Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe's Legacy (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, 3)

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Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

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This collection of essays historicizes and theorizes forgetting in English Renaissance literary texts and their cultural contexts. Its essays open up a field of study overlooked by contemporary Renaissance scholarship, which is too often swayed by a critical paradigm devoted to the “art of memory.” Such a field recovers forgetting’s crucial role in the production of early modernity’s subjective and collective identities, desires, and fantasies. Because forgetting is, as the introduction argues, a cultural presence not an absence, each of the volume’s four sections concentrates on a distinctive site of forgetting. The first section investigates the body as a volatile site of forgetting; the second examines poetic and rhetorical signs of forgetting; the third explores narratives of identity formation, reformation, and deformation; and the final section considers forgetting’s localities, ranging from the imaginary geography of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the early modern theatre and library. This book promotes a dynamic view of forgetting neither confined to a single discourse nor dominated by a single concept. Together its essays show how forgetting not only struggles and colludes with remembering to produce culture, but also forms its own images, places, materialities, and practices. Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture is essential reading for students and scholars of Renaissance Studies. Christopher Ivic is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY, Potsdam. His articles on cultural identities in early modern Britain and Ireland have appeared in such books as Archipelagic Identities and British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, as well as in Ariel, Genre, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Grant Williams is Assistant Professor of English at Nipissing University. His articles on corporeal fantasies in early modern rhetoric, medical discourse, and literature have appeared in Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, ELH, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture

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Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre P. A. Skantze

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The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson Mary Ellen Lamb

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Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture Lethe’s legacies Edited by Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams

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Irigaray and Premodern Culture Edited by Theresa Krier and Elizabeth D. Harvey

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Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture Lethe’s legacies

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Edited by Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams

First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2004 Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams for editorial matter and selection; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-41708-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-34067-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–31046–6 (Print Edition)

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Contents

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List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: sites of forgetting in early modern English literature and culture

vii viii x

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GRANT WILLIAMS AND CHRISTOPHER IVIC

PART I

Embodiments 1 The decay of memory

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WILLIAM E. ENGEL

2 Lethargic corporeality on and off the early modern stage

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GARRETT A. SULLIVAN JR

3 Pleasure’s oblivion: displacements of generation in Spenser’s Faerie Queene

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ELIZABETH D. HARVEY

PART II

Signs 4 Textual crudities in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica

65 67

GRANT WILLIAMS

5 Off the subject: early modern poets on rhyme, distraction, and forgetfulness AMANDA WATSON

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vi Contents PART III

Narratives 6 Reassuring fratricide in 1 Henry IV

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CHRISTOPHER IVIC

7 “The religion I was born in”: forgetting Catholicism and remembering the king in Donne’s Devotions

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DAVID J. BAKER

8 Legends of oblivion: enchantment and enslavement in Book 6 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

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ELIZABETH MAZZOLA

PART IV

Localities 9 Nomadic Eros: remapping knowledge in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

135 137

PHILIPPA BERRY

10 “Unless you could teach me to forget”: spectatorship, self-forgetting, and subversion in antitheatrical literature and As You Like It

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ZACKARIAH LONG

11 Reading reformed: Spenser and the problem of the English library

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JENNIFER SUMMIT

Bibliography Index

179 193

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Figures

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4 5 6 7 8

“Memory.” Richard Day, Booke of Christian Praiers (London, 1608). Private collection. “Still Life with a Skull and Writing Quill.” Pieter Claesz (Dutch, 1628). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1949 (49.107). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Owl in “Memento Mori” emblem. George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes (London, 1635). Private collection. Frontispiece. Walter Ralegh, History of the World (London, 1614). Private collection. Allegory. Attributed to Hans Holbein. With kind permission, the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh. Head-letter “A.” Alexander Ross, History of the World, Second Part (London, 1652). Private collection. Head-letter “C.” Hans Holbein, Ptolemeii Geographicae (Lyons, 1535). Courtesy The Newberry Library, Chicago. Totenalphabet, “V.” Facsimile reprint of Holbein’s Initial-Buchstaben mit dem Totentanz (Göttingen, 1849). Private collection.

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Contributors

David J. Baker is Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i. He is the author of Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell and the Question of Britain (1997) and co-editor of British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (2002). Philippa Berry is Fellow and Director of Studies in English at King’s College, University of Cambridge. Her most recent books are Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies (1999), and Textures of Renaissance Knowledge (2003), co-edited with Margaret Tudeau-Clayton. William E. Engel is a freelance author and teacher, independent scholar and educational consultant. His publications include Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England (1995), Death and Drama in Renaissance England (2002), and entries for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of the Renaissance and Reformation. Elizabeth D. Harvey teaches English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and Renaissance Texts (1992), co-editor of Women and Reason (1992) and Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (1990), and editor of Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (2002). Christopher Ivic is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY, Potsdam. His articles on cultural identities in early modern Britain and Ireland have appeared in Ariel, Genre, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Zackariah Long is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Virginia. His dissertation, The Mnemonic Subject: Memory and Cultural Crisis in English Renaissance Theater, explores how early modern mnemonic experience was reconfigured in the wake of key social upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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Contributors ix Elizabeth Mazzola, Associate Professor of English at CCNY, has written essays on Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart, and a book entitled The Pathology of the English Renaissance: Holy Ghosts and Sacred Remains (1998). A study of the Sidneys is forthcoming from Palgrave. Garrett A. Sullivan Jr, Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, is the author of The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage. His current book project focuses on forgetting, memory, and subjectivity in early modern drama.

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Jennifer Summit is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Stanford University. She is the author of Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (2000) and articles on medieval and early modern topics. Amanda Watson is a Lecturer in English at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the relationships between poetry and the arts of memory in early modern England. Grant Williams is Assistant Professor of English at Nipissing University. His articles on corporeal fantasies in early modern rhetoric, medical discourse, and literature have appeared in Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, ELH, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Modern Language Association for accepting Grant Williams’s session on “Lethe’s Legacies” in 1997, to the International Spenser Society for accepting a workshop co-chaired by Christopher Ivic and Garrett Sullivan on memory and forgetting in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and View of the Present State of Ireland at the “Place of Spenser: Words, Worlds, Works” conference in 2001, and to The Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies (GEMCS) for accepting William Engel’s panel “Sites of Forgetting in Shakespeare and Spenser: Touring the Storehouse of Memory” at the “Memory and Ritual” conference in 2002. We want to thank Nipissing University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, both of which have generously funded the preliminary research of this volume, and The Folger Shakespeare Library, which provided Grant Williams with a research fellowship in 2002, enabling him to make use of its collections. Many thanks to Paul Stevens for his support during the early stages of this project. Two essays in this volume are republished from earlier versions. A different version of Elizabeth Mazzola’s “Legends of Oblivion: enchantment and enslavement in Book 6 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene” appeared as “Working Postulates and Humanist Promises: Slavery and Mythology in The Faerie Queene,” Soundings, 82.3–4 (Fall 1999): 465–80. Jennifer Summit’s “Reading Reformed: Spenser and the problem of the English library” first appeared as “Monuments and Ruins: Spenser and the Problem of the English Library,” ELH, 70:1 (2003), 1–34 © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Introduction Sites of forgetting in early modern English literature and culture Grant Williams and Christopher Ivic

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A volume purporting to examine forgetting in early modern culture may elicit accusations of methodological irresponsibility: of indulging in a poststructural paradox whose actual scholarly value deteriorates rapidly once the initial shine of astonishment has worn off. Even if contemporary relations between history and memory have vacillated between alliance and antagonism, “[m]emory,” as Jacques Le Goff claims, “is the raw material of history” and “seeks to save the past in order to serve the present and future” (Le Goff 1992: xi, 99). How, then, can one recover forgetting from the past, when common sense dictates that the forgotten is by its very nature irrecoverable? If it were recoverable, it would be a remembrance. Augustine agonized over this conundrum in his Confessions, realizing that forgetting is at once the “absence of memory” and – inexplicably and incomprehensibly – something to be remembered. His metaphysical bewilderment would, however, vanish if he did not assume forgetting to be a privation and memory to be an allencompassing field – as he says, “a vast, immeasurable sanctuary” (Augustine 1982: 222, 216). There is much more to forgetting and conversely much less to memory than meets the eye. Lethe’s Legacies strives to move beyond the paradox inherent in the closed dialectic between the presence and absence of memory. Memory is not a totalizing field, and forgetting is neither the outside nor a lack within such an idealized field. Forgetting’s significant presence in early modern culture may be discerned in Alexander Ross’s seventeenth-century commentary on classical mythology, Mystagogus Poeticus. Ross assigns four interpretations to Lethe, the river of oblivion in Hades: first, “Lethe,” that river from which souls would drink before entering their new bodies, means for him the oblivion enjoyed by the departed saints who no longer recall their many miseries, disgraces, and sins suffered while in the world; second, it is an African river, whose underground course gave people the idea that it sprang from hell; third, along with the river Mnemosyne it emblematizes Christian behavior at church, since visitors to the cave of the oracle Trophonius would drink from the two rivers before entering and after leaving, so that they would respectively forget past affairs and remember what the oracle

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had told them; and fourth it is one of the four rivers of hell, each of which symbolizes an aspect of our sinful condition in this hell-like world. For Ross, forgetting occupies neither “no place” nor a single place, but four distinguishable locations: a fiction in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid; a water course in Africa; one of two springs at Trophonius’s cave; and one of four rivers in hell. And these sites, except for the second, are converted further into a Christian topography: heaven, the outside and inside of Church, and the sinful condition of the world. The waters of forgetting spill over into every nook and cranny of the early modern cosmos, even inhabiting different temporalities. Moreover, far from being the negation of memory, forgetting collaborates closely with remembering. The Protestant subject should drink of Lethe before hearing the sermon and should drink of Mnemosyne afterwards – not vice versa – so that he or she will carefully remember what the preacher has said. While he explores the several tributaries of this mythological site, Ross also performs an act of forgetting by way of the early modern rhetorical practice of typology. He converts Lethe, the classical motif, into a type saturated with Christian signification. Forgetting forms fluid, multiple channels, and, as we will see, its legacies are deposited throughout the archive. Determining Lethe’s legacies is the next logical stage in cultural studies’ ongoing inquiry into memory. Summarizing the main assumptions behind the current multidisciplinary research being done in this area, Jens Brockmeier explains that modernity has shaken the traditional notion of memory as “a unitary faculty of the individual, single mind” to the point that “the topic and concept of memory must itself be seen as a culturalhistorical phenomenon” (Brockmeier 2002: 5, 7). In the wake of Foucault’s theories, memory has become “a relational concept” constructed by an array of discourses and practices, observing no major separation between the individual or personal and the social or collective (Brockmeier 2002: 7, 9). But this shift to see memory immanent within and not transcendent to culture should have a seismic impact on our understanding of forgetting. Forgetting, too, must circulate within culture, possessing its own discourses and practices; it can no longer remain the negative space of an obsolete model of memory. Although he admits no principal separation between remembering and forgetting, Brockmeier fails to pursue the implications that “the emergence of a new post-positivist research paradigm in the study of memory” has for forgetting (Brockmeier 2002: 9, 8). Discussions of cultural memory, even when acknowledging forgetting’s formative power, neglect to determine its presence and place within historical, social, and textual activity.1 This volume charts out a territory that can be distinguished from two flourishing areas in cultural studies, despite offering numerous opportunities for cross-fertilization. Locating cultural forgetting is not synonymous with the recovery of the forgotten. What Peter Burke calls “social amnesia,” that

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Introduction 3 is, the unofficial, as well as the official, acts of censoring the past (Burke 1997: 56–9), receives in one form or another considerable treatment by cultural historians. The retrieval of counter-memories has flourished since Foucault’s genealogical method offered an alternative to traditional historiography.2 It seeks to rescue the marginalized, the disenfranchised, and the silenced from an official historical record oblivious to issues of gender, race, and class. It fills in history’s gaps. Neither is locating cultural forgetting synonymous with examining the passage from psychic pain to full remembering. The area of trauma studies attempts to understand the various healing processes through which social groups make sense of the senseless violence of the past.3 Narrative plays a prominent role in converting unspeakably traumatic events into cultural memory, where the traumatized party finds meaning (Bal 1999: viii–x). Generally, under the counter-memory model or under the trauma model, forgetting appears as violence, a negative cultural force subordinate to memory. It is the obverse of a liberating act of remembering. Forgetting, though often traumatic for social agents, performs vital and complex cultural work, at times ideologically suspect, at other moments subversive, yet not restricted to a single political valence. Its relationship to and circumscription by culture overrides its traditional subordination to memory. Far from hindering remembrance, it is very much the silent yet active partner of memory in the social sphere. This is certainly true of early modern England, where a Protestant English identity struggled to emerge from the shadow of a Catholic and British past. The (re)formation of national subjects in early modern England owed much to amnesia. Prompted by biblical injunctions on memory, personal narratives efface earlier events, earlier desires, and earlier subjectivities. At the beginning of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian breaks down after reading “the book,” presumably the Bible – but also a grim reminder of the book of destruction, in which are inscribed humankind’s sins in anticipation of judgment day and irrevocable oblivion (Bunyan 1960: 8). His reaction to this ultimate book compels him to leave behind his friends and family. God’s terrifying power to remember, frequently figured as a book throughout the King James version, doubtlessly moves Donne to pray in Holy Sonnet Nine that a “heavenly Lethean flood” drown his “sinnes blacke memorie” (Donne 1984: 312). Both Bunyan and Donne illustrate biblical conversion and repentance to be early modern practices of forgetting. But this forgetting is not absolute. As David Baker argues, Donne’s own conversion from Catholicism demonstrates a complex, fully dialectical interplay of forgetting and remembering, whose theological and political implications reverberate throughout his corpus. Collective identity, too, can be formed through acts of forgetting; indeed, as Ernest Renan has famously remarked, forgetting is “a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” (Renan 1990: 11). Drawing upon both Renan’s and Benedict Anderson’s reflections on the constitutive power of social forgetting,

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Christopher Ivic’s essay explores the ways in which unofficial history – in this case, 1 Henry IV – remembers/forgets the unbrotherly Wars of the Roses as reassuringly fratricidal. At times national amnesia can be quite deliberate, even an act of legislation. On 11 July 1660, two months after Charles II ascended to the throne, the House of Commons passed the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, which exempted from punishment those who had served the authorities under the interregnum (Sawday 1992: 183).4 On the one hand, the act provides generous amnesty to the King’s subjects, but, on the other hand, it attempts to blot out the rebellion by enforcing the forgetting of all treasonous events. When forgetting holds an antagonistic relation to memory in early modern culture, it does not negate culture, but undermines the cultural dominant with its own discursive presence. In an effort to bolster their status in uncertain economic times, the Elizabethan aristocracy intensified heraldic activity, developed elaborate funereal rituals, and built expensive tombs (Gittings 1988: 13, 166); it should come as no surprise, then, that a culture whose hegemonic order exhibited anxieties over the decay of memory should pathologize forgetting. Part of this pathologization is generated by medical discourse. Forgetting takes the form of a particular disease, called lethargy, which Philip Barrough’s Method of Physick connects to sluggishness and an irresistible desire to sleep. Generally, physiological forgetting results from the bodily imbalance of humors, which for Lemnius’s Touchstone of Complexions may be induced by either an excess of cold/moist temperature or an excess of cold/dry. This disease’s various embodiments and its numerous moral implications engender, as Garrett Sullivan’s essay traces on and off the stage, “a kind of rhizomatic chain with a subterranean logic all its own.” A good part of this pathologization is also generated by biblical discourse, which stigmatizes forgetting as a socially subversive transgression. Because the Old Testament encodes submission to God’s life-giving covenant in terms of remembering his commandments, forgetting encapsulates both nationalistic and individualistic trespass: it leads to both the wanton idolatry of Israel in Deuteronomy and the shameful disobedience of the son in Proverbs. To not remember in covenantal practice is tantamount to breaking an agreement with the father, attesting to the importance of memory for ensuring patriarchal continuity. For the forgetful, there is only one punishment to fit the crime: God threatens to blot the transgressor out. In the public narratives of early modern culture, effacement carries the scriptural overtones of irrevocable punitive action too. Milton’s famous lines on the devils’ erasure from divine history – “Though of thir Names in heav’nly Records now / Be no memorial, blotted out and ras’d / By thir Rebellion, from the Books of Life” – resonate politically throughout Restoration historicizing (1.361–3). When not collaborating with or directly undermining memory’s cultural work, forgetting may be seen to operate as a force in its own right, exposing the fragility of the social order in early modern literature. The phrase “to

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Introduction 5 forget oneself” bears witness to the anxious fluidity and instability of selves in the period: as one of the OED’s entries indicates, the phrase means not only “to lose remembrance of one’s station, position, or character; to lose sight of the requirements of dignity, propriety, or decorum” but also “to behave unbecomingly.” It is a cultural performance, not the negation of a mnemonic practice. That this sense of forgetting oneself pervades English literature cannot be overstated: in her examination of early modern debates over rhyme, Amanda Watson argues that forgetting often represents the overwhelming effect poetry has on the reader and the writer’s subjectivity; and, as Zackariah Long observes, throughout antitheatrical texts, the stage threatens to make spectators forget themselves, too, because its erotic delight induces in them degenerative mental/moral habits that they take home with them. Notwithstanding such an accusation, early modern plays often dramatize the impact forgetting has on the self.5 In Shakespeare’s history plays references to memory are frequently accompanied by a monumentalizing homosocial rhetoric of brotherhood. This rhetoric is evident in Henry V: the “awak[ing of] remembrance” (1.2.115) serves to rouse Henry, and, although “[o]ld men forget,” those “rouse[d]” at “the name of Crispian” “shall be remembered” (4.3.49, 43, 59). Forgetting, in contrast, entails a proscription from participating in history, one that is often ethnic and gender specific: Henry likens the forgotten – those without a tomb – to a “Turkish mute” (1.2.232); he declares that the men excluded from the feast of Crispin will “hold their manhoods cheap” (4.3.66). To forget oneself is not simply a lapse of memory; it often signals a slide from one social category to another, in the case of Henry V for instance, from civility to incivility or from masculinity to femininity. Its ubiquity raises profound questions about the crucial role forgetting plays in pre-modern notions of social, racial, and gendered identities. Instrumental in managing the cultural other as well as the cultural self, forgetting sustains early modern colonial discourse. As Elizabeth Mazzola argues through Book 6 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Renaissance humanism cannot accommodate everyone into its cultural project of rebuilding the Old World through the New; despite being central to England’s economic expansion, slavery is pushed to the margins of Renaissance myth-making. When it is acknowledged, forgetting fuels disciplinary procedures for maintaining social control, betraying the ideological fear of the disintegration of cultural reference points. Take for example, Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, which insists that Ireland’s Gaelic inhabitants must learn “to forget [their] Irish nation” (Spenser 1970: 156). Besides calling attention to the ideological uses of forgetting, Spenser’s View evinces an acute anxiety about cultural amnesia, about forgetting one’s civilized, aristocratic, English self. Eudoxus, one of the View’s interlocutors, expresses shock that an Old Englishman could “forget his own nature and forgo his own nation,” that

6 Grant Williams and Christopher Ivic the Old English “should in so short space quite forget their country and their own names” (Spenser 1970: 48, 64). Of course, cultural anxiety about forgetting oneself haunts English discourse on Ireland: in his Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued, Sir John Davies voices an identical lament, and Donne’s epistolary warning to Sir Henry Wotton – “[l]et not your soule . . . Itself unto the Irish negligence submit” (Donne 1984: 217) – betrays fear of another potentially lost English soul in Ireland. To forget oneself entails a degeneration into a cultural other known for its deterioration of civility or gender. Witness, again, Spenser’s View, which recounts the story of the Lydians, a “warlike nation” that “forgot their former fierceness” and became “most tender and effeminate” (Spenser 1970: 69, 70). The idea that forgetting amounts to a transformation rather than annihilation figures prominently in early modern treatises on ethics, which blend medical, psychological, and theological discourses in their consideration of subjectivity. These treatises, such as Pierre La Primaudaye’s French Academie and Pierre Charron’s Of Wisdome, regard the quintessential care of the soul as nosce te ipsum, while the abuse of this care is not simply the ignorance of the self, but the forgetting of the self. Thomas Rogers’s Philosophicall Discourse, Entituled, the Anatomie of the Minde warns, Knowe thy self, and thou shalt not offend: forget thy self, and what wilt thou not do? Neither reason from wickednesse, nor religion from ungratiousnesse can hold thee backe. Art thou an Aristides for uprightnes? forget thy selfe, and what art thou but an Acteon for couetousnesse? A Lucretia for chastetie? forget thy selfe, and thou shalt be a Messalina for incontinencie. A Caesar for clemencie? Forget thy self, and thou art a Nero for crueltie. (Rogers 1576: Preface) What is fascinating about Rogers’s use of the phrase “forget thy self” is that it does not have as its dialectical counterpart an act of remembering but rather the famous adage found on the temple at Delphi and made famous by Socrates.6 Forgetting is a contrary philosophical attitude that the wayward subject chooses to take toward his or her self and thus toward others. In The Optick Glasse of Humors, a treatise connecting the different complexions of bodies to ethical behavior, Thomas Walkington calls Arachne, Marsyas, and Thamyris “selfe-forgetters” (Walkington 1607: B4r) because these creatures were so tainted with self-love that they dared to compete with the gods. In ethical treatises, forgetting one’s self registers anxiety over the motility of becoming and a concomitant acceptance of the stasis of being. Playing out the logic of these treatises, the most astounding enactment of the power of forgetting one’s self occurs in Paradise Lost when Satan spies Eve just before the temptation scene. Stunned by her angelic beauty, he

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Introduction 7 becomes for the moment “stupidly good, of enmity disarm’d, / Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge,” until he recollects his thoughts and realizes “with what sweet / Compulsion thus transported to forget / What hither brought us” (9. 465–6, 473–5). Whereas forgetting one’s self usually means ethical deterioration, here forgetting is instrumental in actually making the devil good – albeit briefly. Despite its frequent pathologization by diverse ideological programs, forgetting performs necessary work in a culture strained by an obsession with remembering the past. In attempting to revive classical antiquity, early modern culture not only invented techniques and institutions for storing and retrieving the past – from the research imperatives of antiquarianism to the creation and development of the printing press, libraries, and museums – but also restored to prominence classical literature and rhetoric and, by doing so, renewed interest in one of the five canons of classical oratory, the art of memory. This mnemonic technique allows the practitioner to associate things to be remembered with images and to locate these images in an orderly architectural setting, so that later he or she can retrieve from the images filed in their memorable setting the various things they stand for. As Francis Yates’s landmark study attests, the art of memory does not implement perfunctory mnemonic drudgery for early modern culture, but meaningful labor in many intellectual domains, namely, art, architecture, literature, Ramism, and Renaissance hermeticism. But not everyone put into practice the ars memoriae. Erasmus’s “Art of Learning” seems to distrust it, employing, instead, the notebook method of remembrance, popular with numerous humanists. Yates contends that behind Erasmus’s comments on it in On the Method of Study can be heard Quintilian, who criticizes the art of memory for the double task that the technique imposes upon the natural memory (Quintilian 1961: 11.2.26; Yates 1984: 127). Early modern culture taxes mnemonic systems. The strain exerted on memory reveals itself most forcefully in John Willis’s Mnemonica. Although Willis advocates the implementation of the classical art of memory when writing is unavailable, he brings to this art a striking innovation. Cicero, the first official advocate of the art of memory, denies that the individual memory can be “crushed under a weight of images” because he has met people with unbelievable powers of recollection (Cicero 1996: 2.88.360). Cicero’s incredulity over information overload presumably compels him to imagine an art of forgetting outside his art and only useful, if it were at all possible, to a mnemonic master such as Themistocles (Cicero 1996: 2.74.299–300). Breaking with the Ciceronian art, Willis actually integrates into the art of memory the art of oblivion. For Willis, the art of memory consists of two operations: reposition and deposition. Reposition, basically following Cicero’s chief goals, entails “charging Memory with Noteworthy things,” while deposition involves “discharging things committed to mind” (Willis 1661: 28, 30). Enriching our conceptualization of early modern forgetting, “deposition,” means an “action of depositing, laying

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down, or placing in a more or less permanent or final position,” but specifically means “internment.” It comes from liturgical language, referring to the “placing of a saint’s body or relics in a new resting-place,” according to the OED. In an earlier treatise, the reason he gives for this interment is clear: “that the minde not be charged with the burthen of them [things committed to memory] longer then needs must” (Willis 1973: 97). The architecture of the artificial memory, what was called a memory palace, should have its memorial places emptied regularly in order to receive new, more important images (Willis 1661: 130). Willis says, “Deposition . . . is not unlike expunging writing out of Table-Books: If therefore there be any Art of Oblivion (as some affirm) it may be referred hither” (Willis 1661: 30–1). The art of memory structurally needs the art of oblivion; otherwise, corpse-like images will overburden the reliquary, the sacred memory palace. Captured in the phrase “expunging writing out of Table-Books,” Willis’s sense of the unbearable burden of the past no doubt arises from wider social anxieties over the uncontrollable production of knowledge. In a telling fantasy of what might have happened had all the works of the ancients been preserved, Louis Leroy’s Of the Interchangeable Course, or Variety of Things in the Whole World imagines that “we should haue no other moueables in our house but bookes: we should be constrained to go, sit, and lie vpon bookes.” Nonetheless, in spite of the ravages of time, the number of books grows to the point that “the age of man could not suffice to read, not onely the writings in many disciplines, but in one particular: and seldome are the Inuentories found perfect” (Leroy 1594: 128v). No one can master even a single discipline since the plethora of books makes a comprehensive survey inconceivable. As Grant Williams argues by way of Robert Burton and Thomas Browne, mnemonic culture, overrun by the printing press, has reached such a point of saturation that it materializes forgetting in what he calls “textual crudities.” Thus obsolescence is seen to perform the work of relieving the encumbered memory, and even at times, rather questionably, of decontaminating knowledge. Recalling the parable of the tares in Matthew 13, Roger Ascham’s Scholemaster looks to the example of God for separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak: But behold the goodnesse of Gods prouidence for learning: all olde authors and sectes of Philosophy, which were fondest in opinion, and rudest in vtterance, as Stoickes and Epicures, first contemned of wise men, and after forgotten of all men, be so consumed by tymes, as they be now, not onelie out of vse, but also out of memorie of man: which thing, I surelie thinke, will shortlie chance, to the whole doctrine and all the bookes of phantasticall Anabaptistes and Friers, and of the beastlie Libertines and Monkes. (Ascham 1970: 266)

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Introduction 9 God, a divine thresher, employs forgetting to keep learning free of those fantasy-ridden ideas that are capable of leading men astray. He bases his judgment on the quality of writing, since a decorous style guarantees honesty and wisdom. Ascham seems to suggest that like the divine teacher the earthly teacher should forget writings that neglect the correspondence between matter and words. Jennifer Summit studies in detail the Protestant work performed by the obsolescence Ascham hints at: she finds that postReformation book collectors build the early modern English library through “a lectio of suspicion,” a selective reading process that, forgetting even as it preserves, separates the integumentum of truth from the chaff. In medical discourse, forgetting may inhabit non-pathological sites too. In Helkiah Crooke’s anatomy of the human body, erotic and procreative amnesia facilitates the continued propagation of the species by making women forget the pain of child birth and, as Elizabeth Harvey skillfully shows, produces Crooke’s own treatise, where it is a generative principle, facilitating intertextual couplings with Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Generally speaking, humoralism helps to explain why forgetting may counteract the ill effects of remembering in early modern culture. While dealing with the preservatives and aids to the faculty of memory, Lemnius’s Touchstone of Complexions acknowledges that there are many things that settle in man’s mind against his will – many of which are pernicious to his person. Lemnius recalls from Cicero’s De Oratore Themistocles’ desire for an art of oblivion rather than an art of memory, admitting the necessity yet the difficulty of eradicating deep-seated impressions, such as grudges (Lemnius 1581: 122r–v). His comments effectively contextualize the disturbing pathology of remembering in Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies, where duty to the victims means retaliating with murder. Besides vengeance, love is seen to be a form of pathological remembering in early modern culture. When Benvolio urges the lovesick Romeo to forget Rosaline, Romeo laments ironically, “O, teach me how I should forget to think” (1.1.226). He cannot be taught because lovesickness puts down deep roots into the memory. In sonnets, the lover often communicates through the language of the heart his mnemonic obsession with the image of the beloved: in sonnet 45, Spenser encourages his beloved to leave her mirror to see the “fayre idea” of her “celestiall hew” within his heart (Spenser 1947: 45.7); in sonnet 24, Shakespeare tells the young man how he has engraved his “beauty’s form in the table” of his heart (24.2). Early modern writers regard the persisting imprint of the beloved’s image as a symptom of love melancholy. Robert Burton says, “as he that is bitten with a mad dogge, thinkes all he sees dogges, dogges in his meat, dogges in his dish, dogges in his drinke, his mistris is in his eyes, ears, heart, in all his senses.” Conversely, when a lover has been cured of the malady he has effectively “forgotten” his beloved as “if he had taken a dramme of oblivion” (Burton 1997: 156, 216). Thus both Ferrand’s Erotomania and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of

10 Grant Williams and Christopher Ivic Melancholy list in their sections on remedies of love melancholy bodies of water renown for their restorative properties (Ferrand 1990: 347–8; Burton 1997: 241–2). Effecting a cure by permanently cooling love’s flames, certain fountains, lakes, and seashores are symbolically tributary of the underworld river, Lethe, since the newly dead were obliged to drink its waters in order to forget their previous lives. And yet, these tributaries may wash the early modern subject into deeper waters of eroticism. As demonstrated by Philippa Berry’s consideration of nomadic identity in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fluid geography outside Athens is a radical site of forgetting, disruptive to civic duty and conducive to desire and fantasy. Research into forgetting not only marks the next stage in cultural studies’ continuing engagement with memory, but, as seen by its dynamic cultural work in English literature and culture, also reconceptualizes the early modern archive, that is, the space of documents with which scholarship is preoccupied. Contemporary archival space actually replicates the structure of the memory palace, the mental edifice built by the art of memory. Patrick Hutton’s History as an Art of Memory has evinced that this classical art operates in the methodology of contemporary French historiography, where historians return not to the “ideas” but to the imagery and loci (places) of yesteryear for composing their historical accounts. Separating themselves from the history of ideas, the enterprises of Foucault and Pierre Nora, in particular, reconstruct an archeology of memory that conceives history as having existence in the material form of documents, representations, and artifacts. Nora seems to conflate the archive with the memory palace: “Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image” (Nora 1989: 13). A rather literal yet notable illustration in early modern scholarship is Jonathan D. Spence’s Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. Spence organizes his biography of the Italian Jesuit’s life around mnemonic techniques that Ricci taught in China. Hutton’s thesis that the art of memory shapes the contemporary archive applies equally – if not more strongly – to cultural studies within early modern scholarship.7 Two recent major statements on cultural memory illustrate the prominence of this archive. In Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass take issue with the disavowal of the object from historical inquiry. Their cultural materialist account elucidates what the history of ideas could not make sense of; for example, the vestiarian controversy in Elizabethan England may be understood not by theology but by the constitutive power of clothing, the object’s mnemonic significance ( Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 4). Their account regards social memory in terms of fabric, clothes, and textile craft, whose materiality they recover from the archive: household inventories, portrait pictures, woodcuts, engravings, textiles, literary texts, and theatrical documents help

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Introduction 11 them to reveal the role clothing plays in early modern processes of identity formation. In his study of Hamlet and culture, Stephen Greenblatt cares little for the history of ideas when sketching out purgatory. He is not concerned with a mental notion, whether a fraudulent superstition or a theological doctrine; he is concerned, instead, with purgatory as a production of archival documentation, and so his study draws attention to the “rituals of everyday life” (prayers, masses, and almsgiving) and artifacts (votive plaques, suffrages, statutes, images, and fables) by which the living remembered the dead. Purgatory is a manifestation of cultural memory whose “highly tangible results” and startling power are recovered from the material practices and discourses of the archive (Greenblatt 2001: 16, 38). In an archive already structured upon the art of memory, there is no room for forgetting. As a consequence of this archival bias, the materiality of documentation, whether discourses, practices, or artifacts, becomes the substrate of the cultural imaginary, early modern culture’s subjective and collective identities, desires, anxieties, and fantasies. In the case of Jones and Stallybrass, “clothes as material memories [are] constitutive of the subject” ( Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 269); in the case of Greenblatt, purgatory, a powerful expression of early modern memory and a “great imaginary construction,” is a product of a materialist sounding cultural “poetics” that manifests itself at once in manuscript illuminations, narrative accounts, and poetic representations and generates “elemental human fears, longings, and fantasies” (Greenblatt 2001: 38, 45). These two studies presuppose that the archive can materialize or make visible the cultural imaginary – that identity and its attendant postures, guises, and ruses may be historically reclaimed through acts of mnemonic retrieval.8 In this regard, cultural materialism and new historicism cling doggedly to the empiricist prejudice of observation. However, if forgetting is fully dialectical with remembering, and if we turn not to Yates but to Willis who claims that the art of oblivion is integrated with the art of memory, then the early modern archive can no longer be said to materialize the cultural imaginary. A culture’s identities, desires, and fantasies cannot be captured in the imprint of a mnemonic image. And so forgetting divides the archive against itself, which is to say that the cultural imaginary straddles two sites: the material archive and the site created by its acts of oblivion, that is, its “depositions,” to use Willis’s term. Deposits are made to the archive and to its crypt, the archival other, insofar as the process of constructing the self always requires the forgetting of the other. One such study of the depositions of the early modern archive is Elizabeth Mazzola’s Pathology of the English Renaissance. Her project explores the processes of “cultural burial and retrieval” whereby “the sacred symbols and practices” repudiated by Protestants “still powerfully organized the English moral imagination in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Mazzola 1998: 2, 3). What has become forgotten, such as Arthurian legend, purgatory, and transubstantiation, still exerts a formative influence on culture.

12 Grant Williams and Christopher Ivic Forgetting thus participates in the cultural imaginary, not merely as a counter-memory waiting to be retrieved, but as an active yet suppressed part of the process of identity formation itself. To locate the cultural imaginary, then, we cannot naively gravitate toward the visibility of the material record but need to consider the work of forgetting, whose displacements, exclusions, and “deposits” make possible early modern identities. In this respect, forgetting ruptures the narcissism of archival memory, which assumes to command a view of the cultural imaginary. But forgetting reconceptualizes the early modern archive in another way. Because it may itself take the form of documents, practices, and discourses, forgetting challenges the methodological principle that the archive can be converted smoothly into a memory palace. The archive does something which is inconceivable to the classical art of memory: it materializes oblivion. William Engel’s examination of oblivion through its emblematic and iconographic incarnations eloquently bears witness to the richness of the material deposits of forgetting. One of the few books to consider Lethe’s legacies, Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler’s Art of Forgetting brings together a collection of essays on art, anthropology, and architecture, each of which shares the common problem of “how artefacts,” particularly monuments and memorials, “constitute part of the process of social forgetting.” Among the variety of reasons for casting doubt on “the general assumption that material objects can take the place of the mental form of memory” (Forty 1999: 8, 4), Forty focuses on three: ephemeral monuments of non-Western societies, which are made only to be abandoned to decay, suggest that collective memory does not dwell solely in the material; Freud’s inversion of the Aristotelian model of memory indicates that “physical artefacts can no longer be regarded as analogues of memory, because mental material [is] not subject to the same processes of decay as objects in the phenomenal world” (Forty 1999: 6); and the difficulties of remembering the Holocaust have exposed the inadequacy of conventional memorial practices. The Art of Forgetting’s well-argued skepticism of the unproblematic equivalence between memory and materiality extends to the archive. The mnemonic materiality of the document, the power of the printed image to stand for a memory, is tenuously held in place by an assumption often made in Western culture: memory is preserved in matter. To sever this connection it only takes the shifting of the cultural frame, the adoption of another theoretical model of memory, or the recognition of a crisis in commemoration. Forgetting quickly deterritorializes memory’s occupation of archival space. Forgetting’s prominence in early modern culture and its potential to reconceptualize the early modern archive challenge received notions and narratives about periodization. Signifying a “rebirth” of ancient culture, the “Renaissance” etymologically encourages scholars to associate with the period

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Introduction 13 the act of remembering. This association seems only natural in light of humanism’s agenda to revive the works of classical antiquity. Recent scholarship indebted to Yates’s Art of Memory has gone far in productively exploring the ways in which a mnemonic episteme or mentality may distinguish premodernity from modernity. Mary Carruthers’s influential work, namely The Book of Memory, along with The Craft of Thought, advances the contention “that medieval culture was fundamentally memorial, to the same profound degree that modern culture in the West is documentary” (Carruthers 1990: 8). Another contemporary study that attempts to recover a mnemonic paradigm from pre-modernity as though modernity has lost touch with the past is Engel’s Mapping Mortality. He wants his book to provide “contemporary readers with a key for recovering and understanding – in its early modern context – the epistemological assumptions of a mnemonically oriented principle of aesthetics,” which he places “at the core” of Renaissance culture (Engel 1995: 11, 3). Likewise, Lina Bolzoni’s Gallery of Memory “attempts to meet the challenge of . . . [the] cultural strangeness and distance” of “a cultural code far removed from our own” (Bolzoni 2001: xiv). The cultural code she examines is a mnemonic one, which gives the modern reader access to a distinctive mode of perceiving words and images in the print literature of sixteenth-century Italy. As groundbreaking as these studies have been in explicating the strangeness of pre-modern memory activity, the epistemic break assumed by them plays too readily into contemporary claims of modernity’s trouble with memory (Terdiman 1993; Antze and Lambek 1996: iv; Forty 1999: 7; Brockmeier 2002: 7). Cultural studies creates a general memory crisis in the modern/postmodern epoch only by projecting onto pre-modernity a trouble free or at least an unreflective mnemonic mentality. Nora’s influential work has done much to hypostatize memory into a pre-modern phenomemon, “unself-conscious, commanding, all-powerful, spontaneously actualizing.” In his view, modernity has seen history detach itself from memory because democratization, industrialization, and mass media have created an allencompassing historical perception, universal in its authority and relativizing in its perspective. If cultural memory can still exist in contemporary society, it can be found only in lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, since the real environments of memory, milieux de mémoire, have gone the way of peasant culture and close-knit communities based upon “daily devotion to rituals of tradition” (Nora 1989: 8). Though it would be an exaggeration to claim that cultural studies accepts uncritically Nora’s romanticization of memory, his work effectively points out that a meta-narrative of crisis depends upon a meta-narrative of stability and homogeneity – at the expense of early modernity. Forgetting challenges the meta-narrative that a memory crisis distinguishes modernity from the Renaissance, noted for its solid mnemonic episteme. As we have seen in early modern literature, forgetting not only

14 Grant Williams and Christopher Ivic struggles with but also collaborates with remembering; it makes possible the triumphs of memory even as it discomfits those triumphs. The conception of the “Renaissance” is itself the achievement of a formidably deliberate act of forgetting, for it is in this period that the previous centuries separating it from the collapse of antiquity are termed the “Middle Ages” as though this time were obstructive, not productive (Ferguson 1948: 73–7). Forgetting’s many channels through the episteme, then, open up fissures of micro-narratives that undermine the stability of remembering and anticipate – even minimize – modernity’s grandiose tectonic shifts. In complicating the mnemonic episteme, forgetting inevitably disrupts Renaissance historiography, crystallizing in one concept the recent critical revisions of this period. In fact, it is one of the foundational categories that separates the competing investigation of early modernity from that of the more traditional Renaissance Studies: whereas the “Renaissance,” as a time of rebirth, dwells on recovering and recollecting classical antiquity, early modernity (indeed early coloniality), as an anticipation of modernity, clearly dwells on obliterating the past.9 To heighten this difference further, one may appeal to the historiographies of Burckhardt and Nietzsche. Whereas Burckhardt, embodying Nietzsche’s notion of the antiquarian, memorializes the Renaissance, Nietzsche recognizes in history the art and power of forgetting to which he applies the term “the unhistorical” (Nietzsche 1983: 62–3). In contradistinction to current scholarship on memory and to a historiography oblivious to the unhistorical, this volume’s essays historicize and theorize sites of forgetting in early modern English literature. Attending to these sites means more than simply offering localized re-readings; it permits scholars to rethink received meta-narratives about the period and thereby promises to challenge and expand the present critical vocabulary with which we understand early modern English culture and its literature. As suggested by the titular reference to Lethe, this volume plays upon Nora’s concept of the “site of memory.” Nora makes no bones about deriving his concept from Yates’s Art of Memory (Nora 1989: 25), whose tracing of the traditions of mnemotechnia demonstrates the importance of loci (places) for storing and organizing images. Moving beyond the oxymoron inherent in the closed dialectic between remembering and not remembering, this volume of essays strives to communicate that forgetting consists of sites too and that these sites show forgetting to be a formative force, troubling memory with its counter materiality and spatiality. The volume is thus organized around four parts, each of which concentrates on an overdetermined site of forgetting apposite to the study of early modern culture: embodiments, signs, narratives, and localities. The considerable overlap among the parts promotes a view of forgetting neither confined to a single discourse nor dominated by a single concept. And so all sections consider forgetting’s active involvement in the construction of the cultural imaginary – how it fosters

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Introduction 15 subjective and collective identities, desires, and fantasies foundational to early modern culture. What may be perceived as undue overlap in the volume occurs with Shakespeare and Spenser, who appear repeatedly in the volume’s analyses of forgetting. This attention to Shakespeare and Spenser, by no means exhaustive, is completely justified considering that they have enjoyed a memorializing status nothing short of the ancient institution of the mnemon. The mnemon was a person charged with reminding the hero of his duty to his divine mission but later was employed by Greek cities as a magistrate who maintained the memory of the past for religious and juridical decisionmaking (Le Goff 1992: 63). Spenser’s self-proclaimed mission to memorialize Elizabeth I and Shakespeare’s dramaturgy of chronicling England’s past qualify them for this office. Set apart from the rest of Elizabethan memorializers and chroniclers, they, however, have reached a sort of arch mnemon status in early modern scholarship insofar as Eumnestes’s library in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene (Anderson 1989; Mazzola 1995; Curran 1996) and Hamlet’s musings on remembering his father’s ghost have become critical touchstones for discussions of early modern memory (Dawson 1999: 63–7; Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 262–8; Greenblatt 2001). To recover forgetting’s active involvement in early modern culture means contesting Spenser’s and Shakepeare’s status as cultural mnemons. The first part of the volume explores the body as a site of forgetting. Although everyone recognizes Lethe as one of the rivers of the classical underworld, few know that this river is named after Oblivion, the daughter of Eris and in some myths the mother of the Charities. To study the embodiment of Lethe thus includes tracing its mythological and iconographical incarnations and its representations in medical, anatomical, and physiological discourses. The second part of the volume concerns signs of forgetting, rhetorical, and poetic. Arguing against the possibility of an art of forgetting in a now classic essay, Umberto Eco’s “An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!” reasons that an art of memory is a semiotics, and a semiotics, by definition, is a mechanism that makes present an absent thing. An art of forgetting can, therefore, never make something deliberately absent with a technique designed to make something present. Nonetheless, Lethe’s Legacies takes issue with Eco’s argument that forgetting cannot materialize semiotic forms, especially because he relies on the contested presupposition of intentionality, as though the art of memory, like rhetoric, were under the total control of subjectivity. The third section of Lethe’s Legacies explores early modern narratives of identity formation, reformation, and deformation. Benedict Anderson observes with nations what he observes with persons: “All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives” (Anderson 1991: 204). In order for a new identity to be posited,

16 Grant Williams and Christopher Ivic numerous older narratives of the nation, religion, and community had to be erased or rewritten. The final part of the volume comprises essays that consider localities of forgetting, ranging from the imaginary geography of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the theater and the early modern library. In Western literature, two instructive loci classici depict the locality of forgetting as threatening to one’s sense of self and ultimately one’s genealogy. Encountered by Odysseus, the lotus eaters were people who eating of the lotus tree forgot their friends and homes and, losing any desire to return to their native country, abandoned themselves to luxurious lethargy in Lotus-land. These hospitable people tempt Odysseus and his crew to eat the Lotus fruit so that their guests will join them as permanent emigrants. Ancestral degeneracy through location also occurs in the story of the Poseidonians. The Poseidonians were once of Greek origin until, losing their native tongue and customs, they became barbarized as Tyrrhenians. According to Athenaeus, they still observe one Greek festival – a veritable festival of forgetting – during which they call up from memory the remnants of their heritage and then lamenting their loss go their separate ways. Geographical alterity threatens to dislocate the self by inducing an irreversible amnesia. The ever-mutating complex of forgetting and memory in early modern literature offers scholars rich material for revising the parameters of mnemonic culture. Not only does forgetting struggle and collude with remembering to produce culture but it also forms its own images, places, materialities, and practices. To recover these sites in early modern literature helps to reconceptualize the archive and complicates a totalizing representation of mnemonic culture, and, as a result, problematizes easy scholarly and historiographical access to what that culture and our culture consider to be worthy of remembering.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

Although mentioning in their conclusion that “[f]orgetting here is as much an active process as remembering,” the editors of Tense Past neglect to articulate the formative force of forgetting in a volume that purports to attend “to the cultural shaping of memory, to the roles of trope, idiom, narrative, ritual, discipline, power, and social context in its production and reproduction” (Antze and Lambek 1996: xxix, xiii). See the special issue of Representations, “Memory and Counter-Memory” (Davis and Starn 1989). See Caruth 1995 and Antze and Lambek 1996. For a full discussion of Restoration revisioning, see Sawday 1992. For a seminal analysis of the way in which forgetting produces identity in All’s Well That Ends Well, see Sullivan 1999. For a history of this famous adage, see Wilkins 1979. Recent examples abound. One is Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin’s Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence. In their collection of essays, Florentine familial culture is studied through its imagery and materiality – from names and family record books to altarpieces, tombs, and rural residences. Another noteworthy

Introduction 17

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example is Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall’s The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Their collection of essays transforms funeral culture into a memory palace – or, rather, memory tomb – by localizing memory in burial practices, commemorative rituals, popular lore on ghosts, wills, and death imagery. Perhaps Lina Bolzoni’s ambitious Gallery of Memory is the most explicitly indebted to the art of memory: her book aims to show how Camillo’s memory theatre “is taken apart throughout the course of the [sixteenth-] century, and, at the same time, how its different components continue to live together and to blend” in each new literary context (Bolzoni 2001: xvi). David Cressy (1994) approaches national identity in early modern England by materializing memory. A recent collection of essays Material Memories (1999) is founded on the premise that the archive makes visible the cultural imaginary; in particular, Marta Ajmar’s essay in that collection argues that “objects [in the Renaissance household] help us to materialize these otherwise invisible and elusive female presences” (Ajmar 1999: 76). For a critical discussion of the recent terminological shift, see Marcus 1992.

