, 10–11, 44, 66, 72, 77–9, 87, 90–91, 143, 183, 287 performative, the 3–12, 18, 22–3, 31–5, 47–8, 52, 54–8, 60, 62–71, 74, 78, 81–5, 89–90, 92–3, 98, 106, 115, 128–29, 131, 133, 138, 152–53, 166–8, 172, 176, 184, 186, 192, 194, 198 Pericles 101, 228, 243 perlocutionary acts/perlocution 48, 55–7, 62–8, 70–71, 81, 83 Perry, Curtis 232 Petrarch, Francesco 111, 241 Petry, Sir George 104 Phelan, Peggy 8–10 phenomenology 137 Piper, Billie 289, 296 platea and locus staging See under Weimann, Robert Plato 8, 101, 122 Plautus, Titus Maccius 100, 192–4, 246 Poe, Edgar Allan 126 Poliakoff, Stephen 284 Pope, Alexander 10, 275 post-structuralism 52 Presbyterianism 192, 202 Preston, Thomas 159 Prince Henry 151 prompt box, the 41 prompter, the 41–3, 97 Pythagoras 100 Queen’s Men, the 6, 145–7 Rabelais, François 158

329

Radio 3 (Britain) 282 Radio 4 (Britain) 282 Raleigh, Walter 275 Rastell, John 151 Red Lion, the (Theatre) 6, 146 Reddy, William 48, 62–3, 68, 71 Redford, John 148, 150, 152 Regietheater 16 Regisseur 16 Reinhardt, Max 16 Relihan, Constance C. 254 Riehle, Wolfgang 193 Riggs, David 274 Roach, Joseph 81, 117 Roberts, Gareth 231, 234, 238, 242, 253 Roper, William 155 Rose, the (Theatre) 117, 147 Rouse, W.H.D. 260, 263–5 Rowley, William 194 Saussure, Ferdinand de 28, 52 St George’s Chapel, Windsor 157 Schalkwyk, David 12, 23, 25, 32, 77–9, 81–6, 92, 166, 179 Schechner, Richard 81 Schücking, L.L. 35–6 Scientific Revolution, the 261, 275 Scoloker, Anthony 95, 108, 110 Scotland 246 Searle, John 55 Seneca, Lucius 100, 112 Sewell, Rufus 289–90, 296 Shakespeare, William A Midsummer Night’s Dream 87, 134, 227, 252, 257, 281, 286, 289–90, 292–3, 297 All’s Well that Ends Well 210–11, 228, 252 Antony and Cleopatra 81, 211–3, 219, 221, 227–9 Coriolanus 28, 211–12, 219 Cymbeline 217, 220 Hamlet 14–15, 17, 24, 29, 40–41, 43, 49–51, 53, 70, 79–81, 85–8, 100, 108–10, 112, 172, 176–9, 182, 184, 195–6, 211, 217, 219, 227–8 Henry IV 75, 100, 105, 107, 186–7, 189, 211–12, 215, 227–9

330

the shakespearean international yearbook: 10

Henry V 4, 13, 99, 121, 126, 137, 184, 186, 210, 212, 214, 224, 227, 243, 245 Henry VI 98–9, 116, 210–13, 215–7, 224, 226–9, 231 Henry VIII 200, 202, 228–9 Julius Caesar 219, 227–8 King John 115, 184, 196, 211–12, 224, 227, 229 King Lear 100, 196, 219, 228–9, 257, 269–70, 277 Love’s Labor’s Lost 210, 229 Macbeth 180, 218–9, 222, 227–8, 284 Measure for Measure 128, 131, 133, 141, 211, 216, 218, 228, 254 Much Ado about Nothing 229, 281–90, 292–3, 295–6 Othello 134–8, 141, 208–9, 211, 216, 219, 222, 226–7, 250, 282–4 Pericles 101, 228, 243, 254 Richard II 75, 210–12, 227, 234, 276 Richard III 63, 65, 112, 170, 173, 184, 191, 196–7, 217, 227–8 Romeo and Juliet 87, 109–10, 115, 207–8, 210, 214, 216, 218, 220–22, 226–8, 273, 276 Sonnets 81, 100, 166, 180, 284, 294, 301 Titus Andronicus 112, 227–9, 253 The Comedy of Errors 217, 231, 250, 253–5 The Merchant of Venice 222, 229, 243, 254 The Rape of Lucrece 212, 229 The Taming of the Shrew 210, 281, 286, 288, 290, 292–3, 295–6 The Tempest 9, 29, 227, 249, 286 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 217, 228 The Winter’s Tale 11, 125, 127, 198–200, 204, 212, 215, 217, 227 Timon of Athens 219 Troilus and Cressida 13–14, 87, 120, 185, 198, 210–13, 216, 225, 227, 240, 252 Twelfth Night 108, 117, 174, 189, 197, 227, 229 Venus and Adonis 100, 110, 214 Shakespeare Association of America, the 113, 249