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Part I

Embodiments

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The decay of memory William E. Engel

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Memoria, according to Cicero, is “the firm mental grasp of matter and words” (Cicero 1976: 1.7.9).1 The end of rhetoric concerns the orderly marshaling of words, and yet images set everything in motion. Classical oratory teaches us to “encompass the record of an entire matter by one notation, a single image.” Further, we are advised: to remember this first point, we shall in our first background form an image of the whole matter. We shall picture the man in question. . . . In like fashion we shall set the other counts of the charge in backgrounds successively, following their order, and whenever we wish to remember a point, by properly arranging the patterns of the backgrounds and carefully imprinting the images, we shall easily succeed in calling back to mind what we wish. (Cicero 1999: 3.20.33–4) Picturing, then, understood as thinking through images, is fundamental to memory’s role in using reason to exercise one’s will in the world. The stronger one’s memory, the greater one’s capacity to picture images, and thus to persuade others through rhetoric. As memory decays, however, so does one’s “firm mental grasp of matter and words.” And so rhetoric provides ways to extend natural memory, through places (loci) and images (imagines) (Yates 1984: 6–7). Under the heading of ‘Place, topos, locus,’ Roland Barthes in “The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-mémoire,” confronts “the agonizing question always posed by Rhetoric and which it seeks to answer: what is to be said?” He considers how the metaphoric approach to place is more significant than its abstract definition. Places, he recalls, following Aristotle, are “not arguments themselves but the compartments in which they are arranged” (Barthes 1988: 64, 65). With its reliance on places, memory is subject to the same metaphoric, spatializing processes that are part and parcel of how the rhetorical tradition has enabled – and taught – us to think through images.2

22 William E. Engel The expression “to think through” needs to be construed in a double sense. First, it implies getting to the bottom of something, applying reason to come to a prefigured destination, arriving at the end of an argument. It is also to be understood in both its instrumental and locative senses – which is to say, as a vehicle used for carrying a thought or image to a place where it is safe from being forgotten, where oblivion is not sovereign. Though the shades of difference in meaning between forgetting and oblivion will be fleshed out in what follows, in its particular sense, forgetting is being unable to think of, or to recall, something once known. It has a temporal and personal aspect, for one may remember something at a later time that has been forgotten for the present. Accordingly, forgetting also can connote neglect or heedlessness. Oblivion, though, is broadly speaking a state or quality of something being utterly forgotten, something that once loomed large in consciousness but which now is as if it never were. And this state or quality can pertain to individuals, communities, and even entire civilizations. Oblivion, more so than mere forgetfulness, plays a necessary and urgent role in the dynamic depiction of memory in the seventeenth century. As we shall see in the next section, Memory and Oblivion in the Renaissance exist in a dialectical relation – allegorically as well as ontologically.3 And yet, even though each depends on the other to be recognized fully for what it is, the allegorical presence of the one does not cancel out the meaning or identity of the other. Moreover, as a result of the associative connections thus set in place, Oblivion resonates with Death and Envy, while Memory generates meanings with History as well as with Justice and Prudence. No simple set of binary opposites can be deduced from this nest of symbolic relations, for the story of memory’s decay in the Renaissance is subtler than that by far. Unlike oblivion, which implies a blotting out of something past recognition and beyond recovery, forgetting is not an amnesic blank. As such, it has a special place in how we think through early modern notions of memory. The substantial nature of forgetting thus bodies forth a troubling materiality, for, in acts of forgetting, something always remains; just as with the decay of radio-active particles, some trace of the original element, like a signature, is left behind, so that anyone skilled in such matters can determine what the material once was and what it will be next. Memory, informing a series of commonplace practices in Renaissance England, decays along similar lines, the traces of which can still be glimpsed through images and allegories associated with memory’s plenitude. Accordingly this essay, by revisiting and building on my previous work on mortality and memory,4 will examine some of the marks left along the fault lines of just such sites of forgetting. Specifically, a necessary aspect of the early modern idea of the plenitude of memory is the coincident expression of its fragility and paucity, its decline and inevitable decay. As Frances Yates argued, material expressions of emblems and imprese, which properly belong to the Art of Memory, were designed to stabilize thoughts and intentions

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through vivid visual cuing techniques (Yates 1984: 124). Each image, though, brings with it a backlog of prior meanings and a flood of alternative interpretations, which Michael Bath has discussed in terms of “the place of the emblem within the wider economy of symbols” (Bath 1994: 130). Beyond this, though, the overall effect of the image, as John Manning has argued, “tugs at something teasingly half-remembered, half-assimilated, a feeling of subliminal déjà vu” (Manning 2002: 317). The half-remembered is also the half-forgotten. Humanist educators, like Erasmus and Mulcaster, therefore looked back, with high hopes, to Cicero for a model of order that would minimize the effects of the fragility of memory. The concatenation of memory images in classical rhetoric is likened at times to dancers linked hand-in-hand, and at times to retracing one’s steps through a building within which symbolic trigger images have been placed. Whole systems and regimes of thought were thus developed to keep one’s memory active and to keep forgetfulness at bay. In this sense then, the threat always posed by forgetfulness, including the way things slip from one’s mind, motivates the creation – and the ongoing recreation – of memory. This creation takes place primarily visually, using symbolic images to condense and stand for larger ideas. Fearful of the lure and instability of such images though, Quintilian advocated getting things by heart verbally, through repetition, “so that the memory may derive assistance from the double effort of speaking and listening” (Quintilian 1961: 11.2.33). And yet words too carry with them their own equivalent of things slipping from mind, namely the possibility that stringing words together while trying to learn to recite them will lead to confusion and gibberish. Gibberish builds on, and yet discloses, the potentially faulty links of reason forged by the order of language. If the memory images are recovered in the wrong sequence, then the resulting oration will be gibberish. As this essay will explore further in its conclusion, early modern gibberish comes to be associated with the breakdown of discourse – and reason. It threatens to overwhelm the symbolic content once memory images are translated back into words. In this regard then, it is all the more troubling not only because it threatens to disrupt the order of reason, but also because, in its confusion of communication, it renders language void of conventional meaning. To inquire further about the substantial nature of forgetting, let us turn to an allegorical embodiment of Memory found in the margins of a work popularly known as Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book.5 In Figure 1, the embodiment of Memory, more directly than the other allegorical figures in the series, such as Temperance and Justice and their counterparts Intemperance and Tyranny, reflects the ideational mechanisms associated with the production, circulation, and consummation of meaning. To be sure though, the essentially mnemonic qualities of these emblems, typical of metaphoric expressions of

Figure 1 “Memory.” Richard Day, Booke of Christian Praiers (London, 1608). Private collection.

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mortal temporality in general, are realized through the viewer’s taking in, at a glance, what the emblem conveys. This aspect of memory’s legacy is bound up with recognizing and remembering one’s end. Indeed, as in the case of grave-shrouded oblivion, symbolic representations calling death to mind pose a threat to what memory tries to preserve and highlight the limits of what any emblem (and this one in particular) can achieve. The implied advent of oblivion thus makes the emblem’s work all the more urgent. But oblivion is not simply emblematic of what is lost to mental recall; indeed, reminders of oblivion push the limits of epistemological paradox, much in the same way as did the view in the Renaissance that “any picture is in some measure a representation of the transient, a memento mori, a metaphysical comment upon semblance and reality” (Colie 1966: 275). Oblivion, when pictured as Memory’s counterpart, can also be taken to embody the forces that disrupt the memorial power of emblems in general. In communicating a series of didactic points about virtues and vices, Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book situates memory in a dialogue with the allegorical figures disposed throughout the rest of the volume. Memory is appropriately tagged here as being “a treasure house,” and is easily recognized by her traditional attributes of a pen (or stylus) in her right hand and a book (or palimpsest) in the other (Ripa 1611: 335).6 Triumphant Memory, busy with her task of recording, stands nonchalantly over Oblivion. We might even say that she is oblivious to the presence of Oblivion. And yet while Memory is clearly the dominant of the two figures, by virtue of the way the visual dialogue is set up in the border illustrations, each supplements, rather than negates, the meaning of the other. Notwithstanding the pains with which Memory, as an abstract and idealized virtue, is shown working toward obviating the effects of oblivion through her task of recording, underlying this allegorical program is the anxiety that the grave extinguishes individual memory. Oblivion thus takes on a kind of conceptual sovereignty, much like that of death. The melancholy end of all mortals is mirrored in oblivion. Our end is seen in, and through, Oblivion’s image which, by virtue of metonymy, is represented by the grave-digger’s instruments and a shrouded, faceless corpse, collectively signifying “death” and, more particularly, “my death still to come.” Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book likens oblivion to a place; namely, the grave, which houses an arresting image, a shrouded corpse – thus paralleling loci and imagines agentes of a typical memory theatre (Cicero 1996: 2.87.358). As such, oblivion is made to conform to the rules of memory even as what it represents and signifies exceeds the limits of what Memory can accommodate. Closely related to this way of thinking through memory, and owing to the same principles of allegorical hermeneutics, is the unsettling paradoxical implication that, even though Memory is figured as an enduring recorder, what she writes will, in time, fade and be lost to mortal sight. Attributes of the writer (pen and ink, paper and portfolio) are often included in vanitas paintings of the period, such as Pieter Claesz’s “Still Life with a

26 William E. Engel Skull and a Writing Quill” (1628) in Figure 2, symbolizing the futility of such endeavors, a theme to which this essay will return in the conclusion. Oblivion thus stands opposed to Memory in a double way: as the darkness of death and as an erasure of what once was thought to be known – what was known by virtue of thinking through memory. How then are we to think through Oblivion, with Memory as our guide, when such a way of thinking implies thinking back to the basis of thinking itself, and following that thought back to the source and wellspring of poesy (Heidegger 1968: 11)? Memory, who is after all the mother of the muses, brings into being all manner of intellectual creativity. The key, then, to thinking through memory with respect to issues of mortality is to think through images that embody and express the loss of Cicero’s “firm mental grasp of matter and words.” Accordingly the next section of this essay concerns what is to be learned from listening to “the sheeted dead.”

HORATIO. In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood [tenantless] and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets. Shakespeare, Hamlet (1.1.113–16)

Many cultures imagine that the souls of the dead wander restlessly, no longer sharing in “the society of the living and yet . . . not admitted amongst the dead either” ( Johnston 1999: 9).7 In the early modern period, the restless dead, among other things, “squeak and gibber.” Gibberish is an onomatopoeic word that means to speak rapidly and inarticulately, or to chatter. It is linked to the realm of the dead, in part owing to its sources in epic poetry and classical mythography.8 Additionally though, gibberish is oblivion’s conceptual parallel in the early modern world of words, especially as it pertains to social commerce, namely the means by which, as John Florio puts it, we “enterknow one another.” The full context of Florio’s phrase explains the importance of discourse for social cohesion: Our intelligence being onely conducted by the way of the Word: Who so falsifieth the same, betraieth publik society. It is the onely instrument, by means wherof our wils and thoughts are communicated: it is the interpretour of our soules: If that faile us we hold our selves no more, we enterknow one another no longer. If it deceives us, it breaketh al our commerce, and dissolveth al bonds of our policie. (Montaigne 1965: 2.394) Florio’s commonplace conceit concerning the relationship between body and soul finds a parallel in the way in which visual devices, like imprese, were

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Figure 2 “Still Life with a Skull and Writing Quill.” Pieter Claesz (Dutch, 1628). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1949 (49.107). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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28 William E. Engel said to operate during the period: since the picture is the body and the motto the soul, words quicken or animate images (Giovio 1585: B4v; Engel 1995: 205). And so, according to the metaphoric logic of Florio’s passage, if words are the interpreters of the soul, then those souls denied access to language are souls unable to be interpreted; they are shadows of men, gibbering shades. For example, William Cowper’s translation of the Odyssey relates that Cyllenian Hermes “drove them gibbering down into the shade,” and that the “ghosts / Troop’d downward, gibbering all the dreary way” where they enter into the meads of Asphodel “by shadowy forms possess’d, / simulars of the dead” (Cowper 1854: 371). The Greek terms translated into English as “squeak” and “gibber,” sounds uttered by animals, usually associated with the chirping of young birds or bats, are “also applied to the noise made by ghosts” (Liddel and Scott n.d.: 1575). Thomas Browne notes that Penelope’s paramours, killed by Odysseus and Telemachus at the final banquet of the epic, “chirped like bats” as they were conducted to the Underworld by Mercury, “and those which followed Hercules made a noise but like a flock of birds.” Being at once quite literal in his interpretation and yet open to the power of poesy, he comments that the dead in the “human Hades” of Homer “seem all alive . . . yet cannot well speak, prophesie, or know the living, except they drink bloud, wherein is the life of man” (Browne 1928: 4.39). Among the other resonant meanings of gibberish during the period, the Italian balchi is defined by Florio’s Worlde of Wordes as “a fustian, roguish, gibberish word, used for money” (Florio 1598). Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (Drayton 1612: 12.200) associates “gibbridge” with the sound made by an infant. Although there are other references to the term in the Renaissance, these examples suffice to give us a sense of who was said to gibber: shades, rogues, and infants. Having determined the speakers of gibberish, let us return to the blood-deprived shades to consider what their sounds manage to signify associatively – by virtue of the poet’s conceit and cunning. The sounds made by ghosts in these popular early modern English translations of the classical epic, and thus what echoes in one’s private memory theatre, are the squeaking of bats, the shrill cry of young birds, and the screeching of owls. Indeed, Horatio’s shades squeak and gibber, while in Julius Caesar Calphurnia’s “shriek and squeal” (2.2.24). Shrieking in Shakespeare’s plays, however, most often is attributed to owls,9 the quintessential “melancholy Night-bird,” (Wither 1635: 3.168) linked to death, as shown in Figure 3 with the straightforward motto “MEMENTO MORI.” All of these sounds – squeaking, gibbering, shrieking – require breath, the sign of life, to make them audible. Wind through a pipe of whatever sort – whether depicted as coming from the bloodless mouth of a shade in Hades or from a pipe played by a spry cadaver in a popular Dance of Death – symbolizes life and the enduring quality of art, even if the utterances or notes are unintelligible and

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Figure 3 Owl in “Memento Mori” emblem. George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes (London, 1635). Private collection.

30 William E. Engel chaotic (Meyer-Baer 1984: 5). Such sounds made by a gibbering shade, despite failing to convey specific semantic content, still manage to communicate something important. The effort to make one’s intentions audibly known implies an active will, even if it is cut off from the means to exercise it. The shades, unable to utter words, are reduced to the kind of powerlessness associated with infants and the socially marginalized insofar as they are unable to express themselves, be understood, and attain what they want. As Browne points out though, for Homer’s underworld it is blood – the life of man – that empowers the shades to speak. In the world of mortals, as Cicero taught (following the precepts of ancient Greek oratory), the animating element of speech is reason, for it orders and conveys the spirit of one’s intentions and inventions. Animated speech, above all, characterizes those who are considered viable participants in the affairs of the human community. The spirits of Hades, notwithstanding their loss of speech, still embody and convey a sense of the uncanny restlessness associated with one reduced to squeaking and gibbering. When we encounter a shade in the world of poetry, or a person in the world who, for whatever reason, has been divided from the community of language, we see our own mortality and fragility mirrored in his or her situation. Those who have made a crossing, whether over the river Lethe or over a crinkle in the brain that controls speech and reason, leave behind their former lives – their memories. By virtue of having crossed over and having drunk from Lethe, a shade forgets even the thought that something has been lost – something as fundamental as his identity. Even if he were once a warrior, the shade becomes as powerless as a small bird or bat, chirping and screeching. Such myths, associated with the restless dead, have remarkable staying power. And like the decaying atomic particle mentioned at the outset, the shade’s “half-life” can be glimpsed in what has been recorded by poets and allegorists. But its meanings radiate out further still, toward a host of other associations, even as the memory of the original is in a steady state of decay. Hades, as a place where the dead congregate and gibber, a place filled with vivid memory images that have been mined from classical literary treasuries, is nonetheless associated with a gaping site of forgetting. And so, as we move into the final section, let us keep this articulate gaping in mind, along with Ronald MacDonald’s view that epic underworlds may be related to this venerable [Ciceronian] mnemonic technique, they may in fact contain the reminiscence of a technique of reminiscing. And yet the burial ‘places’ of memory (the technical term . . . is loci) become the burial-places of memory only with the supervention of the idea of repression, an active forgetting, so to speak, as opposed to the merely passive decay of the memory trace. (MacDonald 1987: 9–10)

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Given what we have seen of oblivion’s tight involvement with emblems of memory, let us conclude by comparing other depictions of Memory triumphing over Oblivion, and consider what the coexisting sites of forgetting can tell us about the decay of memory. Let us focus first on the central drama depicted on the frontispiece of Ralegh’s History of the World in Figure 4. Here we find vanquished Mors, a desiccated skeleton, beside slumbering Oblivio, both under the feet of “Magistra Vitae,” a figure glossed as “the Mistress of Man’s Life, grave History.” What I have said of the image in Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book, where allegorical figures of Memory and Oblivion are visually linked and set in relation to one another (Figure 1), can be said of History and the twin figures of Death and Oblivion. And the same holds for the figure of God-the-Son in traditional Christian iconography. Associated with bringing the word of truth into the world, Christ is in Figure 5 depicted trampling on dry bones, which signifies his victory over Death. A noteworthy variation of this same motif appears on the frontispiece of King James’s Workes (1616). In the left niche, the winged figure of Religion tramples a skeleton. She is balanced in this composite emblem by Peace, in the right niche, who treads upon implements of war. Although labeled simply Religio, clearly she is meant to stand for Christianity as her right arm rests on a cross, and, more particularly still, given her relation to Pax, she represents one of the twin goals of James’s policies, “the evervigilant promotion of the true reformed religion” ( James’s other guiding policy, Pax, was to keep England out of continental wars) (Corbett and Lightbown 1979: 140). What Memory accomplishes in the realm of the Reason, Christ (or, as mentioned above, the Christian Religion personified) achieves in the realm of the Spirit, and Magistra Vitae accomplishes in the World. These three triumphant figures call on, respectively, the logic proper to commonplaces of poesy, religion, and history. Moreover, they are emblematic of key stages in the ever-widening circle of mortal concerns, moving from the individual, to the Christian community, and to the human race. These correspondences may be carried out to their conclusion: Memory spares each person from declining into thoughtlessness and gibberish, Religion makes it possible for the faithful to get from this world to the next, and “grave History” enables the record of the world’s affairs to come down through the ages. Although it is awkward to speak of personified virtues needing anything, the figures of Memory, Religion, and History need Death (linked to Oblivion as discussed above) to generate, convey, and pass on the extent of their emblematic meanings.10 What we have here, then, is a pattern and precedent for understanding more about the ways in which memorable images, especially where Death and Oblivion are involved, came to be figured and reconfigured in early modern England. Let us turn now to a curious survival of just such an image,

Figure 4 Frontispiece. Walter Ralegh, History of the World (London, 1614). Private collection.

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Figure 5 Allegory. Attributed to Hans Holbein. With kind permission, the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.

found in a somewhat unlooked-for place: as a head-letter. It shows up, among other places, in Alexander Ross’s continuation of Ralegh’s History of the World in Figure 6 (Ross 1652: 4I2r). This emblematic head-letter speaks eloquently, if tacitly, to Ross’s aims in a telling memory image. Used at least as early as 1590, the appearance of this “factotum” (as it was known in the printing house) in 1652 would have called forth a residual “sense of nostalgia for the monarchy” (Engel 2002: 151 n.24). Although this nostalgia is not the only possible response a contemporary reader might have had, it is one that must be entertained alongside and balanced against several others. Such ornamental pieces usually appeared in prefatory material, like letters of dedication – even those in sections coming at the end of a vast tome, as is the case here, with the “Brief Chronologie.” A citation from Seneca follows, thus enabling the royalist Ross to use a commonplace to express his mind while distancing himself from the particular events of his day: Who’ll dote on Kingdoms? O mans vanitie! What mischiefs under smiling faces lie?

34 William E. Engel

Figure 6 Head-letter “A.” Alexander Ross, History of the World, Second Part (London, 1652). Private collection.

As storms rage most on Hills, and as Rocks Which part the Sea, and subject to its knocks: So highest Principalities and Crowns Are liable to angry fortunes frowns. (Ross 1652: 4H4r) The same theme of vanity, though perhaps with a cunning nod to his own politics, shows up in the iconographic program implicit in the head-letter. Most notably, above the letter “A” is a Tudor Rose, a symbol of British regal sovereignty. The crown is supported, on the right, by Prudence, who is identified by her traditional attributes of mirror and snake, which in this context are emblems of circumspection, not vanity. On the left, the supporter is Justice, eyes uncovered, with her sword to cut to the truth. Reminiscent of

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the figure of Memory, both Justice and Prudence tread upon what can be taken to be a decaying corpse, “a carcass without life” (to use Ross’s phrase), signifying Oblivion, for graveyard vipers have taken up residence in the skull, once the seat of reason (Ross 1652: B5r).11 Seen in this way, it is a vanitas figure. And, given the repeated moral themes throughout his text, this image handily evokes the notion of death being the wages of sin, for in the author’s farewell we read: “there is no such antidote against the Infection and Poyson of Sin, as the reading of Historie” (Ross 1652: B6v). The allusion to poison invites an additional interpretation of the recumbent figure as Envy (Invidia).12 Seen in the context of the emblematic tableau, Envy, one of the cardinal vices, is rendered harmless by two of the cardinal virtues, Justice and Prudence. Envy is also considered to be one of the so-called deadly sins, or, more properly, “mortal sins” in the terminology of the Renaissance.13 While the serpent associated with Prudence points back to Matthew – “Be ye wise (prudentes) as serpents” (10.16) – the locus classicus of Envy’s relation to poisonous vipers is Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Ovid 1966: 2.768–86). Among the epithets commonly associated with Envy at this time were snaky, viperous, poisonous, snake-hair’d, deadly, mortal, proud, and biting (Poole 1677: 81). This set of associations, combined with the Ovidean myth of Aglauros being turned to stone, invites a further comparison, one between the face of the subdued figure of the head-letter and Medusa. This gorgon, like Envy, according to Ross in another of his books, “had fearfull lookes,” thus giving him suitable matter to derive the moral lesson concerning our transience: “let us learn not to be proud of our beauty” (Ross 1648: 137). I do not want to discount the related range of associations familiar to readers of the day, but, given the overall visual context of the factotum head-letter, this figure is intended primarily to stand for that which is vanquished by Prudence and Justice. The stock allegorical opposites attributed to these two virtues, Justice and Prudence, respectively are Injustice (or Tyranny, as it is personified in Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book) and Folly,14 the latter of which usually is portrayed as a jester with a bauble, sometimes a man crowned with feathers and holding a cudgel (Katzenellenbogen 1979: 82–3). And since neither of these vices is represented by a snaky-headed cadaver, we must look instead toward Oblivio as the correspondent, appositive match – though, as suggested above, perhaps it is a special conflation of oblivion and Envy. For the mythopoetic precedents of the composite figure of Oblivio and Invidia (linked as well to shades of the dead), we have to look only to the region of the Giants in Dante’s Inferno.15 Here envy characterizes the famous figures who are punished for forgetting their place and rebelling against the gods. Especially noteworthy with respect to gibberish is that it is here we meet Nimrod, the larger-than-life designer of the Tower of Babel, who thus caused the universal confusion of tongues (Genesis 10.8–10, 11.1–9). In opposition to prudent men, the figures punished in this circle are depicted

Figure 7 Head-letter “C.” Hans Holbein, Ptolemeii Geographicae (Lyons, 1535). Courtesy The Newberry Library, Chicago.

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Figure 8 Totenalphabet, “V.” Facsimile reprint of Holbein’s Initial-Buchstaben mit dem Totentanz (Göttingen, 1849). Private collection.

as having been foolish in life – and they are still stupid in death (Dante 1958: 31.31). Dante makes good use of the long history of prudence and justice standing opposed to folly (linked to obliviousness) and to tyrannical efforts to overthrow just authority. Whether we take the vanquished figure in the factotum head-letter to be Invidia or Oblivio, the disposition of the allegorical virtues in the tableaux visually parallel Christ’s triumph over Death. Moreover, we must not lose sight of the memento mori aspects of such a head-letter, which is, in its form and function, reminiscent of Holbein’s subtly crafted head-letters calling to mind death in word and image in Figure 7, and of his more explicit, graphically violent designs in Figure 8. In particular, this staple of William Stansby’s printer’s stock gives added resonance to Ross’s emblematic way of expressing moral points in his text, especially his view that

38 William E. Engel History, indeed, is the Body, but Chronologie the Soul of Historical Knowledge; for History without Chronology, or a Relation of things past, without mentioning the Times in which they were Acted, is like a Lump or Embryo without articulation, or a Carcass without Life. (Ross 1652: B5r) In the same way the motto animates the picture, as the soul does the body, so too here Chronology – carrying out the work of Memory – informs History. Whether a visual allegory of mortal sin or a textual reference to a corpse drained of life, such images implicitly celebrate the power of memory even as they gesture to what they are modeled on – namely, the dead. These powerful representations give us something to hold onto and through them we can gain some control over the dreadful prospect of our eventual decline into gibberish, death, and oblivion. They are conceptual talismans to which we cling in the face of losing significant, and essentially characteristic, aspects of ourselves. As such, they are imbued with a desperate immediacy that ends up symbolizing, beyond the content they are intended to portray, the need to keep in circulation tokens of remembrance, for, as John Weever reminds his readers, “above all remembrances (by which men haue endeauored, euen in despight of death to giue vnto their Fames eternitie) for worthinesse and continuance, bookes, or writings, haue euer had the preheminence” (Weever 1631: B1r). And so it is with a touch of irony and heightened self-consciousness about the limits of memorial designs of whatever form, that Lucan reports on how Caesar, oblivious to all but his current objectives, passed through a landscape of epic history: A little gliding streame, which Xanthus was, Vnknowne he past, and in the lofty grasse Securely strode; a Phrygian straight forbid Him tread on Hectors dust: with ruines hid The stone retaind no sacred memory. Respect you not great Hectors tombe quoth he! Oh great, and sacred worke of Poesy, That freest from fate, and giv’st eternity To mortall wights; but Caesar, envy not Their living names, if Roman muses ought May promise thee, while Homer’s honoured, By future times shall thou, and I be read; No age shall vs with darke oblivion staine, But our Pharsalia ever shall remaine. (Lucan 1631: R4v) The sacred work of Poesy is to make immortal the words and deeds of mortals, and yet the event recounted here shows just how limited, temporary,

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and pathetic – and tinged by envy – such attempts ultimately are. Again to remark on the subtle shades of difference between forgetting and oblivion (as was mentioned in the opening section), the translator here is to be commended for following the poet so closely in describing the motive factor animating his sacred task: he uses “darke oblivion” for Lucan’s “tenebris” (“tenebrae, -arum”), which connotes the darkness of death. This way of thinking, of thinking through images (even if those images are of dark oblivion and death), of thinking back to what is to be thought about the decay of memory, returns us to the source and ground of poesy itself. Such an understanding of oblivion shading into the darkness of death thus brings us back, by way of the mythopoetic, to the ground of poesy, where places of memory intermingle with “darke oblivion,” for the idea – and the poetic memory image – of declining into gibberish recalls a metaphoric journey to Lethe. Aeneas is warned that “the gates of hell / stand open for all comers nyght and Day. / No wyght ys ever barred of thether cominge / but to retowrn from thense thear lyes the cunning” (Harrington 1990: 14). There lies the cunning indeed: how does one bring back, record, and publish what is lost to the underworld? The fear of having forgotten is a half remembering that something needs recording – whether a journey in the Underworld or the trace of a previously “placed” memory image. In the sixteenth century, artificial memory schemes designed to support, sustain, and perhaps extend memory typically included visual tables with allegorical and mythological figures. Such compilations of commonplaces, and carefully articulated lists, whether textual or visual, are a “sure sign of information overload” (Hobart and Schiffman 2000: 104). Framed analogically, the fear of having forgotten something is to the realm of visual allegory what gibberish is to the realm of verbal commerce, the means by which we “enterknow one another” and our souls are interpreted. In kind, gibberish – or rather, its always-present potentiality – like counterfeit currency inundating the economy of meaning, changed the ways Elizabethans thought through memory (in the double sense of the term discussed at the outset). A principal aim of this essay will have been achieved once Oblivion, though still shrouded and faceless, will no longer be waiting in the wings, recumbent in a mnemonic niche, but will have been moved closer to the center-stage of our understanding of Renaissance Memory – seen now as a site of forgetting.

Notes 1 Memory is the fourth of the five parts of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, expression, memory, and delivery. 2 On the historic role of images in thinking, see Carruthers 1998: 3. 3 Whenever personified attributes are ascribed to memory, oblivion, history, death, or envy, in the spirit of early modern allegoresis, they will be capitalized in the text.

40 William E. Engel 4 Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England and Death and Drama in Renaissance England: Shades of Memory. 5 Mapping Mortality examines these allegorical devices too (Engel 1995: 1–6). 6 Also see Cecchini 1982: 131. 7 This section, as well as what follows, develops in greater detail the concluding argument of Death and Drama (Engel 2002: 168–75). 8 See MacDonald 1987. 9 Note, for example, Richard II (3.3.183); 3 Henry VI (5.6.44); and Macbeth (2.2.3). 10 Compare with Death and Drama (Engel 2002: 174). The following paragraphs likewise review and extend aspects of a related argument (Engel 2002: 137, 151). 11 A Choice of Emblems depicts a similar emblem, the main visual focus of which is a skull “rotten, bare, and drye,” glossed as a site “[w]herin, sometime was sacred reason plac’de” (Whitney 1586: 229). 12 I am grateful to Sabine Mödersheim for encouraging me to consider Invidia as a possible identification of the vanquished figure. 13 See, for example, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, where “malicious Envie” is part of the pageant lead by Lucifera in her House of Pride (1.4.30–2). 14 What amounts to a canonical order of Alciato’s emblems was established in an edition of 1548, in which the poems were organized thematically: the second virtue listed is Prudentia (Prudence) and the second vice is Stultitia (Folly). This pattern is a predominate feature of the trend-setting French version that appeared the following year, Emblemes d’Alciat, the second virtue listed is “Prvdence”, and the second vice, “Follie,” (Alciato 1549: 35–45; 80–8). 15 I am grateful for conversations with Carol Kaske about Dante and gibberish.

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Lethargic corporeality on and off the early modern stage Garrett A. Sullivan Jr

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The reader of early modern anatomies and psychological treatises will discover herself initially frustrated in the search for forgetfulness. Memory, of course, is readily found; it is housed in the hindmost ventricle of the brain. Forgetting, on the other hand, is placeless – it has neither a ventricle nor an organ to call its own. Nevertheless, forgetfulness is recognizable as a somatic process, one that manifests itself most fully and dramatically in diseases, bodily dispositions, and humoral excesses. This essay first takes up a particular depiction of oblivion as a body.1 From there, it turns to some of the ways in which forgetfulness intersects with the somatic phenomenon of lethargy. Forgetfulness and lethargy are integral to an early modern fantasy of the body as completely unregulated and undisciplined – a fantasy advanced in a variety of texts, most notably antitheatricalist ones. Finally, we will see that, while antitheatrical texts read theater as a crucial agent in the scandalous production of forgetful bodies, the theater itself, as represented by a few key moments in Hamlet, complicates this view by making forgetfulness and lethargy the signs under which subjectivity emerges. While in the early modern period forgetfulness is seldom conceptualized, it is often represented. One such representation is to be found on the title page of Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World (Figure 4, see p. 32). The poem printed opposite the title page describes its image as follows: “From Death and darke Obliuion (neere the same) / The Mistresse of Mans life, graue Historie, / Raising the World to good, or Euill fame, / Doth vindicate it to Aeternitie” (Ralegh 1614: “The Minde of The Front”). Oblivion here represents a broadly historical forgetfulness, one aligned with death and in opposition to history. The association of oblivion with death is conventional; it appears, for instance, in an illustration drawn from Richard Day’s Booke of Christian Praiers captioned as follows: “Memorie is a treasure house,” “Obliuion is as a graue” (Figure 1, see p. 24). In the Ralegh engraving, though, history rather than memory is set in opposition to oblivion, but the two are clearly aligned; history is the name by which various significant deeds are memorialized by either “good, or Euill fame.” As James Bednarz describes this image, “Oblivion and Death lie sleeping under the feet of History, the

42 Garrett A. Sullivan Jr teacher of life. Death and Oblivion are conquered by the power of vigilant remembrance. . . . Memory triumphs over the forces that attempt to destroy it: decay and forgetfulness” (Bednarz 1996: 290). I want to attend to the languid body of Oblivion and, in doing so, modify Bednarz’s characterization of it. With legs loosely crossed, head pitched forward over his slumping body, an arm laying listlessly to one side, and eyes open, Oblivion is a figure overtaken not by sleep but by lethargy. Certainly lethargy has connections with sleep, but most pressing here is its relationship to forgetfulness.2 In terms of etymology, lethargy owes its name to Lethe, the mythological river of forgetfulness. In the early modern dictionary An English Expositor, John Bullokar describes Lethe as a “[p]oeticall word, signifying a feyned Riuer in hell, the water whereof being drunken, causeth forgetfulnesse of all that is past” (Bullokar 1967). The connection between Lethe and lethargy is rendered explicit in this example from Pierre de la Primaudaye: “And the disease called the Lethargie bringeth with it forgetfulnesse and want of memorie, as the name itself giveth us to understand . . .” (La Primaudaye 1605: 166; my emphasis). As there is an etymological link between the two terms, so is there a physiological one, and in this latter context the relationship between lethargy and forgetting can be more precisely delineated. Bullokar explains that lethargy is “[a] disease . . . [caused by] cold Phlegmaticke humours . . . whereby [the sufferer] becommeth forgetfull, with losse (in a manner) of reason and all the senses of his body.” Stephen Batman goes further: Litargi . . . is a postume bread in the hinder cell of the head, [&] hath that name Litargia of Lethos, that is forgetting, for it induceth forgeting. It is oft in old men [&] in winter, [&] commeth of fleme: And it cometh neuer it selfe, but it commeth alway of some former sicknesse: for in some sicknesse fleme is bred by working of a feuer heate and boiling, is rauished up to the braine. (Batman 1582: 89r) The incipience of lethargy, then, occurs in the hindmost ventricle of the brain – the region of memory. Lethargy and forgetfulness here are produced by humoral imbalance, the predominance of phlegm that is cause and evidence of disease. At the same time, lethargy has a broad series of effects. Bullokar characterizes lethargy in terms of what seems to be the erosion of bodily function: the loss of reason (at least “in a manner”) and of “all the senses.” As both sign and agent of lethargy, oblivion is antithetical to the proper functioning of the body. With this description of lethargy in mind, more can be said about the physiology of both forgetting and memory. The accumulation of memory traces in the storehouse of memory, as well as the recollection of these traces, is the end result of a physiological process that requires the operations of the

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Lethargic corporeality 43 animal spirits in the brain. These spirits are necessary to the performance of the faculties; they are the media by which, for instance, the evidence of the senses is passed to the imagination, or from the judgment to memory. From a physiological perspective, forgetfulness is a product of lethargy because the operations of the animal spirits in the brain are impeded by the preponderance of phlegm.3 And thus there may develop in “the hinder cell of the head,” which refers to the ventricle where memory is located, a postume that disables the operations of the spirits, operations that could take the form either of installing or recollecting memory images. In short, not only forgetfulness but also the disruption of the body’s operations discussed above can be attributed to the interruption of the proper functioning of the animal spirits. As Bullokar states, forgetfulness is a symptom of lethargy; at the same time, lethargy can also be understood as the body forgetting how to perform its functions, as the disabling or the dis-integration of the body’s constitutive parts and operations. This dysfunctional body is made plain in an excerpt from Thomas Eliot’s definition of the term, in which lethargy is caused by a moyste and veraye colde humour [i.e., phlegm], wasshyng the brayne . . . Alexander Trailianus addeth therto, that therin is suche a forgetfulnesse, that he which is sicke, can not remembre what he wolde speake. Constantinus sayeth, that where sometyme they dooe gape, they do forget to close theyr mouthes. (Eliot 1559) The “wasshyng” of the brain enacted by phlegm draws upon commonplace metaphors of memory as inscription: the material entered onto memory’s “wax tablet” is erased when the tablet becomes so moist that it can no longer hold that inscription (Gratarolus 1971: B6v–B7r). (Such logic lurks behind the notion that drinking water from the river Lethe leads to forgetfulness; in Erasmus’s Prayse of Follie, the old experience second childhood when, from Lethe, they “haue drunken long forgetfulnes of things passed . . . washing away all the troubles & carefulnesses of the mind” [Erasmus 1577: B6v; my emphasis]. In addition, one might argue that Lethe, in its cold wetness, metaphorizes or evokes the operations of phlegm in the brain.) More importantly, lethargy not only leads its sufferers to forget what they were going to say, but also affects simple bodily performance: it leaves them with mouths agape, evidence of somatic slackness understood in terms of forgetfulness. Another intriguing example is proffered by Walter Bruel, who tells us that the lethargic “are as forgetfull as madde men; for if they aske for a urinall to pisse in, they immediately forget for what end they did call for it” (Bruel 1639: 88). Here, urinating reads as an entirely willed activity, whereas lethargy suggests the forgetting of the will’s command. Lethargy and forgetfulness serve a fantasy of a recalcitrant and unresponsive body, a body from which the will’s purposive control has been completely evacuated. In this

44 Garrett A. Sullivan Jr context, the etymology of forgetting takes on new force: to forget is “to miss or lose one’s hold”; the lethargic subject’s failure to maintain a firm grip on re-collected memory traces is matched by the broader disabling of his or her bodily functions.4 These last examples of lethargy have important implications for gender and the body’s temperament. Humoral theory has it that men are by definition hot and dry, whereas women are cold and moist, their bodies naturally characterized by a predominance of phlegm. As a disease, lethargy, which both Batman and Eliot tell us arises out of that moist and cold humor, makes the male body more like a female one. Significantly, it is an increase in coldness that encourages the emergence of lethargy in men; their vital heat is susceptible to diminishment either through aging or through action, such as the profligate spending of that heat in sexual intercourse. Batman thus claims that old men in winter are especially prone to lethargy because their vital heat has decreased over the years; as these men are already relatively cold, their bodies are increasingly likely to become phlegmatic after the ravages of fever. Two larger points stand out, then. First, the recalcitrant and unresponsive body discussed above is one that, before succumbing to lethargy, is tacitly male. Second, as a result of the disease, that body is at a basic humoral level effeminized, because the condition of lethargy resembles the temperament of women in general.5 Moreover, for Eliot such effeminization goes hand in hand with a loss of bodily integration; lethargy manifests itself through the disruption of the smooth operation of the masculine body.6 If lethargic forgetting can be understood as disrupting somatic functions, it can in another register also represent a more generalized inactivity. In the following example, lethargy is construed not in terms of pathology, but in terms of social performance: after hearing Hamlet pledge “with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love / . . . [to] sweep to [his] revenge,” the Ghost tells him, “I find thee apt. / And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed / That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf, / Wouldst thou not stir in this” (1.5.29–31, 32–4). The ghost is pleased to recognize that Hamlet is not dull, does not root himself in ease, and will “stir” in the matter of vengeance; that is, Hamlet does not suffer from lethargy. The connection between lethargy and forgetfulness is made explicit through the ghost’s reference to Lethe. While the river here seems to induce not literal forgetting but lethargy, the point is that in this example lethargy is a form of forgetfulness. It is only sixty or so lines later that the ghost insists that Hamlet remember him, an act that the ghost sees as entailing that Hamlet seek revenge. To forget him, the ghost suggests, is to be idle not merely in the performance of this task but also in general – to be lethargic. Forgetfulness is here understood not primarily in terms of “a moyste and veraye colde humour, wasshyng the brayne” (Eliot 1559) – although the reference to the river Lethe arguably evokes the cold wetness of phlegm –

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Lethargic corporeality 45 but as a mode of inactivity and a reluctance toward a prescribed action or set of actions. Physiology subtends the (non-)performance of a variety of behaviors that bear no immediate relation to that physiology; the language of soma underpins the ghost’s chastising depiction of a son who “wouldst . . . not stir in this.” This account of lethargic forgetting partially explains the lassitude of Ralegh’s figure of Oblivion. On the title page, the body of Oblivion is phlegmatic, inactive, lethargic. The image is unconvincing as a depiction of forgetfulness narrowly defined, but it compellingly represents a notion of forgetfulness as inactivity. Moreover, that inactivity can be understood as effeminizing, the male figure having fallen into an emasculated, Circean lassitude, his prone body attesting to a loss of the rectitude (both physical and ethical) that is associated with idealized masculinity. In contrast, History has a noticeably active body; she literally steps on Death and Oblivion while “[r]aising the World to good, or Euill fame.” I want to stress, however, that in certain contexts lethargy and lethargic forgetfulness connote not inactivity but activity that is understood as somehow improper. While in the narrow sense of each term he is neither lethargic nor forgetful, Hamlet again provides an instructive example. In the bedroom scene he is exhorted by the ghost not to forget, because he has seemingly grown dull in not executing his “almost blunted purpose” (3.4.111). Here, lethargy and forgetfulness bespeak not a general inactivity but the failure to perform prescribed actions. In religious discourse, forgetting, lethargy, and inappropriate activity are also frequently linked; lethargy represents the succumbing of the subject to pleasure in a way that promises damnation if he fails to remember both his death and the last judgment. As John Downame puts it, what will their passed pleasures, honours and riches, now profit them . . . if they die of a spiritual lethargie, and be rocked asleepe of the divell in the cradle of security, and so carried quietly into hell; so as they have no leasure to think of these things, or time to entertaine these fearfull meditations; yet how much more hellish horror have they when they are awakened out of their deep sleep, with those intollerable tortures? (Downame 1611: V4r–v) Lethargy here involves the willful avoidance of meditating upon one’s mortality. Although Downame refers to “passed pleasures,” they are only past from the perspective of the last judgment; he is diagnosing the spiritual state of those who are hardly inactive, but who pursue the wrong things: “pleasures, honours and riches.” Similarly active in their lethargy are those who, according to a sermon delivered by Richard Carpenter, “contriue in secret those things, which afterward being brought to light, cast shame in their faces, a burthen on their consciences, a blot on their name; and without repentance, everlasting confusion vpon body and soule”; to his auditors/readers,

46 Garrett A. Sullivan Jr Carpenter declaims, “I hope, this Lethargy and deadly sickenesse hath no way indangered your soules, but that they are euer awaked with the remembrance of Gods presence, in all your actions and censures of vindictiue or remuneratiue Iustice” (Carpenter 1623: 100). For both Carpenter and Downame, the lethargic are opposite to those who “are euer awaked with the remembrance of Gods presence,” and who, in turn, always remember their mortality. In these examples, forgetfulness is often imagined less as a purely psychological phenomenon than in terms of a bodily disposition, a mode of action, or a way of living. Thus, it is linked to a variety of phenomena, corporeal or not, that always have more broadly social implications: lethargy, excess sleep, sloth, hedonism, alienation from God, and the loss of identity. These linkages are not conceptualized. Instead, they form a kind of rhizomatic chain with a subterranean logic all its own, one that bears a crucial relationship to memory, labor, and discipline. What ties these behaviors together is the fact that they mark bodies as undisciplined. For example, forgetting God is understood as being lulled asleep by the pleasures of the flesh, while spiritual diligence represents the cure for the forgetfulness bred of false security. Similarly, lethargy and forgetfulness are recognized as inseparable, each linked to the other by a shared and defining absence of disciplined activity. In this regard, Eliot’s earlier description of one of lethargy’s symptoms corroborates the other examples that we have encountered: those sufferers from lethargy who forget to close their mouths enact a (fantasmatic) vision of a body unregulated by even the most basic forms of somatic discipline. As such, the lethargic or forgetful subject expresses the opposite of Renaissance ideals of masculinity. Insofar as these ideals are subtended by a logic that understands discipline and labor as constitutive of the masculine, lethargy’s effeminizations, mentioned above in relation to feminine coldness, extend into the arenas of bodily comportment and social (in)action. But what does this lack of discipline have to do with memory? Just as the forgetful body is constituted primarily in negative relation to discipline, so is there a crucial connection between memory and disciplined labor, one that to early modernity would have been self-evident. As Norman M. Klein has recently put it, [r]emembering was arduous. . . . From the Romans through the Renaissance, students were trained to fight aporia [defined by Klein as ‘an inability to know how or where to begin’] through ‘memory theaters,’ a spatial imaginary that kept knowledge from drifting into oblivion. (Klein 1997: 302). While Mary Carruthers has reminded us that the theater was not the only mnemonic structure deployed in training the memory, the basic point is

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Lethargic corporeality 47 sound: shoring up memory requires labor and discipline; above all, the properly orchestrated and functioning memory occupies and is defined as a space in which, in André Du Laurens’s formulation, “lodgeth every thing in his severall place, not shufling them up disorderly together, which observeth time, circumstances and order” (Du Laurens 1599: 77). Memory is vulnerable not only to outside attack from forgetting, but also to inward disorder that is to be staved off through memory’s agency. And such disorder can be understood as forgetting: not the obliteration of the remembered matter, certainly, but the rendering of that matter inaccessible. The fact that such matter is not marked clearly and lodged in a place from which it can be easily retrieved means that, in the context of an attempted act of recollection, it is forgotten.7 If memories are not located in their proper places, the failure belongs not merely (or even primarily) to the ordering agent that is memory, but to the undisciplined and idle subject who fails to train and exercise his memory appropriately. That memory is linked to discipline is made plain by Gulielmus Gratarolus: An often callinge to mynde of things seene or h[e]ard, doth strength[en] and confirme the Memorie: for there is nothyng that is so soone encreased by diligence, or diminished by necgligence, as Memorie it selfe is: because except it be throughlye tylled and exercised with a continuall meditation, it is soone corrupted by sluggishenes. (Gratarolus 1971: D8r) Juan Luis Vives makes a similar argument: We be framed and facioned by these three things, Knowledge, Wytte, and Memorie, and the dilig[en]ce, which we use to the atteyning of them, is called Studie. . . . Memory [is] encreased by diligent tillyng and occuping thereof. . . . Whether thou rede or here any thing, do it with attenci[on] & effectiously, let not thy mind w[an]der, but constrayn it to be there, & to doo [the] thing which is in hand, and none other. (Vives 1575: E1r–v) Paying close attention marks what one reads as memorable, but doing so is difficult; it requires that the mind remain focused on “the thing which is in hand,” a focus that is described in terms of constraint. Reading “with attencion and effectiously” requires a well-regulated mind that refuses the temptation to let itself wander. Moreover, the language of “tilling” apparent in both of these quotations aligns the exercise of memory with arduous and masculinized forms of labor. This emphasis is also apparent later in Vives, when he insists, “Thou shalt not neglecte thy memory, nor suffre it to decay

48 Garrett A. Sullivan Jr through ydelnesse: for it reioyseth aboue al thing, to be set awork, & increaseth not a little therby. Exercise it therfor dayly with some worthy busines” (Vives 1575: E6v). Vives’s reference to idleness and Gratarolus’s mention of sluggishness evoke our earlier discussion of the bodily disposition of lethargy, which Gratarolus elsewhere explicitly links with forgetting (Gratarolus 1971: B6v–B7r, C1r–v). In depicting the active use of the faculty of memory, Gratarolus and Vives also articulate a broader ideal for bodily deportment, one that champions and assumes a disciplined body marked by diligence and the regular exercise of its faculties. Moreover, as these examples suggest, the disciplined labor of remembering is gendered male, while, as we have seen, the coldness and moistness of lethargy mark forgetfulness as both evocative of the feminine and, for the male body that slips out of “a prescript order of life,” effeminizing. It is worth underscoring that what underpins this linkage of memory and discipline is a pre-Cartesian conception of mind and body as entwined and imbricated in one another. Gratarolus’s and Vives’s tilling metaphors become more powerful when we recognize that the diligent tilling of memory, insofar as it is inseparable from a broader somatic disciplinary process, is a fully embodied activity. And what is true for memory is obviously so for forgetfulness. Lethargy makes plain that forgetfulness engages the body in its entirety. Memory, then, is intimately linked with notions of discipline and order; forgetfulness, associated as it is with practices and physiological processes antithetical to ideals of bodily comportment, connotes idleness, sloth, lethargy, and excessive sleep: all resistant to the claims made upon the body by discipline. So far we have seen how the very act of training the memory requires and is associated with self-regulation, but it is important also to recognize the broader ideological and institutional implications of the somatic discipline upon which memory is built. Memory is obviously crucial to both religious and secular education. Such education entails not merely the mastering of content, but, as Richard Halpern has shown in relation to early modern grammar school education, the internalization (through the disciplining of the subject) of protocols and bodily dispositions necessary to the performance of socially valorized behavior (Halpern 1991: 19–60). As the various examples adduced above show, memory is aligned with an array of social virtues – studiousness, diligence, rigorousness, and piousness – while forgetfulness and forgetting are associated, in a range of discourses, with everything from illness to alienation from God. Memory disciplines and inserts the subject into the social order; forgetting is the vehicle by which the social order both imagines its opposite and polices its subjects through appeals for the reformation of their corporeal and spiritual deportment. Furthermore, forgetfulness, emerging at the junction of the spiritual and the physiological, constitutes a mode of being associated with humoral, spiritual,

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Lethargic corporeality 49 and social disorder. In sum, oblivion has its own forms of embodiment and social practice, ones that are coded as at best passive and at worst sinful and erosive of identity. It is important to stress that there are specific connections to be made between forgetting and the theater – connections elucidated by those who were the stage’s enemies. Antitheatricalist writers routinely construed the theater as a catalyst for forgetting and its associated somatic states. William Rankins explicitly links forgetting and drama. Most probably referring to actors rather than audience members, Rankins asserts in a marginal gloss that “[p]layes make th[em] forgette GOD.” Rankins understands plays as entertainments that transform the behaviors of those who stage and view them:

111 Then drinking of the wyne of forgetfulnes, which seemed unto them more sweete than Nectar, and farre more pleasant then Manna from Heauen, to digest the diuersitie of theyr daintie dyshes, they tempered theyr tongues, and outward gesture with such talke, that theyr action might be uniforme to the rarenes of theyr banquette. . . . (Rankins 1587: C3r)

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Metaphorized as the wine of forgetfulness, the play induces audience members to imitate the actions on stage. This banquet obviously connotes hedonistic excess, as is underscored by the text’s marginal comment that “[p]laiers are ministers of Idlenesse” (Rankins 1587: D2r). Rankins sees plays as contaminating the audience with idleness, which is so contagious, that as the Ryuer Laethes maketh hym that drynketh therof, presentlie to forget his own condition & former deedes, so this damnable vice of idlenes, so besotteth the sences, and bewitcheth the myndes of menne, as they remembred not the profitable fruites of vertuous labor. (Rankins 1587: C4r–v). The theater is an agent of forgetting that transforms the viewer’s body from one marked by “vertuous labor” to one constituted by idleness. The reference to Lethe is pointed; the viewer of plays is understood as forgetting himself – “his own condition & former deedes” – as completely as if he had died and drunk from that mythological river. To be besotted and bewitched is also to be reconstituted through and in terms of both idleness and theater. While Rankins understands the theater as engendering (self-)forgetting, Stephen Gosson recognizes and takes advantage of the centrality of memory to theatrical practice in order to argue that the theater offers an education in corruption. Consider the way in which Gosson links memory to discipline:

50 Garrett A. Sullivan Jr If any goodnes were to bee learned at Playes it is likely that the Players them selues which committ euery sillable to memory shoulde profitte most, because that as euery man learneth so hee liueth; and as his study is, such are his manners; but the dayly experi[en]ce of their behauiour, sheweth, that they reape no profit by the discipline them selues; how then can they put us in any good hope to be instructed thereby when wee haue the sight of such lessons, but an houre or two as they study and practise euerie daye, yet are neuer the better. (Gosson 1582: C7v–C8r) While players work strenuously to memorize their lines, the usual association of memorial discipline with virtue and order is overturned, for the content of what the players learn besmirches their characters. Here, forgetfulness is not blamed for the corruption of the players; instead, the discipline of memorization inserts the actor into the debasing and debased institution of the theater. In a different text, Gosson makes what is by now a familiar argument. Here, the theater is an integral component of the curriculum in a school of abuse, one in which the students are taught to forget themselves: You are no soner entred but libertie looseth the reynes and geves you head, placing you with poetrie in the lowest forme, when his skill is showne too make his scholer as good as ever twangde: he preferres you to pyping, from pyping to playing, from play to pleasure, from pleasure to slouth, from slouth to sleepe, from sleepe to sinne, from sinne to death, from death too the Divel, if you take your learning apace, and passe through every forme without revolting. (Gosson 1841: 14–15) This learning is the antithesis of a proper education, to which memory would be central. Instead of discipline, the scholars/playgoers are offered liberty. The lessons they learn allow them to pass through every form, but the bitter joke is that the longer they stay in school, the more they become self-forgetful: the more they give themselves over to sloth, sleep, and sin. In addition, that they pass from death to the devil tells us that these students have failed to master the most important lesson of all: they do not remember who the Lord is. The theater, then, both induces acts of forgetting and engenders that character trait known as forgetfulness, a trait which promises to produce the kind of languid and effeminized (if not sinful) body we have seen on Ralegh’s title page. The theater is potentially a breeder of actions and behaviors that cannot be easily accommodated by disciplinary regimes. The early modern stage can be seen as occupying a conceptual space outside of the patterns of work, education, and religious practice that are central to the shaping of the

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Lethargic corporeality 51 disciplined subject. However, the social position of the theater was less a given than the subject of debate; it would finally be unsatisfactory to adduce a monolithic conception of theater as either wholly transgressive of or complicit with (a homogenized notion of) social authority.8 We can see, though, that memory and forgetting are categories in terms of which early modern versions of this debate sometimes took place. If memory and forgetting are categories in terms of which the theater is disparaged, they are also integral to the dramatic conceptualization of identity. That memory should be integral to identity hardly surprises us, but I want to conclude this essay by stressing that forgetting also functions as the ground for the dramatic representation of identity. On the early modern stage, forgetting and memory chart multiple interfaces between the subject and society. That is, they are the vehicles of and for disparate interpellations, the means by which the subject is located and locates herself in relation to various forms of desire and authority. “Forgetting” in particular is the sign under which are collected conceptions of identity and forms of embodiment unsanctioned by secular and ecclesiastical authorities. It is the hoariest of critical commonplaces to assert that Hamlet does not take action, but of course he does. In truth, he never stops taking action. The voice that utters that commonplace reveals itself as invested in the Ghost’s imperatives, in the coercive logic of “remember me” – a logic whereby “remembrance” is defined narrowly as the specific actions that the Ghost wants Hamlet to perform.9 The actions that Hamlet does perform, however, are there to be observed – they form much of the matter of the play, encompassing everything from his most lugubrious soliloquy to his leap into Ophelia’s grave – even if the Ghost would dismiss them as evidence of forgetfulness or lethargy. Forgetting, then, describes an action or actions disparaged by the Ghost as inaction, and thus as evidence of Hamlet’s failure to remember him. More importantly, forgetfulness also charts the contours of Hamlet’s character, which emerges out of its complex relationship to the claims the Ghost makes on him. What the Ghost calls forgetfulness limns the boundaries of that constellation of resistances, meditations, machinations, and impulsive acts that is Hamlet; forgetfulness both has a content and traces the contours of a subjectivity. The “problem” of Hamlet’s “delay” – understood by the Ghost as his forgetfulness – is also generative of his interiority. Whereas Laertes eagerly embraces the role of avenger, he also remains little more than a type, the loyal son bent on revenge even if it means slicing his nemesis’s throat in a church. Hamlet is so famously deliberative because he does not accede immediately to the demands of “remember me” by becoming a version of Laertes. It is his non-identicality to the role of the avenger (and to other roles he is called upon to play) that is productive of Hamlet’s subjectivity. And, as I have suggested, one name for such non-identicality is

52 Garrett A. Sullivan Jr forgetfulness. In this sense, forgetfulness is generative of depth of character. Hamlet’s subjectivity is produced out of the forgetfulness that most of the writers we have surveyed would see as erosive of identity. With this last point in mind, I conclude with a brief return to Ralegh’s title page. Oblivion’s languid demeanor notwithstanding, this figure can be understood as laboring intensely, ceaselessly making claims on the viewing subject, potentially seducing him or her into modes of action and being divergent from those championed by History. At the same time, that History stands on Oblivion in order to “[r]ais[e] the World to good, or Euill fame” reveals forgetfulness as foundational. Literally, then, Oblivion bears much of the weight of History on his head. In this regard, I find Oblivion apt, for he carries that weight without stirring.