Shakespeare in Love 284, 289 Shakespeare Re-told 284, 286–8, 292–3, 295–6 shame 138, 168–9, 171, 176–8, 180, 182, 210, 215, 284 Shank, John 201 Shapiro, James 186 Shapiro, Michael 153, 163 Shaw, G.B. 35 Shershow, Scott Cutler 155 Shohet, Lauren 179 Sidney, Philip, Sir 102, 123–4, 129–30, 185, 187, 189, 191, 194, 200 Singer, John 147 Sir Thomas More, Booke of (play) 147–8 Skelton, John 149–52, 159, 161 Skura, Anne Meredith 6 Sly, William 107 Small, Sharon 289, 297 Smith, Kristen D.G. 276 Snow, Edward 228 Socrates 101 Soprano, Tony 83 Southern, Richard 143, 162 Spenser, Edmund 102, 210, 235, 248, 280 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 8, 27 Sprague, A.C. 36 Stamm, Rudolf 5 Stanihurst, Richard 232, 235 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 16, 42 Staunton, Imelda 289, 297 Stein, Gertrude 80 Stein, Peter 17 Stern, Tiffany 45, 58, 74 Stevenson, William 158 Stoppard, Tom 85 Strange Interlude 80 structuralism 52, 54 Stuart, James 275 Stubbes, Philip 6, 132, 139 Styan, J.L. 5 Suzuki, Mihoko 250, 252 Swan, the (Theatre) 295 Tarlton (aka Tarleton), Richard 100, 108–10, 115, 145, 147, 188, 197, 199 Tatum, James 193

Index Taylor, John 106 TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment) 91 Terence 158, 193–4 Thalheimer, Michael 29 The Knight of the Burning Pestle 6 The Magnetic Lady 8 Theatre, the Theatre) 6 Thomas of Woodstock 250 Three Ladies of London 146 Tide Tarrieth No Man 189 Turner, Victor 3, 7, 79 Twycross, Meg 157 Udall, Nicholas 150, 152, 154, 158–9, 192, 194 University Wits, the 145 van Elk, Martine 232 van Gennep, Arnold 8 Vera Drake 289 Vickers, Brian 114 Viennese Burgtheater, the 29 Virgil 262, 280 Virgin Mary 156 Voloshinov, V.N. 63 Vredeveld, Harry 234, 250, 253 Wainwright, Sally 289, 296 Walker, Greg 149, 155, 161–2 Wall, Wendy 147 War of the Theatres, the 94, 154 Warner, William 102, 237, 246, 251 Webster, John 118, 210 Weimann, Robert 31–7, 39–40, 47–8, 58, 63–5, 68–9, 71–2, 75, 77–8, 80, 87–91, 93–5, 97, 110, 113–14, 116, 119–21, 123, 125, 133–5, 138, 143–6, 148, 152–3, 155–6, 158–61, 163, 165–7, 171–2, 174–6, 178–89, 191–7, 202 Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse 114, 183 Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre 7, 26–7, 93–4, 97, 114, 119, 183

331

‘author’s pen’ 14, 20, 34, 40, 47, 58, 77, 91, 100, 119–20, 140, 166, 172, 184, 187, 193 ‘actor’s voice’ 14, 34, 40, 47, 58, 77, 91, 100, 112, 119–20, 165–6, 172, 184, 187, 193 bi-fold authority (of text and performance) 13, 70–71, 87 “extra-dramatic” 192, 194 locus and platea 12, 47, 63 65–6, 68–70, 77, 120, 134, 143, 165, 174, 178, 179–80, 185, 191, 197, 199 magisterial 3, 7, 20, 23, 25, 31, 77, 79, 88, 89, 136 ministerial 3–4, 7, 10, 13–14, 16, 20, 23, 25, 28, 31, 77, 87–9, 144, 186 performance criticism 4–5 “pre-literary” 192, 194 Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre 183 representation 47 self-expression 47, 65 Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater 26, 31, 47, 160, 183, 195 Shakespeare and the Power of Performance 12, 26, 28, 31, 145, 182–3, 185, 189, 192, 195, 197, 203 “Shakespeare on the Modern Stage” 28, 33 textual criticism 4–5 Wekwerth, Manfred 17 Wells, Stanley 281 West Wing, The 295 Westcott, Sebastian 148 Westfall, Suzanne 156 Westminster Abbey 149–50, 157, 162 Whetstone, George 128–31, 140, 188, 190–91, 194, 196 Whitney, Geffrey 240 Whitworth 253–4 Whore of Babylon, the 232, 234, 246 Williams, George Walton 226, 228 Wilson, Benji 284 Wilson, J. Dover 190, 221, 226–7 Wilson, Robert 19–21, 146–7

332

the shakespearean international yearbook: 10

Windsor Chapel 152 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 32, 37, 52–3, 55, 60 Wooster Group, the 21 Worthen, W.B. 4–5, 11–13, 23, 28, 47–61, 65, 71–2, 74, 77, 82 Wyrick, Deborah Baker 240

Yahweh 42 Yes, Minister 286 Youth 151 Zeffirelli, Franco 85