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Early modern definitions of oblivion routinely list “forgetfulness” as a synonym. I explore connections between forgetfulness, lethargy, and sleep in a longer version of this essay. Just before taking up lethargy, Batman talks of a related disability called stupor, which is often caused by “superfluitie of humours, that stoppeth [&] letteth [the] wayes of the spirits in the braine” (Batman 1582: 89r). John Abernethy states that lethargy “oppres[ses] the animall spirits” (Abernethy 1622: 91). See “The First Anniversary” in which the “sick world” is suffering from a lethargy that has led to its having “lost [its] sense and memory”; it has “speechless grown” and has “forgot [its] name” (Donne 1984: 271.23–31). Batman asserts that “forgetting is [a] token of moisture . . .” (Batman 1582: 38v), a view compatible with what I have been arguing. In particular, if the hindmost ventricle of the brain, devoted to memory, is too moist – coldness and dryness being the ideal Batman attributes to Aristotle – then one is bound to be forgetful. Under these circumstances, memory inscriptions cannot fix themselves in the brain. This paragraph owes a debt to Gail Kern Paster 1998. Mary Carruthers states, “The great vice of memoria is not forgetting but disorder” (Carruthers 1998: 82). Thomas Nashe offers the counter-argument that plays educate the audience in virtue: the subject of them, (for the most part) it is borrowed out of our English chronicles, wherein our forefathers’ valiant acts (that have lain long buried in rusty brass and worm-eaten books) are revived, and they themselves raised from the grave of oblivion, and brought to plead their aged honors in open presence. (Nashe 1956: 451)

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The Ghost’s appeal to memory subsumes into itself not only his earlier call to vengeance, but also the other important demands he makes of Hamlet – that he not go mad, take action against his mother, or let the royal bed “be / A couch for luxury and damned incest” (1.5.82–3).

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Pleasure’s oblivion Displacements of generation in Spenser’s Faerie Queene Elizabeth D. Harvey

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Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings. . . . Sir Thomas Browne (1928: 4.47) In my opinion we take the fact of infantile amnesia – the loss, that is, of the memories of the first years of our life – much too easily; and we fail to look on it as a strange riddle. Sigmund Freud (1960: 46)

Helkiah Crooke’s description of the organs of generation in his influential English anatomical treatise, Microcosmographia, implicates the sexual act in forgetfulness. He argues that had not “the God of Nature” placed “so incredible a sting or rage of pleasure” in the “obscœne parts,” “as whereby we are transported” “for a time out of our selves,” an extreme pleasure that erases memory, no one would be willing to “defile” themselves “in such impurities.”1 Although this ecstatic transport is cognate with the erotic madness whose central symptom is obsessive recollection and which is described by such writers as Plato, Lucretius, and Robert Burton, what interests me here is Crooke’s focus on the conjunction of eroticism and forgetfulness. He suggests that this oblivion, what “Hippocrates calleth a little Epilepsie or falling sickness” (Crooke 1615: 199), makes women willing to endure pregnancy, arduous childbirth, and the “disquiet” of child-rearing, and it makes men able to bear the degradation that Crooke associates with sexual coupling. Only temporary forgetfulness would, Crooke asserts, make “men” willing to indulge in this carnality and turn away from the “divine nature” that they sense within themselves. This linkage between procreative pleasure and amnesia and between birth and forgetting is a reiterated topos in early modern culture, one that recurs in medical treatises and in such works as Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.2 The resonances of this linkage engage the disturbing materiality of procreative bodies, and, in the process, raise questions about the relationship between the body and the senses, on the one hand, and forgetting, on the other.

54 Elizabeth D. Harvey Crooke suggests that the passionate “extasie” that carries us out of our selves just when bodily pleasure is most intense is paradoxically a “senselessness,” a sensual indulgence so extreme that it temporarily snuffs out consciousness. Because early modern treatises on the art of memory frequently link sensory stimulation with enhanced mnemonic recall, Crooke’s insistence that sexuality produces amnesia may thus seem surprising. Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria recommends captivating the audience by arousing the passions, and this advice formed the basis for memory tracts that used eroticism to activate the memory: Pietro da Ravenna’s late fifteenth-century treatise, Memoriae ars quae Phoenix inscribitur, for instance, substitutes beautiful women for the letters in his figurative alphabet so as to stimulate mnemonic activity (Bolzoni 2001: 146–7, 173–4).3 By contrast, the sexual act for Crooke intensifies sensory pleasure so much that consciousness and memory are suspended. It is precisely this forgetting, the unconscious state of sexual ravishment, that counters the oblivion of death because the resulting progeny provides a generational memory. The erotic amnesia engendered by sexual ravishment is necessary for the propagation of the species, “for so every individuum, extending it self as it were in the procreation of another like unto it self, groweth young again and becometh after a sort eternall” (Crooke 1615: 199). Erotic forgetting seems, therefore, to give access to a kind of eternity, an escape from the temporal tyranny that characterizes human life. The relationship between erotic pleasure and amnesia engages the complex territory that lies between the somatic and the psychic, for memory and forgetfulness record and obscure the mingling of subjectivities in sexual union and the moments of ensoulment, bodily incorporation, and separation that attend conception and birth. I will consider memory as a state associated by both Plato and Freud with failures of early recollection. Indeed, psychoanalysis provides a set of theories equipped to examine the traces of these formative moments. Classical mythology reminds us that Mnemosyne, the personification of memory and the mother of the Muses, had a sister named Lesmosyne, who presided over forgetfulness, and so it is crucial to recognize that acts of memory necessarily involve forgetting (Casey 1987: 12–13). How is this forgetfulness linked to cultural censorship or psychoanalytic repression, and how can we understand these concepts in relation to early modern culture? I explore the roots of this erotic and procreative amnesia, examining the sources for the erasure caused by intense pleasure. Although my central text is Spenser’s Faerie Queene, my analysis of the poem is focussed through the lens of Helkiah Crooke’s anatomical reinterpretation of Spenser. In reading Crooke’s explication of the physiology of sexual oblivion in relation to Spenser’s poetic and allegorical accounts of reproduction, I argue that Crooke activates moments of forgetting in The Faerie Queene that are channelled into his anatomy of human reproduction. These Spenserian lapses not only provide the philosophical underpinning for

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Displacements of generation in The Faerie Queene 55 Crooke’s anatomy, their forgotten poetic imaginary, but are also thematized in the intertextual process. Indeed, Crooke’s use of Spenser is a kind of textual coupling, a union of allegory and anatomy that enacts the very erotic oblivion described by Crooke. Just as amnesia encompasses human generation, so does forgetting allow for the passage of poetic sources or souls, as it were, into the new body of Crooke’s vernacular anatomy.

Translation and the unconscious Crooke, Spenser’s younger contemporary,4 “incorporates” The Faerie Queene in quotation and allusion throughout his vernacular anatomical treatise. Just as Spenser regards himself as an English Virgil, so does Crooke see his task as translating classical and continental sources into the vernacular. Microcosmographia, as Crooke repeatedly reminds his readers, compiles and translates writings by Gasper Bauhinus and André Du Laurens, and collects illustrations by Vesalius and others. His book, dense with references to classical and medieval medicine and philosophy, suggests that the history of anatomical knowledge is dominated by ruin and forgetting, a loss that allegedly began with the rupture of the pure correspondence between words and their material correlates in Adamic language (Crooke 1615: 36). Although a foundation for the medical arts was subsequently laid, it was lost and “worne out by length of time, for want of Letters and meanes to preserve them.” After Galen, the science of anatomy lay “raked up” in ashes until “within some of our Memories” Vesalius “blew up the almost deade sparkes into a most Luculent Flame” (Crooke 1615: 36, 37). If cultural forgetting shaped anatomical pre-history, Crooke’s own project is one of recalling and restoring, and he positions himself as a kind of English Vesalius, a physician who will by means of his vernacular anatomy revitalize and remember forgotten and scattered medical knowledge. While he borrows liberally from classical and continental sources, the poetic influence that shapes both the structure and the imaginary underpinnings of his treatise is Spenser’s Castle of Alma (2.9). The spatiality of the dissected body and its constituent parts bear the pervasive marks of Spenser’s allegory, so that the belly becomes the body’s “[c]ooke-roomes and sculleries,” the heart is a “[p]arlor of pleasure,” the reproductive organs are the “[g]eniall bed and the Nursery,” and the reader is led up by “staires of Ivory into the presence Chamber, where the Soule maketh her chief abode.” Book 12, on the “Gristles, Ligaments, Membranes, and Fibres,” describes how the parts of the body are “interlaced and intertexed,” words that refer as much to Crooke’s use of Spenser as to the joining properties of corporeal ligatures (Crooke 1615: 907). Just as Spenser had taken Chaucer as his English precursor, so does Crooke set himself in a similar relation to John Banister, surgeon, “practitioner in phisicke,” and author of the English anatomy, The Historie of Man. Crooke’s task, like Banister’s, is to translate

56 Elizabeth D. Harvey anatomy into his mother tongue, a process that involves the literal transposition into English, a translation of the body’s materiality into language, and, in the more literal sense, a turn to the origin of life in the maternal body.5 Freud famously linked the operations of memory and forgetting both to translation and to repression, and he saw memory as a gateway between the conscious and the unconscious.6 Parapraxes and forgetting thus become symptoms of the unconscious, moments that signal the presence of a palpable psychic life over which the subject has incomplete control, especially where sexuality and early childhood are concerned. Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life provides a sustained meditation on forgetting, erroneous memory, and the extension of these mistakes into reading and “bungled actions.” Central to his theory of parapraxes is his notion of “screen memory,” a compromise formation between a generalized childhood amnesia and the relative insignificance of the memories that are retained. Children characteristically have little recollection of their first years, and the formation of “screen” memories thus “has as its basis a forgetting of other more important impressions” (Freud 1960: 45). In other words, screen memories are substituted as a cover for what has been forgotten or repressed, and they are recognizable by the discrepancy between the enigmatic oddness of the trivial detail they encode and the importance of the memory they displace. Freud furnishes three examples: in the first, the screen memory covers a young boy’s first encounter with sexual difference. The second example constellates around a boy’s image of his mother unfastening her skirt in front of the mirror, a screen memory for her unexpected labour pains and subsequent confinement. The final instance concerns Freud and a memory image of himself standing in front of a cupboard screaming at his much older halfbrother and the sudden entrance of his “slim” mother. His interpretation of the deeper recollection behind the screen memory involves his rivalry with his brother, his mother’s pregnancy, and the arrival of a little sister. Freud’s desire to see inside the cupboard or wardrobe figures his wish to know whether the hidden insides of his mother’s body concealed yet more children (Freud 1960: 48–52). What is notable about these examples, which are all repressed memories about sexuality and reproduction, is the mechanism of forgetfulness that attends their encrypting within the psyche. For Freud, the process that joins screen memory with real and phantasy childhood recollection is displacement, a phenomenon that involves substitution along a chain of association. Displacement relies on the same logic that joins memory and place in such early modern memory treatises as Gulielmus Gratarolus’s The Castel of Memorie and John Willis’s The Art of Memory, but its focus on forgetting and its movement along networks of affiliated mnemonic links help to explain the amnesia that attends childhood, Platonic accounts of birth, and Crooke’s sexual forgetting. As Freud asserts when extending his theory into a cultural register, screen memory forms an analogy

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Displacements of generation in The Faerie Queene 57 with the “childhood memories that a nation preserves in its store of legends and myths” (Freud 1960: 48). Amnesia is intertwined for Freud with childhood and narratives of origin, and, as we will see in the relationship between Crooke and Spenser, displacement becomes a crucial strategy in the narratives that recount these gynecological, national, and genealogical beginnings.

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A puzzling and much remarked aspect of Spenser’s corporeal allegory in the Castle of Alma is the forgetting or censorship of the organs of generation.7 While Spenser has no difficulty depicting the anus, the “port esquiline,” he passes by the genitals in a moment of allegorical oblivion, moving from the body’s kitchen directly to the parlor of the heart. There is a cultural and medical precedent for this elision, evident in the work of Banister, Crooke’s anatomical predecessor, who refuses to describe the female reproductive organs (Harvey 2004). While Banister does consider the anatomy of the male reproductive system in detail, he claims that it would be a violation of decorum to depict or explain the female instruments of propagation that Nature has veiled within the secrecy of the female body (Banister 1969: 88). Crooke departs from Banister and Spenser in his explicitly argued decision to represent both the male and female reproductive organs in Microcosmographia. Indeed, the Royal College of Physicians attempted to censor his book, because it was written in the vernacular and possessed putatively lewd content.8 Crooke eloquently defends his use of the mother-tongue and his rationale for the inclusion of his section on the reproductive systems. His explicit countering of Spenser’s omission of the secret parts in the Castle of Alma is apparent in the allusions to The Faerie Queene that Crooke weaves into his anatomization of the sexual and reproductive organs. In the preface to the fourth book, Crooke offers a rationale for the desire that inheres in the sexual organs:

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. . . that there might bee a mutuall longing desire betweene the sexes to communicate one with another, and to conferre their stockes together for the propagation of mankinde, beside the ardor and heate of the spirits conteyned in their seeds, the parts of generation are so formed, that there is not onely a naturall instinct of copulation, but an appetite and earnest desire thereunto, and therefore the obscœne parts are compounded of particles of exquisite sense, that passion being added unto the will, their embracements might be to better purpose. (Crooke 1615: 199)

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His phrase, “conferre their stockes together” is a clear echo of the 1590 ending to Book 3, in which Amoret and Scudamour like “senceles stocks in long embracement dwelt” (3.12.45a). “Stockes” is not an accidental

58 Elizabeth D. Harvey importation; Crooke used the whole phrase to describe the blockage of a coronary artery, which he claimed produced a “dulnes” that turned the patient into a “senceles stocke” (Crooke 1615: 40). Just as screen memories frequently function by means of a linguistic bridge, a pun or homonym, in which one meaning is linked to the screen memory and the other associated with a deeper, repressed memory, so this allusion figures Crooke’s memory of Spenser. His recollection involves both Spenser’s “forgetting” the genitals in the Castle of Alma and their displacement into the narrative union of the lovers. The citation is even more layered than this, however, since the reference to the 1590 ending would have entailed Crooke’s awareness that these stanzas were erased or forgotten by the new 1596 conclusion to Book 3. Crooke’s evocation of the elided hermaphroditic union is accomplished not only through his use of “stock,” but also through his transplantation of the sexual delight Spenser describes in which Amoret “did in pleasures melt” and “in sweete rauishment pourd out her spright” (3.12.45a) into his anatomical description of the organs of generation. Crooke’s allusion carries with it, and indeed enacts, Spenser’s Ovidian intertext, in which Salmacis and Hermaphroditus are fused into one body. The simile that Ovid uses to figure the union is arboreal grafting: “velut, si quis conducat cortice ramos, / crescendo iungi pariterque adolescere cernit, / sic ubi conplexu coierunt membra tenaci” (As when one grafts a twig on some tree, he sees the branches grow one, and with common life come to maturity, so were these two bodies knit in close embrace) (Ovid 1966: 4.375–7). Spenser’s word “stocke” incorporates Ovid’s tree analogy, and, like the key phrases in Freud’s screen memories, it operates as a linguistic moment of translation, moving between memory and oblivion, carrying within it the repressed memory of Spenser’s forgetfulness of sexual and generative origin. Its usage in the Microcosmographia binds Spenser and Crooke into a union as intimate as Amoret and Scudamour’s. As we will see, Crooke’s use of the word is symptomatic of the way in which The Faerie Queene becomes a kind of poetic imaginary for Microcosmographia. Perhaps nowhere is the ligature between body and soul as tenuously fashioned and as vulnerably maintained as in sexual union and conception, for the organs of generation are the medium through which a new body is infused with a soul. In the fifth book of Microcosmographia, Crooke sets out to describe the principles of generation, including the conception, conformation, and birth of the infant. He says that he initially thought that he would “find pleasure” in his “conception,” but, whereas in “naturall generation” “the infant is begotten in pleasure, though brought forth in paine,” he assures the reader that his own chapter “was begotten with much paine & travel” (Crooke 1615: 257). Crooke’s evocation of the pleasure associated with coition and the painful travail that attends birth elicits Chrysogone’s different generative circumstances in The Faerie Queene, where, as Spenser tells us, “[u]nwares she them conceiu’d, vnwares she bore: / She

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Displacements of generation in The Faerie Queene 59 bore withouten paine, that she conceiued / Withouten pleasure” (3.6.27). Crooke’s allusion serves to distinguish his labor from hers, while simultaneously gesturing toward his own description of sexual amnesia, the hermaphroditic embrace in the 1590 edition, and his awareness of Chrysogone’s procreative history, all of which are ringed round by forgetfulness. Chrysogone conceives the twins during sleep, a “gently slombring swowne” (3.6.7), and she gives birth “[u]nwares” in a “slombry traunce” (3.6.26). Sleep, the suspension of consciousness, is an especially vulnerable state in romance, where it frequently signifies the relaxation of the rational faculty. I would argue that Chrysogone’s sleep holds additional significance. Her swoons resemble lethargy, the state of prolonged and unnatural drowsiness that Philip Barrough describes in The Method of Physick. A “soporiferous” condition characterized by the “inexpugnable desire of sleeping,” “[l]ethargus” is a compound of “Lethe” and argus, meaning slothful or dull; Barrough discusses this sleepy oblivion in conjunction with memory loss and related disorders such as epilepsy (Barrough 1596: 24–7). The word, and its condition, is ultimately derived from the Greek lanqanesqai, to forget, and the amnesia associated with the begetting of Amoret and Belphoebe thus suspends not only agency but also memory. Corresponding to Crooke’s sexual forgetting, Chrysogone takes part in sex and childbirth as a kind of ecstatic participant, present in body but absent in memory. Her state, a “traunce,” again carries etymological keys to its significance. Rooted in the Latin, transire, to pass, the trance suggests a state in which things move from one state to another, a translation or transmutation of form. Chrysogone’s loss of consciousness in these crucial moments effectively displaces the drama of conception and birth – the translation of soul into the embryonic bodies of the twins – into other parts of the narrative. When Venus and Diana discover Chrysogone having just given birth to Belphoebe and Amoret, it is as if her trance envelops them as well: “when they both perceiued, / They were through wonder nigh of sense bereaued, / And gazing each on other, nought bespake” (3.6.27). If Chrysogone’s trance is a mechanism of displacement, an ecstatic lethargy, it functions like Freud’s screen memory in that it encodes detail in metaphors that simultaneously obscure and reveal the reproductive drama. The conception, for instance, is displaced into the landscape: “She bath’d with roses red, and violets blew, / And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew” and the sunbeams “pierst into her womb” where with “secret power vnspide” “in her pregnant flesh they shortly fructifide” (3.6.6–7). The scene, which stages conception as a function of natural conditions (warmth, moisture), fuses the efflorescence and fructification of Chrysogone’s body with the earth’s burgeoning. Crooke himself draws an analogy between human seed and “fruits, and trees, and plants, all of them being able to bring foorthe seeds, which shall perpetuate their kindes” (Crooke 1615: 198). Early modern medical texts characteristically depicted the female genitals as flowers, and “flowers” is, of course, the common euphemism for menstruation.9 Spenser

60 Elizabeth D. Harvey translates human conception into landscape, first in his placement of Chrysogone in the forest and his depiction of her body as a natural topography, and most tellingly, in his displacement of human sexuality and generation into the Garden of Adonis.

The womb of forgetting The Garden of Adonis, associated by Erasmus’s Folly with Lethe and the Isles of the Blest, is, in The Faerie Queene, the site both of the Platonic allegory of generation and the topographical description of the Mount of Venus. As commentators have noted, the allegory of generation is subtended by the myth of Er in the Republic.10 In Plato’s narrative, after the souls chose their lives, they quench their thirst by the River of Forgetfulness, fall asleep, and in the middle of the night, they are sent, “like shooting stars,” to their births (Plato 1961: 844). The boundary between worlds is marked by the erasure of memory for all the souls except Er, who is prohibited from drinking the Lethean waters. He witnesses the transition of souls as if in a dream; he does not know how he returns to his body, but recovers his sight and his consciousness with his memory intact. While Spenser preserves many details from Plato’s account of the cycle of souls, he omits any mention of the journey from one realm to another as bounded by forgetfulness. Elizabeth J. Bellamy suggests that Virgil’s Elysium may also provide an epic prototype for the Garden of Adonis (Bellamy 1992: 245), but, if so, Spenser again does not include Anchises’s explanation of the role Lethe plays in eradicating memory during the cycle of generation. What he omits is instructive. The Platonic and Virgilian accounts share a preoccupation with the transition between pure soul and its establishment in the fleshly body, mythic versions of what medicine terms conception and generation. I contend that Spenser displaces this moment of translation between body and soul into the narrative that abuts his description of the Garden of Adonis, Chrysogone’s “lethargic” sleeps of conception and delivery. Spenser’s garden, with its “stocke” of souls that is “not lessened, nor spent” (3.6.36), situates Platonic allegory between this unconscious human conception and the topographical description of female anatomy in the Mount of Venus, as if the Garden of Adonis represented a version of Chrysogone’s unconscious, a psychic space or dream world, guarded by its porter, Genius, who presides over the double gates. These twinned portals recall the gates of ivory and horn in the Aeneid (itself an allusion to the Odyssey), which are described just after Anchises presents his prophetic genealogical vision to Aeneas, and it is through the ivory gate that Aeneas reascends to the upper world (Virgil 1965: 6.893–901). Dreams and genealogy thus converge in Genius, whose name is derived from the Latin gignere, to give birth, and who also presides, in an etymologically “embedded” phrase, over Crooke’s description of the reproductive organs, which he calls the body’s “[g]eniall bed” (Crooke 1615: 907).

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Displacements of generation in The Faerie Queene 61 Just as Chrysogone’s rational faculties are suspended in forgetful lethargy, so is the ending of the Venus and Adonis narrative deferred in the garden. The spatial metaphor for its suspended closure is the cave that is hewn in the rock underneath the Mount of Venus and that holds the boar with its phallic tusks “firmely” captive (3.6.48). Adonis, “[l]apped in flowres and precious spycery,” held in a sexual bond in which Venus “[p]ossesseth him, and of his sweetnesse takes her fill” (3.6.46), a pleasure so mutual (“[j]oying his goddesse, and of her enioyd” [3.6.48]) that even Spenser’s syntax mimics their blissful union, the lovers seem to enact the sexual fusion that Crooke describes. The ending of the myth, depicted so vividly in the tapestry in the Castel Joyous, where Adonis lies “languishing,” “[d]eadly engored of a great wild Bore” (3.1.38), is in the Garden of Adonis concealed in the cave, latent. Latent, derived from the Greek lanthanein, to forget or lie hidden, is etymologically connected to lethargy and tropologically linked to the pattern of sexual forgetting that I have been tracing. Helkiah Crooke’s medical portrayal of the female genitals in Microcosmographia supports this reading of Spenser, for Crooke incorporates the Garden of Adonis into his anatomy. His description of the “[l]ap or Privity” includes “mirtle berries” or “caruncles,” a term that points not only to his medical sources but also to Spenser’s “mirtle trees” that “from their fruitfull sides did sweet gum drop” (3.6.43), a landscape that includes clefts, valleys, and the “mount of Venus,” and perhaps most tellingly, a repetition of Crooke’s theory of sexual forgetfulness just where he describes the recently discovered source of female pleasure, the clitoris: For Nature . . . hath given to all creatures both the instruments of conception, and hath also infused into them a strange and violent kind of delight, that none of the kinds of creatures should perish but remain ever after a sort immortall. And truly it was very necessary that there should be a kind of pleasant force or violence in the Nature of mankind to transport him out of himself or beside himself as it were, in the act of generation; to which otherwise being master of himself he would hardly have been drawn; which exstasie (for it is called a little Epilepsie or falling sickness) is caused by the touch of the seed upon the nervous and quick sensed parts as it passeth them. (Crooke 1615: 238) The pleasure of sexual coition is transferred from the ecstatic bodies to the contact between seed and the “parts,” as if all this pleasure were, as Crooke tells us elsewhere, a seminal yearning for immortality, an urgency to transcend the moral span through a fusion analogous to the endless embrace of Venus and Adonis, “eterne in mutabilities, / And by succession made perpetuall” (3.6.47). Gynecology and genealogy converge in Crooke’s use of Spenser’s poem; both Microcosmographia and The Faerie Queene are works that use English to

62 Elizabeth D. Harvey establish mythic, poetic, and professional nationalism. Crooke’s vernacular anatomy employs Spenserian intertexts not only as the poetic soul that animates the corpse he dissects and dis-members but also as the conveyor of an indigenous cultural heritage that Crooke seeks to mimic in a medical context. The “remarkable analogy” that Freud sees between childhood screen memories and the myths and legends that a nation preserves as the narrative of its origin is evident in the strange mirroring that both Banister and Crooke posit between the womb and the brain. Both describe the brain as divided into three ventricles, which correspond to the three chambers in Alma’s turret and house the faculties of Imagination, Reason, and Memory (Crooke 1615: 432). In the third ventricle, they describe structures that look like the testicles and buttocks, and in Banister’s case, also “the shape or privye part of a woman” (Banister 1969: 100v). Crooke describes this structure using the analogy of the body’s lower parts in a similar way, a duplication that is evident in the designation of the brain’s membranes as the dura mater and the pia mater because of their enveloping and nourishing capacities. Although neither anatomist pursues the implications of this somatic replication beyond the implicit analogy, I would suggest that, for Spenser, this sympathetic mirroring subtends his treatment of the three chambers of Alma’s turret. The womb and the imagination are, of course, closely linked as productive organs, in often dangerously ungovernable ways. The uterus is susceptible to impressions, especially images, and like the imagination, is capable of generating new life. It is in the third ventricle, the chamber of memory, that this analogy is most fully developed. In this ruinous chamber piled high with worm-eaten records, scrolls of parchment, and books, sits Eumnestes, a man “of infinite remembraunce,” and from his library Arthur and Guyon choose two books, Briton moniments and Antiquitie of Faerie lond (2.9.60). Both turn out, of course, to be genealogies, works preoccupied with histories of begetting. If these are narratives of conquering and war, they are also tales of birth, of what Spenser calls in a word that has a particular resonance for Crooke, “th’ antique stocke” (2.10.36). The word evokes not only the sense of lineage bound up with arboreal genealogy, the family tree, but also, of course, the “senseles stocks” of human sexual coupling. Ravishing sexual delight produces momentary oblivion, and this erotic amnesia turns out to be the source of generation. National history and anatomical memory are sympathetically joined to the generating organs that Spenser elides (or appropriately simply forgets) but reinstates in a more lasting way within the brain. It is a consensual union in which Spenser implicates himself, for, in the history of the Faeries that Guyon reads, we are told of a meeting in the gardens of Adonis between an Elfe, the “first authour of all Elfin kind,” and a Faerie, “th’authour of all woman kind,” from whom springs the lineage of the Faeries (2.10.71). The creation of people through physical begetting or through imaginative making brings womb and brain into analogical and consensual union, figuring the

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Displacements of generation in The Faerie Queene 63 poet in general and Spenser in particular as progenitor. If the brain of the poem is in Alma’s turret, the consenting organ, the womb of the poem is at The Faerie Queene’s center, the Garden of Adonis, and we can glimpse there – reshaped through the transformations of forgetting – the Spenserian ideas that animate and shape Crooke’s account of the organs of generation.

Notes 1 I have silently modernised “i,” “j,” “u,” “v,” and long “s,” and expanded contractions. 2 Erasmus has Folly articulate an analogous sentiment in The Praise of Folly, where, for example, she argues that no woman who has gone through the “perilous labor of childbirth” “would ever consent to go through it again if it were not for the divine influence of Lethe.” Indeed, Folly sees forgetfulness as bounding the span of human life. She explains how she helps mortals to return to a “second childhood”: I bring them to the spring of our handmaid Lethe, which has its origin in the Isles of the Blest (the Lethe in the underworld is only a rivulet flowing from the main spring), so that they may drink large drafts of oblivion and thus by dissipating their cares grow young again. (Erasmus 1979: 19, 20–1). 3 For an analysis of the three central Latin sources for the art of memory, Ad Herennium, Cicero’s De Oratore, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, see Yates 1984. She judges Quintilian to be less invested in the relationship between emotion and memory than Cicero or the anonymous author of Ad Herennium (Yates 1984: 25–6). See also Carruthers on the medieval memory tradition – a tradition influenced by Averroes and Aristotle – in which the memory image is laden with sensory and emotive associations (Carruthers 1990: 47–60). 4 Crooke was born in 1576, 24 years after Spenser, and like the poet, he was a sizar (the poorest category of student) at Cambridge. Crooke apparently received a bachelor’s degree in 1596, the same year in which the first six books of The Faerie Queene were published, and in the subsequent year he studied medicine in Leiden. He then returned to Cambridge, where he earned his bachelor’s degree (this time in medicine) in 1599 and his degree of doctor of medicine in 1604. Although Crooke probably never met Spenser, he would have known him by reputation at Cambridge. For background on Crooke’s life, see C. D. O’Malley’s (1968) biographical portrait of him. 5 See Walter J. Ong’s analysis of the implications of Latin moving from a vernacular tongue to a school language around AD 700. Latin was “chirographically controlled,” that is, always taught as written language as well as a spoken language. He argues (in a now-contested assertion) that learned Latin thus became sex-linked, written and spoken only by males, and that it was isolated from the “psychic links” associated with early childhood experience and “emotion-charged depths” of the mother tongue (Ong 1982: 110–12). 6 The clearest place to see this is in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which forgetting, slips of the tongue, bungled action, superstitions, and errors provide evidence of the unconscious workings of the mind. Freud’s second chapter concentrates on the forgetting of foreign words, and his discussion brings together the associative pathways by which material is transferred between the conscious and the unconscious and actual translation between languages. As James Strachey, Freud’s translator, notes in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, many of the anecdotes that

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Freud relates depend upon a play on words that is untranslatable (Freud 1960: xxi). Translation seems both to figure the traffic between parts of the psyche and to replicate these complexities in what only appears to be a relatively simpler linguistic exchange. One of the most important discussions of this omission is David Lee Miller’s The Poem’s Two Bodies, which sees the sexual organs displaced through the operations of sublimation into the sexualized interactions in the parlor of the heart (Miller 1988: 164–83). See also Michael Schoenfeldt’s objection to Miller’s psychoanalytic emphasis of the elision of the sexual organs (Schoenfeldt 1999: 63–6). The College of Physicians attempted to stop the publication of Microcosmographia, first with the help of the Bishop of London, and then by intimidating William Jaggard, the publisher of Crooke’s medical treatise (and of the first folio of Shakespeare’s works). Crooke was Jaggard’s physician at the time, but, because the publisher was also the son of a barber-surgeon, he may well have had a special sympathy for Crooke’s situation. Crooke was threatened with a radical emendation of the offending parts and then with book burning should his treatise be published, but none of these attempts to suppress the book was successful. Despite his eventual success, the cultural pressures of propriety continued to operate even after Crooke had negotiated the overt threats of the book’s suppression. Crooke says, “we have so plotted our busines, that he that listeth may separate this Booke from the rest and reserve it privately unto himselfe” (Crooke 1615: 197). Crooke had in fact arranged to publish Book 4, on the male and female genitalia, as a secret removable section that could be read in private. See O’Malley 1968 for a detailed although skewed account of Crooke’s relationship with the College of Physicians. See also my critique of O’Malley’s interpretation (Harvey 2004). I argue that O’Malley replicates the physicians’ caricaturing of Crooke as an opportunist, and that their reprimands to Crooke need to be understood at least partly as a response to the professional rivalry with the barber-surgeons. The frontispiece to The Compleat Midwifes Practice provides a typical illustration, which displays the open abdominal cavity of a woman as a large flower with an infant framed within its petals. Among the diseases of women in the table of contents are a number of menstrual disorders that include the “suppression of the flowers,” “the discolouring of the flowers,” and the “inordinate flux of the Flowers” (Chamberlayne 1656). See, for instance, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Nohrnberg 1976: 440–2).

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Part II

Signs

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Textual crudities in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica Grant Williams

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Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica are extraordinary commonplace books insofar as they unsettle rhetorical assumptions about forgetting. The early modern commonplace book renders visible the practice of the art of memory – rhetoric’s fourth canon – by embodying in print as well as writing what was popularly embodied in the individual. Like the architecture visualized by Cicero, it houses an artificial memory that the reader returns to for locating mnemonic content. The discourse of rhetoric in which the early modern commonplace book is situated assumes memory to be textual abundance and forgetting to be its privation. In this negative form, forgetting does not encroach upon memory, which vouchsafes to writer and reader imaginary selfmastery through accumulating commonplaces. Burton’s and Browne’s commonplace books, however, conceptualize forgetting as a material excess, not a privation, and thereby signal a crisis in early modern mnemonic culture: the overproduction of the printing press has made it impossible for humanist subjectivity to digest commonplaces into the self. Burton and Browne look toward modernity in registering an epistemological suspicion of textuality, even as they materialize their forgetting in characteristically early modern terms. Although Burton’s and Browne’s treatises do not comport rigidly to a homogenous genre, to disregard their relationship to commonplace books is to deny their dependence on the humanist method of composition that gathers passages and ideas (verba and res) from writers and arranges them under headings.1 In the preface to The Anatomy, Burton explains this method through elaborating a comparison with his namesake, the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus, who dissected animal carcasses to find the seat of atra bilis (Burton 1989: 6). For Democritus Jr, anatomizing the disease is not an empirical pursuit with a knife but the rhetorical operation of dissecting books to reveal the written locations of melancholy. The Anatomy arranges these fragments under headings corresponding to the Galenic rubric for examining diseases: symptoms, causes, and cures. Browne also searches

68 Grant Williams high and low for the verba and res of a no-less-rampant kind of commonplace – error – and arranges his findings under a defined set of headings. His headings run through the chain of being that links together the cosmos, climbing from minerals, plants, and animals to man, his world, and finally providential history. However, what is extraordinary about both commonplace books is that, despite their method of managing textual fragments, they actively undermine the commonplace book’s primary epistemological purpose. The commonplace book endeavours to supplement natural memory with an artificial one in order to secure for subjectivity imaginary control over textuality. The process by which a prosthetic memory feeds the subject’s narcissism is best described by the trope of digestion. Etymologically speaking, digestion does the work of artificial memory: it signifies the disposition of things into due order, the precept underlying the ars memoria. This signification explains why Thomas Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric identifies “digestion” as a figure of speech for “an orderly placing of things, parting every matter severally” and later uses the word to describe the arrangement of images in the art of memory (Wilson 1994: 223, 237). The popular trope regularly governs commonplaces wherever they are collected or discussed (Browne 1928: 2.44; Burton 1989: 11; Moss 1991: 510), though it does not signify a dead metaphor for early modernity. Digestion subtends copia, Erasmus’s educational program for teaching rhetorical skills. By projecting onto literature the alimentary, copia conceives reading and writing as digestive enterprises.2 The writer – a beneficent host – sets before the reader a bounteous repast, a text containing a generative potential both appetizing and nourishing.3 Literature’s inherent salubrity necessitates Erasmus to outline instructions for composing commonplace books (Erasmus 1978: 635), which are vital to his entire program of learning (Erasmus 1997: 931–5). In contrast to Erasmus, Burton does not regard the accumulation of commonplaces as alimentary abundance.4 Throughout his preface, Burton complains about the degeneracy of commonplace book culture. Before they are fit to teach, too many writers “rush into learning,” “rake over all Indexes and Pamphlets for notes,” and “lard their leane bookes with the fat of others Workes”; as a result, “Amongst so many thousand Authors you shall scarce find one by reading of whome you shall be any whit better, but rather much worse . . . by which hee is rather infected than any way perfected” (Burton 1989: 9, 10). Literature’s alimentary abundance has soured in Browne too. Error is commonplace throughout knowledge because of the flourishing error of commonplaces. Browne’s explanation of error’s dissemination singles out adherence unto antiquity, tradition, and authority, widespread scholarly beliefs particularly germane to the commonplace composition valorized by copia (Browne 1928: 2.42–56). After dealing with these malignant causes, he devotes two chapters to recording authors, such as Pliny and Athenaeus, whose polymathic works have often been plundered for passages. He compiles this

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bibliography to dissuade readers from assuming the habit of commonplace thinking. Burton and Browne decry the unhealthy profusion of commonplaces in scholarly culture and yet at the same time tirelessly store them up. They are clearly alienated from the literature out of which they should, according to copia, nourish their corporeal economies. Briefly put, they cannot digest the textual scraps they have consumed. While explaining his writing style, Burton admits corporeal dysfunction:

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And for those other faults of Barbarisme, Doricke dialect, Extemporanean stile, Tautologies, Apish imitation, a Rhapsody of Rags gathered together from severall Dung-hills, excrements of Authors, toies and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without Art, Invention, Judgement, Wit, Learning, harsh, raw, rude, phantasticall, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, in-digested, vaine, scurrile, idle, dull and dry; I confesse all (’tis partly affected) thou canst not thinke worse of me then I doe of my selfe. ’Tis not worth the reading, I yeeld it, I desire thee not to loose time in perusing so vaine a subject. . . . (Burton 1989: 12)

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This passage suffers from the same dyspepsia that it attributes to the entire text. On the level of the actual sentence, it neglects to digest the steady stream of listed items: a lack of subordination makes a mockery of Wilson’s aforementioned figure of speech. With reference to quoting authors, Burton confesses to going out of his way to collect cast-offs from dung hills. “Rude,” “raw,” “ill-composed,” and “in-digested,” his appropriated verba and res signify imperfectly concocted food or humors, what early modern medical discourse called crudity. During his only focused discussion of crudities, Browne refutes the commonplace that Jews stink by conceding that any individual troubled with faulty digestion may emit offensive odors. In addition to “[p]utrid humours” and “grosse and humide bodies,” “errors of one concoction” may cause the lapse in hygiene (Browne 1928: 3.43). That Browne substitutes error for crudity should not be surprising when it recurrently occupies in his text the structural position of an imperfectly concocted humor. While illustrating the errors based on the fallacy non causa pro causa, Browne mentions the “gross mistakes” made by physic (Browne 1928: 2.37). This is neither the first nor the last time Browne couples “gross” with errors, in one sense denoting their flagrancy or monstrosity (Browne 1928: 2.20; 2.26; 2.175; 3.228; 3.287). But the modifier, said of liquids, solids, or vapors, specifically draws attention to the thick materiality of things not considered to be spiritual or ethereal (OED). And so in medical discourse, it commonly describes those humors and spirits that have been corrupted through imperfect concoction; “How should a man choose but be cholericke and angry,” says Burton, “that

70 Grant Williams hath his body so clogged with abundance of grosse humours?” (Burton 1989: 373).5 The nocuous materiality of humors explains why Browne regards them as the corporeal media of the devil (Browne 1928: 2.73). In light of crudity, which appears so prominently in Burton and Browne, why would digestion and its failure be fundamental to the artificial memory of the commonplace book? What sense does it make to argue that rhetoric understands a mental activity in terms of a physiological process? It makes good sense to early modern mnemonic discourse, which considers the stomach to hold a special, overdetermined relationship with the natural memory – that which artificial memory systems endeavour to simulate and supplement. In William Fulwood’s Castel of Memorie, a translation of Gratarolus’s mnemonic treatise, food easily concocted helps to restore and fortify memory, whereas undigested food is most dangerous to body and mind (Gratarolus 1971: C1v–D5v). This treatise also uses the stomach as an admonitory trope: the reader must avoid intemperate mental activity, because memory, like a stomach, will not work properly when overcharged (Gratarolus 1971: G2v). In mnemonic discourse, the stomach metaphorically and metonymically indicates the memory’s embedment in the humoral body.6 To a certain extent no corporeal zone escapes the influence of digestion, since the body with its three different concoctions is, as Michael Schoenfeldt remarks, “a giant stomach” (Schoenfeldt 1999: 26). But the memory and the stomach have a special kinship insofar as they are both active sites in subjectivity’s interior struggle to overcome the threatening materiality of the world. The memory engages with the outer world from two fronts. First, if the stomach digests its contents well enough, humors will be converted into the three spirits, the last of which, the animal, permits the brain’s inner wits to operate: “these spirits imprint or stampe the shapes and images of things in the braine” (Mornay 1602: 115). Second, the memory, like the stomach, takes in external matter and converts it into higher corporeal media. The common sense transmits sensory impressions, gathered from the fives senses, to the imagination, where some are selected to be stored in the cell of memory (Boughner 1932: 93). Because these images ultimately derive from the world, they retain traces of its threatening externality. Thus, according to Nicholas Mosley’s treatise on the passions and faculties of man, a sensitive memory coexists with the intellectual memory, the immortal part that remains with the soul after death.7 And yet, if sensual images prevail over the intellectual, the memory becomes a “sink of all uncleanness from whence springs every wicked intention” and, like “gangerene,” quickly overruns the parts and faculties of both body and soul (Mosley 1653: 81, 82). The practice of controlling textuality through the artificial memory of the commonplace book corresponds to the natural memory’s engagement with the outer world. The artificial memory is thus an artificial humoral system, a Galenic economy based on converting base materiality into higher corporeal media. This early modern homology between the artificial and the natural

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mnemonic systems not only contextualizes the corporeal dynamics of copia but also helps to explain Burton’s and Browne’s crudities. Crudity upsets mnemonic systems. To fathom its threat to corporeality, one should not associate crudity with excrement, a substance astutely explicated by Michael Schoenfeldt. His study of the physiological basis of interiority in early modern literature argues that Galenism, far from repressing or pathologizing excrement, actually highlights its ethical significance. The conscientious regulation of ingestion, digestion, and evacuation enables subjectivity to exercise autonomous agency. For that reason, crudity, unlike evacuated excrement, severely disturbs corporeal integrity. Digestion, comprising of three concoctions, separates out of an alimentary substance the profitable and the excremental;8 crudity remains when the first or second concoction fails to make this crucial separation in either food or chyle. If it were promptly expelled, then its effects would be minimal; however, as Lemnius’s treatise on bodily health warns, “for therewith the Stomacke is too much stuffed and distempered with cruditye engenderinge opilation and putrefaction, the verye breeders and procurers of Agewes & all other diseases” (Lemnius 1581: 54v). Confounding the opposition between the excremental and the profitable, crudities stubbornly remain within the corporeal system. Melancholy, the avowed topic of The Anatomy, captures the full semiotic drift of crudity. It is the only vital bodily fluid whose name has become synonymous with a disease, the early modern humoral disease. Timothy Bright regards the humor to be either “nutritive juice or excrement unprofitable,” explaining that black choler after alteration leaves dregs that may disturb the passions and through further corruption oppress all “organicall actions” with madness (Bright 1613: 2–3). Indeed, even prior to faulty concoction, melancholy “consists of the less pure and less nutrimental parts of the chyle and is considered semiexcremental” (Babb 1965: 6). Another sign for crudity, “melancholy” mixes the profitable with the excremental. And Burton’s commonplace of melancholy is no different. On the one hand, Burton writes of melancholy “by being busie to avoid Melancholy,” since study is a cure for the disease (Burton 1989: 6; Burton 1990: 84–5); on the other hand, melancholy diverts him from “many other subjects” that he is more conversant with and would rather write about, for wandering in discourse as well as travel is a symptom exhibited by the melancholic (Burton 1989: 20, 397). On the one hand, he compiles a book on melancholy to help a world suffering from the “[e]pidemicall disease”; on the other hand, he advises readers to avoid sections of this book because the melancholic commonplace may actually induce the disease (Burton 1989: 110, 24). Browne also confounds the excremental with the profitable. Purporting to follow a dogmatic agenda of separating the truth from error, his text often proceeds with skeptical detachment. Achsah Guibbory observes, “Browne’s writing is riddled with words suggesting incertitude. . . . Most of his

72 Grant Williams conclusions are couched in uncertainty” (Guibbory 1976: 492). For example, his chapter on diet argues against the error of naturalizing dietary restrictions, because he notes in Genesis that every plant and, later after the flood, every moving thing may be meat. Yet, when acknowledging the antediluvian distinction between clean and unclean beasts, he suspends his judgment, not knowing why Moses would ever formulate this distinction since no animal is naturally unclean. Browne’s uncertainty does not stop him from arguing that the preference of some dishes over others is “arbitrary” (Browne 1928: 2.282, 284), until he reaches his conclusion. There, a series of unanswered questions on restrictive diets is identified in the margin as “a problem.” The problem concerns health but, for some inexplicable reason, must not “prolong” his discourse (Browne 1928: 2.286, 287). His conclusion clearly cannot separate truth from error. In a general sense too, Browne’s dominant commonplace occupies the position of unexcremental excrement. On the one hand, Browne denounces the commonplace method of composition for breeding errors, especially through its uncritical adherence to textual traditions (Browne 1928: 2.50–6); but, on the other hand, he deals with these errors precisely through the commonplace method of composition. Jonathan F. S. Post summarizes the all-pervasive contradiction: “Even when Browne is apparently attempting to resist the tyranny of its [written word’s] presence, authority still looms large in Pseudodoxia” (Post 1987: 106). Insofar as it confounds the profitable with the excremental, crudity amounts to an early modern manifestation of what Julia Kristeva calls the abject. As Kristeva comments on Mary Douglas’s anthropological explanation of filth (Kristeva 1982: 69), the abject in its most rudimentary sense is not a quality in and of itself but something that holds a relation to a boundary: through being expelled from a region, an object creates a boundary and becomes the abject. However, when the abject returns to or cannot be expelled from corporeality, subjectivity, or textuality, it disturbs order, ruptures identity, and breaks down system in its total disregard for limits and functions. Because Galenic physiology depends on the second concoction for the production of the four humors and three spirits that respectively build and replenish the body’s parts and make possible its physical functions and intellectual motions, the production of crudity threatens corporeal integrity at all levels. For any humoral economy, it putrefies parts, impedes functions, and debases intellectual motions. If, as Schoenfeldt contends, “all acts of ingestion and excretion” were for the early modern subject “very literal acts of self-fashioning” (Schoenfeldt 1999: 11), then crudities definitely obstruct identity formation. Burton’s and Browne’s dyspepsia, far from being a minor discomfort, upsets a specific kind of identity supported by rhetoric. Their commonplace books unsettle the humanist imaginary. Renaissance humanism, especially through the techniques of copia, regarded the commonplace book as an indispensable

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tool for learning (Havens 2001: Introduction). The Erasmian student, who acquired knowledge by emulating the most noteworthy Roman and Greek authors (Voss 1987: 292), built up the self out of remembering. He fed off the past (Callahan 1978: 105), incorporating the verba and res of classical writing into his own discourse. The power of memory to master textuality through incorporation attains its most famous and most widespread expression in the apian analogy, first worked out by Seneca and later implemented by countless Renaissance humanists – including Erasmus (Erasmus 1972: 82; Erasmus 1978: 639) – to describe commonplace book composition. Seneca urges the writer to imitate bees, because the writer should collect nectars from various sources and convert them into his or her own sweet honey (Seneca 1996: 277–9).9 Traditionally, Seneca’s apian digestion has not been read so much in terms of mnemonic activity as in terms of writerly imitation. Readers transform into their own style what they find and emulate in the best literature. More recently, Mary Carruthers’s work with the analogy corrects the unrhetorical, even romantic, bias of emphasizing textual transformation. In Seneca, memory “is not an alternative to creativity . . . but the route to it” (Carruthers 1990: 192), because the past mediates both present and future.10 I would like to suggest another aspect of memory – more humoral – encoded in Seneca’s analogy. The comparison of the writer to a bee sets up his later argument that we should digest texts in the same way that our bodies digest food (Seneca 1996: 279–81). The juxtaposition of mellification and idealized digestion communicates the core of the early modern humoral fantasy of mastering textuality through remembering. The bee symbolizes the perfect digesting machine, since its body, a stomach with wings, transforms what it collects from flowers into honey – not excrement. It symbolizes less digestion than the alchemical miracle of sublimation, wherein base matter is transmuted into the alimentary. The Senecan analogy projects the narcissistic illusion that subjectivity can effect a miraculous sublimation of literature without leaving behind any troubling material remainder. Sorely disturbing the dynamics of the humanist imaginary, The Anatomy and Pseudodoxia Epidemica cannot sublimate commonplaces. In each case, a humoral economy loses its struggle with the material world, which obstinately resists incorporation. Crudities corrupt memory, through which humanist subjectivity fashions identity. Because the commonplace book fails to assimilate textuality into its corporeal order, the subject cannot build up the self with verba and res and finds himself/herself alienated by and in words, writings, and books. Consequently, crudities confound memory not in attacking it from outside but overturning its assumptions from within. Their materiality throws into question classical rhetoric’s configuration of the opposition between memory and forgetting, which essentially regards forgetting as the absence of memory.

74 Grant Williams Normally reticent about forgetting, classical rhetoric considers this opposition in the story of Themistocles. When asked if he would like to learn the art of memory, he replied that he would sooner learn how to forget, his mind being so brilliantly retentive. Cicero imagines an art of forgetting to express his awe at Themistocles’s capacious mind and to encourage students to train their memories (Cicero 1996: 2.74.299–300). When it appears at all, forgetting reinforces the narcissism of an all-powerful memory: to possess is to remember; to be dispossessed, to lose, to forgo, is to forget. And so rhetoric proceeds on the grounds that memory is a full treasure house (Quintilian 1961: 11.2.1; Cicero 1999: 3.16.28). As artificial memories, early modern commonplace books obviously enact classical rhetoric’s opposition between presence and absence, possession and dispossession, abundance and dearth. The seventeenth-century anonymous essay “Of Common Places, or Memorial Books” truistically says of the commonplace book, “Hic thesaurus, hic apothegma. . . . Tis a treasury (like that of an honest heart) where are good things stored up, both old and new . . .” (Havens 2001: 2), no doubt because the valuable possession of commonplaces means being able to have them close at hand to retrieve; conversely, the absence of commonplaces means having lost them, having forgotten them. Burton’s and Browne’s crudities do the unthinkable to the humanist treasury: they materialize forgetting as though ingesting, possessing, and storing-up commonplaces were worthless epistemological activities, incapable of empowering the self. Whereas the hoarding enacted by the commonplace book assumes forgetting to be a privation, Burton and Browne regard forgetting to be a troubling remainder that the corporeal system cannot handle after consumption. Confounding the profitable with the excremental, the abject materiality of crudities casts doubt on rhetoric’s imaginary mastery over textuality. Copia is powerless to digest commonplaces, and, consequently, the self cannot possess the past. What was traditionally thought to be an artificial memory shows itself to be a site of oblivion. In Burton and Browne, “crudities” aptly designate the materiality of early modern forgetting and thereby reveal the mnemonic trauma of early modern subjectivity, since these abject corporeal media were actually thought to harm “the power memorative” (Lemnius 1581: 120v). When created by the concoction of humors, spirits have the duty of imprinting images on the brain and retrieving them at the appropriate moment; however, “when the spirits and humours therein bee grosse, thicke and with many vapours pestered, [there] proceedeth Oblivion, slowness to understand, and hardness to conceive”: “crudity and surphet are the spoilers of memory” (Lemnius 1581: 120v, 122v). Yet Burton and Browne do not foster crudity by individual choice; rather their crudity, a byproduct of the conditions of early modern technology, signals a more global crisis in humanist subjectivity. After enumerating

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learned writers whose penned works should be read with caution, Browne directs his attention to a more immediate source of error: And seeing the lapses of these worthy Pens, to cast a wary eye on those diminutive, and pamphlet Treaties daily published amongst us, pieces maintaining rather Typography then Verity, Authors presumably writing by Common Places, wherein for many years promiscuously amassing all that makes for their subject, they break forth at last in trite and fruitless Rhapsodies; doing thereby not only open injury unto Learning, but committing a secret treachery upon truth. (Browne 1928: 2.64) Devoid of the alimentary, that is “fruitless,” these “rhapsodies” etymologically refer to texts stitched together from other texts and loosely signify “a miscellaneous collection” or “a medley or confused mass” (OED). Browne obviously uses the term to derogate commonplace books, recalling Burton’s memorable phrase “a Rapsody of Rags gathered together from severall Dunghills” (Burton 1989: 12). In diagnosing the epidemic of error in culture, Browne thus recognizes a conjunction between the abject commonplace book and the printing press’s overproduction. Pseudodoxia Epidemica may have been a direct response to this crisis, for the same inauspicious conjunction appears in his earlier work, Religo Medici: ’Tis not a melancholy Utinam of my own, but the desires of better heads, that there were a general Synod; not to unite the incompatible difference of Religion, but for the benefit of learning, to reduce it as it lay at first, in a few and solid Authours; and to condemn to the fire those swarms and millions of Rhapsodies, begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker judgements of Scholars, and to maintain the trade and Mystery of Typographers. (Browne 1928: 1.33) The printing press has proliferated throughout knowledge an unmanageable excess, which only the violence of book burning can eliminate. Although Burton does not call for such drastic measures, he, too, registers amazement and frustration at the press’s boundless overproduction (Burton 1989: 10, 20, 21). Burton makes it clear that subjectivity cannot manage this typographical excess through the natural memory. He confesses, “I have read many Bookes, but to little purpose, for want of good method, I have confusedly tumbled over divers Authors in our Libraries, with small profit, for want of Art, Order, Memory, Judgement” (Burton 1989: 4; my emphasis). His dismissive reference to the key building blocks of the art of memory betrays his

76 Grant Williams frustration with the failure of mnemonic systems to navigate the vast expanse of libraries. As suggested by his disorientation within the world of books, his reaction to typographical excess is also profoundly corporeal. Later on, he laments, What a Catalogue of new bookes all this yeare, all this age (I say) have our Franc-furt Marts, our Domesticke Marts brought out? . . . Who can read them? As already, wee shall have a vast Chaos and confusion of Bookes, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ake with reading, our fingers with turning. (Burton 1989: 10–11; my emphasis) Needless to say, his aching eyes do not bode well with the art of memory, which relies upon vision (Cicero 1996: 2.87.357). But what deserves special attention here is the effect that the mass of books has on “our” bodies: oppression. Burton’s diction continues a complex pun articulated a few pages earlier, when confessing that his theft from other sources puts him in a large company: I am content to be pressed with the rest. ’Tis most true, tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes, and there is no end of writing of bookes, as the Wiseman found of old, in this scribbling age, especially when the number of Bookes is without number (as a worthy man saith) Presses be oppressed. . . . (Burton 1989: 8) This passage, notwithstanding its allusions to Juvenal, Ecclesiastes, and the Lord Bishop of London, reveals a complex pun indeed. To be “pressed with the rest” signifies the punishment of the torture instrument, the peine forte et dure, by which a felon who would not speak during interrogation would be crushed to death. The pun implies rather ironically that Burton’s widely used compositional method yields no communication, that is, recalcitrant muteness among felon-like authors. But to be “pressed with the rest” is to be, of course, turned into print. The pun thus brings together the printing press and the peine forte et dure as though they were one and the same machine. The press and, by metonymic extension, the brute materiality of books exert a lethal pressure on the body. The number of books increases to such a magnitude that even the instrument of torture becomes crushed. Typographical excess makes presser and pressed indistinguishable, for “[p]resses be oppressed.” However, the “oppression” (Burton 1989: 11) suffered by Burton applies equally to interiority as to the outer body. Paradise Lost speaks of a similar malaise caused by the same intemperate situation: “But Knowledge is as food, and needs no less / Her Temperance over Appetite, to know / In measure what the mind may well contain, / Oppresses else with Surfeit, and soon

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turns / Wisdom to Folly, as Nourishment to Wind” (7.126–30). Too much knowledge may “oppress” the mind with “surfeit,” that is, the morbid condition in which a gluttonous subject has overloaded his corporeal system. Even more to the point, “[s]urfeite,” as Thomas Walkington informs us, “is an ouer cloying of the stomach, with meates or drinkes properly, which hinder the second concoction, these fester and putrifie, corrupting the spirits, infecting the blood and other internall parts . . .” (Walkington 1607: 35r). The surfeit of books, cloying, oppressing, and distending interiority, leads us once again to crudities. Typographical surfeit has had a disturbing impact on early modern subjectivity, because interiority, whether physical or psychological, operates according to the imaginary conditions of humoralism, which privileges crasis, the state of interior balance and order among the humors (Walkington 1607: 78r). In a wonderful passage on how poets have “exceeded others” in spreading fallacies, Browne likewise denounces textual excess for oppressing interiority: yet do they [Fictions, Apologues, and Fables] afford our junior capacities a frequent occasion of error, setling impressions in our tender memories, which our advanced judgments generally neglect to expunge. This way the vain and idle fictions of the Gentiles did first insinuate into the heads of Christians; and thus are they continued even unto our days. Our first and literary apprehensions being commonly instructed in Authors which handle nothing else; wherewith our memories being stuffed, our inventions become pedantick, and cannot avoid their allusions; driving at these as at the highest elegancies, which are but the frigidities of wit, and become not the genius of many ingenuities. It were therefore no loss like that of Galens Library, if these had found the same fate; and would in some way requite the neglect of solid Authors, if they were less pursued. (Browne 1928: 2.67–8) Upsetting the functioning of the mental apparatus, fiction has settled into “our tender memories” dross-like impressions that cannot be purged. In fact, our memories have been so “stuffed,” with what can be only called crudities, that we are incapable of any ingenuity.11 The “frigidities of wit” indicate a debilitating humoral imbalance, since Gratarolus claims, “forgetfulness is the daughter of coldness” (Gratarolus 1971: B6r). Frigidity congeals the vehicles of thought – the humors and spirits. But Browne does not seek to apply individual remedies to each humorally imbalanced person; as in Religio Medici, he calls down upon civilization an ecpyrosis – a radical ministration of heat. According to Burton and Browne, the excesses of typographical production have paralyzed mnemonic culture. Mnemonic culture has become itself so distempered through the press’s surfeit that humanism can no longer

78 Grant Williams digest textuality into the self. Both natural and artificial memories have been overrun by crudities; that is, forgetting with its gross indigestible dross obstructs and oppilates mnemonic culture from remembering the past and thereby charting a course for the future. Knowledge production has come to a complete standstill. If Burton and Browne diagnose humanism as suffering from crudities, then they part company in their responses to this collapse of mnemonic culture. Whereas Browne proposes to eliminate crudities, Burton gives himself up to them. To combat the epidemic of error, Browne advises the implementation of another kind of forgetting, distinct from crudity and reminiscent of an ecpyrosis. This kind directly contests the dominant expression of mnemonic epistemology in the Western tradition. In his preface, Browne distinguishes his project from that of Plato, whose Meno asserts that all knowledge amounts to recollection. The individual, possessing a mind clouded with physicality, must try to remember the pure forms, of which his immortal soul still contains vestiges. Browne wishes knowledge were indeed Platonic remembrance, a process, he imagines, of coloring in the pale “impressions” imprinted on the soul (again his language betrays a suspicion of print technology); but for him the situation is far worse: “knowledge is made by oblivion, and to purchase a clear and warrantable body of Truth, we must forget and part with much we know” (Browne 1928: 2.3). To be clear, that is, to be free from the gross vapors and dross obstructing mental functioning, truth’s body must effect an evacuation of what it has hitherto consumed and stored. It must effect a cathartic forgetting. This forgetting that makes knowledge possible is not a product of ingestion and digestion, but a process of purgation, which he explicitly mentions later in the preface (Browne 1928: 2.6). What is notable about the preface’s account of the crisis is that pathological forgetting and curative forgetting, both conceptualized through humoral subjectivity, dominate the early modern epistemological landscape. And memory, the heart and soul of a culture fixated on preserving the past, appears as a shadow – a Platonic delusion only sustainable in a world untouched by the pressures of print. Mnemonic culture has destroyed itself through the very humanist media that gave it life: a humoral lesson, indeed. For Browne, then, the dialectical struggle in early modern epistemology is not between two forms of memory, one technology, say of print, replacing an older form of remembering, say of writing; it is not a struggle between memory and forgetting, in which Platonic recollection rescues the eternal from the ephemeral or in which rhetorical memory stores and guards mnemonic gold from theft; but it is a struggle between two kinds of forgetting, a struggle in which an act of oblivion attempts to cure knowledge from the intellectual paralysis caused by textual crudity. Although Browne’s response to crudities is not unique, his recognition of the epistemological necessity of oblivion to open up new knowledge

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eloquently articulates the point of departure for the modern episteme. To move beyond the stasis of mnemonic culture, Cartesian philosophy must perform a radical act of forgetting. Amazed by the many falsehoods that he has accepted into his thinking, Descartes first rids his mind of all worries and demolishes all of his opinions before he can establish science on the firm footing of certainty (Descartes 1986: 12). He repeatedly resists the temptation to place his trust in these opinions, which, despite his wishes, seize his credulity because of his long standing acceptance of the law of custom (Descartes 1986: 15). He realizes that he cannot dispatch each of the opinions individually, for that “would be an endless task” (Descartes 1986: 12). Instead, he sets his mind to probing the foundational principles upon which his beliefs rest so that he can undermine the entire building. In effect, Descartes begins his philosophical program by emptying his memory of everything that he has accepted on the basis of received wisdom. Surely, Descartes has in mind the humanist legacy, which, mired as it is in commonplace books, treasuries, collections, digests, florilegia, epitomes, centos, and rhapsodies, must be forgotten in order to make way for ingenuity and discovery. He sets ablaze the frigidities of wit, epistemological oblivion clearing out a mental space for modernity. Yet, even though Browne realizes the necessity of this radical forgetting, in practice he cannot perform the Cartesian purgation. He does precisely what Descartes deems so futile: he sets himself the task of handling each error individually. Browne is a Cartesian in word, but not in deed. He is a closet Burtonian, an epistemological bulimic, which brings me to Burton’s response to textual crudities. Despite denouncing commonplaces, Burton does not dream of purging them from knowledge or even from his own method of composition. The Anatomy accumulated bulk through its first six different versions as though Burton were composing a written commonplace book. With each new edition, Burton adds “material at every level from single words to entire paragraphs to increase his examples, cite additional authorities, and expand his analyses throughout the work” (Faulkner, Kiessling, and Blair 1989: xxxvii).12 Even The Anatomy’s typographical incarnations bear witness to Burton’s compulsion to consume without revising, integrating, and deleting – without digesting properly or purging healthily. In one respect, his “inclusion of all that concerns human life signals the book’s identification with those works of humanist universality” (O’Connell 1986: 41), but, as I have been arguing, his method betrays a humanism pushed to sickness, which John Carey epitomizes succinctly, “What keeps Burton at his books is not the pursuit of truth but the fascination of excess” (Carey 1970: 408). It is excess that describes not only his themes and style but also the way in which he collects his material. Yet why can Burton not stop his excessive ingestion of texts, especially when engendering crudities undermines memory and upsets the narcissism

80 Grant Williams of the humanist imaginary? Recently, Jonathan Sawday has looked upon the revisions of Burton’s text to be the outcome of the jouissance of print technology (Sawday 1997: 181). There is some wisdom in that, but such an observation still does not adequately explain how typographical crudities – disruptive, malignant phenomena – could ever yield pleasure. Mnemonic discourse, though, once again comes to our assistance. In exposing the humoral anxieties of early modern subjectivity, it enables us to put into the words the pleasure derived from the accumulation of crudities. With its epilogue, The Castell of Memorie manages one last effort to fortify the reader from assaults to his memory. It advises that “a perpetuall fobrietie of lyfe doth moft of all helpe” and what follows this dictum of moderation is a few illustrations of immoderate living: for gluttonye and dronckennes, lyke as they doe dulle the witte, so doe they also utterly ouer throwe & destroye the Memorie: also the varietie of cares, and [the] heape of busynesses is hurtefull, the tumultuous readynge of diuers volumes or bookes is also noyous. (Gratarolus 1971: H6v–H7r) This admonition does not accidentally move from the excesses of corporeal consumption to the excessive ingestion of books. The stomach and memory’s overdetermined correspondences in humoralism extend not only to their functions and dysfunctions but also to their deviant appetites: “great or carefull studye is likewise hurtefull in as muche as it is not without an earnest & greedy desyre” (Gratarolus 1971: H7r). One can get drunk or glut oneself on books. Gratarolus’s admonition, common in early modern discussions of memory, articulates a dangerous pleasure, noxious enough to harm the individual humanist subject and yet frequent enough to warrant vigilance.13 The memory, which early modernity constructs on the basis of humoral medicine and identifies metaphorically and metonymically with the stomach, may degenerate into an organ of self-destructive pleasure. No other articulation could adequately characterize Burton’s orgiastic engorgement. His gluttony far exceeds the circumscribed pleasures of copia, the temperate yet abundant “repast” of early modern rhetoric. Textual crudity, the abject which his treatise compulsively and excessively accumulates, provokes a “surplus enjoyment, an ‘enjoyment in pain,’ in displeasure, baptized by Lacan jouissance, the ‘impossible’ /traumatic/ painful enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle” (Zˇizˇek 1992: 182). If, as Burton notes, quantity of diet causes “crudities, wind and oppilations,” “an insatiable paunch” being an “al-devouring and murdering gut,” “a pernitious sinke & the fountain of all diseases both of body and minde” and if, as he piously censures, “for all this harme, which apparently followes surfetting & drunkenesse, see how we

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[still] luxuriate and rage in kinde” (Burton 1989: 220, 221), then it cannot be an exaggeration to call his insatiable scholarly gluttony a death-driven, surplus enjoyment. Often glimpsing into the ancient records of many “dish moungers” whose riotous misdieting cut their lives short, Thomas Walkington’s Optick Glasse of Humors elucidates further the humoral jouissance to which Burton gives himself up. Walkington recounts from Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists a narrative about the poet Philoxenus, who became “deadly sicke of the crudity,” after devouring at one sitting all but the head of a yard long cuttle fish. Upon hearing from the physician that he had seven hours to live, Philoxenus uttered the following words: “Since that Charon and Atropos are comd to call me away from my delicies, I thinke it be best to leave nothing behind me, wherefore let me eat the residue of the Polipus” (Walkington 1607: B3v–B4r). He died after finishing the dish. The precious opportunity offered by the physician’s seven hours – an opportunity to reflect upon the price of gluttony, to prepare for his departure from this world, or to bid loved ones adieu for the very last time – is squandered in an act of senselessly hedonistic surplus enjoyment. Philoxenus abandons any last residue of the self to his gluttonous pleasure – or rather to Hades, since his drive toward death seems indistinguishable from his compulsion to eat. Such surplus enjoyment must be Burton’s too. While knowing full well the harm that he has brought to the humoral economy, Burton continues to devour commonplaces with selfabandon. Like Philoxenus, Burton, “deadly sicke of the crudity,” gorges himself into oblivion. Textual crudities are symptomatic of mnemonic culture’s inability to manage the overproduction of the printing press with commonplace books. They materialize a forgetting that overcharges and unbalances artificial memory systems, which operate according to humoral logic. As such, they at once mark the death of Renaissance humanism and the birth of the modern episteme – the inadequacy of rhetoric to control knowledge and the necessity of purging epistemology of its textual residue and oppilations. Although commonplace book practice continues well into the eighteenth century, rhetoric’s dominance in early modern epistemology gives way to the rise of scientific methodology: empiricism, mathematical certainty, and Ramism (Sloan 1985: 144). Textual crudities belong to the larger cultural shift from Humanist rhetoric to the modern episteme. And yet their very threat to humanist subjectivity, which depends on the imaginary crasis of humoralism, yields an extraordinary surplus enjoyment. Even as they announce the obsolescence of the commonplace book for advancing learning, Browne, the bulimic, and Burton, the sybaritic glutton, are kept from entering modernity by the jouissance of oblivion.

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Notes 1 Recent work on commonplace books has brought this genre and its compositional method to the foreground of early modern textual production. See Crane 1993, Moss 1996, Benedict 1996, and Sharpe 2000. 2 On the relationship between copia and eating, see Jeanneret 1991: 172–198. 3 Cave 1986: 171–182 discusses the inexhaustibly productive cornucopian text. 4 In Burton criticism, however, The Anatomy’s composition has been often connected to copia. For a recent discussion, see Schmelzer 1999. 5 For more medical examples, see Walkington 1607: 15v and Lemnius 1581: 84v. 6 For the same slide between the metonymic and the metaphoric, see Willis 1661: 145–155, 106. 7 The distinction between sensitive memory and intellectual memory is made by Aquinas. On this distinction, see Carruthers 1990: 51–2. 8 On the three concoctions and their respective byproducts, see Bamborough 1952: 54 n.10. 9 Another version of this analogy, in which Macrobius depicts mellification more as a process of mnemonic arrangement than as a process of transmutation, has been extensively examined by Moss 1996: 14–15. 10 This “omnitemporality” of medieval thought explains why past authors can permit a writer to think through the present (Carruthers 1990: 193–4). 11 On the exhaustion of ingenuity by textuality, also see Burton 1989: 10. 12 From the 1621 edition of 300,825 words, The Anatomy enlarges its girth continually, settling at 446,132 words with the 1651 edition (Faulkner, Kiessling, and Blair 1989: xxxviii). 13 John Willis prohibits the same scholarly voracity in one of his rules for living a well ordered life beneficial to a strong memory (Willis 1661: 153). Also see Fuller’s The Holy State and the Profane State: “Take heed of a gluttonous curiositie to feed on many things, lest the greedinesse of the appetite of thy Memory spoyl the digestion thereof” (Fuller 1938: 175).

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Off the subject Early modern poets on rhyme, distraction, and forgetfulness Amanda Watson

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It is the principle that makes works of art so unlike What the artist intended. Often he finds He has omitted the thing he started out to say In the first place. Seduced by flowers, Explicit pleasures, he blames himself (though Secretly satisfied with the result). . . . John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

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Rhyme – it goes almost without saying – is supposed to reinforce memory. As Mary Carruthers points out, one need only think of the time-honored “[t]hirty days hath September, / April, June, and November” (Carruthers 1990: 80). Rhyme, like meter, makes a poem easier to memorize; one endword cues us to remember the next, and each recurring sound reminds us of its previous occurrences. “Now that Verse far exceedeth Prose in the knitting up of the memorie, the reason is manifest,” explains Sir Philip Sidney in The Defence of Poesie: “one word, so as it were begetting another, as be it in rime or measured verse, by the former a ma[n] shall have a neare gesse to the follower” (Sidney 1968: 27). Sidney’s discussion of rhyme serves his wider rhetorical purpose of rescuing poetry from the charges of frivolity and falsehood leveled by anti-poetic arguments such as Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse (Gosson 1973: A6v–A7r).1 If memorable lines of verse can function as “hourely lessons” in the reader’s memory, and “if reading be foolish without remembering,” then poetry, with its built-in mnemonic features, is ideally suited for respectably didactic purposes (Sidney 1968: 28, 27). And yet the period in which Sidney praised rhyme’s mnemonic potential was also one in which rhyme was frequently attacked. It may seem surprising that an age that produced a seemingly endless stream of songs and sonnets should question the value of rhyme. But among the poets who did so were Jonson, Campion, and Milton, who famously rejected rhyme in the preface to the second edition of Paradise Lost. Not a few writers in early modern England considered rhyme to be vulgar, tyrannical, seductive, or childishly excessive,

84 Amanda Watson a vestige of the “barbarous” Middle Ages that needed to be cast aside to make way for poetry written in proper classical forms. In what follows, I will argue that the debate over rhyme also draws upon questions of the memorability and forgettability of verse and upon the waywardness of poetic form. The poem’s memorability is tied to its transmissibility; poets argued about which tradition, classical or medieval, should be remembered and continued in the early English nation-state. But rhyme, which aids recollection, was a vexed topic in part because it was also seen as inducing a peculiar amnesia in the poet – a dangerous condition when the poet’s goal is seen to be the communication of instructive material, the recollection of previous literary ages, or the transmission of Englishness. The very qualities that fix a poem in the reader’s memory also distract the poet. This fear of rhyme’s temporary amnesias has partly to do with the larger cultural amnesias that helped to introduce new forms of poetry into the English language: defenders of quantitative verse feared that Greek and Roman antiquity would be forgotten, while defenders of rhyme countered with arguments about the need to remember the more recent past. If rhyme was a locus of forgetting for early modern poets, this forgetting is a familiar but under-theorized kind: the distracted absent-mindedness that occurs because one train of thought has displaced another. We need more models for forgetting if we wish to recover its various sites. The particular model of forgetfulness that I will explore in this essay is based on the proliferation of impressions rather than their burial or disappearance. Umberto Eco argues that one way to forget is to try to remember two similar impressions, the first of which is the right one and the second of which is close enough to cause confusion, “as, for example, when one does not remember whether fraise means ‘blackberry’ or ‘blueberry.’ ” He concludes that “it is possible to forget on account not of defect but of excess,” by addition rather than subtraction (Eco 1988: 259). Early modern theorists of memory recognized this phenomenon too. John Willis, author of the popular seventeenth-century treatise Mnemonica, suggests that to memorize anything, one must “study to drown all unnecessary thoughts in oblivion,” since “Oblivion [is] such a principle of Memory, as Privation is of Generation” (Willis 1661: 28–9). In other words, we need one type of oblivion, the elimination of “unnecessary thoughts,” in order to memorize and thus prevent another kind of oblivion – the kind that results from too many such “unnecessary thoughts” crowding each other. Rhyme, as we will see, is frequently connected with the latter type of oblivion; these lapses of memory entail the loss of intention and the dispersal of will. Whether poets approve or disapprove of rhyme, they invoke the lurking threat of forgetfulness to signal their uneasiness with poetry’s more extravagant effects. In 1575, the poet George Gascoigne published a short preface entitled “Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English.” Along with other practical advice on prosody and invention, this

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treatise suggests what poets should do if stuck for a rhyme: “take the last worde [of a line of verse] and coumpt over all the wordes of the selfe same sounde by order of the Alphabete,” and then pick the most suitable rhymeword. But this method is not without its dangers. Gascoigne remarks that rhyme is likely to lead poets astray and cause them to “forget” what they plan to say. He advises his readers to “beware of rime without reason,” because rhyme may “leade you . . . from your firste Invention.” This is because many wryters when they have layed the platforme of their invention, are yet drawen sometimes (by ryme) to forget it or at least to alter it, as when they cannot readily find out a worde whiche maye rime to the first (and yet continue their determinate Invention). (Gascoigne 1969: 469) Gascoigne does not forbid rhyme per se; he goes on to explain how to rhyme a rime royal stanza, a sonnet, and various other verse forms (Gascoigne 1969: 471–2). But he does imply that it is relatively easy to substitute rhyme for reason. “Your Invention being once devised,” Gascoigne warns his reader at an earlier point, “take heede that neither pleasure of rime, nor varietie of devise, do carie you from it” (Gascoigne 1969: 466). Rhyme gives “pleasure,” but it is a dangerous pleasure that “draws” or “leads” the poet down a primrose path, so to speak, away from the poem’s ostensible topic. Anyone who has attempted to write rhymed verse will recognize the phenomenon Gascoigne describes, right down to the mental alphabet-search, the occasional “pleasure” of an unexpected rhyme presenting itself, and the problems that arise when the only available rhymes have nothing to do with the next line already forming in one’s head. Trying to write a sonnet, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing complains, “I can find out no rhyme to ‘lady’ but ‘baby,’ an innocent rhyme; for ‘scorn,’ ‘horn,’ a hard rhyme; for ‘school,’ ‘fool,’ a babbling rhyme: very ominous endings. No, I was not born under a rhyming planet . . .” (5.2.37–40). Benedick finds himself constrained to introduce childishness, folly, and cuckoldry into what he intended as a love poem – “ominous endings” indeed.2 Benedick’s struggles with rhyme are more comic than distressing; his “halting sonnet” gets its point across eventually (5.4.87). But Gascoigne strikes a note of real concern. The possibility of forgetting one’s inventions – or intentions – seems to concern him far more than it concerns some of his fellow poets, such as Sidney. A generation later, in 1602, Thomas Campion published his Observations in the Art of English Poesie, a treatise advocating that English poets adopt classical meters. Observations revive the connections among rhyme, forgetfulness, pleasure, and the abandonment of intention. For Campion, rhyme was a belated distraction both from the poet’s intended “matter” and from the ancient prosodical traditions he wanted to revive. “Old customes, if they be better, why should they not be recald,” Campion asks, “as the yet

86 Amanda Watson florishing custome of numerous poesy vsed among the Romanes and Grecians”? But rhyme, easier than quantitative verse to accomplish in English, prevents these “old customes” from being “recald.” Worse still, in Campion’s opinion, rhyme “inforceth a man oftentimes to abiure his matter, and extend a short conceit beyond all bounds of arte” (Campion 1602: 4, 6). Campion’s complaint about rhyme constraining the poet to “abiure his matter” resembles Gascoigne’s warning to poets not to forget their first inventions.3 For Campion, rhyme is associated with ignorance: it originated in “lack-learning times,” that is, the medieval period, and “in barbarized Italy” (Campion 1602: 3). Its danger lies in its over-easiness, the way it has managed to displace classical prosody by its seductive and facile appeal. Yet, despite what Campion calls the “facilitie” of this verse form, it nonetheless holds a certain power over its users, “inforc[ing]” them to act against their wills. And in doing so, rhyme also compels poets to forget the classical tradition. The most famous reply to Campion’s argument is Samuel Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme. Daniel answers Campion’s charges by vindicating custom. He defends English poets’ right to compose the way they know and like best. This answer includes a surprising and eloquent defense of the Middle Ages, which Daniel perceives to be just as praiseworthy as the classical period. According to Richard Helgerson, who summarizes the Defence, Daniel “celebrates the cultural accomplishments of the barbarians” where his more classicizing contemporaries “sought to rip out barbarous custom and impose in its place the civility of Greece and Rome.” Helgerson argues that Daniel’s vindication of native English custom is “as much a political as an aesthetic matter,” and that the Defence, published in the year that James I came to the throne, speaks to “concerns aroused by the accession to power of a king who claimed ancestral conquest as the ultimate sanction of his authority” (Helgerson 1988: 286, 287). I would also add that Daniel is trying to defend rhyme against potential charges that it compels poets to forget their Englishness. His criticism of quantitative verse and his justification of the “monuments of most profound iudgement and learning” left by the medieval English tradition (Daniel 1603: H2r) are part of a conversation about the distractions of rhyme as a form of self-forgetfulness, whether for the individual subject or for the nation forgetting its past. Daniel repeatedly invokes memory and delight as advantages of rhyme: such poetry is “a frame of wordes . . . introduced, the better to expresse mens conceipts, both for delight and memorie,” and it gives “both to the Eare an Eccho of a delightfull report & to the Memorie a deeper impression.” If we read these references to memory as an oblique response to Campion and others who charged rhyme with provoking forgetfulness, then Daniel may be seen to reclaim memory for the pro-rhyme side of the debate. He replies to claims, like Gascoigne’s, that rhyme is pleasurable but potentially hazardous to memory. Moreover, Daniel claims to be preserving the memory of the national past in defending rhyme,

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to defend the sacred monuments erected therein, which containe the honour of the dead, the fame of the liuing, the glory of peace, and the best power of our speach, and wherin so many honorable spirits haue sacrificed to memorie their dearest passions. (Daniel 1603: G4r, H6r) For Daniel, medieval and early modern English poetry consists of a collection of “monuments,” made “sacred” by the sacrificial and commemorative acts of prior poets. He depicts himself as a brave defender who stands in the way of their potential destruction. Each participant in this debate appropriates the memory/forgetting binary for his own purposes, and each invokes it on both personal and national levels. Campion decries the oblivion into which quantitative verse has fallen; Daniel asks why English poets must forget the traditions in which they have worked for centuries. The Defence also seems to spring from a more personal recollection: Daniel dedicates it to his patron, William Herbert, the third Earl of Pembroke, whom Daniel tutored during the early 1590s at the famous Sidney-Herbert household at Wilton (Seronsy 1967: 21–2). Daniel claims to have first learned “the formall ordering of [his] compositions” at Wilton, which, he adds, “I must euer acknowledge to haue beene my best Schoole, and thereof alwayes am to hold a feeling and gratefull Memory.” The Defence commemorates both the “sacred monuments” of the English literary tradition and the “gratefull Memory” of Daniel’s own development as a rhyming poet. By contrast, classical meters become “these new measures, threatning to ouerthrow the whole state of Ryme in this kingdom” (Daniel 1603: G3r). Daniel takes the terms of Campion’s attack on rhyme – quantitative verse as “old custom” worth recalling, rhyme as threatening innovation – and neatly reverses them. Ironically, as Helgerson observes, neither form of poetry “was particularly English,” since the rhymed verse-forms Daniel defends are relatively recent borrowings from the French and Italian: “[t]o identify immemorial custom with the sonnet was to invent history” (Helgerson 1988: 288). Campion and Daniel not only invent history, but also forget it, in a selective act of oblivion that establishes which other versions of the past will be remembered. In a passage to which I will return, Daniel implicitly answers the objections to rhyme that Gascoigne, Campion, and others raise: rhyme, he insists, hath beene so farre from hindering [poets’] inuentions, as it hath begot conceit beyond expectation, and comparable to the best inuentions of the world: for sure in an eminent spirit whome Nature hath fitted for that mysterie, Ryme is no impediment to his conceit, but rather giues him wings to mount and carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight. (Daniel 1603: G6r)

88 Amanda Watson Where Gascoigne and, to a certain degree, Campion see rhyme-induced departures from invention as a threat to the meaning and integrity of the poem, Daniel insists on their validity; rhyme takes the apt poet not astray, but above and beyond. Despite the great differences in attitude between Gascoigne and Daniel, a similar sense of rhyme as that which stands outside of or opposed to invention can be found in each of their comments on rhyme. Whether rhyme makes poets “decline or trouble their former Invention” or begets “conceit . . . comparable to the best inuentions of the world,” both authors recognize that the demands of rhyme can divert the poet from his original course. For Daniel, as for the others, rhyme exceeds the bounds of reason. (“The eare,” Campion complains, “is a rationall sense” [Campion 1602: 4–5; my emphasis].) But Daniel also compares rhyme to the process of “invention” itself. Daniel thus vindicates rhyme’s unreason even as he tries to associate irrationality with Campion’s classical meters: “as good still to vse ryme and a little reason, as neither ryme nor reason” (Daniel 1603: G5r). Ben Jonson’s “A Fit of Rhyme Against Rhyme,” written in response to the Campion–Daniel controversy,4 reminds us how each side of the debate can appropriate the other. Jonson levels against rhyme the by now familiar charge that it distorts “true” meaning: Rhyme, the rack of finest wits That expresseth but by fits True conceit; ............................. Wresting words from their true calling, Propping verse for fear of falling To the ground. Jointing syllabes, drowning letters, Fastening vowels, as with fetters They were bound! (Jonson 1985: 350.1–3, 7–12) Rhyme enacts a great deal of violence in these opening lines, torturing, “wresting,” “jointing,” “drowning,” and fettering the poet’s hapless words. The ferocity of Jonson’s imagery owes something to Campion’s complaint that a poet writing quatorzains “handles his subiect as tyranically as Procrustes the thiefe his prisoners” (Campion 1602: 6). But Jonson also borrows from Daniel’s pro-rhyme arguments, for instance, Daniel’s assertion that Greek and Latin poetry exhibits “strange crueltie, in torturing and dismembring of wordes in the middest” until the verse “fall[s] down into flat prose” (Daniel 1603: G5v). And even as Jonson appropriates both authors’ rhetoric of violence, as if to emphasize their interchangeability, he punctuates his stanzas with effortlessly apt rhymes: “letters”/“fetters,” for instance, or, later, “measure”/“caesure” (Jonson 1985: 351.45, 48). If rhyme is “the rack of finest

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wits,” its action of “express[ing] . . . true conceit” suggests a literal pressingout, an extraction of meaning that only occurs in the “fits” (stanzas and convulsions) of the poet tortured or pressed to death by its constraints. For all Jonson’s anti-rhyme posturing, the opening lines of this “fit” suggest that it may be necessary after all. Jonson imagines rhyme locked in a perpetual struggle with reason: “Still may syllabes jar with time, / Still may reason war with rhyme, / Resting never” ( Jonson 1985: 351.52–4). But out of the contest, which perpetually “wrest[s] words from their true calling,” new fits of poetry can emerge.

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The temporary amnesia that Gascoigne, Campion, and others claim as a sideeffect of rhyming is not exactly what we think of as forgetting; instead of a slow erasure of previous memory-traces, this type of forgetting looks more like distraction, or a glitch in short-term memory that allows the train of thought to go off the tracks. The rhyming poet who loses track of intentions bears an odd resemblance to the man of disordered memory who appears in a discussion of aposiopesis in George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie. Defining this figure, in which a speaker deliberately breaks off in midsentence, Puttenham lists a variety of effects and affects that aposiopesis can signify: shame, fear, and anger, for instance. But Puttenham adds that aposiopesis is also “fit for . . . such as be sodaine or lacke memorie,” and he gives an example: I know one of good learning that greatly blemisheth his discretion with this maner of speach: for if he be in the grauest matter of the world talking, he will vpon the sodaine for the flying of a bird ouerthwart the way, or some other such sleight cause, interrupt his tale and neuer returne to it againe. (Puttenham 1988: 178–9)

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Puttenham’s absent-minded scholar, who suffers from a kind of early modern attention-deficit disorder, will allow any “sleight cause” to distract him, thereby making him entirely forget what he was going to say. While Puttenham favors rhyme in English verse, it is worth noting that he, like Gascoigne, cautions his readers against letting their rhymes get the better of them. In a chapter entitled “How the good maker [i.e. poet] will not wrench his word to helpe his rime, either by falsifying his accent, or by untrue orthographie,” Puttenham argues that inexact rhymes and rhymes that require alterations in spelling to look exact (door/restore, ram/came, bean/den) suggest that the poet “is not copious in his own language, or (as they are wont to say) is not halfe his crafts maister” (Puttenham 1988: 94). The real poet gains the upper hand over the language by being able to rhyme without “wrenching,” just as the good scholar will not “lacke memorie” and become distracted by birds flying overhead.

90 Amanda Watson Aposiopesis, Puttenham’s figure of absent-mindedness, occasionally marks such distracted and forgetful moments in drama. Consider Hamlet’s Polonius, losing track of his thoughts in mid-sentence: “And then, sir, does ’a this – ’a does – what was I about to say? / By the mass, I was about to say something” (2.1.49–50). Or consider Cleopatra, attempting to remember what she wants to say in farewell to Antony: Sir, you and I must part, but that’s not it; Sir, you and I have lov’d, but there’s not it; That you know well. Something it is I would – O, my oblivion is a very Antony, And I am all forgotten. (1.3.87–91) Cleopatra’s “oblivion,” her forgetfulness, is “a very Antony” because of the rapid way in which she forgets, which, she claims, parallel the rapid shifts in Antony’s affections. Jonas Barish has argued that instances of forgetfulness are extremely rare in Shakespeare’s plays, but he does not consider moments like these. The main example that he examines is Coriolanus’s forgetting of his benefactor’s name in Act 1 of Coriolanus. Barish mentions another instance, Hotspur’s forgetfulness in 1 Henry IV, but claims that “this is mere distraction” (Barish 1996: 214–16). By “failure of recollection,” Barish means the “tendentious” kind of forgetting that Freud argued was a hallmark of repression (Barish 1996: 215). He refers to the discussion of memory lapses in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which Freud advances the thesis that we forget names, words, impressions, and intentions because “the motive for forgetting is invariably an unwillingness to remember something which can evoke distressing feelings” (Freud 1960: 275). In contrast to the failures of memory that result from repression, “[t]he basic determinants of the normal process of forgetting are unknown,” although Freud later added a footnote suggesting that “indifferent” memory traces undergo gradual condensation and distortion over time (Freud 1960: 274 n.2). “Normal” forgetting, like “mere distraction,” is less conspicuous and less easy to theorize than the forgetting-as-repression model. But what if distraction were less “mere” than it seems? Why should we privilege tendentious forgetting over more everyday types of forgetting? Why not investigate absent-mindedness in our search for the place of forgetfulness in early modern mental life? We should pay attention to inattention. As we have already seen, distracted forgetfulness could be a cause for alarm, or at least for disapproval, when it manifested itself as a loss of control over discourse. But distraction had its uses in the early modern imagination. In his essay on diversion from the third book of the Essais, Montaigne suggests some ways in which we might take distraction and inattention seriously.

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When he cannot forget a “sharpe conceite” or “a violent imagination,” Montaigne writes (in the 1603 translation by Daniel’s longtime friend, John Florio), I finde it a shorter course to alter and divert, then to tame and vanquish the same; if I cannot substitute a contrary unto it, at least I present another vnto it. . . . Shifting of place, exercise and company, I save my selfe amid the throng of other studies and amusements. (Montaigne 1965: 3.57) Montaigne advocates disregarding one’s troubles by substituting other thoughts. As with Eco’s “art of forgetting,” forgetting something means multiplying impressions rather than eliminating them. We can see another positive (and perhaps related) attitude toward distraction reflected in Daniel’s meditation on the ways in which rhyme carries the poet away, in a good way. The contemporary poet Richard Hugo provides a twentieth-century analogue to Daniel’s defense of rhyme-as-distraction. In his essay “Writing Off the Subject,” Hugo advises young poets to lose track of the initial subject of a poem in order to come across “the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean, and which is generated or discovered in the poem during the writing” (Hugo 1979: 4). Like Daniel, Hugo finds that forgetting the initial poetic idea can generate unexpectedly stronger subjectmatter. And, again like Daniel’s, his means of getting away from his first invention is to use rhymes and slant-rhymes: When I was a young poet, I set an arbitrary rule that when I made a sound I felt was strong, a sound I liked specially, I’d make a similar sound three to eight syllables later. . . . Why three to eight? Don’t ask. You have to be silly to write poems at all. (Hugo 1979: 10) These internal rhymes, “silly” and “arbitrary” as they may be, nevertheless open up for Hugo the “associative notions” that enable him to write poetry (Hugo 1979: 10). In Hugo’s account, the poet should actively try to be sidetracked by sound-devices because “[t]he words should not serve the subject”; instead, “the subject should serve the words” (Hugo 1979: 6). And this relation between words and theme is where Hugo’s late-twentiethcentury view of poetry differs from the early modern mindset of a Campion or a Gascoigne, in which language should adorn but not dictate the “sense” of the poem. We are not in the habit of thinking of formal poetic devices as freeing rather than constraining, but Hugo’s reference to the “associative” qualities

92 Amanda Watson of rhyme is a reminder that lyric form “at once frees and channels the unconscious,” as another contemporary poet formulates the paradox (Merrill 1986: 61). The psychoanalyst and poet Frederick Feirstein comments that one of the aims of psychoanalysis is to enable the analysand to “learn to use metaphors, symbols and narration” to rewrite the plot of his or her own life, and that poetic form has a role to play in this process: “Those of us who use meter and rhyme,” he writes, “know that these devices, far from constraining us, help create the trance-like states which give us access to deeper and deeper levels of the psyche. . . . [R]hyme leads to connections of meaning that are often consciously inaccessible.” He gives as an example a portion of the case history of an analysand who uses rhyme as a method of free association: “He would . . . make up rhymes which he would write down on long sheets of paper. He would keep the rhymes rolling till they led to startling material hitherto preconscious or unconscious” (Feirstein 1997: 436). The apparent randomness of rhyme, its stubborn unreasonableness, here becomes a device for getting at apparently random unconscious material. In “Further Recommendations on Technique,” Freud formulated his fundamental rule of psychoanalysis – the rule of free association – as an injunction to be distracted from the point at hand: “ ‘Ordinarily,’ ” he recommends saying to the analysand, “ ‘you rightly try to keep a connecting thread running through your remarks and you exclude any intrusive ideas that may occur to you and any side-issues, so as not to wander too far from the point.’ ” However, within the analytic session, the analysand must allow the digressive “side-issues” and “intrusive ideas” full sway: “You will be tempted to say to yourself that this or that is irrelevant here, or is quite unimportant, or nonsensical, so that there is no need to say it. You . . . must say it in spite of them” (Freud 1958: 134, 135). To “drown all unnecessary thoughts in oblivion,” in John Willis’s terms, may be a precondition for the exercise of conscious memory, as well as a requirement for the easily distracted poet according to Campion or Gascoigne; but forgetting unnecessary thoughts along with remembering only the “necessary” or “relevant” ones is precisely what prevents free association. In order to allow unconscious material to surface, the analysand must allow room for distraction, that is, giving one’s due to the unnecessary. Freud argues that the analyst, too, must learn to forget. While the analysand free-associates, the analyst is advised to cultivate “a state of evenly suspended attention” – that is, as Freud explains in an often-cited passage, to surrender himself to his own unconscious mental activity, . . . to avoid as far as possible reflection and the construction of conscious expectations, not to try to fix anything that he heard particularly in his memory, and by these means to catch the drift of the patient’s unconscious with his own unconscious. (Freud 1961: 239; my emphasis)

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Adam Phillips comments that the analyst’s evenly suspended attention hinges on the “ability to forget; to be able to tolerate not wilfully keeping things in his mind,” to the point where the analytic situation requires “temporarily forgetting who one is” (Phillips 1994: 29–30).5 Both participants in the analytic session are asked to forget the thread of the conversation and to forget themselves – in other words, to do what Gascoigne feared would happen to rhyming poets, what Puttenham’s absent-minded scholar does whenever a bird flies overhead, and what both Daniel and Hugo recommend as a technique for poetic invention. Distracted self-forgetfulness can be upsetting or useful, depending on one’s perspective, because it means allowing something unintended – the unconscious or a new idea for one’s poem – to appear out of the mass of everyday memories. Self-forgetfulness seems to be one of the most intense sites of ambivalence for the defenders and opponents of rhyme I have been discussing. Losing track of one’s intentions, the dangers of which Gascoigne so vividly sets out, can be an unsettling loss of control over self and poem, or a productive “flight” into whole new territories of invention. I have suggested that part of this concern with forgetting in early modern poetic theory has to do with poets’ selective amnesia toward the literary past. But I also want to argue, by way of conclusion, that Daniel’s speculations about the distractions and pleasures of rhyme take him into new territory of his own. Campion’s arguments and Daniel’s responses set up oppositions: on the one side, memory of the Greco-Roman poets; on the other, the pleasure and forgetfulness of rhyme. Daniel reconfigures these oppositions so that pleasure or “delight,” memory, rhyme, custom, and closure are on one side, while unrhymed quantitative verse occupies the other. The latter type of poetry seemes not to satisfie nor breede that delight as when it is met and combined with a like sounding accents. Which seemes as the iointure without which it hangs loose, and cannot subsist, but runnes wildely on, like a tedious fancie without a close. (Daniel 1603: G5r) Rhyme and stanzaic structure offer “delight and memorie” instead of the confusion of a lengthy unrhymed poem. As the Defence progresses, the lack of definite end-stops in classical poetry becomes associated with a disturbing and threatening type of unbounded chaos that Daniel implicitly links with forgetfulness. Rhyming stanzas, for Daniel, provide “the certaine close of delight” foreign to Greek and Roman verse. “For their boundlesse running on,” he continues, “often so confounds the Reader, that hauing once lost himselfe, must either giue off vnsatisfied, or vncertainly cast backe to retriue the escaped sence, and to find way againe into his matter” (Daniel 1603: G6v). Daniel seems to be thinking of the long sentence units and convoluted syntax of Latin poetry, and of the labors

94 Amanda Watson of reading it, but his word choice is suggestive. Readers lose not only their places but also themselves in the poem’s “boundlesse running on.” This selfloss, I would argue, is another kind of self-forgetfulness, aligned here with rhymelessness instead of with rhyme. Indeed, the lack of boundaries or definite formal characteristics becomes, for Daniel, an image both of chaos and emotional disarray: For the body of our imagination, being as an vnformed Chaos without fashion, without day, if by the diuine power of the spirit it be wrought into an Orbe of order and forme, is it not more pleasing to Nature, that desires a certaintie, and comports not with that which is infinite, to haue these clozes, rather than, not to know where to end, or how farre to goe, especially seeing our passions are often without measure. (Daniel 1603: G6r) Daniel alludes, of course, to Genesis 1.2. The poet wields a godlike power over the formless mass of the imagination and the passions. This is a familiar figure for the imposition of poetic form onto the raw material of language, but the context in which this passage occurs in the Defence – it comes shortly after the image of rhyme giving the poet wings to go beyond invention – suggests that Daniel is also indirectly addressing the question of whether the poet controls the formal device, or vice versa. Susan Stewart has suggested that poetic form can be “a means of representing the transport or compulsive way-laying of subjective intention,” and that “we cannot necessarily conclude that strict form signifies authorial mastery or control” (Stewart 2002: 118–19). The discourse of forgetting in early modern poetic theory seems to mark just this “submersion of will.” Daniel’s “chaos,” which stands in opposition to rhyme, memory, and selfcontainment, looks to me oddly like a precursor of what later criticism would eventually label as the sublime. In some of Daniel’s more hyperbolic discussions of unrhymed poetry, he finds something almost unbearable about its lack of closure, something that the mind cannot quite process. Even the effort of emulating the ancients strikes him as “laying greater burthens vpon our mindes, then they are well able to beare” (Daniel 1603: G6r). The poet wrestles with measureless passions, and the reader loses him- or herself. “Nature” itself avoids “that which is infinite.” While the sublime was not a widely discussed critical concept in the early seventeenth century, some of its later exponents would formulate it in terms that sound remarkably like Daniel’s criticisms of rhymeless poetry. Edmund Burke, for instance, defines as a cause of the “sublime” anything that is “in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror,” and connects sublimity with the infinite: “Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime.” Sublime objects, according to Burke, are those that

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overpower us (Burke 1990: 36, 67, 60–1). One might begin to explain Daniel’s apparent dread of infinity and his pleasure in the bounded stanza as having to do with the fears of self-loss that circulate around the rhyme controversy, fears which later centuries would begin to recognize as aesthetic effects. I do not wish to assimilate Daniel’s oppositions between rhyme and quantitative verse willy-nilly to Burke’s oppositions between the beautiful and the sublime – evocative as the similarities may be. But I do want to argue that Daniel, like his predecessors and opponents in the classical versus vernacular poetry wars, recognized something overwhelming about the process of writing a poem, and even of reading one, and that forgetting was the concept many of them used to acknowledge this overwhelming effect. It is at times difficult to distinguish memory from forgetfulness in the texts I have been discussing. The terms change places with bewildering frequency. Even psychoanalytic theory, which in many ways theorizes both recollection and forgetfulness, blurs the distinction: repressive forgetting preserves its objects, and conscious remembering entails oblivion.6 Ultimately, early modern poets seem to invoke forgetting whenever they are most worried about how poetic language, especially rhyme, often means in excess of what the poet intends to say. The reader of poetic theory from this period encounters the figure of forgetting as a continual counterpoint to that of memory and the mnemonic – or, to return to John Willis’s formulation, “Oblivion being . . . a principle of Memory.” What I am suggesting here is that it is a principle of poetry as well.

Notes 1 2

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On early modern antipoetic sentiment, see Herman 1996. One might argue that Benedick’s rhymes say more than he realizes, and that his selection of “baby” instead of a more predictable rhyme like “shady,” or “horn” instead of “torn” or “lorn,” indicate fears about his relationship with Beatrice that he cannot quite admit. Milton refers to this argument in his dismissal of rhyme in the 1674 Paradise Lost preface: rhyme works to poets’ “vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have exprest them” (Milton 1957: 210). See Ian Donaldson’s note on this poem and, in this edition, the “Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden,” in which Jonson claims to have “written a discourse of poesy both against Campion and Daniel, especially this last” ( Jonson 1985: 690 n.29, 595). Juliet Mitchell provides an intriguing account of “evenly suspended attention” in action, with particular reference to memory and forgetting (Mitchell 1998: 107–10). Adam Phillips discusses at greater length than I do this paradox of memory and forgetting in Freud, especially as articulated through metaphors of burial and excavation in the “Rat Man” case history (Phillips 1994: 26–9). In another register, this is also the paradox with which Campion and Daniel struggle.

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Part III

Narratives

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Reassuring fratricide in 1 Henry IV Christopher Ivic

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I begin this essay with Benedict Anderson’s reflections on nationalism, or, more precisely, his thoughts on what, in the preface to the revised edition of Imagined Communities, he terms “the amnesias of nationalism” (Anderson 1991: xv). Although Anderson is concerned primarily with nationalism as a post-Enlightenment phenomenon, his work, as many literary historians have shown, allows us to glean valuable new perspectives on the ways in which early modern English texts participated in the construction of imagined communities.1 This is particularly true of one of the two chapters added to the revised edition: the chapter entitled “Memory and Forgetting,” wherein Anderson revisits the work of the nineteenth-century French biblical scholar and historian Ernest Renan. This chapter, especially the section entitled “The Reassurance of Fratricide,” has its origins in the realization that in 1983 – the date of the first edition of Imagined Communities – Anderson cited Renan without really understanding what Renan had actually said (Anderson 1991: xiv). The misunderstanding concerns two significant sentences from Renan’s essay: in Martin Thom’s translation, these sentences read as follows: “the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things . . .”; “every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century” (Renan 1990: 11). “At first sight,” Anderson remarks, “these two sentences may seem straightforward. Yet a few moments reflection reveals how bizarre they actually are.” Anderson is struck by what he calls the “peremptory syntax of doit avoir oublié (not doit oublier) – ‘obliged already to have forgotten’ – which,” he adds, “suggests . . . that ‘already having forgotten’ ancient tragedies is a prime contemporary civic duty” (Anderson 1991: 200). Moreover, Anderson is intrigued by Renan’s insistence that his readers “have already forgotten” something that Renan clearly assumes they remember. Renan, of course, is interested in more than a simple lapse of memory; as Anderson puts it, it is “precisely the need for forgetting that occupied him” (Anderson 1991: 199; my emphasis). In Renan’s seemingly paradoxical statement, Anderson uncovers – though only the second time around – a crucial element in the “construction of

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national genealogies” (Anderson 1991: 201): namely, that collective acts of remembering are inextricably intertwined with, indeed brought into being by, collective acts of forgetting. In revisiting Renan’s work, Anderson does well to flesh out Renan’s rather imprecise musings. Whereas Renan simply posits the thirteenth-century Midi and the sixteenth-century Saint Bartholomew massacres as instances of social forgetting, Anderson attends to the ways in which social forgetting effected reunion amongst the fratricidal French. To flesh out Renan’s ideas, Anderson offers as an example the singular French noun “la Saint-Barthélemy,” which, he explains, occludes killers and killed – i.e., those Catholics and Protestants who played one local part in the vast unholy Holy War that raged across central and northern Europe in the sixteenth century, and who certainly did not think of themselves cozily together as “Frenchmen.” The use of “la Saint-Barthélemy” results in a tropology that refigures “the colossal religious conflicts of mediaeval and early modern Europe as reassuringly fratricidal wars between – who else? – fellow Frenchmen” (Anderson 1991: 200). Such tropologies were deeply embedded in national narratives that sought to reinscribe “antique slaughters” as “‘family history’” (Anderson 1991: 201). Indeed, as Renan’s work evinces, nineteenth-century French historians put in place national genealogies that played a central role in the invention of a unified sense of Frenchness stretching back to the middle ages. What makes Anderson’s approach so valuable is both his focus on forgetting as a collective rather than merely an individual faculty and his attention to the cultural, ideological, and political work that forgetting performs. Indeed, Anderson invites us to refocus the current overemphasis on memory’s seemingly exclusive involvement in the formation of group identities.2 Rather than simply obstructing remembrance, forgetting is bound up with memory. Anderson’s frequent use of “remember/forget” and “remembered/ forgotten” unsettles traditional formulations that delineate memory and forgetting along the lines of remembering and not remembering, thereby reconceptualizing forgetting as a formative force in the production of history and culture. Forgetting participates in the cultural imaginary not merely as a counter-memory waiting to be retrieved but as an active yet suppressed part of the process of identity formation itself. From the perspective of early modern historians and literary historians, however, Anderson’s insistence that the affective power of social forgetting emerged simultaneously with “post1820s nationalist ‘memory’ ” is too limiting (Anderson 1991: xiv). All of his examples, for instance, are post-Enlightenment ones: along with nineteenthcentury France, he considers post-civil war America, and twentieth-century Spain. By restricting himself to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Anderson seriously overlooks the ways in which social forgetting was

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Reassuring fratricide in 1 Henry IV 101 practiced in earlier periods. Not simply in the nineteenth century, but also in the period Renan revisits – the sixteenth century – instances of social forgetting can be explored. Perhaps no sixteenth-century English text bears witness to the constitutive power of collective acts of forgetting more emphatically than Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV. The traumatic historical event that many sixteenth-century English texts – chronicles, plays, and poems – strive to wash from collective memory is, of course, the Wars of the Roses. While many texts manifest this washing of memory, I want to focus on one published close to the time when 1 Henry IV was performed and published (1598). I have in mind a late Tudor account of the fifteenth-century wars, John Speed’s Description of the Ciuill Warres of England, a text that accompanies – in fact, encompasses – Speed’s broadside map of 1600, entitled “The Invasions of England and Ireland with al their Ciuill Wars Since the Conquest.” Pervading Speed’s narrative is the need to forget the painful memories of civil war; for instance, the text closes with a cry to “[c]ease ciuill broyels, O Englands subjects cease, / With streames of blood staine this faire soyle no more.”3 For Speed, “Englands ciuill wars” are “the markes of our owne infamies and staines to be washed away rather with repentance, then againe to be renewed by remembrance.” As the author of an account of “the Ciuill Warres of England,” Speed cannot but help remind his readers of these wars. But I would add that Speed is offering a narrative that allows his fellow Elizabethans to remember/forget these hostilities. Despite evidence to the contrary – both map and text bear witness to battles between the various inhabitants of the British Isles – Speed represents these not-too-antique slaughters as family history: These being for the most part Ciuill Battles betweene meere English-men of one Nation, wherein the parties victorers, besides the losse of their owne side, procured on the other, the fall and ruine of them that were all of his owne Countrey, many of them of his owne acquaintance and alliance, and most of them perhaps his owne friends in any other cause, then that in which hee contended for. If the nastiness of war is elided in Speed’s narrative, so too is any sense of the sharp geographic and political divisions that clearly rent England in this period. Note that Speed remembers/forgets the civil wars as not simply wars between fellow Englishmen but pure (“meere”) Englishmen, as if a homogeneous, unified sense of Englishness existed in the early fifteenth-century. Ironically, Speed turns to one of the most troubled periods in the history of the English kingdom to consolidate an Elizabethan sense of nationhood, constructing a stable Elizabethan identity out of volatile fifteenth-century protonational identities.

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In that Speed’s text narrates “[c]iuill Battels betweene meere Englishmen of one Nation,” while simultaneously recording the presence of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh combatants, it has much in common with the recurring images of civil strife that haunt Shakespeare’s history plays. More so than any other of his history plays, 1 Henry IV at once remembers and forgets the Wars of the Roses by representing them as wars between English brothers. Underpinning the complex dynamics of remembering/forgetting in Shakespeare’s representation of the Wars of the Roses is a reassuring fratricide that serves to put in place a nascent discourse on Englishness. But by no means do I want to suggest that this play is clear and coherent in its nationalist pronouncements. The presence of the Welsh Glendower, the Scottish Douglas, and the “northern youth” Hotspur – not to mention Hal’s distancing himself from Falstaff – reminds us that regional and class antagonisms are not easily forgotten, especially as these antagonisms were far from quelled at the time of the play’s performance. But what is remarkable about this play’s representation of the Wars of the Roses is how it refigures, and in the process anglicizes, fifteenth-century Anglo-ScottishWelsh conflict as “civil war” – that is, as, ultimately, a war between English brothers: between Hal and Hotspur. As we shall see, with its shift from intra-island conflict to a final fratricidal fight between fellow Englishmen – two Harrys battling for “one England” – Shakespeare’s play stands as a marvellous instance of one text’s attempt to map early modern English identities onto premodern warring communities. The politics of memory and forgetting are evident immediately in 1 Henry IV. King Henry’s opening speech shifts from his call for “new broils” (1.1.3) to be carried out by the English in the Holy Land to his remembrance of civil war and back to his desire to levy an English army to battle Muslim forces. In Henry’s speech, reference to future actions serve to bracket the trauma of the past; however, it is precisely the memory of civil war that frustrates the king’s desire for national unity. “No more the thirsty entrance of this soil / Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood,” the King exclaims (1.1.5–6). There is something unsettling about the King’s announcement of an end to bloodshed, for his pronouncements are being delivered at a liminal moment in between past wars and (hoped-for) future peace and reconciliation. “Those opposed eyes,” he continues, Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven, All of one nature, of one substance bred, Did lately meet in the intestine shock And furious close of civil butchery, Shall now, in mutual well-beseeming ranks, March all one way and be no more oppos’d Against acquaintance, kindred, and allies.

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Reassuring fratricide in 1 Henry IV 103 The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife, No more shall cut his master. (1.1.9–18) Punctuated by “[n]o more” and “shall,” the King’s opening speech strives to bring closure to an event by simply proclaiming its termination. In a language not unlike Speed’s (“many of them of his owne acquaintance and alliance”), King Henry attempts to paint a picture of a reassuringly fratricidal war: “All of one nature, of one substance bred, / Did lately meet in the intestine shock / And furious close of civil butchery” – a war that has served to unify the English nation – “in mutual well-beseeming ranks.” Henry’s “English” crusade, however, is quickly thwarted as Westmoreland responds with “heavy news” regarding the capture of Mortimer and the butchering (“[a] thousand of his people butchered”) by the “irregular and wild Glendower” (1.1.37, 42, 40) and “unwelcome news . . . from the north” of Hotspur’s battle with Douglas at Holmedon (1.1.50–1). Henry’s “new broils,” then, give way to “this broil” (1.1.47), which, of course, is the result of old broils and grudges. Westmoreland’s “butchered,” an echo of Henry’s “butchery” – one that would not have been lost on Shakespeare’s audience – signals the unforgettable presence of civil war at the opening of the play. The trauma of civil strife is not confined to the past, and this has much to do with the refusal of the King’s opponents to forget. Memory, at once personal and political, emerges in the play as not only resistance to the monarch but more so an impediment to unification and reconciliation. While Hotspur twice suffers a lapse of memory – in Act 1, Scene 3, he cannot remember the name of the place where he first met Bolingbroke (Berkeley Castle); in Act 3, Scene 1, he forgets the map of Britain (both of these instances are Shakespeare’s invention) – his memory is closely tied to his rebellious sense of honor.4 Hotspur’s heated speech in which he denies having denied prisoners is, not coincidently, prefaced by “[b]ut I remember” (1.3.30). Throughout the play, the rebels’ challenge to Henry’s kingship is underpinned by memorial discourse. When Worcester and Vernon visit the King’s camp at Shrewsbury, for instance, Worcester lists the grievances that have led to the rebellion in the form of a reminder: “It pleas’d your Majesty to turn your looks / Of favor from myself and all our house, / And yet I must remember you, my lord, / We were the first and dearest of your friends” (5.1.30–3). At the heart of Worcester’s grievance is the fact that Henry broke the oath he took at Doncaster not to seek the crown: “You swore to us,” Worcester reminds the King; you, he repeats, “[f]orgot your oath to us at Doncaster” (5.1.41, 58). And in an earlier scene, when the rebels plot to overthrow Henry, Hotspur dismissively refers to Henry as “this forgetful man” (1.3.161). Moreover, it is in the name of memory that Hotspur seeks to redeem the honor of the Percy family:

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Christopher Ivic Shall it for shame be spoken in these days, Or fill up chronicles in time to come, That men of your nobility and power Did gage them both in an unjust behalf .................................... To put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose, And plant this thorn, this canker, Bullingbrooke? (1.3.170–3, 175–6)

Here, Hotspur anxiously looks to the future to imagine how he and his allies may be remembered. The reference to “chronicles,” registers of memory, functions to spur Northumberland and Worcester into providing the material for their own histories, as if Hotspur is inciting them to memorialize themselves. “[T]ime serves,” Hotspur tells his father and uncle, “wherein you may redeem / Your banish’d honors and restore yourselves” (1.3.180–1). For Hotspur, memory and honor are inextricably intertwined. More importantly, his actions attest to both the harmful effects of memory and the need for a radical forgetting to extirpate a deeply rooted enmity. While 1 Henry IV revisits the hostilities that raged across the British Isles in the fifteenth century, it does so in a way that invites social forgetting, and this invitation becomes particularly evident when one contrasts Shakespeare’s treatment of the events at Shrewsbury with his various sources. Perhaps the most significant alteration is the change in the age of the historical Henry Percy, who was two years older than King Henry and twentythree years older than Prince Henry, so that Hotspur appears to be roughly the same age as Hal. In the chronicles, exactly who slew Hotspur is unclear.5 In Samuel Daniel’s First Fowre Bookes of the Civile Wars Between the Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke, the defeated Hotspur is chided for his misdirected “rage, which valor should have ben” (Bullough 1966: 215). But Daniel makes no reference to Hal slaying or eulogizing Hotspur. While these changes make for a better dramatic performance, 1 Henry IV does much more than simply spice up its sources. In rewriting his sources, Shakespeare offers a powerful fictional account of Shrewsbury in place of the official histories or political memory, an account in which forgetting emerges as a central concern. Hotspur, of course, does not make good on his promise to “redeem” his uncle’s and father’s names and honor; rather, Hal emerges as the play’s agent of redemption. Hal’s “reformation” (1.2.213) mirrors the rewriting of the nation that the play enacts. What needs to be remarked is how the nation’s redemption is effected through Hal’s status as an agent of forgetting. When Hal counters his father’s charges of degeneracy, for instance, he does so in a language that not only sets up the final fratricidal fight with Hotspur, but also is suggestive of forgetting. “I will redeem all this on Percy’s head,” the Prince tells his father,

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Reassuring fratricide in 1 Henry IV 105 And in the closing of some glorious day Be bold to tell you that I am your son, When I will wear a garment all of blood, And stain my favors in a bloody mask, Which, wash’d away, shall scour my shame with it. And that shall be the day, when e’er it lights, That this same child of honor and renown, This gallant Hotspur, this all-praised knight, And your unthought-of Harry chance to meet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For the time will come That I shall make this northern youth exchange His glorious deeds for my indignities. (3.2.132–41, 144–6) In a fine essay on laughter and forgetting in Shakespeare, Adrian Poole notes that from “classical antiquity onwards forgetting is associated with liquid” (Poole 1994: 94).6 The language of staining, washing, and scouring in this passage serves precisely to anticipate a washing away, a forgetting of a former, “degenerate” self (3.2.128). Indeed, in the wake of his victory over Hotspur, Hal’s blood-stained favors, as we shall see, will resurface as a sign of a promise fulfilled and as a marker to remember/forget Hotspur. This “homecoming scene” is significant for another reason: from this point on, the play’s emphasis will be on the fratricidal fight between Hal and Hotspur. In fact, the next time Hotspur appears on stage he foresees a one-on-one battle: “Harry to Harry shall, hot horse to horse, / Meet and ne’er part till one drop down a corse” (4.1.122–3). The combination of alliteration and rhyme here wonderfully captures the play’s intensifying focus on the two Harrys. And in another departure from his historical sources, Shakespeare has Hal challenge Hotspur to a single battle, a challenge that Vernon describes as a fratricidal fight: “No, by my soul, I never in my life / Did hear a challenge urg’d more modestly, / Unless a brother should a brother dare / To gentle exercise and proof of arms” (5.2.51–4). When Hal and Hotspur finally meet on stage, the two Harrys are made to battle for “one England” (5.4.66). Like many of Shakespeare’s battle scenes, the “battle” between Hal and Hotspur is anti-climactic. This has led many critics to suggest that 1 Henry IV is not a mere war play, but rather a classic study of the legitimation of power. “If 1 Henry IV can be said to be ‘about’ anything,” writes David Scott Kastan, “it is about the production of power” (Kastan 1991: 241). What the play also produces is a way of incorporating the Wars of the Roses within national consciousness. In fact, when Hal and Hotspur encounter each other at Shrewsbury, the play seems less interested in the consolidation of power than in how this event will be remembered/ forgotten.

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Drawing attention to Hotspur’s faulty memory, Poole contrasts Hotspur to Hal, whom Poole views as having “mastery of his memory” (Poole 1994: 92). At Shrewsbury, Hal displays a mastery of not only memory but also, and more importantly, forgetting. As Hotspur fades from the play, Hal symbolically appropriates his opponent’s, or brother’s, voice. Horatio-like, but so unlike Horatio, Hal lives to tell Hotspur’s story. To Hotspur’s “[n]o, Percy, thou art dust, / And food for –,” Hal replies, “For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well great heart!” (5.4.85–7). The eulogy that follows is ostensibly a memorializing speech: This earth that bears [thee] dead Bears not alive so stout a gentleman. If thou wert sensible of courtesy, I should not make so dear a show of zeal; But let my favors hide thy mangled face, And even in thy behalf I’ll thank myself For doing these fair rites of tenderness. Adieu, and take thy praise with thee to heaven! Thy ignominy sleep with thee in the grave, But not rememb’red in thy epitaph! (5.4.92–101) What I want to suggest is that Hal’s monumentalizing speech is, paradoxically, the most pronounced instance of remembering/forgetting in the play. Crucial here is Hal’s placing of his “favors” – likely the blood-stained favors Hal refers to in Act 3, Scene 2 – over Hotspur’s “mangled face,” which is representative of a nation scarred by civil war. While this action serves literally to cover up, to bury Hotspur’s face, it is also socially symbolic. “Images, words and things are,” writes Michael Rowlands, “intricately bound up in the objectification of memory in ways that elicit forms of memory and means of forgetting.” Speaking about burial customs, Rowlands, furthermore, distinguishes between “acts of rupture such as drying, chopping, cutting and burying as constitutive of forgetting and acts that emphasise reunion or reintegration, such as those involving human bodies, trees, the earth, as facilitating remembering” (Rowlands 1996–7: 8). With its references to “earth,” “rites,” “grave,” and “epitaph,” Hal’s eulogy, as well as the play itself, contains both an act of rupture and an act of reunion or reintegration. In its intersecting rhetoric of rupture and reunion, Hal’s eulogy facilitates remembering, to borrow Rowland’s formulation, precisely because it is constitutive of forgetting. Perhaps this instance of remembering/ forgetting is most evident in the signal line “[t]hy ignominy sleep with thee in the grave, / But not remembered in thy epitaph.” As the producer of Hotspur’s epitaph, Hal draws attention to what is not to be remembered: namely, Hotspur’s “ignominy,” the part he has played in England’s civil

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Reassuring fratricide in 1 Henry IV 107 broils. Not unlike “la Saint-Barthélemy,” Hal’s speech “remind[s] one of something which it is immediately obligatory to forget” (Anderson 1991: 201). If forgetting “is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” (Renan 1990: 11), then my argument that social forgetting in 1 Henry IV is marshaled in the name of nation building raises the question “where is the nation in the play?” Some critics, including Richard Helgerson, have argued that Shakespeare’s history plays “are concerned above all with the consolidation and maintenance of royal power” (Helgerson 1992: 234). Following Helgerson, it would be tempting to assume that this play’s invocation of forgetting by power (Hal) serves to sustain power (Hal’s or Queen Elizabeth’s).7 This is, of course, precisely what earlier Tudor chronicles, like Edward Hall’s, did for earlier Tudor monarchs: they inscribed and legitimated official political memory. Early new historicist criticism tended to read Shakespeare’s history plays along the lines of monologic official histories, and Helgerson’s reading of Shakespeare’s histories is deeply indebted to such readings. Yet to read Shakespeare’s history plays through a lens of memory/forgetting rather than power allows us to reinterpret the ways in which these plays participated in the production of early modern English history and culture. While the state informed practices of memory/forgetting, by no means did it determine such practices. Indeed, the communal stage emerged in the Elizabethan era as a site that contributed to a national, if not nationalist, consciousness by fostering public remembering/forgetting, often in opposition to (certainly complicating) official memory.8 As Anderson warns, it is crucial not to view remembering/ forgetting as the work of the state only – as official history: it is surely too easy to attribute these reassuring ancient fratricides simply to the icy calculations of state functionaries. At another level they reflect a deep reshaping of the imagination of which the state was barely conscious, and over which it had, and still has, only exiguous control. (Anderson 1991: 201) To be sure, “state functionaries” – censors, patrons – had a hand in the operations of the early modern theater: witness the erasure of early printed texts’ “Sir John Oldcastle.” Thus, it would be reckless to suggest that the influence of such outside forces was “exiguous.” But recent scholarship has drawn attention to the ways in which the socially heterogeneous stage participated in a dialogic “deep reshaping” of Tudor chronicles, whether Hall’s or the less monarchical Holinshed’s.9 And given the social status of those involved in the production, performance, and reception of plays, it would be fair to say that the nation is all around the stage.

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That the forgetful Falstaff participates in the cultural amnesia and reconciliation that occurs at the conclusion of this play should not be overlooked.10 Unlike Hotspur, who is committed to memory and honor, Falstaff eschews honor as “[a] word” (5.1.134). Falstaff’s presence at Shrewsbury is a prime example of the kind of “deep reshaping” of history that took place on the early modern stage. Indeed, Falstaff’s stabbing of Hotspur’s lifeless body elicits laughter from the audience, an inclusive laughter that, coupled with the play’s emphasis on forgetting, contributes to the transformation of a dynastic and aristocratic “family history” into a history of the nation. What I have been tracing in 1 Henry IV, then, is less an example of Shakespeare’s commitment to the Tudor myth and more of an instance of Shakespeare appropriating the narrative material that sustained royalist propaganda for the purposes of rewriting narratives of the nation.

Notes 1 Richard Helgerson, in a footnote, acknowledges the influence of Anderson’s work on his monumental study of Elizabethan imaginings of England (Helgerson 1992: 305 n.17). 2 On collective memory, see Halbwachs 1992; for a critique of Halbwachs, though one that says little about forgetting, see Connerton 1989. 3 Since this broadside is without pagination, I have not included page numbers after my citations. 4 While critics have drawn attention to Hotspur’s forgetfulness, many restrict themselves to a consideration of the causes of that forgetting: see Mitchell and Wright 1983, and Barish 1996. In his article “Remembering and Forgetting in Shakespeare,” Barish is primarily concerned with both memory and forgetting in terms of an individual character’s faculty: “In most cases, forgetting comes down to a refusal to remember, a conscious act of denial, often a self-serving shutting out of something inconvenient or unwelcome.” My argument treats acts of remembering/forgetting as cultural rather than individual, something that Barish gestures toward when he states that “forgetfulness can become a moral imperative” (Barish 1996: 216, 221), but, again, his examples tend to focus on an individual character. 5 It is possible that Holinshed supplies the information, though the line in question is ambiguous: “The other on his part incouraged by his doings, fought valiantlie, and slue the lord Persie, called sir Henrie Hotspurre” (Bullough 1966: 191). Samuel Daniel’s Civile Wars refers to Hotspur’s death, but not the doer. Addressing King Henry, Daniel’s narrator states, “There shall young Hotespur with a fury lead / Meete with thy forward son as fierce as he” (Bullough 1966: 211), but when the reader arrives at Hotspur’s death no mention is made of his opponent. Speed, writing in 1600, makes no mention of Prince Henry: At Shrewsbury a bloody battel was fought against K. Henry 4 by the Percies Henry & Thomas, wherein Henrie L. Percie surnamed Hotspur, was slaine in the place called Olde field, and Lord Thomas Earle of Worcester taken and beheaded: there were slaine on both sides 6600. 6 Poole also comments on generic differences: In Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies the liquid in which things get regularly ‘steeped’ is of course blood and the action hardens memory into indelible

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Reassuring fratricide in 1 Henry IV 109 griefs and grudges. In the comedies the predominant liquids are clearer, they enter and leave the body more freely in the form of water and wine and tears and sweat, and their action dissolves memory into new forms of readiness. (Poole 1994: 96). Given its mixed generic status, it is not surprising that 1 Henry IV at once hardens and dissolves memory, though, as I argue, the play marks a shift from hardening to dissolution, from memory to forgetting. 7 Howard and Rackin concur with Helgerson – “Shakespeare’s history plays are primarily monarchical in orientation” – though, more so than Helgerson, they allow for a counter or competing imagining of nationhood: there is a subterranean tension, especially in the second tetralogy, between the idea of a borderless state centered on the body of the monarch and a chorographic focus on the land and people of England . . . as defining the nation. This tension is implied even in Richard II . . . but in the Henry IV plays it becomes fully manifest in the social heterogeneity of the characters and the geographical heterogeneity of the settings. (Howard and Rackin 1997: 160–1). As a “feminist account” of Shakespeare’s history plays, Howard and Rackin’s book offers the most sustained examination of the presence and absence of women in and from the nation. A central problem with Anderson’s work on nationalism is his uncritical acceptance of a rhetoric of fraternity. If the rhetoric of a reassuring fratricide in 1 Henry IV works to consolidate national identity, it also obscures the contribution of women. 8 In an essay entitled “Wars of Memory in Henry V,” Jonathan Baldo astutely remarks that “[c]ontrol over how a nation remembers a momentous event like a war is almost as significant as the outcome of the war itself, given how crucial memory is for the legitimation and exercise of power.” Baldo, however, challenges the assumption that Shakespeare’s histories mimic official accounts of national memory, arguing instead that the second tetralogy evinces a “more problematic and divisive question of memory” (Baldo 1996: 133, 134). 9 See, for example, Rackin 1990. 10 This is not, of course, true of 2 Henry IV.

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“The religion I was born in” Forgetting Catholicism and remembering the king in Donne’s Devotions David J. Baker

Forgetting Catholicism “Forgetting,” as Ernest Renan famously said in 1882, “is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.” If “the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common,” it is “also that they have forgotten many things.” “It is good,” he pronounced, “for everyone to know how to forget” (Renan 1990: 11, 16). Recently, scholars of other periods, the early modern among them, have become interested in how this insight might have been conceptualized and put into practice outside the nineteenth century. It has become clear, for instance, that, as the editors of this volume say in their introduction, forgetting, especially religious forgetting, was a “crucial factor” in consolidating the often tenuous nationhood of early modern England, where a Protestant Englishness struggled to emerge from a Catholic past. The post-Reformation English were “reformed,” in part, by a kind of enforced amnesia, whereby earlier loyalties, desires, and beliefs, constituting a distinct “subjectivity,” were effaced by a concerted program of official erasure. Elsewhere in this volume, Christopher Ivic revisits, by way of Benedict Anderson, Renan’s remarks and suggests that these efforts to undo England’s history should lead us to rethink both memory and forgetting in the period. We will best be able to trace the interplay of memory/forgetting in early modern England, however, if we realize, not only that forgetting was productive, but that the relation between it and memory was, as it were, fully dialectical. That is to say, while it is so that remembering requires forgetting in order to posit its identities and sustain its illusions, it also summons up – or perhaps even creates – memory as it goes about manufacturing its identities and sustaining its illusions. The forgetting/memory dialectic, then, is precisely not “closed” (in the sense of “static”) but “open,” in that both memory and forgetting are constantly sustained by one another and modified by one another in their joint inter-productivity. The recognition that this volume’s Introduction urges upon us, that forgetting is a formative force in the production of history and culture, is integral in allowing us to move

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Forgetting Catholicism in Donne’s Devotions 111 beyond what historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called the “storage model of memory-history,” whereby the past is just “there” to be retrieved. What memory seems to recall, he notes – the “past” – is “more accurately, pastness,” a “position” that is ceaselessly under construction as the not-now of the “present” (Trouillot 1995: 14–15). And forgetting is indeed an operational necessity for this construction. But equally crucial is the recognition that what forgetting “forms” as one of its effects is often memory itself. If we can say that there is no present without a past, we can also say there is no memory without forgetting – as long as we remember that it also works the other way around. This point can be put schematically, as I have done here. But it is also supported by what we know of the dynamics of religious memory in early modern England. What Ivic and Williams claim of the “amnesia” that was imposed on the early modern English as the precondition for a certain form of Protestantism is true, and the history of attempts by early modern Protestant regimes to root out the appurtenances of Catholicism is well documented. Eamon Duffy, for instance, has detailed the assault on the rites, ceremonies, and customs of the Catholic church, as well as its literal icons. In Henry VIII’s reign, he notes, “men and women . . . had seen the monasteries and friaries go, the shrines pillaged, the lights in parish churches snuffed out, the Pope’s name scratched or cut out of the parish liturgical books” (Duffy 1992: 462). Iconoclasm under Edward was more severe yet, and continued under Elizabeth. For instance, brasses and obit inscriptions calling for prayers for the dead . . . were ripped up from gravestones . . . the removal and the images and petitions of the dead was an act of oblivion, a casting out of the dead from the community of the living into a collective anonymity. (Duffy 1992: 494). However, as several historians have been saying recently, some of them in response to Duffy’s claims, this enforced forgetting met with only partial success. Despite the efforts of Protestant reformers, many of the English in this period refused to turn their minds altogether from the proscribed religion of their recent forebears and accepted among themselves what amounted to a more or less unreconstructed Catholicism. Well into Elizabeth’s reign, such people remained, as Christopher Haigh puts it, “decatholicized but un-protestantized” (Haigh 1993: 290). Reminders of the Catholic past were ubiquitous in England. Anthony Milton observes that, Protestant iconoclasm aside, [l]ocal churches still contained medieval and early sixteenth-century monuments with Catholic inscriptions, and for all of the Edwardian

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David J. Baker and Elizabethan reformations, still contained many pieces of medieval church furniture, including seating and fonts, . . . [as well as] a great deal of medieval stained glass. (Milton 1999: 104)

Attempts to consign the dead to “anonymity” were similarly inconclusive. “[A]ll early modern Englishmen in a sense had Roman Catholic neighbors and kinsmen, in the form of their own ancestors” (Milton 1999: 104), and these were not only not forgotten, but venerated. Many Protestants, for instance, resisted the claim that these same ancestors were now consigned to hell, and many Catholics refused to convert on its account. In some parts of the realm, Catholic practices were accepted and Catholic persons were tolerated, as long as they were local Catholics, as opposed to odious foreign ones (Haigh 1981). Catholic treatises were widely read, and the arts were pervasively cross-confessional. Indeed, Protestant divines often represented themselves as “Catholic Christians” and allowed that the church of Rome was, in fact, a church. In the early Stuart period, for example, it became “increasingly fashionable” for some controversialists to assert that the break with Catholicism had not been absolute, but only “limited and qualified,” and to argue that Rome and the Church of England agreed on most fundamental points of doctrine. Even Puritan divines, under some circumstances, were willing to contemplate “unit[ing] ourselves under [Rome] againe” (Milton 1999: 89) or to disavow the name of “Protestant” (Milton 1995: 378–9). Overall, anti-Catholic polemic mostly failed either in promoting a sense of Catholics as absolutely “other” or in persuading the English to forget their shared Catholic past. Thus, Milton concludes, “there is an important sense in which early modern English men and women were used to disregarding confessional divisions on a fairly systematic basis” (Milton 1999: 105), and, by the same token, of disregarding the forgetting of Catholicism that was mandated for them. Not surprisingly, an official church and state, still struggling to amalgamate the splintered territories of “Britain” into a single “nation,” found it hard to police memorial borders as well. An author for whom this reconsideration of memory/forgetting is particularly relevant, I would suggest, is John Donne. Crucial to much of Donne criticism is a notion of “conversion”: a punctual event which has decided and recognizable consequences, including consequences for memory and forgetting. Donne’s conversion, we are often told, signals his renunciation of the minority religion of his upbringing and his adoption of the official religion. After this shift (and not all critics agree that it occurs), he might have been a conflicted “apostate,”1 or perhaps, as Richard Strier puts it, a deeply “principled [loyalist] to the established church and state” (Strier 1996: 94), but he was, in any case, quite changed and no longer plausibly Catholic. As Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out in another context, though, just by “undoing

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Forgetting Catholicism in Donne’s Devotions 113 the concept of fixed, unalterable identities, conversion unsettles the boundaries by which selfhood . . . nationhood, and community are defined, exposing these as permeable borders.” Among such borders is the one between the past and the present, and this was a border that the emerging English nationstate had conspicuously failed to define or enforce. “Shifts in religious consciousness,” as Viswanathan notes, “traverse the contained order of culture and subtly dislodge its measured alignments” (Viswanathan 1998: 16) and such dislodgement will occur even if it is not intended. Thus, a converted Donne is not necessarily a “loyal” Donne. Nor, for that matter, is an unconverted Donne necessarily “disloyal.” The dynamics of memory/forgetting in early modern England do not allow for such simple conclusions, any more than they support the view that a converted Donne must necessarily be unmindful of the faith of his youth, or that he would expect such memorial oblivion in his readers or auditors. If it is a mistake to imagine that conversion must imply an unquestioning and unquestionable adherence to the “established church and state,” is it any less a mistake to think that it will imply lapses in religious recall? Despite the stress on the ruptures in Donne’s life – those break points that divide the youthful Catholic from the dutiful Anglican – another Donne has been emerging, one who, as it happens, is more in keeping with the ambiguities of memory/forgetting in the period. Several critics have argued that Donne’s religious leanings cannot be unequivocally assigned to any one persuasion, at least not when he was in his later years. Instead, they say, as he matured he developed a syncretic theology that allowed him to reconcile the tensions we might expect in an Anglican divine who was also a lapsed Catholic. David Chanoff, for instance, finds the “essential fiber of Donne’s spirituality” in the later sermons and in his Devotions Vpon Emergent Occasions. Here, Donne is revealed to be “a man of the Catholic past” who was at the same time taking part in an Anglicanism that “fostered (or at least permitted) a preservation of the medieval heritage” (Chanoff 1980: 164). And, indeed, even in Pseudo-Martyr, which Donne wrote partly to announce his conversion from Catholicism, he reminded his readers that he had “used no inordinate hast, nor precipitation in binding [his] conscience to any locall Religion” (Donne 1993: 13). The theme of the persistence and inclusiveness of the true church was frequent in Donne’s later preaching as well. In one sermon, he urged his congregation to “love those universall and fundamentall doctrines which in all Christian ages, and in all Christian Churches, have been agreed by all to be necessary to salvation; and then thou art a true Catholique” (Donne 1959b: 2.280). Donne, in short, “recover[ed] . . . important aspects of his Catholicism within the context of the Established Church” (Chanoff 1980: 164), ecumenically synthesizing confessional traditions into a theological amalgam. His confessional stance, like many in early modern England, implied loyalties that extended across borders and into “the country’s own past” (Milton 1999: 105).

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Remembering James I Much has been made, by critics who talk of Donne’s conversion, of his professed devotion to James I and of his frequent adoption of his royal rhetoric. “Donne,” one reader says, “found a voice in the royal favor” (Goldberg 1983: 213). Most often, Donne’s adherence to his king has also been taken as a mark of his commitment to the Anglican establishment. I want to propose, though, that it was precisely Donne’s investment in the theology of James I that made it possible for him to remember/forget the Catholicism of the proscribed past, and thus for him to undo, to an extent, the forgetting that conversion might otherwise have entailed. To illustrate this investment and its implications for how we read Donne, I want to turn to perhaps the most famous passage in his works. It is found in the Devotions, in meditation seventeen on the commonality of “mankind.” Recently, Strier has put forward a cogent suggestion, albeit one which, he “freely admit[s],” “enter[s] the realm of speculation” (Strier 1996: 108). He points out that in the lines in which we are enjoined “never to send to know for whom the bell tolls” (Donne 1959a: 3) because it tolls for us, the great passage about being “involved in mankind” is almost certainly not, in its context, about “mankind.” It is about Christendom, and, most specifically, as the seemingly casual mention of Europe indicates, it is about Europe. In context, it may be that the real point of “No man is an island” is that “No island is an island” – that is, that England should find a way to see itself as united with the Church of Rome. (Strier 1996: 108) He cites a sermon of three years later in which Donne prays that the “Church may be truly Catholique, one flock, in one fold, under one Shepherd” (Donne 1959b: 7.433) but he might as well have quoted the meditation itself, which drives forward from the claim that “[t]he Church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all” (Donne 1959a: 107). Not only had the “idea of the reunion of European Christendom . . . been percolating earlier,” he observes, but “a variety of factors were encouraging a more tolerant attitude toward the Church of Rome” towards the “end of James’ reign.” The king himself was thought to incline towards such an accord and a number of Donne’s contemporaries were working up tracts on the theme. “Perhaps,” he ventures, “my suggestion is not utterly fantastic” (Strier 1996: 108). Donne’s passage has, of course, most usually been taken as an evocation of a trans-human solidarity, but Strier’s claim that an ecclesiastical proposal is being made here is distinctly plausible, and in fact a much stronger case can be made for it than he offers. Though Strier makes little of the influence of James on the language and themes of Donne’s treatise, other

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Forgetting Catholicism in Donne’s Devotions 115 than to note his “pacific sensibilities” (Strier 1996: 108), distinct reverberations of royal dicta can be heard throughout, and perhaps nowhere more than in this famous meditation. As W. B. Patterson has remarked,2 when Donne insists that “[i]f a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were” and does so while arguing that a collective “body” of faith, apparently dispersed, is in truth united by a pealing bell that joins “island” to “continent” (Donne 1959a: 108), he is almost certainly taking up the theological beliefs of his king. To the extent that Donne is implying that there exists a truly Catholic faith that might, under certain arrangements, encompass both the Church of England and “the Religion that [he] was born in” (Donne 1910: 260), he is not articulating a dissident claim. He is giving voice to a premise that animated the theology of James I. It is well known, of course, that James saw himself as “rex pacificus, a new Constantine” under whom a “genuinely catholic Christian doctrine would be promulgated and maintained.” “[M]y care for the Lord’s spiritual kingdom is so well known,” he wrote in 1609, “both at home and abroad, as well as by my daily actions as by my printed books” (Fincham and Lake 1985: 169, 169–70). His foreign policy was irenic, though sometimes maladroit. His willingness to countenance alliances with Catholic powers on the Continent, even to the marriage of Prince Charles to the Spanish Infanta, disturbed many of his more overtly Protestant subjects. And it cannot be doubted that, in some complicated way, Donne spent much of his life aligning himself with the theological politics of his king; he made a point of saying this himself. But recent research, and especially the ground breaking work of Patterson in King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom, allows us to see just how closely imbricated were Donne’s confessional stance and James’s ecclesiastical aspirations. This king was not just a would-be Solomon with, as some suspected, crypto-Catholic leanings. He came to the throne in 1603 with a distinct plan for reconciling the feuding factions of Christianity, and he followed it, with mixed success, throughout his reign. As this historian shows, one of the monarch’s “long-range objectives” from his early years in Scotland to his death in England in 1625 was “[r]econciling those who were at enmity by reason of traditional rivalries, conflicts, and feuds” (Patterson 1997: 18–19). While James was alert to the threat militant Catholicism posed to the Protestant powers (and to him personally), he was also conscious that it was the rift between them that gave rise to just those threats. When he became king, he made known his desire, through diplomatic channels that led to Rome, for an ecumenical council. It would be summoned by the Pope and would include, besides England, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Dutch states, as well as “the Free Cities of the Empire.” “Beyond a doubt,” the king’s representative assured an intermediary, such a council would remove “abuses . . . on all hands, and a sound decision would put an end,

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perhaps forever, to the discords in the Christian faith.” “[N]or,” he was sure, “would his Majesty think he could act more nobly than to be the first to offer complete obedience to [the] Council’s decrees” (Patterson 1997: 37). This plan came to naught, mostly because of the Gunpowder plot and the animus it stirred up among English anti-papists. But James, himself one of the plot’s targets, tried to curtail the backlash against priests and recusants that followed. He distinguished, he said, between fanatical adherents of Rome who threatened his royal person and domestic Catholics who were willing to forego violence, and he seems to have meant the Oath of Allegiance to clarify that distinction – while Parliament, on the other hand, “intended it merely as another means of rooting out Romanist disaffection” (Milton 1995: 56). He hoped, he was later quoted to say, that the Oath would “secure himself against evil designs” (Patterson 1997: 146). Nor did he abandon his plans for a “generall Councell.” If this ever were to come about, he wrote in 1609, it would bring together delegates representing “all Christian Princes” and “all Churchmen of Christian profession.” In 1614, he was bruiting about the same appeal (Patterson 1997: 96, 146). In these years, the writings he published abroad sometimes contained stringent anti-papal attacks, and at home he sometimes supported anti-Catholic measures. In those same writings, though, he often strove to convince his readers that his hostility was not to Catholicism as such, but to the Pope’s machinations against his sovereignty. His plan for a general council was never realized, but it represents a sustained attempt by this king to conceive of a spatially, and perhaps temporally, undivided Christendom. To this royal discourse, sometimes polemical, sometimes conciliatory, Donne’s own publishing history is intimately related. He issued his second treatise, Pseudo-Martyr, in defense of the Oath of Allegiance, and one of its more interesting, though mostly unexamined, features is “Donne’s international approach to the nature of the church.” Written to attest to Donne’s “conversion” and to advance him as an adherent of the king’s policies, much of this treatise is, as Raspa notes in his introduction, given over to arguing for “the possibility of international religious allegiances” (Donne 1993: liii). R. C. Bald noted that, in this, Donne’s “views had scarcely changed from those he had held while still a Catholic” (Bald 1970: 38). We might wonder, though, if it was not James’s commitment to religious union that allowed Donne to make the transition, not so much to forget his old church, as to find in the new one an authoritative and ecumenical version of the larger church that did not insist on rigid historical distinctions. Fourteen years later, his Devotions, as Strier suggests, reflects an ecumenism that may well have a royal inspiration. Even its topic – Donne’s gradual recovery from a bout with “relapsing fever” – is suggestive. As the treatise was written, James himself lay ill; he would be dead in a little over a year. Four days before his death,

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Forgetting Catholicism in Donne’s Devotions 117 [a]ccording to John Williams, the bishop of London . . . the king asked . . . to receive the sacrament of Holy Communion. “Being desir’d to declare his Faith,” James repeated the articles of the creed and then added that “hee beleeued them all, as they were receiued and expounded by that part of the Catholique Church which was established here in England.” (Patterson 1997: 356) Taking into account what we know of James’s specific and consistent advocacy for religious unity, it does not seem “fantastic” at all to say that Donne’s appeal – “[n]o man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” (Donne 1959a: 108) – might echo it. To say this, however, is only to begin to open up the complexities of remembering/forgetting that are intimated in the meditation. We can see how the Devotions “spatializes” this work if we follow the geography of the tolling bells for which the meditation is so well known. The meditation begins, we should remember, not in England, but in Turkey, well beyond the domain of Christendom. There, a “prisoner” languishes, “a convenient author,” says Donne, “who writ a discourse of bells” in his cell. “How would he have enlarged himself,” he exclaims, “if he had been my fellow-prisoner in this sick bed, so near to that steeple which never ceases, no more than the harmony of the spheres, but is more heard.” In Constantinople, where this author, Hieronymus Magius, was in fact lodged, there are no bells to be heard because when “the Turks took [the city], they melted [them] into ordnance” (Donne 1959a: 102). As Donne sets out to imagine a “Catholic” church, he first summons up a “heathen,” the Turk who converts the instruments of ecumenism into instruments of war, and possibly inter-faith conflict. Already, we can note a tension between this doctrinal “othering” and the later claim that “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind” (Donne 1959a: 109). As Strier might point out, “mankind” probably does not include the Turk. True enough, but there is a movement in this meditation by which any limit that Donne places on the church of his imagining is by the same gesture broadened, so that what was “outside” comes to be, if not “inside,” then at the shifting border. Here, for instance, were the “convenient author” to join Donne in his sickbed, he might be “enlarged” by London’s tolling bells. But was the divinely tuned “harmony of the spheres” absent in Turkey? Perhaps it is simply unheard there, but ubiquitously present all the same. Similarly, as Donne moves outside Christendom, he also moves back into the memorial past to remind his readers that the “foundation of [the] militant church” was first laid “amongst the Jews.” In those days, God “didst appoint the calling of the assembly in . . . by trumpet” (Donne 1959a: 104) – not bells, but their musical precursor. The relation of the present church to earlier versions is very much on Donne’s mind in this meditation. “I know,” he addresses God,

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These “natural men” may not be identical with “mankind” as it is constituted in 1624, but they do serve as a general category by which Donne blurs the lines he elsewhere seems to be marking confessionally between Christianity and other faiths. The same both/and logic is at work in Donne’s “distinctions” between contemporary Catholics and Protestants. In fact, nowhere in the treatise does Donne seem more indebted to James’s sense of ecumenism than in his unwillingness to give us a clear sense of what the crucial differences between them now are. Instead, he is constantly at work intimating the existence of a historically continuous “communion of saints” that transcends, even as it includes, all those “comers” and “conventicles” and “schismatical singularities” (Donne 1959a: 105, 48) that would seek to divide it. The familiar lines on the effect of bells on passersby – “[w]ho bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?” (Donne 1959a: 108) – continue the thought of earlier lines: it is bells that bring the communion of saints together. To refuse to heed their peals is to sunder the body of Christ. Some Protestants have criticized “this ceremony of bells at funerals” because “abuses may have crept in amongst Christians,” he says. But bells, properly heard, “call . . . us all” (Donne 1959a: 104, 108). “[L]et not that pull us asunder from one another,” he implores, “which was intended for the assembling of us in the militant, and associating of us to the triumphant church” (Donne 1959a: 105). Thus, “[n]o man is an island,” and so on, and, if Strier is right, no church is either, but all are “a part of the main” (Donne 1959a: 108) – just as James had proclaimed. Throughout, the meditation seems to imply prior incarnations of the church universal that have not been entirely subsumed or replaced by the Church of England. The bells that summoned the faithful to honor the dead would also have served to remind the English of Donne’s time of the faith that until recently had been their own. When Donne pleads, “Let not that” – the controversy over the ringing of bells – “pull us asunder,” he implies that this is just what has happened, given the objections some among his countrymen have raised against the practice. As several critics have noted, Donne’s reference here is far from “neutral: the tolling of bells in Protestant England was a subject of contention” (Greenblatt 2001: 43). “Puritans” objected to it as a papist vestige, as Donne registers when he asks whether the “ceremony of bells at funerals” should be “refuse[d]” because some

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Forgetting Catholicism in Donne’s Devotions 119 Catholics believe they “drive away evil spirits” (Donne 1959a: 104). And not only was the tolling of bells thought to be Catholic; it was associated with a specific Catholic doctrine. The sounding bell was a “call for prayers that would help speed the newly departed soul through its purgatorial torment” (Greenblatt 2001: 43). Donne is well aware of this association since, in the following meditation, he goes out of his way to complicate it: If I will ask, not a few men, but almost whole bodies, whole churches, what becomes of the souls of the righteous at the departing thereof from the body, I shall be told by some, that they attend an expiation, a purification in a place of torment; by some, that they attend the fruition of the sight of God in a place of rest, but yet of but expectation; by some, that they pass to an immediate possession of the presence of God. (Donne 1959a: 115) Since he is disinclined to say which among these views might be authoritative, we cannot say that Donne explicitly reveals much about his stance beyond its ecumenism. But the logic of “bodies” in this section makes a point of its own. Sometimes Donne imagines a church body that is coherent and inclusive and that incorporates his own. The baptized, for instance, are “connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member” (Donne 1959a: 107–8). This body incorporates all Christian faiths, and has done so since its primitive origins. But sometimes, as in his survey of opinions on the afterlife, he remembers that “Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world” (Donne 1959a: 23), and that the ecclesiastical body has now devolved into theological monads – “whole bodies, whole churches” – whose refusal to cohere is exposed by the discord on which he reports. The slippage from one religious corporeality to the other – and, concomitantly, from a mode of remembering to one that acknowledges forgetting – can be located in the word “almost.” Whole churches are now “almost” islands unto themselves, whereas once, within living memory, the church universal was “almost” an undivided “continent.” As these church bodies collapse into one another, Donne can appear to us to be in more than one time at once. In early modern England, as Stephen Greenblatt says, the “sound of the bells demarcated a geographical unit of fellow feeling within whose limits prayers were particularly appropriate” (Greenblatt 2001: 44). By insisting that “Europe” be included in the world reached by the pealing of funereal bells, Donne could be heard speaking from both sides of the historical divide called the Reformation. He upheld, it could be argued, what was regarded as a Catholic practice in the name, as he said, of a “Catholic” church in order to include European Catholics in a community of “fellow feeling” and shared faith. A supple manipulation of theological time/space allowed him to apprehend a church of his own, and yet not entirely of his own, since it reached back to incorporate the remembered faith of his

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upbringing and out to engage many across the Channel, all within the ecumenical rhetoric of a king who was himself imagining a church that would one day “secure the religious peace of Christendom” (Patterson 1997: 37). Like James I, Donne was not always compelled to think of himself as definitively placed in a certain “community” of faith. Instead, his religious imagination was occupied, often, with the “translation” of the tropes of divergent confessions, in the assurance that, as he put it in this meditation, “God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another” (Donne 1959a: 108). Whether Donne was thereby undercutting or upholding the specific Protestant Englishness that was enabled by the coerced forgetting of the Catholic past is an open question. In the Devotions, he expounds upon a “Catholic” church, housed, in some complex fashion, either within or around the Church of England (or both). But his warrant for this reconstruction is taken from a head of state who is also the head of that church. As he writes, James is imagining a supra-national sacred polity that “should be superior to all Churches, all doctrine, all Princes, secular and ecclesiastic, none excepted” (Patterson 1997: 37). Donne assumes – in the sense of “adopts,” but also “presupposes” – a flexible piety that allows for various stances toward Catholicism and England’s Catholic past, since his king did too. As readers of Donne, we might conclude that we should look in his works not only for the places where he is prescriptively committed to one or another doctrinal “position,” but also for those places where he can be observed to interpolate diverse confessions into one another. It was not, we might decide, that Donne could ever have forgotten the faith of his youth, nor that in remembering his earlier faith he remained a tacit adherent of it later in his life, but that often in his oeuvre he reworked the distinction between Catholicism and Anglicanism, neither of which he could have forgotten or remembered without the other. It was in this dialectical fashion, perhaps, that the claims of Donne’s Catholic heritage and his Anglican loyalties were, if not altogether rectified, then “almost.” It is for such reasons, I suggest, that the Devotions cannot be reduced to a work either of memory or forgetting. Like most of his English contemporaries, Donne, perhaps, seems to have registered the “presence” of Catholicism through the signs of its absence. It was a religion under a certain memorial erasure, but in some ways all the more compelling for that. If the relation between memory and forgetting is indeed dialectical, then we should expect to find the trace effects of the one in the operations of the other, and, in this treatise, we do. On the one hand, Donne not only refers to, but sometimes brings himself to bear the apparatus of “forgetting” by which a certain version of “pastness” was to be disavowed in the more sanctified “present.” “In those times,” he says at one point, speaking of the early church, but not without obvious and more recent historical allusions,

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the Gentiles were over-full of an over-reverent respect to the memory of the dead: a great part of the idolatry of the nations flowed from that; an over-amorous devotion, an over-zealous celebrating, and over-studious preserving of the memories, and the pictures of some dead persons. (Donne 1959a: 117). There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this critique. Tacitly, at least, “idolatrous” Catholic iconography is being exposed to a severe Protestant condemnation, and with it an heretical stance towards the past and the faith of one’s predecessors. This is a form of recollection that Donne does not promote, and he does not expect his readers to do so either. Their “forgetting” is active and self-conscious and rejects “an over-studious preserving of memories.” On the other hand, this passage is itself – again, tacitly – an act of memory, calling to mind an ornate and sensually rich (“over-amorous”) relation with the “past,” one that Donne expects his readers both to “remember” and to re-member – in the sense of assembling memorial fragments – in the “present.” Indeed, this “memory” would not have the allure that it does, and these lines would not have the effect that we may presume they did, if this “idolatry” was not in some sense operative in the “present,” if, that is, the “Catholic” recovery of the “past” that is implicitly being both condemned and enacted here was not effectually possible in 1624. In the Devotions, forgetting calls up memory, and memory forgetting; the workings of both are contingent and relative to one another, but they can be defined, as I have tried to show here, with a fair degree of historical precision. It has been the mistake of a certain strand of Donne criticism, I think, to imagine that this divine and his co-religionists could either have removed themselves from this (re)cycling of memory/forgetting or have consistently striven to do so. “But those dangers [of idolatry] being removed,” Donne reminds himself and his readers, “God . . . dost certainly allow that we should do offices of piety to the dead and that we should draw instructions to piety from the dead” (Donne 1959a: 118). Gone, but not remembered and not forgotten.

Notes 1 2

John Carey (1981) applies this term to Donne throughout his influential study. In discussion at an interdisciplinary conference, “British Political Thought in Early Modern Europe: Mapping Networks and Practices of Political Exchange in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, 18–20 May 2000.

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Legends of oblivion Enchantment and enslavement in Book 6 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene1 Elizabeth Mazzola

If the class “in great part responsible for the great flowering of vernacular literature in the Elizabethan period” was also involved in laying the groundwork for “Britain’s future economic advancement” abroad, the relationship between the two projects was neither as obvious nor as easy as some English poets might have wished (Hall 1995: 18). Spenser, patronized by his queen, was, nonetheless, retained in – or exiled to – Ireland as secretary to the Lord Deputy overseeing England’s plantations there; Elizabeth’s “favorite,” Sidney, was forcibly prevented from accompanying Sir Francis Drake on a 1585 voyage to the West Indies; not long after, Donne’s petition to serve as treasurer of the Virginia Company would be denied by Company members, Sidney’s nephew William Herbert presumably among them.2 Visionary projects are not always so antithetical: perhaps lofty ideals simply needed to be conveyed with less artifice in the Americas. Still, a brazen world was no match for a golden one, as Sidney proudly observes in his Defence of Poetry, a judgment Spenser comes to as well – without sharing Sidney’s estimation of the world or of poetry – in the 1596 installment of The Faerie Queene. In the last two books of his poem, Spenser’s experiments in Renaissance myth-making grow both more tenuous and more destructive. Indeed, in the Legend of Justice chronicled in Book 5 and then, in the Legend of Courtesy outlined in Book 6, Spenser delimits a romance world that has become surprisingly fragile and philosophically rigid. Moreover, this world is nearly ruined through the exertions of the barking Blatant Beast, a monster who spreads rumors, slanders, and the scandal of humanist promises run dry. But more disturbing than the havoc the beast wreaks is the pervading sense of corrosion and waste in faeryland. With the gradual silencing of heroic songs, humanist dreams become privileged secrets – a problem which appeared limited to the “beastly” Grille in Book 2, who, choosing to remain a hog, much prefers the magical form that the seductress Acrasia has shaped. Grille’s choice is quickly overturned, but it nonetheless illustrates a principle increasingly crucial to (and increasingly embraced by) the logic of The Faerie Queene. Not everyone can be accommodated in Renaissance schemes for rebirth, and some figures must be left behind in order for Spenser’s knights

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Enchantment and enslavement in The Faerie Queene 123 to illustrate properly the virtues of his poem. As the poem continues, faeryland becomes cluttered with the bodies of inhuman others, imaginative residue that the poet’s allegorical scheme either refuses or intentionally discards. Yet the humanist project Spenser outlines in his Letter to Ralegh, his aim to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline,” (Spenser 1909: 485) belongs to a much broader cultural project, that of rebuilding the Old World with the remnants and labors of the New. In fact, only the empirical data that the New World supplies – that which makes the New World both new and a world – can illustrate and justify the doctrines organizing the Old one. This colonizing project, which Walter D. Mignolo describes as the “dark side” of the Renaissance, is closely linked to the emergence of slavery in the New World.3 And Spenser himself intimates towards the close of The Faerie Queene that poetry will fail because it can neither prevent such a project nor do without it. In Book 5 of The Faerie Queene, Spenser outlines the difficulty for a knowing subject – someone like the knight Artegall, a being with a highly developed capacity for reason – to inhabit a knowing body, an object that exemplifies reason, the way that Artegall’s brutal servant Talus does. Fashioned through “discipline / Of vertue” (5.Proem.3), Artegall displays mastery by disciplining others, while Talus enforces Artegall’s ratiocinations, his chivalric “inquest,” with a “club of Iustice dread” (5.1.2). These images of knight and servant constitute and endanger each other, much in the way that the “enchaunted” Florimell, a “snowman” fashioned into a lovely maiden, melts in the presence of its fleshy original. In Book 6, the divide between “enchaunted” bodies and masterful knowledges grows wider. For one thing, the idyllic pastoral setting to which Calidore has temporarily retired also houses slaughtered bodies, lawless thieves, a tiger, and a broken bag-pipe, all relics of a romance vision abruptly foreshortened. Perhaps Calidore’s courtesy stems from the fact that he can make expert use of such spoils, as when the knight – “[w]hose euery deed and word. . . . / Was like enchantment” (6.2.3) – devises a “counter-cast of slight” and beheads a villain’s corpse to clear a guilty maiden’s name (6.3.16). The severed head Calidore then parades gives “faire colour to that Ladies cause in sight” (6.3.16), while Priscilla’s shame is projected back onto the dead discourteous knight. Surveying its fragile mythical structure, Graham Hough once observed of Book 6 that “[t]here is no book in The Faerie Queene where historical identifications are of less importance” (Hough 1963: 204).4 I disagree with Hough, although I want to focus here on how this sophisticated procedure of detaching signs from bodies – or disengaging allegory from history – occurs, and with what results. The consummation of such a process takes place at Mount Acidale, where the piping shepherd Colin (a figure for Spenser) is rudely interrupted by Calidore and the maidens dancing to Colin’s

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music instantly vanish, his shrill song forever silenced. Colin now must admit not only the gap between his subject and his audience but also a ground where experience dissolves, while readers who have delighted in Spenser’s “delectable return” to romance in Book 6 must now concede, with Hough, the “violence and sadness in this world” (Hough 1963: 204). At the same time, those readers, including Hough, have not always grasped Spenser’s deliberate efforts to theorize the principles by which a New World might be organized or to imagine the bodies upon which its principles could be tested and refined. Like Artegall’s judgments in Book 5, which frequently seem rash or harsh, Calidore’s courteous ideas about how to display virtue – or how to make ends meet – are hardly fastidious, Spenser’s narrator tells us, “nothing nice” (6.9.7). “[T]he historical dimension of Spenser’s book of courtesy,” as Robert E. Stillman argues, is “demonstrably more consequential than has been thought” (Stillman 1992: 300). Traditionally, many scholars have lamented the Renaissance’s relatively few contributions to philosophy. Perhaps they were looking in the wrong places, or to the wrong subjects. Even so, The Faerie Queene has hardly seemed the best place to begin. B. E. C. Davis, for instance, criticized the way Spenser’s hopelessly confused philosophy turned to allegory as both a solution and an escape: “To a mind thus at discord with itself,” Davis argued, “allegory offers a means of reconciling abstract thought with concrete representation, at the same time offering a refuge from both” (Davis 1962: 212).5 Spenser’s apparent ineptitude might be construed as part of a wider cultural tradition, however. Paul Kristeller once noted that, according to most scholars, “the Renaissance does not seem to have produced any philosophers of the very first order.” “[H]istorians of philosophy,” he explained, “still tend to jump with a few perfunctory and often misleading comments from Thomas Aquinas or William of Ockham to Bacon and Descartes” (Werkmeister 1963: 80, 87–8). Like Calidore’s courteous quest, Renaissance philosophical interests and solutions have nearly always appeared wayward and episodic, unfinished and all too easily distracted. To be sure, most new philosophical questions which arose with a secular political theory, historiography, and cartography could not be fully addressed in the Renaissance. One reason was that the cords tying Christianity to Neoplatonism had become disentangled, so that Platonism, which could then be absorbed in its original form, offered both a correlate to and critique of Christian models of transcendence (Blumenberg 1986: 39).6 A second and more disabling problem was that new discourses still relied on outmoded sacred vocabularies, even if the kinds of answers and experiences possible were transformed when transcendental models were emptied out or abandoned. Rudimentary laws of Renaissance physics, for instance, busied themselves with the problem of discrediting the doctrine of transubstantiation.7 Another discrepancy between aims and ends becomes evident when

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Enchantment and enslavement in The Faerie Queene 125 Colin’s secret retreat at Acidale is disturbed by Calidore’s gaze, and the haunt of graces is revealed as both good place and no place. This shift was not confined to faeryland. When other worlds imagined by Neoplatonism yield to spatial schemes of “extra” worlds – which might instead be explored, exploited, or abandoned – philosophy is displaced “nowhere” to the New World,8 where it bolsters vague doctrines supporting the “intrinsically modern phenomenon” of slavery (Gilroy 1994: 220).9 Such doctrines materialize in Spenser’s poem as well. Although his pastoral vision in the Legend of Courtesy has often been faulted for its escapist tendencies, the very same reparations are proposed in Book 6, when the failed transaction at Acidale is almost immediately replaced in the next canto by the Brigants’ exchange of prisoners.10 The scaffolding supporting a pastoral vision of retirement is now exposed, and Spenser shows us behind its promised music and rewards of ease the heavy lifting forgetting does, the cultural work of oblivion. Patricia Fumerton has also commented on the Brigants’ trade in The Faerie Queene, arguing that Spenser’s substitution of economic for transcendental schemes serves specifically as a criticism of the English system of fosterage: “Here the individual is not subsumed in a larger whole but lost in a murky confusion of ‘things.’ Here living beings are not passed along in an expanding circle of exchange but treated in a self-restricting cycle of profit” (Fumerton 1991: 63). But we might locate Fumerton’s observation within an even larger context. Until the sixteenth century, Neoplatonism, had supplied a “consoling play of recognitions” which sometimes “tortured differences into likeness” (Tomlinson 1993: ix).11 Yet the mimetic identification Neoplatonism works through – a basic structural principle coordinating and organizing the events of Spenser’s Faerie Queene – finally breaks down, its harmonies and brutalities abruptly exposed when Calidore intrudes upon the hundred and four maidens dancing to Colin’s pipe and discovers an imaginative setting which he cannot inhabit. This is not the first ideological wreck Spenser’s poem describes: parallel texts had collided at Alma’s Castle in Book 2, when the Renaissance history recorded in Arthur’s biography finds itself at odds with the cultural memory preserved in the chronicles that the elf Guyon reads. But a more devastating collapse of philosophical systems occurs in Book 6 because the validity of the quest framework itself is questioned. Knightly rewards are no longer appropriate to the knightly contests undertaken, and a “faire shepherdesse” is put up for sale (6.11.11).12 There was a similar lack of epistemological fit when new philosophical problems were raised in old contexts or old issues made to inhabit newlyconfigured settings. According to Hans Blumenberg, this strained reason or clumsy ratio calls into question the “legitimacy” of the modern age, although Blumenberg reminds us that the philosophical solution was not simply to begin again from scratch, “as Descartes’ program [had] prescribed” (Blumenberg 1986: xx–xxi, 60). Instead, the disintegration of Renaissance

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world views accounts for the appearance of slavery in the New World at a time when slavery had practically been abolished nearly everywhere else on the globe. Just as traditional iconology and sacred lore were being disseminated to a greatly-expanded audience of lay readers,13 new regions of freedom and affluence were opening up throughout much of Western Europe alongside markets for sugar, tobacco, coffee, and cotton (Davis 1997: 8). All of these refinements circumscribed a world of shared values sharply defined against an “unworldly world” of none (Blumenberg 1986: 9). During the same period, slavery is proposed several times in Tudor England, and briefly implemented on two occasions, in 1547 as punishment for beggars, and twenty-five years later as a discipline for “incorrigible rogues.”14 As Robin Blackburn similarly asserts, “[t]he Renaissance did little to weaken ideas supportive of the legitimacy of slavery. The rediscovery of classical authorities did nothing to undermine belief in the lawfulness of slavery.” If anything, Blackburn argues, “the Renaissance nourished a sense of cultural superiority that dovetailed with the classical Aristotelian doctrine that barbarians were natural slaves” (Blackburn 1997: 87). Alden T. Vaughan concludes that, if seventeenthcentury England “had no legal slavery,” it nonetheless had “an abundance of ‘unfree’ people – indentured servants, debtors working off obligations, criminals serving sentences, and the like,” statuses, Vaughan claims, “transferred automatically to British America” (Vaughan 1995: 140–1). Still, slavery was only one of many classical forms recovered during the Renaissance. At the same time, new instruments of reason, including Cartesian mathematics, philology, jurisprudence, and historiography, were constrained, in Blumenberg’s words, to “reoccupy” abandoned transcendental systems or wrestle with sacred problems only those systems could pose. This reoccupation required the production of new empirical evidence, something that could almost magically be supplied by the bodies of slaves, rational signs who would remain invisible, whose meanings could be easily lost, and whose labors promised ultimately to erase themselves.15 Indeed, Spenser’s faeryland requires the disciplined bodies of inhuman others, elves or fairies or imaginative residue (like the hoggish Grille) that remains whenever Spenserian allegory exceeds or depletes Spenserian knights. Harry Berger suggests that such bodies belong to “boundary figures” ultimately rendered archaic and abandoned in the course of The Faerie Queene, like Malbecco or both Florimells. This archaizing process is also an evolutionary one for Berger, who claims that “the beginnings which Spenser creates . . . are also endings, since they involve acts of transcendence or supersession whereby the new either rejects and replaces or transforms and assimilates the old” (Berger 1969: 136). Humphrey Tonkin maintains, though, that such “acts of transcendence” are continually revealed as inadequate in The Faerie Queene. Boundary figures are really “massed at the borders of the poem where,” Tonkin explains, “they must be constantly overcome” (Tonkin 1972: 13).

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Enchantment and enslavement in The Faerie Queene 127 Boundary figures threaten both Spenser’s poem and the perimeter of early modern world views, and the conceptually empty term “race” emerges to fill gaps between dangerously fluid early-modern notions of geography, history, and nation.16 Calidore appears to operate comfortably within this hazardous terrain, however. In Book 6 of The Faerie Queene, where the term “slavery” is mentioned more than anywhere else in the poem,17 he occupies a space “neither wholly inside or outside”; presiding over what Homi Bhabha terms a “gestalt of betweenness” at the limits of the pastoral, Calidore seemingly reinvents a romance world he repeatedly courts and upsets (Bhabha 1994: 209–11). Abandoning his quest and shelving his love for Pastorella, Calidore trespasses on the poetic threshold of Acidale, interrupting the Neoplatonic exercises staged there. When Calidore secretly approaches their circle, the maidens, fearful of being seen, vanish “he knew not where” (6.10.18). The celestial spectacle that excludes Calidore is more forbidding than its “diuelish” parody in Canto 8, a circle of cannibals preparing to feast on the maiden Serena, for when the graces vanish and Colin breaks his pipe in grief, transcendence is forsaken. Acidale is a good place which becomes a no place, and the conceits supporting Renaissance philosophy are exposed by the poet as a “confused preasse / Of carcases” like the ones which almost bury Pastorella (6.11.20), a collection of dead ends or Platonic scrap heap, a place where oblivion resides. Ireland has been construed by many recent readers as the margin for Spenser’s epic vision. Anne Fogarty, for example, employs Foucault’s term “heterotopia” to investigate Spenser’s Ireland as an imaginative middle-ground or “place of difference” both “inside and outside of social reality” (Fogarty 1995: 24). Indeed, the Ireland imagined by Spenser and many contemporaries was an epistemological loophole or metaphysical detour, a second world that threatened both faeryland’s diversions and England’s ambitions. But Foucault’s term also includes ships, brothels, gardens, cemeteries, and cinemas, all locales that forcefully require (and not only encourage) imaginative repositioning. Even Book 6 of The Faerie Queene, which Fogarty likens to “heterotopia,” finally necessitates such repositioning, especially at the ruins of what was once Acidale (Fogarty 1995: 24). Still more useful to a reading of Book 6 might be Paul Gilroy’s conception of a place of “betweenness” rather than of “difference,” a place he has termed the “Black Atlantic.” This is a site of memory and forgetting, collective repression and colonialism, lodged between Europe and America in the cracks of a modern world no longer held in place by political or sacred regimes or yet firmly tied to economic markets.18 Spenser’s faeryland increasingly hints at the secrets and dimensions of the “Black Atlantic,” especially in Book 6, where slavery is featured as a basic structural principle of the romance

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world. This site also represents an imaginative or mimetic failure like the one Spenser describes at Acidale, when experience is fatally severed from knowledge, and ontology from history. Indeed, Gilroy’s description of the “Black Atlantic” provides us with the image of a Renaissance black hole, a gap in reasoning or a tear in ethos repaired by the bodies of slaves. The Roman naturalist Pliny (AD 23–79) offers an account of slavery strikingly similar to many of Calidore’s courteous practices, a “secret discipline” or ethical system held together by imaginative breaches and physical collapses. “We use other people’s feet when we go out,” Pliny observed, “we use other people’s eyes to recognize things, we use another person’s memory to greet people, we use someone else’s help to stay alive – the only thing we keep for ourselves are our pleasures” (Patterson 1982: 339). Such enslavement, however, requires constant vigilance and careful organization. Spenserian allegory, straining to “hide ideas behind [its] images,” is especially busy in Book 6 with the production of new empirical evidence out of Neoplatonism’s “earthly emanations,” physical data that further corroborate transcendental schemes (Miller 1979: 179). Perhaps this requirement explains an otherwise mysterious chivalric activity repeatedly undertaken in Book 6, for it is precisely such laboring we see in the weakened bodies that Calidore frequently carries on his back, like the “wounded sore” Aladine he transports (6.2.48) or the head of the traitor knight who had tormented Priscilla. Calidore’s double, Calepine, likewise conveys the “diseased” Serena (6.3.32) and delivers an infant from a bear, only to turn the “louely litle spoile” quickly over to Matilde and Sir Bruin, presenting them with a vaguely human set of possibilities and an even vaguer set of humanist instructions (6.4.25). He tells Matilde: “ye may enchace / What euer formes ye list thereto apply, / Being now soft and fit them to embrace; / Whether ye list him traine in cheualry, / Or noursle vp in lore of learn’d Philosophy” (6.4.35).19 The definition of pastoral supplied by William Empson is based upon the same hidden dynamic animating human relations. “The essential truth of the old pastoral,” Empson argued, “was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor. . . . From seeing the two sorts of people combined like this you thought the better of both; the best of both parts were used.”20 Yet as a sophisticated courtly means (or set of optical illusions) for vicarious living, pastoral is emptied out in Book 6, and Calidore’s courtesy becomes more of a survival technique which allows him to navigate between universes upset or discarded by the unthreading of Christianity and Platonism.21 Mount Acidale is the place where Neoplatonic identities finally dissolve, where the Graces encircle each other only to uncover more fragile structures of difference. When their project collapses, the knight and the poet find themselves completely at odds. Spenser employs these maidens as imaginative placeholders who, in lieu of concrete history, might shape a more abstract ontology. In the same way, colonial frameworks (the legacy of Western

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Enchantment and enslavement in The Faerie Queene 129 hermeneutics) would rely upon allegory in a starkly new and improved New World. We see this substitution in the fourth grace at the center of Colin’s ring. “[U]tterly lack[ing] any identifiable aspects,” she has instead – as Gilroy might put it – “a completely poetical existence” (Nestrick 1968: 33). Registering the maiden’s isolated status and fragile power, some readers link the flawed spectacle in Canto 10 with the ruined terrain of Ireland: “The flattened, rational space of Spenser’s ideal Ireland is insistently punctured by those intransigent ‘corners’ and ‘coverts’ of locality, a pocketing or pockmarking of the paper plane with non-integrated hollows of cultural and terrestrial difference” (Lupton 1993: 95). New World slavery institutionalizes such hollows and pockets. The fourth maiden is not a metaphor of abstraction, but, Spenser shows us, the “real thing,” a thing whose purity has much in common with the “concentrated intensity of the slave experience” that Gilroy maintains “marked out blacks as the first truly modern people” (Gilroy 1994: 221). Spenser’s Faerie Queene also explores how imaginative techniques became increasingly adept at pushing to the margins those cultural materials that were instrumental in shaping its center, like the Celtic myths employed by Tudor historiographers or Guyon’s alternative ontology which repairs Arthur’s faulty genealogy. These imaginative techniques become ever more sophisticated or violently abstract, as we see when Spenser proposes in his prose tracts the systematic purging of the Irish wasteland. Spenser’s absent fairy queen is a spectator to this process of active forgetting, someone who has neither to reward these labors nor to labor herself. Her absence is needed, though, because there is actually little breathing room in the “gestalt of betweenness.” As Tonkin puts it, describing the allegorical requirements and challenges of faeryland, “[a] world where the past is constantly present and where the future is contained within this present affords special poetic advantages but creates major ontological difficulties” (Tonkin 1972: 6). Its advantages and difficulties organize the many enclosed rings and private spaces of Book 6, like the “siluer slomber” Turpine disturbs when he stumbles upon a sleeping Arthur, a privileged spectacle which, at this late point in the poem, is also an empty one, fraught with peril. When the organizing figure of English history is “[l]oosely displayed vpon the grassie ground, / Possessed of sweete sleepe, that luld him soft in swound,” the ill-mannered Turpine takes the sleeping Arthur for dead (6.7.18, 20). Most readers are careful not to fault the sleeping Prince in this episode. Tonkin, for instance, argues, “This is not Redcrosse in a drugged stupor before Orgoglio’s attack, nor is it Guyon in a faint after his passage through the Cave of Mammon” (Tonkin 1972: 84). Still, we are not faced here with knightly sin or weakness, but with chivalric boredom, with the fact that the Prince is absent-minded, not entranced: he has become a Platonic idea, like

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Mount Acidale, which can no longer be thought. Spenser’s Faerie Queene provides the anatomy of a metaphysical loophole, a chronicle of Neoplatonism starting to decay, for now myth-making has become completely private and contradictory, and Renaissance philosophy, once a system of all-inclusive visions, has reached a standstill. At this point, Arthur is firmly, if unconsciously, locked into place. The breakdown of ontological registers and cognitive frameworks in The Faerie Queene is especially ironic because Spenser uses Book 6 to administer lessons about making others feel at home, albeit through an obsequious knight with a rather personal agenda. Richard Neuse has commented that Calidore is too self-contained to be truly courteous: the knight of Courtesy goes through the motions and feigns familiarity rather than seeking to put himself in someone else’s place (Neuse 1970: 235–8). But what organizes this legend are ruptures, excavations, exposures, and “lucklesse” breaches, with courtesy providing the illusions that make politeness or politics cohere and oblivion the rule. Once he returns from the evacuated Acidale, Calidore learns that Pastorella and the shepherds have been kidnapped and sold into slavery. Pastorella is ultimately discovered under a pile of corpses, the rotting anatomies of pastoral sentiment. But by interrupting Colin’s vision, Calidore has similarly fashioned himself into a cultural dead end, his courtesy no longer building worlds but destroying them (Berger 1969: 138). There is nonetheless a music that comes from the untuning of the spheres, a poetics which accompanies the disengaging of history from experience. Ralph Ellison describes the music that we might see Spenser’s Calidore – if only momentarily – experiencing: Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those parts where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. (qtd in Gilroy 1994: 202) But this lyric, too, quickly fades in faeryland. In the wasted plains and woods to which Calidore returns “nought but ecchoes ruin rebound” (6.11.26–7). Calidore has become one of the “boundary figures” of the poem, along with the resurrected Pastorella and even the faery queen herself. Like the faery queen, such boundary figures would continue to haunt the perimeter of faeryland. It is slavery which promises to lose track of such dead ends and prohibit inquiry into their whereabouts or their history. Edward Said describes this Western discourse of blind spots – its fruitful legends of oblivion – when he argues that

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Enchantment and enslavement in The Faerie Queene 131 [w]hat . . . has never taken place is an epistemological critique at the most fundamental level of the connection between the development of a historicism which has expanded and developed enough to include antithetical attitudes such as ideologies of Western imperialism and critiques of imperialism on the one hand, and on the other, the actual practice of imperialism by which the accumulation of territories and population, the control of economies, and the incorporation and homogenization of histories are maintained. (Said 1985: 22)

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An epistemological black hole or site where knowledge can get lost, Western history has been unaffected by itself, unconscious and ossified, posed and collected in objects that could not be recovered. The New World threatens to reveal this loss, but slavery – rather than metaphysics – uses allegory to conceal the rift between form and matter that Calidore locates when he discovers the other as a “methodological problem” that “might even be confined to poetics, and redistributed more adequately there” (Teskey 1994: 296). Like Gilroy’s image of the “Black Atlantic,” Spenser’s faeryland is a burial ground for memory where the heroic Arthur almost always sleeps relatively undisturbed. Hegel would later argue that slavery provides its masters with a private means of myth-making (Hegel 1967: 235), but Spenser’s poetics instead suggest that both master and slave are cut off in the production of a universal history, one that abolishes all external referents and thus really belongs to no one.22 Continually laboring under the burden of memory, the wounded, bleeding Arthur is a sign that empties itself throughout the faery landscape, an image that self-destructs, an allegory that simultaneously unravels and winds itself up. And Arthur’s repeated heroic efforts, like Calidore’s survival techniques or Artegall’s exercises in reason, thus, to cite Adorno, “give flesh and blood to the notion of utopia without betraying it to empirical life” (qtd in Gilroy 1994: 212). In the same way, the hermeneutic techniques supplied by Renaissance anthropology – the human science which develops at the same time that the motives of Renaissance philosophy were lost or waylaid – learn to delimit the inessential or non-existent and discover rationales for ontological differences and existential gaps (Blumenberg 1986: 6, xxx). Slavery takes shape in these new guidelines for erasure. Elizabeth’s action licensing Casper van Senden in 1596 to transport “the blackamoores” from England to Spain and Italy is based on this premise, that blacks and whites are mutually exclusive, fully formed groups, and that unearthly locales might be specified for them outside of English world views (Newman 1991: 80; Gilroy 1994: 7). Calidore’s quest and the Irish Brigants both inhabit these poetic thresholds or unworldly worlds. Yet the private myth-making slavery provides, remaking ontology and reorganizing history, will require an even larger arena. Certainly America

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met physiological requirements for anachronism, more easily allowing the formal construction of sites for mimetic experience outside its bounds.23 Spenser’s poem assumes the same political barriers and makes use of the same epistemological screens in erecting faeryland. These screens get weaker, more transparent, however, by the end of The Faerie Queene. Noting the “progressive flawing of the romance world,” Berger comments on the “deliberate casualness of Book 6”: The characters are all flat and typical, and it is often hard to keep them straight. This is made worse by a similarity in names and situations: the same kinds of situations recur again and again, and the poet merely substitutes one set of figures for another. There is, however, a pattern in the substitutions, for the second group is always worse or more ineffective than the first. . . . (Berger 1988: 219, 218) This pattern is only part of an even larger pattern of substitutions, for once modernity starts from scratch, slaves are the first subjects of a “man-made history,” the working postulates of an enlightened philosophy. It is at Acidale where Calidore experiences the birth pangs of such an antithetical universe, learning there that “[h]istory knows no repetitions of the same; ‘renaissances’ are its contradiction” (Blumenberg 1986: 34, 596). His consciousness inessential at one site, essential in another, Calidore seems at home in Book 6 in a land “with endlesse losse to ouerflow” (6.4.30). His presence destroys one green world even as his absence makes the other vulnerable. Such knowledge is difficult to transmit: if both worlds are fragile, neither one seems real, just as the maiden at the center of Colin’s ring is manifestly not Spenser’s queen. But when Renaissance confusions are corrected so that the concept of man is no longer at stake, the “physiology of history” (O’Gorman 1961: 6) – its organs and stops, recesses and bounds – can be verified once more. With no memories, then, of forgetting, the men Acrasia had transformed to beasts, including the hoggish Grille, return to their “naturall” forms and “comely m[e]n bec[o]me” (2.12.86).

Notes 1 An earlier version of my argument was presented at a 1995 MLA Special Session on Edmund Spenser and a revised version was presented at the Chicago 2001 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. I am very grateful to the editors of Soundings for their permission to reprint part of the essay here. I want to acknowledge the generous readings provided by Maureen Quilligan, David Lee Miller, Chris Ivic, Grant Williams, A. C. Hamilton, Ralph Norman, Craig Berry, and William A. Sessions. 2 On Sidney, see Kuin 1998: 577; on Donne, see Quilligan 1997: 45–6. 3 Mignolo locates the “darker side of the Renaissance” in “the rebirth of the classical tradition as a justification of colonial expansion” (Mignolo 1995: vii).

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Enchantment and enslavement in The Faerie Queene 133 4 Stillman challenges readings of Acidale as an “autonomous aesthetic environ” (Stillman 1992: 300–1). 5 Later readings have posited the subtlety of Spenser’s philosophical thinking: see Bieman 1988 and Bellamy 1990. 6 Robert Ellrodt proposes a similar squaring of pegs in a less favorable light: All known systems of philosophy were tortured into harmony by the minds of men more alive to likenesses than sensitive to discrepancies; and the whole was loosely related to Christianity. That seething mass of confused thinking will be referred to as Neoplatonism. (Ellrodt 1960: 9) 7 See the proofs offered by Johnson 1688. Another example is found in newly available vernacular bibles which seemed to supply sanction for the enslavement of others. For details, see Blackburn 1997: 90 and Jablonski 1997. 8 “[T]he Platonic/Neoplatonic concept of transcendence has superimposed on genuine unworldliness the spatial schematism of an extraworldliness” (Blumenberg 1986: 41–2). See also Knapp 1992: 7. 9 Blackburn similarly tries to identify what is “new and distinctive” about the racial slavery of the New World, “not based,” he claims, “on an Old World prototype. Its bonds were woven from a variety of materials – ethnic identities, legal codifications, technical resources, economic impulses . . . and these comprised something noticeably new” (Blackburn 1997: 65–6). 10 Likewise Stillman urges us to “identify those needs out of which assertions of poetic autonomy derive, rather than celebrate autonomy achieved” (Stillman 1992: 301). 11 I thank Jon Quitslund for directing me to Tomlinson’s work. 12 See Tonkin 1972. 13 Hall describes the “semantic shift” in the opposition between fair and dark, supplementing the “traditional iconography” which associated blackness with death, sin, and evil (Hall 1995: 3–4). 14 See Hunt’s discussion of the Edwardian Vagrancy Act of 1547, repealed two years later, and the Vagrancy Act of 1572, which was rarely enforced. Institutionalized slavery, Hunt claims, was repugnant to the English temperament, and his treatment therefore focuses instead on the “virtual enslavement” of Tudor servants. Yet Hunt hints at some of the same cognitive issues I am exploring as well as the epistemological confusions which made it feasible to institutionalize slavery on the shores of the New World: What is remarkable here is not so much that English statutes of slavery were proposed and then either repealed or neglected as that in the sixteenth century they were repeatedly formulated and that the ancient practice was so often on people’s minds. (Hunt 1997: 39) 15 As Hall notes, “evocations of blackness – with . . . critical effacement – occur with startling regularity through a broad range of Renaissance texts” (Hall 1995: 1). 16 See Ivic 1999: 141–4. Ivic quotes Ivan Hannaford’s observations that “[b]etween the expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain and the landing of the first Negro in the North American colonies in 1619, the word ‘race’ entered Western languages” (Hannaford 1996: 143). See also Boose 1994: 37. 17 Osgood lists the following places where “slavery” or “slaves” are mentioned: 2.7.33.9; 5.5.23.5; 6.10.43.4; 6.11.9.6; 6.11.10.8; 6.11.10.2 (Osgood 1915). 18 For the historical background to this “intercultural” or “transcultural” site, see Canny 1990.

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19 See Ivic 1999: 165–6 and Stillman 1992: 306–7 on this episode. 20 The quotations from Empson are taken from Hoffman 1977: x, 2. Hoffman notes, however, that in Spenser’s later poetry [t]he pretense of “oneness” between the humble shepherd and the sophisticated poet falls apart. The clash of the old pastoral attitude with Spenser’s particular life situation in “Colin Clout” is evident in two significant ways: throughout the poem (and often inappropriately) a real “I” emerges to challenge the poet’s pastoral mask, and non-literary facts of the quality of life in Ireland and England contradict the ‘facts’ of pastoral convention. (Hoffman 1977: 8) 21 Berger describes courtesy as a “technique of survival” (Berger 1988: 222). 22 Gilroy describes how slavery abolishes external referents, with the result that “England ceaselessly gives birth to itself seemingly from Britannia’s head” (Gilroy 1994: 14). 23 Edmundo O’Gorman explains that because America was distrusted as an existential possibility it first needed to be conquered philosophically (O’Gorman 1961: 3).

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Part IV

Localities

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Nomadic Eros Remapping knowledge in A Midsummer Night’s Dream1 Philippa Berry

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream stages a poetic and epistemic mapping, or remapping, of knowledge according to the “accidental” law of eros, in the context of a dramatic narrative that not only problematises conventional conceptions of locality and their relationship to identity but also puts into question the empirical, predominantly rational, thought processes and models of identity that normally shape or inform our relationship to place. The comedy invites us to laugh at the folly of those who fall into the mental state which is romantic love; at the same time, however, it suggests that the lovers’ errors or phantasies, which are symptoms of their forgetting of a dominant civic – collectively legitimated – form of knowledge, are paradoxical signs of an alternative form of knowing. This other knowledge – marginalised, imperfect, but still significant – is identified in the accounts of the two Athenians, Demetrius and Bottom, who both, in different ways, remain enchanted with a fragmentary or dream-like form of memory, to which a heightened sense of physical location, or of dislocation in space, is seemingly of primary importance. It is specifically through the agency of the fairies that the play is able to give narrative form to the changing, dream-like experience of material reality – of place – that is implicitly produced by eros and phantasy. Lysander and Hermia seek a place where “the sharp Athenian law / Cannot pursue” them (1.1.162–3). But when they steal “[t]hrough Athens gates” “to seek new friends and [stranger companies]” (1.1.213, 219) and, together with Demetrius and Helena, become lost in the liminal location of the wood, the Athenian lovers become subject to a different, perversely errant, form of law. Despite its ancient Athenian setting, the play’s comic conception of identity is significantly different, if not wholly inimical to the model of prudent civic virtue which, inherited from Athens and Rome, was privileged within the discourse of Renaissance humanism. It also deviates radically from the emphasis upon reason that was increasingly pronounced within humanist circles, and that would lead in the next century to the Cartesian assertion: cogito, ergo sum. Before the erring Athenian lovers can re-enter the city as married and responsible citizens who are once again governed by “cool reason”

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(5.1.6) and Athenian law, they are exposed to a model of identity which could be described, in contrast to that of Descartes, as desidero, ergo sum – I desire, therefore I am. In the world of Shakespeare’s comedy, the wood outside Athens becomes for the erring Athenian lovers the site of a radical and collective process of forgetting, where they are subjected to another law, of erotic “accidents” (4.1.68), as a highly potent, combustible combination of phantasy and desire produces the midsummer night’s dreaming that reverses and then reorders the erotic preferences of the male lovers. Demetrius declares to Theseus on the morning after the dream: But, my good lord, I wot not by what power (But by some power it is), my love to Hermia (Melted as the snow) seems to me now As the remembrance of an idle gaud, Which in my childhood I did dote upon; And all the faith, the virtue of my heart, The object and the pleasure of mine eye, Is only Helena. To her, my lord, Was I betrothed ere I [saw] Hermia; But like a sickness did I loathe this food; But, as in health, come to my natural taste, Now I do wish it, love it, long for it, And will for evermore be true to it. (4.1.164–76) Demetrius’s forgetting of his love for Hermia, troped here as the dissolution of snow within a natural landscape, as well as of a superficial memory – “the remembrance of an idle gaud” – is contrasted with an act of recollection through which he returns to his “natural taste,” the love of Helena. My consideration of the play’s disordered comic geography is informed by the phenomenologically-derived assumption that, while thought necessarily determines our relationship to locality, conversely, our sensory, affective, and mnemonic experience of place and spatiality can also significantly affect the particularity of what, where – and what kinds of subjects – we think we can know. Maurice Merleau-Ponty comments that [t]he phenomenon is the hidden frame of “subject” and “object” – object returning to itself, subject outside of itself. . . . Truth and knowledge are inseparable from a reciprocal “concept” [Begriff] where the object comprehends [begreift] me no less than I do it. – Philosophy is inseparable from the phenomenon. (Merleau-Ponty 1988: 32, 41)

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Remapping knowledge in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 139 Similarly, Ficino in his commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus observes that philosophical knowledge is not born from notions . . . nor is it as one thing in another, as a formal reason exists, as it were, in the intellect; nor is it the knowledge of what we commonly call entities, for it does not look at natural things as objects. Rather . . . it looks at its own essence as object. (Allen 1981: 156–7) This is a play whose distinctively fluid topography parallels these philosophical premises, disordering the lovers’ perceptions so that they “apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends” (5.1.5–6). Their nocturnal experience of the wood contrasts most suggestively with the empirical, quasiscientific, assumptions that informed Renaissance cartography, while it differs also from that descriptive mapping, or surveying of a land or lands, through a mixture of literary (sometimes poetical) narrative with empirical data, which was currently producing key “chorographic” texts about England and Britain, such as Britannia and Poly-Olbion written by Camden and Drayton respectively in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. During the Renaissance, the proliferation of numerous travel narratives and quasi-scientific cartographies and chorographies attests to the early modern drive to relocate the Western subject in a redefined geographical reality, over which a new epistemic as well as political and economic mastery might be asserted. But, as John Gillies has pointed out, there was also a persistent interest in the threatening edges of the familiar mappable world (whose centre, according to Vico, was the oikumene), where the Greek historian Herodotus had located desert, no-man’s regions termed eschatia or end-zones. In these disorderly, wilderness locations, thoma might be encountered: these were marvels or wonders which sometimes had a monstrous quality (Gillies 1994: 4–14). Othello describes a series of thoma, apparently encountered at the chaotic limits of the known world, in his story-telling to Desdemona and Brabantio. Despite its physical proximity to Athens, the wood of A Dream resembles the eschatia in important respects. This is certainly how it is imagined by Demetrius in his reference to “the ill counsel of a desert place” (2.1.218). At the same time, cartographic moves towards the mastery of geographic space coincided with gradual acceptance of the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus, in which the earth lost the central and immobile position it had enjoyed in the geocentric cosmological schema of Ptolemy. It is often forgotten that the epistemological project of remastering what was increasingly conceived of as an inanimate nature, or matter, as espoused both by the new geographers and by the “new philosophy” of Bacon and others, paradoxically coincided with a new acceptance of the earth’s mobility in space. The ontological uncertainty but simultaneous quasi-ecstatic insight that

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could be inferred from this discovery is hinted at in several literary texts of the early seventeenth century, most notably Antony and Cleopatra and John Donne’s First Anniversary, and may plausibly be anticipated in the boundaryand foundation-dissolving imagery of A Dream. For in contrast to the various forms of cartographic order which were being imposed on the land, the woodland centre of A Dream is framed, not by the stability and order associated with solid earth and the fixity of place, but instead by the evocation of a watery, or waterlogged, scene of natural disorder, which parallels the primal chaos: this was the hyle (Greek) or silva (Latin), a word that also denoted forest.2 The ambiguous doubleness of this classical concept was stressed by numerous philosophers and textual commentators from Chalcidius to Thomas Cooper. Bernardus Silvestris observes, Hyle was nature’s most ancient manifestation, the inexhaustible womb of generation, the primary basis of formal existence, the matter of all bodies, the foundation of all substance. Her capaciousness, confined by no boundaries or limitations, extended itself from the beginning to such vast recesses and such scope for growth as the totality of creatures would demand. (Silvestris 1973: 70) Understood in the context of this philosophical and literary tradition, the primordial matter denoted by the wood in its affinity with chaos invites a repetition of the primal creative act, since, according to the philosophers, God’s action upon this material chaos formed humanity.3 Images of malleable wax or tempestuous sea were often used as metaphors for silva. Theseus tells Hermia, To you your father should be as a god; One that compos’d your beauties; yea, and one To whom you are but as a form in wax, By him imprinted, and within his power, To leave the figure, or disfigure it. (1.1.47–51) By fleeing to the wood, Hermia has effectively defaced or dissolved the imprint of paternal creation which is seemingly synonymous with Athenian law. In the wood, a different and more fluid imprint is substituted for this firmly formative law, here by a supernatural figure of authority, as the lovejuice is used by the fairy king to create, transpose, and recreate desire. When Helena observes that “[t]hings base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity” (1.2.232–3), she defines the potential effect of eros as a creative transposition – a redefinition or differentiation of objects or things that have previously been associated with a state of

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Remapping knowledge in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 141 undifferentiated chaos; yet the verb “transpose,” like another key verb in this play, “translate,” already had the meaning of moving an object from one place to another. Moreover, the initial effect of the concentrated power of phantasy and desire in the play is precisely as a solvent of civilised identity and subject-object distinctions, as the lovers become “wode within this wood” (2.1.192), and the dark and formless attributes of their strange environment are transposed onto them. Helena exclaims, “I am as ugly as a bear; / For beasts that meet me run away for fear. / Therefore no marvel though Demetrius / Do, as a monster, fly my presence thus” (2.2.94–7); later, Hermia is reviled as an “Ethiop” and “tawny Tartar” (3.2.257, 263). We learn at the start of Act 2 that the conflict between Oberon and Titania, itself a conflict of desire, has caused the definite outlines of place to be obscured by flood: . . . the winds, piping to us in vain, As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land, Have every pelting river made so proud That they have overborne their continents. ................................ The fold stands empty in the drowned field, And crows are fatted with the murrion flock; The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud, And the quaint mazes in the wanton green, For lack of tread, are undistinguishable. (2.1.88–92, 96–100) Shakespeare’s account of this dissolving of boundaries and divisions into an “indistinguishable” materiality, both around and within the land, owes a complicated textual debt to elite cultural memory – specifically, to classical texts by Seneca and Ovid. Textual editors and source-hunters have shown the passage to be a palimpsest-like compilation of several different texts: of passages from Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses, including the description of Deucalion’s flood and the plagues of Aegina and Sicily, and passages as well from Seneca’s Medea and Oedipus. Shakespeare’s floods are indirectly associated with the play’s presiding divinity, the moon; when Titania proceeds to describe the confusion of seasons which this flooding has produced, she acknowledges that the moon is “the governess of floods” (2.1.103). The Medea passage seems consequently to be central to the elaborate palimpsest of texts created by Shakespeare, since it is taken from her invocation to Hecate as moon-goddess: Now summoned by my rites appear, you heavenly globe of night, displaying your most hostile looks, with menace in every face. ...................................

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Philippa Berry I have summoned water out of rainless clouds, and forced the sea to its depths: Ocean withdrew his heavy waves, as his tides were overpowered. With the law of heaven confounded, the world has seen both sun and stars together ................................... I have changed the pattern of the seasons: the summer earth has frozen under my spells, and Ceres was compelled to see a winter harvest ................................... Waves have crashed, the maddened seas have swelled with the wind silent; the shelter of the ancient woods has lost its shade at the bidding of my voice. (Seneca 2002: 750–67)

Shakespeare’s transferral, transposition, or translation of these classical scenes of natural disorder into the “mazèd world” of his play results in a curious compilation of key textual memories. But these textual echoes also situate the lovers’ experiences within a primordial level of memory – within a cosmic cycle of repeated instances of natural disorder that typically precede moments of literary revelation, crisis, or renewal. And just as the landscape of the play is disordered, so its human inhabitants are “mazèd”: amazed, astonished, and bewildered; they may even be understood, according to the OED’s definition of this word, as inclined to wander mentally or physically, as if inside a labyrinth. At the centre of this “mazèd world,” in which familiar boundaries have been disturbingly dissolved, is the labyrinthine and self-concealing location of the wood, where the human subjects are briefly subordinated or absorbed into the chaotic world of “base and vile” objects or things. Temporarily synonymous with fairyland because of the visit of the fairies, the wood can only be entered and experienced, like fairyland, through the disturbing “accidents” of phantasy, fancy, or imagination that characterize the errant and dream-like “logic” of desire. And phantasy, fancy, or imagination are key words, of course, in the quasi-philosophical exchange between Hippolyta and Theseus that opens Act 5. In the wood, the lovers discover – or rather lose – themselves as subjects of desire, as they become subjects to desire – impelled by instinctive passions that evoke man’s primordial or precivilised state. These are not “shaping” but, at least initially, “unshaping” phantasies, which produce a uniquely disturbing sense of spatial as well as psychological dislocation, exacerbated by the darkness of night under a waning moon. (This forgetting of cultural as well as perceptual norms is intensified and further complicated by the fairies’ application to the eyes of the male Athenian lovers of the love-juice, extracted from a familiar plant which becomes the marvellous site of a

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Remapping knowledge in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 143 complex layering of memories in the context of the play: the “little western flower” [2.1.166].) As in Shakespeare’s other comedies, this inquiry into the disorientation of identity by the dream-like errancy of desire owes a distinctive debt to the Petrarchan tradition of love poetry. Petrarch had complained repeatedly of “i pensier vaghi” (errant thoughts) and “la menta vaga” (my wandering mind), while associating errancy at the same time with a persistent memory of the beloved: “So I, alas, my lady, sometimes roam / Seeking in other faces you alone, / Some semblance of the one true form I love” (Petrarch 2002: 16). But Shakespeare’s audience would have associated the physical wanderings of his pairs of lovers more directly with the literary tradition of romance, and in generic terms it is romance above all (rather than either Petrarchism or the genre of pastoral poetry, so often cited in relation to Shakespearean comedy) that shapes the disorderly topography of A Dream. Repeatedly condemned by educators and moralists writing in the humanist tradition, romance fiction was associated in this period with a range of imaginative texts that were seen as encouraging moral errancy and a reversion to a “beastly” or “filthy” pre-moral state; Juan Luis Vives writes in De Officio Mariti, translated as The Office and Duetie of a Husband: The works of Poets, the fables of Milesii . . . and many other which are written in the vulgar tonge, as of Trystam, Launcelot, Ogier, Amasus [i.e. Amadis] and of Arthur the whiche were written and made by suche as were ydle & knew nothinge. These bokes do hurte both man & woman, for they make them wylye & craftye, they kindle and styr up covetousness, inflame anger, & all beastly and filthy desire. (Vives 1553: O7r–v) The forest was a paradigmatic romance location, the site of savagery and passion but also of exile, prophecy, madness, penance, and vision (Saunders 1993). Through its use of the popular cultural as well as romance motif of the encounter with the otherworld, A Dream intensifies the romance affinity between errant or “beastly” thoughts and what I will call erotic nomadism, involving physical and emotional alienation in a wilderness location. Shakespeare would have found numerous accounts of such encounters in ballads and old wives’ tales as well as in medieval and contemporary romance, although his play also uses the Ovidian conception of metamorphosis to ally the fairies’ power more directly to the mutability of nature in relation to hyle or silva. In A Dream, the fairies are depicted as essentially nomadic figures, who have simply taken up temporary residence in the forest; so Puck, as a “merry wanderer of the night” (2.1.43), leads the Athenian lovers and all the mechanicals save Bottom “about a round, / Through bog, through bush, through brake, through briar . . .” (3.1.106–7). But the fairies’ mobility is

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also implied to have a close connection with the mysterious flux of matter as it appears momentarily to elude human shaping and control, in the form of moveable objects like the gossip’s bowl and stool mischievously animated by Puck, as well as the commodity-like trifles brought to Titania by her “votaress” (2.1.47–54; 2.1.130–4). In her elaboration of a philosophical account of nomadic identity based on the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Rosi Braidotti has associated what she terms “nomadic consciousness” with a questioning of foundations – of the “logocentric polis, the alleged centre” – which produces an acute awareness of the non-fixity of boundaries and “the intense desire to go on trespassing, transgressing” (Braidotti 1994: 36). Both the metaphorical importance of a wall or walls in this play and the mysterious metamorphosis of a character who is called Bottom indicate that boundaries as well as foundations are in crisis here, along with the walled-in, urban and civic model of identity that was privileged in the discourse of Renaissance humanism. The personified and finally “discharged” wall in Pyramus and Thisbe consequently presents us with an important metaphor of the metamorphic effect of eros upon bounded space, for what is encountered once the city walls have been left behind, as they are both literally (by the Athenian lovers) and also mimetically (by the protagonists of the mechanicals’ play who are their mythic Babylonian counterparts, Pyramus and Thisbe), is a uniquely disorienting sense of place, which can be described as nomadic and contingent as well as metamorphic and porous. When in the phantasy-driven world of the wood Hermia first considers the highly illogical possibility of Lysander deserting her for the formerly despised Helena, she produces yet another image of geographical and cosmic disorder: “I’ll believe as soon / This whole earth may be bor’d, and that the moon / May through the centre creep, and so displease / Her brother’s noontide with th’Antipodes” (3.2.52–5). Critics have recently acknowledged that Shakespeare’s Athenian wood has a close figurative and intertextual affinity with the non-European or barbarian, and in an important essay Margo Hendricks has stressed the mesh of Indian imagery with the fairies as an important key to a post-colonial reading of the play (Hendricks 1996). Yet, as she also notes, the use of the wood as rehearsal space for the mechanicals’ play of Pyramus and Thisbe also allies it with these mythical lovers’ home city of Babylon in ancient Assyria; in fact, in the medieval romance Huon of Bordeaux, which was Shakespeare’s chief literary source for his conception of Oberon, the romance hero travels to Babylon through an enchanted wood ruled over by the fairy king. The magical flower’s epithet of “western” is striking in this connection, since the distance which Puck has to travel to acquire a flower that was native to England might be taken to imply that the fairies are thinking of it from a non-Western, quasi-oriental perspective – one akin to that articulated by the “barbarians” Medea and Phaedra; these are the female protagonists of two of

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Remapping knowledge in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 145 the Senecan tragedies from whose speeches Shakespeare appropriated several important passages to create the natural world of A Dream. In a passage indebted to Seneca’s Hippolytus, the formerly despised Helena is praised as a thoma or wonder whose skin excels the snow on a mountain range in Asia Minor: “That pure congealed white, high Taurus’ snow, / Fann’d with the eastern wind, turns to a crow / When thou hold’st up thy hand” (3.2.141–3). In this comedy’s multiple borrowings from texts in other tongues, we can trace numerous “transported” or “translated” fragments – textual memories, as it were, that are the building blocks of Shakespeare’s fairyland and its geographical specificity. As Robert Miola has pointed out, Shakespeare’s acquisition of the Renaissance habit of analogical thinking, combined with his promiscuous (we could even say errant or nomadic) reading habits, “leads always to the mixing of disparate stories and texts” (Miola 2000: 6). But the play’s multiple sources are not simply used to create topographic detail; they also connect its nuanced conception of the interior forces that cause human errancy and mobility with linked eruptions of natural and emotional chaos in a mythologised and archaic past. Braidotti associates nomadic consciousness with what Michel Foucault called “countermemory,” as “a form of resisting assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of representing the self” (Braidotti 1994: 25). Both Petrarchism and romance literature colour A Dream’s representation of the wandering body and mind of the lover, yet the comedy also draws attention to its debt to Platonic and Neoplatonic texts, particularly the Phaedrus, where the mobility that, according to Plato, is fundamental to the soul is linked with a subtle faculty of something akin to “countermemory”: this is the memory of divine beauty, activated in the true lover by corporeal beauty. The play’s debt to this text is clear from Duke Theseus’s famously sceptical speech about the mobility of the imagination, which presents a distorted version of the doctrine of the four mania or divine frenzies set out in the Phaedrus: 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

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We are reminded by Theseus’s speech that even before the empirical and sceptical intellectual currents that would define early modern secularism had fully triumphed, there was already a widespread ambivalence about imagination or “phantasy” in intellectual circles, which resulted in its frequent devaluation as mere “fancy.” Medieval scholastic thought had followed Plato and Aristotle in asserting that the phantasms or mental images which were apprehended by the phantasy were a vital aspect of intellection (although each of Plato and Aristotle had defined the ideas or phantasms rather differently): a key scholastic maxim was nihil potest homo intelligere sine phantasmata (man can understand nothing without phantasms) (Agamben 1993: 76). And Ficino stresses the relations between fantasy, memory, and the “universal Ideas of things” in his Commentary on Plato’s Symposium: The soul, being present to the spirit everywhere, easily sees the images of bodies shining in it, as if in a mirror, and through those judges the bodies. And this cognition is called by the Platonists sensation. While looking at these, by a power of its own, it conceives within itself images like them but much purer still. This kind of conceiving we call imagination or fantasy. Images conceived here are stored in the memory. By these the eye of the soul is often aroused to contemplate the universal Ideas of things which it contains in itself. (Ficino 1985: 115) In his commentary upon Plato’s Phaedrus, Ficino’s account of the lover’s “amatory frenzy” further stresses its superior capacity to activate the memory of a transcendent reality: both because it comes from the best things – it is excited, that is, from beauty itself and wisdom and goodness, and is filled with our unity – and also because it unites us more effectively and firmly with God [or with a or the god]. (Allen 1981: 174–5) Notable also in this connection is Theseus’s distinctive emphasis upon phantasy’s highly localised effects. The implication is that among the diversity of sensory and subtle experiences to which the phantasy responds, place is of especial importance – especially a location in which a genius loci (a daimon, nature spirit or fairy such as Oberon or Titania) may be resident.

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Remapping knowledge in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 147 In his commentary on the Phaedrus, Ficino had stressed the importance of place and these local “sublunar” gods, noting that Socrates often makes mention here and elsewhere of the local gods. He calls them local gods not only because the higher providence has put various of them in charge of various regions and things but also because some regions and things more than others can be partakers of this or that mundane god insofar as they are more prepared to receive the divine effect. . . . From the differences of the local gods and demons befall the many differences, both secret and important, among various places and things, especially the differences that have a bearing on mental dispositions, behavior and morals. . . . (Allen 1981: 198–9; my emphasis)4 The “wandering” spirits of the fairies may plausibly correspond (in allegorical terms) to the classical conception of a resident daimon or genius loci. But they also appear to play the mediating and inspiring, as well as disruptive, role that is attributed to daimons in general in key Platonic texts such as the Symposium and the Phaedrus. Commenting on Ficino’s interest in this tradition of daimonic inspiration, D. P. Walker (1958) notes that the Neoplatonists considered daimons to be media of planetary influence, and to correspond in this respect to the soul and spirit of the world as anima or spiritus mundi. Late Neoplatonic thought believed there was a corresponding mediating and imaginative function which paralleled that of the daimon within the individual human psyche: the spiritus phantasticus, the “phantastic spirit” (Agamben 1993: 93). The complicated chain of causation and movement which is associated with the “little western flower” – via its accidental “wounding” by Cupid’s arrow, its mock-heroic acquisition by Puck and Oberon, and its first erroneous application by Puck – represents desire or eros not only as outside the scope of rational subjective control, but specifically as manipulated by daimonic forces. At the same time, the fairies’ ability to use the flower is metonymically associated with an act of memory, when Oberon reminds Puck of the location from which he observed Cupid shoot his arrow: Thou rememb’rest Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath That the rude sea grew civil at her song, And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, To hear the sea-maid’s music? ..................................

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Philippa Berry That very time I saw (but thou couldst not), Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all arm’d . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell. (2.1.148–54, 155–7, 165)

In this recollection, the distinctive particularity of the promontory is evoked through Oberon’s and Puck’s imperfectly shared memory of a single fleeting moment. Both heard the mermaid’s song, but only Oberon saw the apparently simultaneous fall to earth of Cupid’s deflected bolt; only Oberon, that is, understands eros as implicated in a chain of supernatural causes and “accidents.” From his promontory Oberon was able simultaneously to apprehend two separate “wonders” or “marvels” that have become subtly connected through this rich sensory experience of simultaneity. And certainly the strange effects of the mermaid’s song appear to parallel the ambivalent, quasidaimonic power of erotic phantasy that is represented by Cupid’s arrow in its simultaneous imposition of both order and disorder on the natural scene: “the sea-maid’s music” civilises “the rude sea” but also causes “certain stars” to shoot “madly” from their spheres. Theseus’s speech tropes the “shaping phantasy” of both lover and poet in terms of a comparable phantasmatic relationship to place – to the “brow of Egypt” that is (implicitly mistakenly) desired by the lover and the “local habitation and a name” created by the poet. But unsurprisingly, given his association with Athens, he does not see place itself as a mobile entity, parts of which might be animated and changed for human perception by the activities of “wandering spirits.” Yet this is one important implication of the comedy’s use of the Ovidian theme of metamorphosis, which is focused in this play on the metamorphosis and “translation” of the “little western flower,” love-in-idleness. A white, golden, and purple violet, the Latin name of this tiny plant is viola tricolor; often associated with Venus and the Garden of the Hesperides, the violet was consequently mnemonic of the classical paradise, yet it also had an emblematic importance in the alchemical work of the transmutation of matter. For example, in Fasciculus Chemicus, Arthur Dee tells us that violets grow near the entrance to the Garden of the Wise: Not far from that fountain at the entrance, fresh Violets do first salute thee, which being watered from the great golden river, they put on the most delicate colour of the dark Sapphire; then Sol will give thee a sign. Thou shall not sever such precious flowers from their roots until thou make the Stone, for the fresh ones cropped off have more juice and tincture; and then pick them carefully with a gentle and discreet hand; if the Fates frown not, this will easily follow. (Dee 1650: O2v–O3r)

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Remapping knowledge in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 149 The viola of A Dream corresponds, analogically, to the transported and translated Bottom, who plays the part of Pyramus in a story whose full narrative (unperformed by the mechanicals) stresses the metamorphic and memorialising role of nature in relation to the highly localised effects of eros. In the Ovidian narrative of Pyramus and Thisbe, the particularity of place serves both to transform and to commemorate the meaning of the lovers’ tragedy in the changed colour of the fruit of the mulberry tree, which is stained with Pyramus’s blood. However, the word used for metamorphosis in this text, “translated,” invests the original Ovidian conception with an additional dimension of movement that also has supernatural implications. By the mid-1590’s “translation” could simply mean the removal or conveyance of a thing or person from one place to another; yet, in the context of Christian theology, it was still used to denote either the movement of a living bishop or holy relics from one place to another, or a conveying (return) to heaven, originally without death. This spiritual and supernatural conception of movement is used by Helena when she phantasises about being “translated” into Hermia, which is virtually what happens in the wood, and the same word is used twice for the metamorphosis of Bottom (3.1.119; 3.2.32); the metaphor of transportation or translation also gestures towards the play’s own complex cultural debts in its staging of nomadic eros as a rewriting or “translation” of a generalised cultural memory, that is, of diverse texts written in other tongues. All these different versions of “translation” shape the play’s eroticised and phantasmatic conception of place and mobility. When understood in these terms, the “translation” of Bottom is evidently the most suggestive aspect of the play’s explorations of the nomadic properties of eros. But it is surely significant in this connection that Bottom only plays the part of the wandering lover – as Pyramus – and that in his encounter with Titania he takes the place of the beloved rather than that of the desiring lover. The Athenian lovers who have briefly become “woodbirds,” and who have experienced the fluidity of both things and identities by seeing “these things with parted eye, / When every thing seems double” (4.1.189–90), return to their city with transformed or stabilised desires, but with only a partial and imperfect understanding of what they have experienced. For Bottom, however, translation into the heart of the labyrinthine wood, which is the bower of the fairy queen, has left him only a wonderful memory. It is his articulation of this sense of wonder, however muddled, in the language of St Paul’s 1 Corinthians, that arguably gives his own nomadic experience – or at least his figurative experience of translation along a vertical as well as a horizontal axis, as a substitute changeling – a more elevated status. In contrast to the expected stabilizing of affection and identities that marks the lovers’ return to civic life, Bottom seems to return to Athens with a more complex, quasi-philosophical, or poetic understanding; this understanding is of the paradoxical knowledge that the instability of his

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dream-memory confers with the stability of place and foundations upon which normal identity depends: “It shall be call’d ‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom” (4.1.215–16). What Bottom says about his dream applies to the entire play, as well as to the nomadic model of knowledge that it appears to celebrate. His failure to specify the details of the dream suggests that he has retained only a general impression of wonder, yet this is clearly a decisively transformative impression. The paradox suggested here (which surely has an implicit affinity with the subtle effects of aesthetic experience, given Bottom’s desire to have a song made of his dream) is that the frequently imprecise memories associated with an intense experience of eros may produce peculiarly lasting effects, even when the original event or memory is virtually effaced or metamorphosed. The implication is that formative desire or phantasy becomes the site not simply of a remembering, but also, crucially of a forgetting, in a dream-like and lethe-like process of anamnesis that involves a melting away of the former differentiation and separateness between the subject and object of desire, the one who remembers and that which is remembered. Like Bottom’s dream, or Demetrius’s recovery of the “natural taste” which is Helena, the memory that is so powerful as to be virtually impalpable becomes a defining attribute of the subject who is translated by eros, for in this transposition of identity in relation to erotic memory, the erotic subject is also pleasurably eclipsed by love, in the particular form of its obscure mnemonic object: as the lover of Helena, Demetrius will remain enchanted, just as Bottom’s dream has “no bottom.”

Notes 1

2

This paper was first given at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, 18 January 2003. I am grateful to Fredéric Régard for the invitation to speak, and to Patricia Parker, François Laroque, Yves Peyré, and Trevor Phillips for the stimulus provided by several conversations related to this essay. Patricia Parker has discussed the figurative and specifically rhetorical importance of the unruliness of unshaped materia (of nature) in A Dream: see Chapter two in Parker 1996. Parker’s emphasis in her brilliant essay is primarily upon the “rude mechanicals,” although she briefly notes that the mechanical in Elizabethan culture also designated not only the practical as opposed to the contemplative but more generally an association with the material, the disordered matter or silva identified in . . . Neoplatonism with the woods outside Athens, woods that play a signal role in the disordered middle of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Parker 1996: 85)

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There is a useful discussion of the philosophical and interpretative tradition in respect of hyle and silva in Saunders 1993: Chapter 2. The Phaedrus also draws our attention to Socrates’s close relationship with his personal daimon or genius. But, in commenting upon “the daimon of Socrates,” Plutarch would later assert that “the greater part of men have this kind of perception [of the daimon or genius] only in dream” (Allen 1981: 198–9).

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10 “Unless you could teach me to forget” Spectatorship, self-forgetting, and subversion in antitheatrical literature and As You Like It

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In Th’Overthrow of Stage-Playes, John Rainoldes argues with William Gager about whether “evil affections might be stirred up” by the theatrical productions Gager has been sponsoring at Oxford. In a previous letter Gager had claimed that his plays could not elicit such a response. However, as evidence to the contrary, Rainoldes relates a story “which is recorded to haue come to passe in the Citie of Abdera”: Where, when at midsummer, in very hott weather, Andromeda (a Tragedie of Euripides) being played, manie brought home a burning ague from the theater: about the seventh day folowing, they were ridde thereof, some by much bleeding, some by sweating, but all, as soon as they were abroade out of their beddes, did fall into a strange distemper and passion of a light phrensie. The which exciting them to say & cry aloud such things as were sticking freshly in their memorie, and had affected most their minde, they grewe all to Tragedie-playing, and full lustilie they founded out Iambicall speeches: their toungs harping chieflie on Euripides, Andromeda, and the melodious woords of Perseus touching love. So that the whole citie was full of pale and thinne folke, pronouncing like stage-players, and braying with a loude voice, But O Cupido, prince of Gods and men, with the rest of that part: vntill at length the winter and colde, waxing great, asswaged their distemper, and eased them of their frantike follie. (Rainoldes 1974: 118–19) As a coda to the story, Rainoldes comments, “That speech, But O Cupido, Prince of Gods and men, vttered under Perseus . . . was of all likelyhoode lesse pearcing and patheticall” than a similar speech spoken by the nymph Nais in Gager’s production of Hippolytus – which leads Rainoldes to wryly conclude: “It was well that shee played in winter, not in summer” (Rainoldes 1974: 119).

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To those familiar with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debate over the English public stage, Rainoldes’s tale about the theater’s power to mold the responses of spectators should sound familiar. With its emphasis on the stage’s ability to induce imitation, its concern with the erotics of theatrical display, and its anxieties about self-loss and transformation, Rainoldes’s text echoes antitheatrical literature’s lament of the social and psychological destructiveness of playgoing. What makes Rainoldes’s tale slightly different, however, is that whereas modern critics, particularly Barbara Freedman (1991) and Philip Armstrong (2000), have tended to focus upon the visual dynamics of spectatorship, especially in terms of the gaze, Rainoldes frames spectatorship as a memory problem. The problem with the theater, Rainoldes argues, is that the actions and speeches witnessed therein stick fast in audience members’ memories, the later recollection of which leads them to slavishly imitate the players. The theater, then, is a site of pathological remembrance. However, remembrance is only half of a dialectical process that depends upon forgetting, since while they are compulsively remembering and repeating the words and actions of the players, the Abderans also forget themselves: in the language of the OED, they “lose remembrance of [their] own station[s], position[s], or character[s],” “lose sight of the requirements of dignity, propriety, or decorum,” and “lose [their] way,” even “lose consciousness,” which leads them, in turn, to adopt behavior inconsistent with their everyday identities. A survey of early modern antitheatrical literature reveals that Rainoldes’s association of the theater with forgetfulness is not unique. In A Treatise wherein Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine playes, or Enterluds . . . Are Reproved, John Northbrooke lumps playgoers in with those who “have no mind of any reformation or amendment of [their] life” (Northbrooke 1974: 8). In The School of Abuse, Stephen Gosson claims that playgoing makes spectators “unmindful of [their] end” (Gosson 1970: 33). In A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters, Anthony Munday says that spectators “utterly forget both GOD and [them]selves” (Munday 1973: 36). In Playes Confuted in five Actions, Stephen Gosson maintains that plays must “bee banished, least . . . little and little we forget God” (Gosson 1972: G4v). And in A Mirrovr of Monsters, William Rankins compares theatrical spectacle to “the wyne of forgetfulnes” (Rankins 1973: C3r). Indeed, references to forgetting and self-forgetting are so plentiful in antitheatrical literature that they form a discourse all their own. How did the theater’s defenders respond to these accusations of theatrical forgetfulness? On the whole, their responses were surprisingly similar to each other: apologists defended the theater not by attempting to bring forgetfulness under their banner, but by arguing that theater and the poetic arts enhanced remembrance (Sidney 1968: 6, 23–4, 27–8; Heywood 1973: B3r–v, C3r, F3v, F4v). For an alternative account of spectatorship from within the paradigm of theatrical forgetfulness, we have to turn to the

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dramatists themselves. In this essay, I shall argue that Shakespeare’s As You Like It provides evidence for such an account. Through a series of metadramatic episodes that revise specific aspects of antitheatrical forgetting, As You Like It demonstrates how forgetfulness can be an enabling cultural and subjective force. These episodes in which theater reflects upon theater’s effects on spectators, I shall argue, contest antitheatrical views about selfforgetting, and ultimately evince the potential to reframe recent critical debates about the subversiveness of Shakespearean comedy. To understand how As You Like It’s metadramatic episodes accomplish these ends, though, one must understand the theatrical context in which they take place, because this context not only has a bearing on Shakespeare’s characterization of spectatorship, but also differs from antitheatrical depictions of playgoing. In antitheatrical literature, playgoing interferes with the way that memory creates the self out of the “working-day world” (As You Like It 1.3.12). According to the antitheatricalists, the maintenance of one’s self consists in the performance of activities, such as working, praying, and attending church, that constitute one’s worldly duties. By ensuring that each individual remembers his duties, memory keeps the social order intact. As John Northbrooke states,

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[y]ou must . . . call to remembrance what vowe and promise you made in your baptisme: you must remember that we be al called to godlynesse and cleannesse: you must remember the shortnesse of your time, and the uncertaintie thereof: also the paynes of hell for the ungodly. (Northbrooke 1974: 79) The diligent exercise of memory “shall draw you away from the companies of the wicked, and make you desire the companie of the godly and vertuous men” (Northbrooke 1974: 79). The problem with the theater is that it inculcates habits of memory that undermine the social order. Specifically, it drives a wedge between memory and virtuous action by taking people out of the working-day world and inserting them into a site where they languish in idleness. As William Rankins notes, idleness is itself a cause of forgetfulness: as the Ryuer Laethes maketh hym that drynketh therof, presentlie to forget his own condition & former deedes, so this damnable vice of idlenes, so besotteth the sences, and bewitcheth the myndes of menne, as they remembred not the profitable fruites of vertuous labor. (Rankins 1973: C4r–v) However, besides turning spectators’ minds from “the profitable fruites of vertuous labor,” the theater also provides spectators with alternative objects of thought – “embracing, clipping, culling, dandling kissing; all manner of

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wanton gestures, and the like” – that do not inspire simple inaction, but active evil (I. G. 1973: H1v). According to William Prynne, when spectators “perceive these things to be acted without shame . . . every one according to his Sex doth prefigure himself in these Images . . . and they returne more corrupt to their Chambers by reason of the vices which adhere unto them” (Prynne 1972: 335). What audience members view in the theater remains with them long afterward. In a play in which theatrical forgetfulness is a foremost concern, one might expect that a dramatist would respond to such accusations by focusing immediately on the act of spectatorship itself, perhaps by attempting to show that witnessing onstage evil actually encourages self-remembrance in spectators by exposing the fruits of sin, or by demonstrating how forgetfulness can serve productive ends. However, As You Like It’s treatment of self-forgetting does not begin in this way. Instead, the play begins by focusing on what appears to be the unexceptional part of the antitheatrical account, its depiction of memory, self, and the working-day world. As we have seen, in the antitheatrical tracts playgoers are urged to exercise their memories in the service of virtuous action so that their spiritual selves might be strengthened. However, a scenario that the antitheatricalists never consider is what would happen if the actions that normally support identity were suddenly thrust outside personal control. What if the link between memory and virtuous action was severed? As You Like It begins with just this scenario. Both Orlando and Rosalind are prevented by those who have power over them from performing the activities that would normally secure their social identities. In the case of Orlando, his older brother Oliver has denied him “such exercises as may become a gentleman” (1.1.72). Rather than following his father’s instructions to “breed [him] well” (1.1.4), Oliver keeps Orlando “rustically at home” (1.1.7), depriving him of his inheritance and opportunities for self-improvement, such as an education. For this reason, Orlando feels estranged from his social identity. He tells Oliver, “You have train’d me like a peasant, obscuring and hiding from me all gentleman-like qualities” (1.1.68–70). Orlando, then, is and is not himself. Although he is a gentleman by birth, he is deprived of the means to give that title purchase. Similarly, Rosalind, as the daughter of the rightful Duke, is entitled to an aristocratic position, but does not enjoy the benefits of her status because her father has been forcefully removed from office. The immediate consequence of this situation is that memory’s usual role in informing virtuous behavior is short-circuited. Without the ability to support actions that sustain identity, memory serves no useful purpose; instead, it brings only further pain. Orlando’s first words in As You Like It – indeed, the first words of the play – are “[a]s I remember” (1.1.1); but what he goes on to recount are tortured reminiscences of the injustices he has suffered at the hands of his brother. Rosalind’s second utterance of the

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play strikes a similar note: “Unless you could teach me to forget a banish’d father, you must not learn me how to remember any extraordinary pleasure” (1.2.5–7). For both of these characters memory is not a boon, but a torment; it exacerbates their situations by underscoring the difference between what they are and what they cannot be – a state of self-division that Orlando wishes to “no longer endure” yet “know[s] no wise remedy how to avoid . . .” (1.1.24, 25). By staging a scenario in which the antitheatrical call to remembrance only reinforces self-alienation, As You Like It acknowledges the constitutive power of forgetting, implicit in Rosalind’s words, “[u]nless you could teach me to forget a banished father, you must not learn me how to remember any extraordinary pleasure.” Forgetfulness might be a path through which persons could redefine themselves – of course, not forgetfulness of any sort; Rosalind, for example, refuses Celia’s implied invitation to forget her father by taking Celia’s father as her own (1.2.10–14), and we applaud this response because it shows that she can tell the difference between a virtuous man and a vicious one. But Rosalind is receptive to other forms of forgetting. After Celia gently rebukes her for her melancholy, Rosalind replies, “Well, I will forget the condition of my estate, to rejoice in yours” (1.2.15–16), demonstrating that she is willing to forget her father through sympathetic identification with Celia. Then, when Celia bids her to “be merry” (1.2.1–2), Rosalind proposes replacing her father’s memory with a romantic partner: “From henceforth I will, coz, and devise sports. Let me see – what think you of falling in love?” (1.2.24–5).1 With the antitheatrical context in mind, we are able to appreciate Shakespeare’s metatheatrical revisions of self-forgetting. By staging a situation in which forgetfulness might serve a useful end, Shakespeare implicitly makes a case for playgoing, which, according to the antitheatricalists, induces pathological forgetfulness. What may be surprising is that As You Like It embraces the very forms of forgetting that antitheatricalists highlight as dangerous. Rosalind has already alerted us to two of these forms, sympathetic engagement and erotic love. Erotic love, or, as Stephen Gosson calls it, “carnall delight,” is mnemonically dangerous because it “withdraweth the minde from better studies” and “settes our heartes upon thinges that are transitory, vaine, and shall perish in the twinckling of an eye.” Moreover, if carnal delight “be not governed by ye rule of Gods word, we are presently carried beyond our selves” (Gosson 1972: F5v, F3v). Sympathetic engagement, though seemingly innocuous, is the more circuitous of the two forms, because it starts off with good intentions, only to lead eventually to the arousal of carnal delight. Anthony Munday relates, “Some [women] by taking pitie on the deceitful teares of the stage lovers, have bene mooved by their complaint to rue on their secret frends, whome they have thought to have tasted like torment” (Munday 1973: 97). For Munday, the female spectator sees a male character suffering onstage and

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feels sorry for him. Next, she notes a similarity between the represented situation and her own – she remembers a person in her own life who claims to feel the same way about her. Finally, she transfers her feelings for the character to her admirer and alleviates his suffering by giving herself to him sexually. In this instance, the female spectator’s thoughts are “turned . . . from chast cogitations” (Munday 1973: 54) not by carnal delight per se but by an experience of sympathetic engagement that leads to carnal delight. Sympathy slides into seduction. Of course, in the metatheatrical scenes that structure As You Like It, the effects of erotic love and sympathetic engagement are different from those claimed by the antitheatricalists. Orlando’s and Rosalind’s metatheatrical experiences do not direct them toward objects of vice but, rather, toward each other.2 Nevertheless, the causes of their self-forgetfulness are the same. Take, for example, the metatheatrical scene in which Rosalind enters Arden. No sooner does she pass into its confines than she becomes spectator to the debate between Silvius, the love-tossed shepherd youth, and Corin, his aged companion. Silvius is complaining to Corin about how Phebe, the sole shepherdess of his affections, refuses to requite his love. He also questions Corin’s ability to understand his plight. A key feature of their discussion is the relationship between memory and love: SILVIUS. O Corin, that thou knew’st how I do love her! CORIN. I partly guess; for I have lov’d ere now. SILVIUS. No Corin, being old, thou canst not guess,

Though in thy youth thou wast as true a lover As ever sigh’d upon a midnight pillow. But if thy love were ever like to mine – As sure I think did never man love so – How many actions most ridiculous Hast thou been drawn to by thy fantasy? CORIN. Into a thousand that I have forgotten. SILVIUS. O, thou didst then never love so heartily! If thou rememb’rest not the slightest folly That ever love did make thee run into, Thou hast not lov’d. . . . (2.4.23–36) Silvius enacts the mnemonic logic of the Petrarchan lover, whose infatuation results in hyper-consciousness; Corin’s inability to remember the “actions” and “follies” to which love has driven him constitutes indisputable evidence that he has never loved as deeply as Silvius. Then, as if to prove his point, Silvius suddenly runs from the stage, shouting “O Phebe, Phebe, Phebe!” (2.4.43), transformed into a passion by the mere thought of his beloved. For Silvius, love is traumatic memory.

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This scene’s effect on Rosalind is powerful. She exclaims, “Alas, poor shepherd, searching of [thy wound], / I have by hard adventure found mine own” (2.4.44–5). In other words, she finds herself pitying and identifying with Silvius, which is the first step in the antitheatrical account of forgetfulness through sympathetic engagement. Out of this sympathy then emerges remembrance of Orlando, the effect of which is to make her love him all the more. Indeed, fifteen lines later, she is still talking about how enamored she is: “Jove, Jove! this shepherd’s passion / Is much upon my fashion” (2.4.60–1). Her exclamation corresponds to the second step of theatrical forgetfulness, the “turn of mind.” The last (and most important) step, however, is the effect that this spectatorship has on Rosalind’s behavior once the scene is over. In the wake of her passion, Rosalind follows a striking turn of direction. Up until this point, Rosalind’s plan has been to look for her father in Arden. But upon hearing Silvius’s speech she suddenly halts her pursuit and, instead, opts to settle down on her own. In short, her mnemonic trajectory completely changes. In a typical antitheatrical tract, her actions would signal that the theater has done its damage: having turned her memory from her father to Orlando, Rosalind takes up an independent existence. We may even be reminded of the opening story told by Rainoldes, in which Perseus’s “patheticall speeches” on behalf of “Cupido” cause the Abderans to forget themselves. Except here, of course, the point is that Rosalind’s selfforgetfulness occurs without loss, since it is her decision to stay in Arden that supplies the backdrop for her marriage to Orlando. Their relationship is the natural fulfillment of the invitation to self-redefinition first hinted at earlier. The forgetfulness triggered by Rosalind’s spectatorship culminates not in self-loss but self-renewal in marriage. Of course, the stage’s enemies would not have been satisfied with such an argument. If Rosalind were featured in one of Anthony Munday’s or William Prynne’s tracts, she would still be an example of the dangers of theatrical forgetfulness, since they would object to the nature of her redefinition. Now that Rosalind has access to her father, ostensibly she need not wait for an Orlando; her swerve from her chosen path would still signify self-loss. The obvious counter-argument would be that Christian marriage is an acceptable form of self-redefinition. However, this response would not satisfy Munday or Prynne, either, because they would disagree with the idea that playgoing could actually serve as a virtuous means to such an end. Thus we arrive at what is perhaps the most fundamental difference between theatrical forgetting as the antitheatricalists and As You Like It present it: the difference in the quality of spectatorship itself, particularly with regard to the audience’s moral response to the performance. According to the antitheatricalists, when spectators enter the theater, something happens to the logic governing their responses to the onstage deeds they witness. Outside the playhouse, a spectator may “heare a

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blasphemer, and not be a partaker in his sacriledge” because “in mind he dissenteth.” Likewise, if he “come while a roberie is a doing, he is cleere, because he abhors the fact.” But when spectators within the theater see these same deeds performed onstage, their perspective changes: instead of responding with moral indignation, “they saie nought, but gladly look on” (Munday 1973: 3). Their response involves a specifically mnemonic reorientation. In The Craft of Thought, Mary Carruthers notes that all memory images “are composed of two elements: a ‘likeness’ (similtudo) that serves as a cognitive cue or token to the ‘matter’ or res being remembered, and intentio or the ‘inclination’ or ‘attitude’ we have to the remembered experience” (Carruthers 1998: 14). Moreover, this intentio encompasses not only emotional associations, but also the aims, biases, and judgments that individuals hold toward a given object. When spectators enter the theater, the “intentions” which they have toward the images represented onstage change. Spectators forget their previous moral judgments and adopt new ones. Of course, the reason for the spectators’ changed response is obvious: the deeds that they are seeing enacted are not real, but feigned, only intended for entertainment. The spectator’s willingness to forget the laws of reality that obtain outside the theater is merely part of the suspension of disbelief required for enjoying the performance. However, the distinction between responses appropriate to fictional and real situations is not one that Munday respects. For him, to look with enjoyment upon a deed that should elicit one’s moral condemnation is to approve it, and therefore is to sin: “For when necessitie onlie makes an euil thing to be left vndone, the verie desire of a filthie thing is condemned in such sort as if it were done” (Munday 1973: 24–5). Moreover, to suspend one’s judgment is to place oneself in danger of letting temporary forgetfulness become permanent – of taking these new intentions back into the working-day world. It is for this reason that Prynne argues, “Spectacles . . . the Ideaes of which men carry away with them to their houses, and there more deeplely imprint them in their minds; are utterly to be prohibited” (Prynne 1972: 330). However, As You Like It does not confirm this degenerative mental process, and it is here that the most significant difference between the play’s representation of theatrical forgetfulness and that of the antitheatricalists emerges. Whereas the antitheatricalists argue that the forgetfulness induced by erotic delight and sympathetic engagement inevitably undermines the moral valence of memory, As You Like It depicts spectatorship drawing on those positive emotions and energies in circulation outside the theater and rechanneling them into objects of theatrical delight. Thus, even when spectatorship results in an exchange in spectators’ primary objects of thought (as is the case with Rosalind), the forgetfulness that results is not simple obliteration, nor are the identities forged as a result of this exchange necessarily perverse. Instead, these new objects of erotic and sympathetic engagement may be bound up with the values of the working-day world and

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the new identities forged through theatrical forgetfulness built upon the foundation of a remembered past. To see this process in action, one need look no further than Rosalind’s experiences leading up to, during, and after the wrestling match. It is, of course, during the wrestling match that Rosalind falls in love with Orlando – an important fact since, as Cynthia Marshall (1993) points out, the wrestling match shares many features with theater. However, for our purposes, the match is significant because it allows us to evaluate how the theatrical context affects the quality of Rosalind’s feelings. Interestingly, when Le Beau first brings word to Rosalind and Celia about the wrestlers who are coming to “perform” (1.2.116), other characters assume that ladies would not enjoy such entertainment. Touchstone says, “But what is the sport, monsieur, that the ladies have lost? . . . It is the first time that ever I heard breaking of ribs was sport for ladies” (1.2.134–5, 138–9). Celia agrees, “Or I, I promise thee” (1.2.140). However, when LeBeau describes the progress of the match thus far, Rosalind reacts not with disgust but sympathy – “Alas!” (1.2.133) – and then articulates her desire to see the match: “But is there any else longs to see this broken music in his sides? Is there yet another dotes upon rib-breaking? Shall we see this wrastling, cousin?” (1.2.141–3). Why does Rosalind feel sympathetic? Le Beau’s description of the preceding match, in which three brothers were defeated by Charles, the Duke’s champion, provides the explanation: The eldest of the three wrastled with Charles, the Duke’s wrastler, which Charles in a moment threw him, and broke three of his ribs, that there is little hope of life in him. So he serv’d the second, and so the third. Yonder they lie, the poor old man, their father, making such pitiful dole over them that all the beholders take his part with weeping. (1.2.125–32)

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In what is by now a familiar formulation, the match promises to provide Rosalind with an opportunity of sympathizing and identifying with other persons – of “taking their part” – which, in turn, connotes theatrical forgetfulness. However, what is most pertinent is the object of this pity, since the person with whom Rosalind wants to sympathize is, himself, a father-figure. Moreover, this father’s situation is strangely reminiscent of that of her own father who also lost a child in a bout with his brother. That Rosalind should feel sorry for such a figure is not unusual, since Rosalind has been mourning her father’s absence. What may be unexpected, given the antitheatrical view of spectatorship, is the transformation that her feelings undergo during the wrestling match. Once Rosalind sees Orlando it does not take long for the second form of theatrical forgetfulness, erotic delight, to emerge. But its appearance is notable because of the context in which it arises. Not yet knowing who

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Orlando is, Duke Ferdinand encourages Rosalind and Celia “[i]n pity of the challenger’s youth . . . [to] see if [they] can move him” not to participate (1.2.159–60, 162). They do so and, of course, Orlando politely refuses. But, echoing Rosalind’s desire to take someone else’s part, he does make a specific request of Rosalind and Celia: “let your fair eyes and gentle wishes go with me to my trial” (1.2.185–7). Thus Rosalind tells Orlando, “The little strength that I have, I would it were with you” (1.2.194–5). Rosalind effectively transfers her feelings of sympathy from her father to Orlando. However, “transfers” is misleading, for it implies that Rosalind’s feelings detach from her father and reattach to Orlando. In fact, her feelings move to Orlando through her father. This movement becomes clear in the moments following Orlando’s victory. As soon as Rosalind finds out who Orlando is, she comments, My father lov’d Sir Rowland as his soul, And all the world was of my father’s mind. Had I before known this young man his son, I should have given him tears unto entreaties, Ere he should thus have ventur’d. (1.2.235–9) That is to say, as soon as Rosalind finds out who Orlando is, she immediately conceives of him in relation to her father. Later, when the match has ended and Celia asks Rosalind, “Is it possible, on such a sudden, you should fall into so strong a liking with old Sir Rowland’s youngest son?” (1.3.26–8), Rosalind replies, “The Duke my father lov’d his father dearly” (1.3.29–30). The ties that bind father to father, family to family, in the world outside the theater actually enhance the feelings of love born within it. Love for the son is routed through the love of the father. The genealogy of Rosalind’s feelings proves that when Rosalind finally turns from pursuing her father in Arden and, instead, takes up with Orlando, she is not abandoning one for the other. Rather, her feelings for the latter ride on the wings of the former, and at the end of the play she marries Orlando with her father’s blessing. What we discern from this episode is that, far from extinguishing memories of familial attachment, the theater may in fact work to reinforce them. The quality of theatrical forgetfulness is directly opposite of what the antitheatricalists claim. Of course, in showing how As You Like It differs from the antitheatricalists in its characterization of theatrical forgetfulness, I could be accused of breaking rank with modern criticism, since both of the above depictions of theatrical forgetfulness are very conservative. What, after all, could be more orthodox than marrying the kind of fellow your father would like? Much modern criticism of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, in contrast, has been devoted to demonstrating how they are subversive, or to pondering the

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question of whether their subversiveness might escape the orthodox teleology of comic form (Bono 1986; Greenblatt 1988; Traub 1992). This critical agenda may in part explain why antitheatricalists so often find a place in modern criticism on plays such as As You Like It. Even with their repressive ideologies about identity, sexuality, power and so forth, the antitheatricalists maintain with unswerving devotion something that modern critics want desperately to believe is true: that this kind of drama is, in fact, transgressive. Granted, in the end much of what the antitheatricalists say has to be set aside, because their views of what constitutes transgressiveness are in many cases quite different than what critics want to argue. Nevertheless, antitheatrical ravings provide the modern critic with important leverage when characterizing the theater as a subversive space, especially since the paucity of specific information about the afterlives of these plays in public discourse necessarily confines us to the realm of conjecture and theory. While I am ultimately consigned to the same realm, I would like to suggest that paying attention to the mnemonic properties of the theater may provide a more concrete way of talking about the issue of the subversiveness of Shakespearean comedy. And I shall do so by considering a final aspect of the antitheatricalists’ depiction of theatrical forgetfulness that Shakespeare affirms. Though in the end this affirmation will be qualified, too, there are good mnemonic reasons for thinking that some early modern spectators would have taken As You Like It’s subversiveness outside the theater with them. Like the types of theatrical forgetting we have been examining, this final kind of forgetfulness is also produced by erotic delight. However, in contrast to the forgetfulness that consists in the exchange of a virtuous object for a vicious one, this forgetfulness consists in confusion between erotic objects themselves – specifically, the confusion produced in the minds of spectators by boy actors cross-dressing as women. Prynne alludes to this kind of forgetfulness when he claims that cross-dressing “perverts one principall use of garments, to difference men from women; by confounding, interchanging, transforming these two sexes for the present, as long as the play or part doth last” (Prynne 1972: 207). As the OED indicates, “confound” means, “[t]o throw into confusion of mind or feelings; so to surprise and confuse (a person) that he loses for the moment his presence of mind, and discernment what to do,” being derived from the Latin root, “confundere,” “to pour or mingle together, mix up.” Prynne’s claim is that audience members are unable to separate their erotic feelings for the “part” – the female character being impersonated – from the body of the boy actor who is doing the impersonating.3 Consequently, spectators find themselves desiring both at the same time, so that when they leave the theater the form their self-forgetfulness takes is “that monstrous unparalleled sinne of Sodomy” (Prynne 1972: 208). Apologists for the theater usually defended against this accusation by arguing that at no point did spectators actually forget they were watching

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boys impersonating females; they were able to keep the two distinct. Thomas Heywood’s response is typical: But to see our youths attired in the habit of women, who knowes not what their intents be? who cannot distinguish them by their names, assuredly knowing, they are but to represent such a Lady, at such a time appoynted? (Heywood 1973: C3v) The key word here is “distinguish”: spectators can demarcate between character and actor – an idea easy enough to accept in theory. However, if this argument is true in other contexts, Shakespeare seems to go to great lengths to upset it in As You Like It, since the play makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish Rosalind from the boy actor. This assault on spectator consciousness begins as soon as the character Rosalind takes on the name “Ganymede.” Valerie Traub notes, “she chooses that of the young lover of Zeus, familiar to educated Britons through Greek and Latin literature and European painting, and to less privileged persons as a colloquial term used to describe the male object of male love” (Traub 1992: 124–5). Immediately, then, the character of “Rosalind” takes on manifold significance: first, through classical allusion, she takes on the associations of androgyny, hermaphroditism, and homoeroticism linked to the figure of Ganymede; second, by taking on such a name, she establishes “Ganymede” as a separate persona who, despite being a performance of Rosalind’s, nevertheless has characteristics of his/her own; and, third, by doing both of these things, she explicitly draws attention to the fact that “she” is not a “she” at all, but a boy actor who is now playing all of these roles simultaneously. And, as if this were not enough, once the boy actor-as-Rosalind-as-Ganymede meets Orlando in Arden and decides to allow him to woo her as though she “really” were Rosalind, these levels of significance multiply. Now, there are even more levels of meaning one could conceivably try to follow: boy actor; Rosalind; boy actor-as-Rosalind; Ganymede; Rosalind-as-Ganymede; boy actor-as-Rosalind-as-Ganymede; and boy actor-as-Rosalind-as-Ganymede-asRosalind. The effect of this multiplication of erotic objects on spectator consciousness is obvious: one cannot possibly keep track of them all at the same time; it is simply impossible to grasp them all in mind. If one were to try, the result would be chaos creating even greater confusion than that predicted by the antitheatricalists. Rather than simply blurring or conflating the boy actor and his female role, the spectator would blur everything, and the result would be mental static. Of course, by unfurling this litany of possible combinations, I do not mean to suggest that static is what spectators actually produce when they watch As You Like It; instead, in all likelihood, they settle (where they settle will differ from person to person and moment to moment in the

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play) on one, two, or, given the right situation, perhaps even three levels of significance and forget the rest. But I do mean to suggest that, by multiplying the number of roles and associations that Rosalind assumes for herself, the play draws attention to the fact that “forgetting the rest” is what spectators do. It draws attention to the fact that if, on the one hand, forgetfulness is the opposite of meaning – the confusion that such mnemonic activity inevitably yields – forgetfulness is, on the other hand, the very condition of meaning; what makes meaning possible. Without the narrowed field of reference produced by forgetfulness, “Rosalind” would cease to signify erotically at all. Thus, by taking the antitheatricalist notion of erotic confusion and exaggerating it, Shakespeare exposes the silent work that forgetfulness performs in producing meaning and, in turn, reframes our understanding of the mnemonic conditions of subversiveness. If, on the one hand, the multiplicity of possible mental configurations and confabulations of “Rosalind” allows for just the sort of response antitheatricalists worry about, on the other hand, it also draws attention to the fact that subversion is not the only conceivable experience. It is also possible to have an orthodox experience viewing Rosalind, depending upon the frame one draws around her in one’s memory – what one pays attention to, and what one forgets.4 Furthermore, it is possible to have the sorts of responses that feminist critics have been recording for some time now; to argue, with Catherine Belsey, that [v]isually and aurally the actor does not insist on the femininity of Rosalind-as-Ganymede, but holds the issue unresolved, releasing for the audience the possibility of glimpsing . . . a mode of being, which is not asexual, nor bisexual, but which disrupts the system of differences on which sexual stereotyping depends. (Belsey 1985: 183, 190)

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What I am arguing is that whether one glimpses this or not will depend, in part, upon the mnemonic habits of the spectator.5 It seems clear to me, though, that there is no good mnemonic reason for thinking that such a subversion of orthodoxy is not possible, that the transgressive energies released in Shakespearean comedy are always and inevitably contained by comic form. Despite the important differences between them, both Shakespeare and the antitheatricalists depict theatrical forgetfulness as a force so powerful that it spills outside the theater. Moreover, mnemonicists from the Ad Herennium onward have insisted that the images that most consistently stick in memory are not “common,” “ordinary,” or “banal,” but “unusual,” “marvellous,” and “extraordinary.” For this reason, “incidents of our childhood we often remember best” (Cicero 1999: 3.22.35–7). Memory, then, is not necessarily tied to the temporal sequence of comic form: what is most striking may be what happens earlier and least striking what happens

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last. If an orthodox ending to a dramatic comedy may be considered “ordinary” and the boy actor’s performance as Rosalind/Ganymede “marvellous,” then there is good reason for thinking that these “[s]pectacles . . . the Ideaes of which men [and women] carry away with them to their houses” could have led spectators to forget themselves and opened their eyes to paths of self-redefinition (Prynne 1972: 330).

Notes 1

2

3 4 5

See Sullivan 1999 for an examination of erotic desire, forgetting, and self-forgetting, all of which involve the substitution of a romantic partner for a father, though not in a metatheatrical context. Sullivan’s analysis is also valuable because it underscores how self-forgetting’s productive potential is inflected by genre. Although As You Like It’s depiction of self-forgetting is obviously informed by its genre, I still find it significant that Shakespeare specifically aligns comic self-forgetfulness with spectatorship, as though to underscore the productive mnemonic possibilities of playgoing. The following analysis focuses exclusively upon Rosalind’s metatheatrical experience, since it most closely parallels that described by the antitheatricalists; however, it is important to recognize that Orlando also forgets metatheatrically. The chief difference between their mnemonic trajectories is that, whereas Rosalind begins As You Like It as a spectator and then gradually becomes a “busy actor” (3.4.59), Orlando starts from the position of actor and then gradually becomes a spectator to Rosalind’s performances. Some of Orlando’s metatheatrical scenes include: his brief scuffle with his brother in (1.1), to which Adam acts as a spectator; the wrestling match in (1.2); his “[if] ever you have looked on better days . . .” speech (2.7) with the Duke Senior and Jacques as spectators; and his wooing of Rosalind/Ganymede with Celia as a spectator (4.1). On forgetfulness as an inability to differentiate memory images from one another, see Engel 1991: 27 and Carruthers 1998: 82. For an interesting meditation on audience responses to male performers in female roles, often in terms of “reminding,” “forgetting,” and “absorption,” see Shapiro 1994: 41–7. Of course, mnemonic habits are affected by a variety of factors. As Shapiro notes, “in every theater audience there is a range of sophistication, alertness, and theatergoing experience, plus differences in gender, class, and other variables” (Shapiro 1994: 41). Furthermore, what spectators remember or forget is not simply a matter of individual preference, but is culturally conditioned. Unfortunately, a full analysis of the conditions under which specific meanings would or would not have been available to particular groups is beyond the scope of this essay, although such an inquiry obviously bears on the question of mnemonic habits of thought. For general thoughts on these matters, see Gurr 1996: 81–118.

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11 Reading reformed Spenser and the problem of the English library Jennifer Summit

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In the history of the English library, the Reformation was a time of both destruction and creation. With the dissolution of the monasteries in 1535 came the dispersal and wide-scale destruction of the monastic libraries, which had formerly housed England’s textual heritage.1 The destruction of books was incalculably vast, and it inspired a new generation of bibliophiles to rebuild what one lamented as the “most ruynously spoyled, broaken up and dispersed lybraryes” that the Reformation left in its wake (Bale 1546: D1v). John Bale, to whom this lament belongs, joined his colleague and friend, John Leland, in combing the ruins of the monasteries for medieval books that they could catalogue and preserve. In their footsteps Elizabeth’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, won a royal commission to compile his own catalogue of surviving books, many of which found their way into his own library.2 For these post-Reformation book collectors, rebuilding the nation’s libraries meant repairing the nation’s memory. The Privy Council letter of 1568 authorizing Parker’s bibliographical survey describes the destruction of the monastic libraries as a crisis of memory: whatever their offenses, it observes, the “divers Abbeys” that had been destroyed in the Dissolution formerly served “as treasure-houses, to keep and leave in memory such occurents as fell in their time” (Bruce 1853: 327). If the monastic libraries had been treasure houses of memory, to Bale, Leland, and Parker, their loss threatened a historical amnesia, for the nation appeared in danger of forgetting its own past. But restoring the nation’s memory instituted its own regimes of forgetting. As agents of the Protestant state, Bale, Leland, and Parker sought versions of the past that supported the Reformation; thus their aims were consistent with those of the iconoclasts and Reformers who brought about the libraries’ destruction.3 Their aim was less to rebuild the former monastic libraries than to redefine the meanings and uses of the library within Protestant contexts; in the process, they reinvented the library from an ecclesiastical receptacle of written tradition to a state-sponsored center of national history. In support of this vision, they developed methods of preservation that were selective rather than comprehensive, saving books such as

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chronicle histories that could be used to uphold Protestant versions of the past, while consigning other works, most notably those of religious genres, to bibliographical oblivion.4 Thus the process of rebuilding the nation’s memory, as defined through the work of the post-Reformation librarybuilders, did not eradicate forgetting; it merely redefined its objects. This essay considers the cultural impact of the post-Reformation librarybuilding enterprise by uncovering its resonances in The Faerie Queene Book 2, and especially the library of Eumnestes (“Good Memory”) in the House of Alma. By imagining a library as his site of memory, Spenser, I will argue, reflects a distinctly post-Reformation concern with the institution of the library as a center for the re-shaping of national identity. With this focus, I reconsider what the Reformation meant to those like Spenser who lived in the generation after Henry VIII. While Spenser’s readers have long seen Book 2 as a work deeply concerned with the Reformation, they have focused on the climactic destruction of the Bower of Bliss, frequently taking it as an allegory of Dissolution-era iconoclasm.5 By shifting the locus of Book 2’s Reformation concerns to the library of Eumnestes, my reading shifts the defining act of the Reformation from iconoclasm to biblioclasm, an act that both inspired the work of post-Reformation book collectors and continually haunted their efforts.6 As Book 2 shows, the Dissolution’s longest-lasting creation was a dialectic of remembering and forgetting that began in the library.

Monuments and antiquities Spenser’s affinity with post-Reformation book collectors is signaled in the very titles of the books from Eumnestes’s library that are identified by name: Briton moniments and Antiquitie of Faerie lond. In the wake of the Dissolution, the terms “monument” and “antiquity” inspired and justified the project of rescuing and preserving medieval books. John Bale uses both terms liberally and pointedly, as when he laments the fact that, through the Dissolution, monastic libraries were “wretchedly spoyled of so many noble monuments of Antiquite” (Bale 1546: E2r; my emphasis). The term resurfaces continually in the discourse of post-Reformation book collecting; for example, the 1568 Privy Council Letter to Parker charges him with seeking out “such historical matters and monuments of antiquity” deemed important “both for the state ecclesiastical and civil government” (Bruce 1853: 327; my emphasis). Classifying books as “monuments of antiquity” sanitized them for Protestant readers by emphasizing their connection with the nation’s past over their association with their monastic sources. By extension, the term redefined the library – where these “monuments of antiquity” would be preserved – as a center of national memory. But this redefinition of books and libraries required Protestant collectors, like Bale and Parker, to define their work as a highly selective practice.

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In 1567, the year before the Privy Council letter charged him with “the conservation of . . . ancient records and monuments,” Matthew Parker wrote to the Warden and Fellows of All Soul’s College, Oxford, ordering them to relinquish the contraband books that remained in their library, which he deemed “monuments of superstition”: “whereas [understanding] is given that you do retain yet in your college divers monuments of superstition, which by public orders and laws of this realme ought to be abolished as derogatory to the state of religion publicly received,” works that included, according to Parker, three portable breviaries (“portuisses”), several psalters, massbooks, “an old manual of prayer,” and “a legend” (Bruce 1853: 297; my emphasis). In distinguishing “monuments of antiquity” from “monuments of superstition,” Parker’s office comprised the suppression as well as the conservation of books. According to the Protestant writer Stephen Batman, whom Parker employed as domestic chaplain, the archbishop personally chose to preserve only a small fraction of the monastic books that were made known to him. Soon after the Privy Council’s charge, Batman worked as one of Parker’s agents, collecting books formerly housed in monastic libraries; during this time Batman brought the archbishop, by his own estimation, “six thousand seauen hundred Bookes, by my onely trauale, wherof choyse being taken, he most gratiouslye bestowed many on Corpus Christi College in Cambridge” (Batman 1583: 394; my emphasis).7 Of the four hundred and thirty three manuscripts in Parker’s library, only two are traceable to Batman, shedding light on how very restrictive Parker’s collecting activities – and how narrow the “choyse” of books that comprised them – were.8 Similarly, it appears that the catalogues that Leland drew up from the monastic libraries created a template from which books were alternately selected or rejected for the royal collections. Leland’s list of books belonging to Lincolnshire monasteries has been annotated with crosses (perhaps, it has been suggested, by the king himself) that single out books to be transferred to the Royal collections: of a total of eighty-six books, only thirty-five were selected, leaving those that remained unmarked to an uncertain fate.9 The need to distinguish library-worthy materials produced its own vocabulary of differentiation. If books deemed “monuments of antiquity” were saved, those that were not were dismissed as mere “fables.” Thus Bale urges readers to be awake to the distinction: “we fynde for true hystoryes, most fryvolous fables and lyes, that we myght the sooner by the deuyls suggestion, fall into most depe errours, and so be lost, for not beleuynge the truth” (Bale 1546: D4r). But if the task of the post-Reformation library is to distinguish the “fabulous history” from the “true hystorye,” the “monument of superstition” from the “monument of antiquity,” medieval book production made the separation of works of “antiquity” from those “fabulous” works decidedly difficult. As Bale suggests, the space between “fable” and “truth” is often difficult to discern, a difficulty that is compounded by the porosity

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of the boundaries between historiographical and religious genres in medieval writing. This porosity forced the post-Reformation reader and collector to be ever vigilant against the intrusion of erroneous matter between the covers of an otherwise licit book. Again describing Leland, Bale observes that the conservation of books facilitated his aim to purify books from within: He ded wele to commyt certen of those worthy workes to the kinges noble libraries to their conservacyon, and also in reserving a certen of them to hym selfe, at that tyme myndynge to have polyshed our chronycles, by fabulous wryters sore blemished. (Bale 1546: C4v) The work of “polishing” as Bale defines it – as an act of restoration that removes Catholic “blemish” and thus recovers chronicle history for Protestant use – shows how the process of selection and purification takes place in Reformation libraries not only from book to book, as some are selected for preservation while others are rejected, but also within books. Bale attempts to differentiate the books he calls “the profytable corne” from those he calls “the unprofytable chaffe,” the “wholesome herbes” from “the unwholesome wedes” (Bale 1546: A7v), a task of distinction that extended to the work of reading itself. Bale’s corn/chaff terminology retrospectively justifies the destruction of the monastic libraries, by acknowledging that they contained books that deserved to be eradicated. At the same time, it appropriates and refigures the central terms of medieval reading as defined by allegoresis. According to Augustine’s well-known elaboration in On Christian Doctrine, the letter covers the spirit as the chaff covers the grain. But to eat the chaff is to be a beast of burden, to eat the grain is to be human. He who uses human reason, therefore, will cast aside the chaff and hasten to eat the grain of the spirit. (Augustine 1958: 3.5.9). Following Augustine, medieval literature preserved the fabulous as a level through which attentive reading moved to arrive at the meaning; thus the author of the Ovid moralisé asserts, “sous la fable gist couverte / la sentence plus profitable” (“beneath the fable, the most profitable meaning lies hidden”) (Copeland 1991: 112). By contrast, Bale’s suspicion of “fables and lies” – shared by his fellow library-makers – materializes the Reformation critique of allegoresis, which is articulated by William Tyndale in his Obedience of a Christian Man as an attack against what he calls “chopological sophisters” (Tyndale 1848: 307).10 For Tyndale allegoresis reduces all writing – from poetry to scripture – to the status of fable, as he retorts in what appears to

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be a reference to the Ovid moralisé, “Yea, thou shalt find enough that will preach Christ, and prove whatsoever point of the faith that thou wilt, as will out of a fable of Ovid or any other poet, as out of St John’s gospel or Paul’s epistles.” Against allegoresis and its insistence on multiple layers of meaning, Tyndale asserts “that the scripture hath but one sense, which is the literal sense” (Tyndale 1848: 308, 304). The need to preserve the primacy of scripture over other kinds of writing led to the degradation of “the fabulous.” When “the fabulous” was seen not as the integumentum of truth but a dangerous perversion of it, it became possible to argue, as Bale does, for the necessity of stripping libraries of their fabulous accretions in order to preserve the “profytable corn” alone. This Reformation compulsion to separate the “true hystorye” from the “most fryvolous fables and lies” – and to preserve the former by extirpating the latter – generated in turn new material reading practices. Where medieval allegoresis produced distinctive technologies of reading in the form of marginal commentary, Reformation reading produced new glossing practices dedicated to rooting out the “fryvolous fables and lies” that Bale insists pervert the “truth” of Protestant history. Bale’s theory becomes method in a book that he appears to have owned, later acquired by Parker for his own library. Corpus Christi College Cambridge (CCCC) MS 43 is a fourteenth-century manuscript miscellany of mostly chronicles and historical materials that begins with William of Malmesbury’s De Gestis Pontificum Anglorum.11 The book itself is filled with annotations, many of which belong to Parker and his secretary, John Joscelyn. But one note appears in a different hand, which I identify to be Bale’s own.12 Following Malmesbury’s text is a shorter document entitled “Tractatus de Visione Monachi Eveshamie anno domini 1196.” This “Vision of the Monk of Evesham” describes a vision of St Nicholas experienced by Edmund, a monk of Evesham, in which Purgatory and Paradise were revealed and explained to him in a vision. To prove the vision’s veracity, its copyist, one Adam of Evesham, cites the fact that the sickly Edmund was miraculously cured of a long-standing illness. The work was widely circulated and was not uncommonly inserted into chronicles under the year 1196, thus demonstrating the medieval classification of visions and miracle as potential species of historical writing.13 Similarly in CCCC MS 43 it has been interleaved into a chronicle to represent an apparently historical event. However, the copy that reached the Parker Library is annotated in Bale’s characteristically spindly hand, labeling it a “visio fallax et fabulosa” (107r). Bale’s annotation “purifies” the chronicle by setting the false and fabulous apart from the “true hystorye” in which it is embedded. But in its effort to distinguish the fabulous from the true, Bale’s note also testifies to the persistence of the one alongside, and indeed within, the other. Bale’s own manuscript, CCCC MS 43, despite the presence of the “visio fallax et fabulosa,” found its way into the Parker library. Indeed, whatever his official acts of suppression, Parker himself admitted that, in the process of preserving “antique histories,” he

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could not help but preserve in their midst “some monastic fragments or rather old wives fables” that their monkish writers introduced.14 The task of distinguishing “true hystorye” from “fables and lies” was undermined not only by the instrusion of religious “fable” into the sources of “true hystorye” but also by the notorious instability of British history itself. Typifying that instability were the stories of King Arthur; the desire for positive evidence of Arthur’s historicity suffused post-Reformation librarymaking, but telling fable from chronicle in the case of Arthur was no easy task. Polydore Vergil’s Historia Anglicana, published in 1534, challenged would-be historians of the post-Reformation period by dismissing histories of Arthur as mere “feining” and “things to be laughed at” (Polydore 1846: 29).15 Leland sought to defend the Arthurian history against Vergil in his Assertio Inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae; but in the process of defending Arthur as a historical figure, Leland had to confront the fact that fabulous histories persisted within the sources of the true: It appeareth most evidently, that both obscure and absurde reportes have crept into the historie of Arthure. . . . But this in deede is not a cause sufficient iust, why any man should neglect, abiect, or deface the Historie otherwise of it selfe, lightsome and true. How much better is it (casting awaye trifles, cutting off olde wiues tales, and superfluous fables, in deede of stately porte in outwarden shew, but nothing auayleable vnto credite, beeing taken away) to reade, scanne vpon, and preserve in memorie those things which are consonant by Authorytie. (Leland 1544: 27) Recalling Bale on the need to separate “profytable corne” from “unprofytable chaffe,” Leland here advocates the production of historical truth through a process of selection and distinction that “[casts] awaye trifles, [and cuts] off olde wiues tales, and superfluous fables,” in order “to reade, scanne upon, and preserve in memorie” true matter. Memory – whose construction is the ultimate end of reading – thus preserves by casting away. Leland thus produces a modus legendi for the post-Reformation library – what we might call a lectio of suspicion. If the library is built through “choyce being taken,” which distinguishes the “monument of antiquity” from the “monument of superstition,” the act of reading internalizes this selective process. But this effort could have no end: its product, memory, represents not so much a positive recovery and preservation of the past as a process of apprehension and castigation of error that would prove infinite.

Spenser’s library of memory The distinction between the true history and the fabulous that was established by post-Reformation library-builders finds a literary resonance in the

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Proem to Book 2 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. At the outset, the Proem worries about how the poem will be “judged,” expressing the concern “[t]hat all this famous antique history, / Of some th’aboundance of an idle braine / Will iudged be, and painted forgery, / Rather then matter of iust memory” (2.Proem.1). Echoing terms established by Bale, Leland, and Parker, the Proem reflects an awareness of the reading process as one of judgment directed at separating the true from the false. In its depiction of a judging reading that intervenes between “painted forgery” and “iust memory,” Book 2, I will argue, offers itself as both diagnosis of and solution to the problem of knowledge-production in a distinctly post-Reformation setting. The judging reading process that is described in Book 2’s Proem is anatomized in Cantos 9 and 10, which depict the culminating stage of Guyon’s and Arthur’s visit to the Castle of Alma. Alma’s Castle renders the human body as an architectural space in which the brain becomes a turret with three chambers following the conventional distinctions between Imagination, Reason, and Memory.16 Most resonantly for our purposes, the third chamber of Memory takes the shape of a library – presided over by a librarian-scribe Eumnestes (“Good Memory”) – in which Guyon and Arthur lose themselves reading the above-mentioned books of national memory, “Briton moniments” and “Antiquitie of Faerie lond.” Memory, as represented by the library, is infinite: Eumnestes is a “man of infinite remembrance,” who preserves the written records of the past in his “immortal scrine,” which is at once archive, shrine, and skull (9.56).17 The infinitude of memory in this library, as becomes clear, is not to be confused with the kind of comprehensiveness dreamed of by Petrarch – or by Borges, for that matter, whose Library of Babel contains every text ever written or writable.18 However vast they are, the libraries imagined by Petrarch and Borges are both finite in scope. To the contrary, Eumnestes’s “remembrance,” like his library, is “infinite,” without limit or end. Instead of aiming for comprehensiveness, it manifests the very incompleteness that is the hallmark of Spenserian allegory, of which Jonathan Goldberg observes that “its very endless quality denies hermeneutic closure” (Goldberg 1981: 76 n.1). Briton moniments, the book in Eumnestes’s library that appears to choose its reader Arthur rather than vice versa, is incomplete because it is unfinished. Like many of the “monuments of antiquity” collected by post-Reformation library-makers, it compiles matter from chronicles in order to trace a prehistory of the British monarchy. But when it comes to the story of Arthur himself, it stops short. Following an account of Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon, “there abruptly it did end” (2.10.68). The gap in the record at precisely the moment of Arthur’s expected appearance reflects the instability of the written record around the question of Arthur, leaving both Arthur’s status and also that of the historical record uncertain and visibly incomplete. But, rather than a site of trauma, Arthur finds that “secret pleasure did offence

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empeach, / And wonder of antiquitie long stopt his speach” (2.10.68). The “wonder of antiquitie” that Arthur experiences at the incomplete book approximates an effect that Spenser claims to produce himself. Book 2’s Proem proclaims that it will “vouch antiquities, which no body can know” (2.Proem.1), imagining antiquity as the absence of knowledge, rather than its basis. The book that picks up where Arthur’s leaves off, Guyon’s Antiquitie of Faerie lond, represents a similar infinitude because it has no end. It recounts a legendary British history that begins with Prometheus and proceeds, through the mythical lineage of Elves and “Faeryes” (2.10.71), to the exotic lands of India, America, and finally “Cleopolis,” the seat of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene herself.19 Like the “antiquities, which no body can know,” Antiquitie of Faerie lond celebrates the unknowable history. Its effect is not to produce an interpretive grid through which “real” history can be decoded, as many of its more recent readers have discovered to their frustration, but to extend into narrative form the “wonder” that Arthur experiences at the end of Briton moniments. If the post-Reformation library aspired to recuperate an uncorrupted knowledge of the past but failed in its attempt, in Eumnestes’s library complete knowledge is infinitely deferred; memory is marked by gaps and ruptures. However, the absence of positive knowledge instigates “wonder,” an admiring acknowledgment of the marvels that exceed knowledge. Spenser’s production of memory in Eumnestes’s library bears comparison with Michel de Certeau’s observation that “[m]emory is a sort of antimuseum: it is not localizable. Fragments of it come out in legends” (de Certeau 1984: 108). Guyon’s Antiquitie of Faerie lond and Arthur’s Briton moniments turn fragmentary history into legend, just as they turn unknowing into wonder. Through them, Spenser develops a new memorial literary aesthetic of the post-Reformation era. This memorial literature does not seek to recollect the past in its totality, any more than the post-Reformation library-builders did in their own re-collection efforts. Rather than posing memory as the eradication of oblivion, Spenser acknowledges that forgetting is an inevitable part of memory, and even suggests that memory creates its own necessary spaces of forgetting. Spenserian memory thus defined through its gaps and exclusions belongs to a historical moment after the Dissolution scattered the contents of monastic libraries, but before the construction of what Thomas Richards calls “the imperial archive,” which represented the “merger of the Victorian project of positive knowledge with the Romantic project of comprehensive knowledge” (Richards 1993: 7). Following the Reformation, knowledge, like its textual sources, was fragmentary rather than comprehensive; likewise, post-Reformation memory was an unstable object that had to be constructed rather than a positive vision of the past to be recovered whole – less a return of the repressed than an act whose own

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repressions were only too conscious and visible. So it is with Spenserian memory. Like the texts it comprises, it exists in fragments and in a perennial state of incompletion – which is why, for Spenser, memory is a library.

At the limits of memory: imagination and the Bower of Bliss Like the post-Reformation library that I argue it echoes, Eumnestes’s library, with its visibly incomplete holdings, is the product of a process of distinction or culling. Just as Leland advocates a process of “casting awaye trifles, cutting off olde wiues tales, and superfluous fables” from those matters that one should “reade, scanne vpon, and preserve in memorie,” so Spenser upholds the library-worthiness of Briton moniments and Antiquitie of Faerie lond – and, by extension, the category of memorial writing that they exemplify – by implicitly contrasting them with “th’aboundance of an idle braine” and “painted forgery” that Book 2’s Proem distinguishes from “iust memory.” The material that is excluded from Eumnestes’s library exists on the other side of its threshold: in the forecourt of the head-like tower of the Castle of Alma, the chamber of Phantastes, the imaginative faculty, is filled with “idle thoughts and fantasies / Deuises, dreames, opinions unsound, / Shewes, visions, sooth-sayes, and prophesies, / And all that fained is, as leasings, tales, and lies” (2.9.51).With their emphasis on imaginative feigning and deception, these “idle thoughts” directly recall the Proem’s anxious invocation of “th’aboundance of an idle brain” and “painted forgery,” while at the same time explicitly translating that anxiety into the realm of Reformation anti-Catholicism. “Opinions unsound / Shewes, visions, soothsayes, and prophesies” name precisely the dangerous fabrications that Protestant readers chastised in the medieval books they salvaged from the monastic libraries: thus Bale castigates the “Vision of the Monk of Evesham” by naming it a “false and fabulous vision” (“visio fallax et fabulosa”). For Protestant library-makers, no less than for Protestant theological writers such as William Tyndale, the imagination was the realm of idolatry: thus Tyndale insists that nothing “bringeth the wrath of God so soon and sore on a man, as the idolatry of his own imagination” (Greenblatt 1980: 113). In Reformation discourse, the antidote to the idolatrous imagination and fantasy was memory: thus injunctions that forbid the works “devysed by mennes phantasies” permit the use of images as objects of “remembraunce, whereby, men may be admonished, of the holy lifes and conversacion of theim, that the sayd images do represent” (King 1990: 78).20 The terms “imagination” and “memory” as Spenser anatomizes them in the House of Alma cannot help but recall these Reformation contexts. What separates Imagination from Memory in the House of Alma is the middle chamber of Reason or Judgment, which performs a culling function, determining which thoughts are to pass from the imagination into the

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memory. This function is consistent with the medieval and Renaissance theories of mind: as Parker’s chaplain Stephen Batman writes in his 1582 translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum, Reason performs the role of a judge: “For what the vertue imaginatiue shapeth & imagineth, she sendeth it to the iudgement of reason. And what that reason taketh of the imagination, as a Judge, iudgeth & defineth it sending to the memory” (Batman 1582: 17v). The contents of memory are determined by a process of judgment understood through its extractive powers: the action that Batman assigns to Reason, “defineth,” signified the power to reduce to or extract an essential nature, looking forward to a later meaning, to distinguish.21 The exclusive nature of this process recalls Leland’s own reading practices, when he describes his aim “to reade, scanne upon, and preserve in memorie those things which are consonant with Authoritie” by “casting awaye trifles, cutting off olde wiues tales, and superfluous fables.” In describing this action of Reason who “iudgeth & defineth,” Stephen Batman may well have had in mind the material processes of the post-Reformation library’s construction: the translator of De Proprietatibus Rerum was the same man who collected books for Parker, whom he describes in terms similar to Reason when he notes the Archbishop’s construction of his own library through a process of elimination, of “choyse being taken” (Batman 1583: 394).22 Spenser’s middle chamber is painted in murals “of laws, or iudgments, and of decretals” (9.53). There its unnamed guardian exercises his sole function: to “meditate all his life long,” an action that recalls the work of monastic lectio. But Spenser appropriates such work on behalf of a decidedly antimonastic aim: if the library of Memory recalls the monastic library and scriptorium, it Protestantizes its memorial function by excluding “shewes, visions, sooth-sayes, and prophesies” to the realm of Imagination, classifying them under the rubric of “all that fained is, as leasings, tales, and lies.” The chamber of Reason or Judgment, which produces memory through the extraction and exclusion of Imagination, also models a new form of reading that, like Leland’s lectio of suspicion, defines memory by what it leaves out. This lectio is the lesson that Guyon learns in the Castle of Alma and enacts, I want to further suggest, in the Bower of Bliss. As a site of “guilefull semblaunts” (2.12.48), the Bower of Bliss embodies the very qualities of imagination that are excluded from the library of memory, the “idle thoughts and fantasies . . . leasings, tales, and lies” (2.12.51) – and, by extension, the “painted forgery” and “aboundance of an idle brain” that the Proem juxtaposes with “iust memory.” If the library of Eumnestes is a seat of memory, the Bower of Bliss is a seat of forgetting. Its centerpiece, the post-coital pietà formed by Acrasia and Verdant, represents a monument to amnesia.23 Thus Verdant is overcome with forgetfulness of his own origins: “His warlike armes, the idle instruments / Of sleeping praise, were hong vpon a tree, / And his braue shield, full of old moniments, / Was

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fowly ra’st, that none the signes might see” (2.12.88). The “ra’st” monuments on Verdant’s shield, emblems of a failed Virgilian ekphrasis, embody historical amnesia and the forgetting of origins. Fear of such forgetting prompted the book collectors after the Reformation to attempt to restore “old moniments” to legibility. For Parker’s secretary Joscelyn, textual criticism offered a means of restoration: as he writes in the Preface to The Testimonie of Antiquitie, the texts that were recovered after the Dissolution bore the marks of corruption by ignorant readers and writers. In one, “a very auncient boke of Cannons of Worceter librarye,” a key passage has been “rased out by some reader,” an action that demonstrated the negligence or wilful destruction of books in pre-Reformation religious libraries. Yet through textual collation, Joscelyn purports to undo “the corruption of hym, whosoeuer he was” in allowing the “rased” passage to be restored, a practice he put to work in the Parker library ( Joscelyn 1566: A5r).24 The “moniments . . . fowlly ra’st” on Verdant’s shield instigate a similarly restorative effort, which, I argue, Guyon carries out in his destruction of the Bower of Bliss. Guyon’s response to his discovery of Verdant and Acrasia is to bind them in what Maurice Evans suggestively calls “fetters of reason,” recalling the lessons of the Castle of Alma’s middle chamber (Hamilton 1977: 297 n.). Guyon’s subsequent destruction of the Bower has been read as a scene of iconoclastic fury which replays the Dissolution’s most destructive excesses.25 Yet the climactic moment itself reveals few direct religious references: rather than seeing it as a literal description of Dissolution iconoclasm, I read the passage’s Reformation resonance in its effort to correct and purify a source of corruption, and thereby to restore the forgotten knowledge of origins first signaled in the “moniments . . . fowlly ra’st” on Verdant’s shield: . . . all those pleasant bowres and Pallace brave, Guyon broke down, with rigour pittilesse; Ne ought their goodly workmanship might saue Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse, But that their blisse he turn’d to balefulnesse. Their groues he feld, their gardins did deface, Their arbers spoyle, their cabinets suppresse, Their banket houses burne, their buildings race, And of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place. (2.12.83) While the objects of Guyon’s violence – bowers, groves, arbors, and so forth – are emphatically secular, the verbs owe their historical and moral force to the Reformation: “broke,” “feld,” “spoyle,” “suppresse,” “burn,” and especially the final act, “race.”26 The repetition of the word “race” in this crucial passage suggests to A. C. Hamilton that Guyon’s destruction of the Bower

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is “fitting revenge” for the “ ‘moniments . . . fowlly ra’st’ on Verdant’s shield” (Hamilton 1977: 296 n.). Similarly, Guyon’s “defacement” of the Bower’s gardens (“[t]heir groues he feld, their gardins did deface”) recalls and responds to Verdant’s self-defacement: “certes it great pittie was to see / Him his nobilitie so foule deface” (2.12.79; my emphasis). But in chastising defacement through defacement, razing through razing, Guyon’s destruction appears to be less an act of revenge than an attempted reversal. Where Verdant’s “ra’st” monuments and defaced nobility represent a historical amnesia, Guyon’s razing of the Bower of Bliss aims to recall its denizens to their forgotten origins. Thus, after this orgy of destruction, Guyon is moved to observe, “See the mind of beastly man, / That hath so soone forgot the excellence / Of his creation, when he life began” (2.12.87). If the Bower is a seat of forgetting, in other words, Guyon’s destruction of it is an act of violent remembering; it is also a form of remembering that works through violent exclusion. Just as in the Castle of Alma, Memory is created through its distinction from the works of Imagination that are banished to the forecourt, Guyon aims to create memory by eradicating the work of imagination that rules the Bower. In this, Guyon recalls the chastening scourge of post-Reformation readers and library-makers such as Leland and Bale, who sought to recuperate England’s lost origins in its “monuments of antiquity” by purifying those monuments of the corrosive accretions of monastic influence. Thus Bale seeks to purge “fryvolous fables and lyes” from the true sources of British history. Similarly, Leland advocates “casting awaye trifles, cutting off old wiues tales, and superfluous fables,” in order “to reade, scanne upon, and preserve in memory.” Like Leland’s and Bale’s acts of “polishing” or “purifying” the written records of the past, Guyon’s destruction of the Bower of Bliss is an act of unmaking, whereby “painted forgery” is castigated in order to produce “iust memorie.” But the “memory” that Guyon instigates offers no positive knowledge of origins; indeed, despite Guyon’s command, “[l]et them returned be vnto their former state” (2.12.85), the Bower’s former denizens never quite recover their original human identities: “being men they did vnmanly looke” (2.12.86). Instead, Guyon’s act of violent purification produces ruins – a broken landscape that offers neither knowledge nor enchantment – as the locus of post-Reformation memory.27 In the Bower of Bliss, Guyon performs the very action of which Book 2’s Proem expresses fear when it worries how it will be “iudged” and whether or not it will be dismissed as “th’aboundance of an idle braine” and “painted forgery / Rather then matter of iust memory” (2.Proem.1). By tracing Guyon’s training, through his progress through Eumnestes’s library and the Bower of Bliss, in the castigation of “forgery” and the production of “memory,” Book 2 innoculates itself against the very judgment it fears by offering itself up as a lesson in such judgment, rather than judgment’s object. In so doing, it reveals how the preoccupations with distinction, chastisement,

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and correction established by post-Reformation book-collectors and librarymakers shaped the conditions of reading in The Faerie Queene. The end of reading is the creation of memory, a point that Spenser emphasizes, following his Reformation precursor, Leland. But for both, memory is created by acts of exclusion that base memorial discourses on violent practices of forgetting. If, as I have argued, the new English library institutes a lectio of suspicion whose product, “infinite remembrance,” is as fragmentary and endless as its contents, The Faerie Queene is the first work after the Reformation to be written for its shelves.

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Notes 1 As David Wallace observes, “[t]he dispersal of books implies the loss not just of individual volumes, but of systems of knowledge and social relationship through which such books were acquired, indexed, cross-referenced, stored, shared, circulated, copied, and discussed” (Wallace 1999: 10). I am grateful to David Wallace for sharing this work with me in manuscript. On the centrality of monastic libraries to preReformation English textual culture, see Knowles 1957: 331–53. 2 The bibliographical work of these figures has been amply documented. See Wright 1949–53; Aston 1973; Fritze 1983; Carley 1986 and Carley 1989; Frantzen 1990; Robinson 1998; Graham and Watson 1998. 3 See Simpson, who observes that Leland is “himself an agent of the destruction of the very past he seeks to recuperate” (Simpson 1997: 222). 4 For example, Ker found that, of the more than six hundred volumes in the medieval catalogue of the Austin friars of York, only five have survived; similarly, of the three hundred volumes that Duke Humfrey is recorded to have given to the University of Oxford between 1411 and 1444, only two survived the library’s purging during the Reformation. See Ker 1941: xi–ii and Watson 1984: xi. 5 See Greenblatt 1980: 189; other readers who find in this scene echoes of Protestant iconoclasm include Berger 1957: 218 and Sinfield 1983: 37. 6 For a reading of the Bower of Bliss in relation to pictorialism and iconoclasm, see Gilman 1986. Cummings (1999) also stresses the importance of biblioclasm to the Reformation. 7 Batman further emphasizes the selectivity of Parker’s collecting enterprise when he observes, Thys reuerende father by vertue of commission from oure soueraigne Queene hyr Maiestie, didde cause to be diligently gathered many bookes of Antiquitie, whiche throughe default of heede takeing, when the religious houses of the Popish were suppressed, their Libraries we almost utterly spoyled, to the great hurt and hindraunce of learning. Among whose Bookes remayned, althoughe the moste parte according to the tyme yet some worthy the view and sage keeping. (Batman 1583: 393–4) 8 Of those two, one is the famous Troilus manuscript; see Pearce 1925: 220. 9 See Liddell 1939; Wright 1949–53: 163; Ker 1941: xii. 10 Of the invented term “chopological” (presumably for “tropological”), the editor observes, “Tyndale had meant to jest at the pedantic terms used by the schoolmen” (Tyndale 1848: 301 n.1). 11 See McCusker 1935–6. Carley notes another copy of De Gestis Pontificum Anglorum (now BL MS Harley 2) with “marginal notes, some possibly by Henry himself, on

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councils, on the authority of bishops and popes,” and on laws of marriage (Carley 1987: 590–1). As based on comparison with Bale’s manuscript notebooks, now preserved as CUL MS Ff.6.28; Bodleian Library MSS Selden Supra 41, 72, 73; and BL MSS Harley 3838 and 1819. See William de Machlinia’s 1482 English translation (reprint 1869) and Ward 1962: 2.495. This admission comes from the preface to Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Breuis, in which Parker admits to editing some “antique histories, in which were hiding some monastic fragments, or rather old wives’ fables” (“historias antiquissimas ediderim, in quibus monastica quaedam fragmenta, aut potius aniles fabulae in quibus reperientur”). Parker’s Latin text is cited in Robinson 1998: 1082 n. 93. On Leland’s battle against Vergil, see Carley 1996. See Yates 1984: 32–4, 256 fig. 9; on the theory of the division between memory, imagination, and reason in the later Renaissance, see Jardine 1974: 90–3. On the multiple meanings of “scrine,” see Anderson 1989: 16–22. Petrarch imagines his own library as a “thesaurus,” a great store-house reflecting in its encyclopedia-like scope, as Armando Petrucci observes, a “universal conception of written culture” (Petrucci 1995: 213–14). Thus Book 1 sings the praises “[o]f Gloriane great Queene of glory bright, / Whose kingdomes seat Cleopolis is red” (1.7.46). See also King 1982: 146. OED, s.v. “Define.” Prescott (1989) identifies Batman as the author of another possible source for The Faerie Queene. Greenblatt notes that the scene suggests a parodic pietà (Greenblatt 1980: 189). Of relevance to my argument about the Bower of Bliss as a seat of forgetting is Roland Greene’s observation that “within the Bower, of course, the boundaries between self and other, immanence and embassy, can scarcely be discriminated” (Greene 1999: 25). My reading would extend this boundary-blurring to the distinction of past and present. On Joscelyn’s method, see Robinson 1998. See Berger 1957: 218; Greenblatt 1980: 189; Sinfield 1983: 37. On the forcefulness of these verbs, see Gilman 1986: 69–70. Aston (1973) argues that monastic ruins spurred sixteenth-century historical consciousness. Spenser’s preoccupation with ruins is usually read in conjunction with classical ruins; see Ferguson 1984 and Anderson 1987.

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111

Index

011

111

0111

0111

0111

111

Anderson, Benedict 15, 99–100, 107, 110 antitheatricalists 41, 49–50, 151–64 art of memory 7–12, 15, 54, 56, 67–8, 74–6 art of oblivion 7–8, 9, 11 Ascham, Roger: The Scholemaster 8–9 Augustine, St: Confessions 1; On Christian Doctrine 168 Bald, R. C. 116 Bale, John 165–9, 170, 171, 173, 176 Banister, John 55, 57, 62 Barish, Jonas 90 Barrough, Philip 4, 59 Barthes, Roland 21 Bath, Michael 23 Batman, Stephen 42, 44, 167, 174 Bednarz, James 41–2 Bellamy, Elizabeth 60 Belsey, Catherine 163 Berger, Harry 126, 132 Bhabha, Homi 127 Blackburn, Robin 126 Blumenberg, Hans 125–6 Bolzoni, Lina 13 Braidotti, Rosi 144–5 Bright, Timothy 71 Brockmeier, Jens 2 Browne, Thomas 28, 30; Pseudodoxia Epidemica 67–75, 77–9, 81 Bruel, Walter 43 Bullokar, John: An English Expositor 42, 43 Bunyan, John: The Pilgrim’s Progress 3 Burckhardt, Jacob 14 Burke, Edmund 94–5

Burke, Peter 2–3 Burton, Robert 53; The Anatomy of Melancholy 9–10, 67–72, 74–81 Campion, Thomas 83; Observations in the Art of English Poesie 85–9, 91–3 Carey, John 79 Carpenter, Richard 45–6 Carruthers, Mary 13, 46, 73, 83, 158 Certeau, Michel de 172 Chanoff, David 113 Charles II 4 Charron, Pierre 6 Cicero 7, 21, 23, 26, 30, 67, 74; Ad Herennium 163; De Oratore 9 Claesz, Pieter 25–6, 27 commonplace books 67–70, 72–5, 79, 81 Crooke, Helkiah: Microcosmographia 9, 53–63 crudity, crudities 69–74, 77–81 Daniel, Samuel: Civile Wars 104; Defence of Rhyme 86–8, 91, 93–5 Dante: Inferno 35, 37 Davis, B. E. C. 124 Davis, John: Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued 6 Day, Richard: Booke of Christian Praiers 23–5, 31, 35, 41 Dee, Arthur: Fasciculus Chemicus 148 Descartes, René 79, 138 Donne, John 3, 6, 112–21; Devotions Vpon Emergent Occasions 113–21; The First Anniversary 140; Pseudo-Martyr 113, 116 Downame, John 45–6

194

Index

Duffy, Eamon 111 Du Laurens, André 47, 55 Eco, Umberto 15, 84, 91 Eliot, Thomas 43–4, 46 Elizabeth I 15, 107, 111, 122, 131, 165; prayer book see Day, Richard Empson, William 128 Engel, William 13 Erasmus, Desiderius 23, 60, 68, 73; “The Art of Learning” 7; On the Method of Study 7; The Praise of Folly 43, 53 Evans, Maurice 175 Feirstein, Frederick 92 Ferrand, Jacques: Erotomania 9–10 Ficino, Marsilio 139, 146–7 Florio, John 26, 28, 91 Fogarty, Anne 127 Forty, Adrian 12 Freud, Sigmund 12, 54; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life 56–9, 62, 90, 92 Fulwood, William see Gratarolus Fumerton, Patricia 125 Gascoigne, George 84–9, 91, 92, 93 gibberish 23, 26, 28, 31, 35, 38–9 Gilroy, Paul 127–9, 131 Goldberg, Jonathan 171 Gosson, Stephen 49–50; Playes Confuted in Five Actions 152, 155; The Schoole of Abuse 83, 152 Gratarolus, Gulielmus 47–8, 56, 70, 77, 80 Greenblatt, Stephen 11, 119 Guibbory, Achsah 71–2 Haigh, Christopher 111 Halpern, Richard 48 Hamilton, A. C. 175 Helgerson, Richard 86–7, 107 Hendricks, Margo 144 Henry VIII 111, 166 Heywood, Thomas 162 Holbein, Hans 33, 36, 37 Hough, Graham 123–4 Hugo, Richard 91, 93 Hutton, Patrick 10 Ireland 5–6, 122, 127, 129 Ivic, Christopher 110–11

James I 31, 86, 114–18, 120 Jones, Ann Rosalind 10–11 Jonson, Ben 83, 88–9 Joscelyn, John 169, 175 Klein, Norman 46 Kristeva, Julia 72 Küchler, Susanne 12 La Primaudaye, Pierre 6, 42 Le Goff, Jacques 1 Leland, John 165, 167, 168; Assertio Inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae 170, 171, 173, 174, 176–7 Lemnius, Levinus: The Touchstone of Complexions 4, 9, 71 Leroy, Louis 8 Lesmosyne 54 lethargy 4, 16, 41–6, 48, 51, 59, 61 Lethe 1–2, 10, 15, 30, 39, 42–4, 49, 59, 60, 150 Lucan 38–9 Lydians 6 MacDonald, Ronald 30 Manning, John 23 Marshall, Cynthia 159 Mazzola, Elizabeth 11 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 138 Mignolo, Walter 123 Milton, Anthony 111–12 Milton, John: Paradise Lost 4, 6–7, 83 Miola, Robert 145 Mnemosyne 1–2, 54 Montaigne, Michel de: Essais 90–1 Mosley, Nicholas 70 Munday, Anthony 152, 155–6, 157, 158 Neuse, Richard 130 New World 123–6, 129, 131 Nietzsche, Friedrich 14 Nora, Pierre 10, 13, 14 Northbrooke, John 152–3 Oblivion 4, 15, 22, 25–6, 31, 35, 39, 41–2, 45, 52 Odysseus 16, 28 Ovid 35, 58, 141, 169 Parker, Matthew 165–7, 169, 171, 174, 175 Patterson, W. B. 115

Index 195

111

Petrarch 143, 171 Phillips, Adam 93 Plato 53, 54; Meno 78; Phaedrus 139, 145–7; Republic 60 Pliny 68, 128 Poole, Adrian 105–6 Post, Jonathan F. S. 72 Prynne, William 154, 157, 158, 161 Puttenham, George: The Arte of English Poesie 89–90, 93

011

Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book see Day, Richard Quintilian 7, 23, 54

111

0111

0111

0111

111

Rainoldes, John: Th’ Overthrow of Stage-Playes 151–2, 157 Ralegh, Walter: frontispiece of The History of the World 31–3, 41, 45, 50, 52 Rankins, William 49, 152–3 Ravenna, Pietro de 54 Renan, Ernest 3, 99–101, 110 Richards, Thomas 172 Rogers, Thomas 6 Ross, Alexander 1–2, 33–5, 37–8 Rowlands, Michael 106 Sawday, Jonathan 80 Schoenfeldt, Michael 70–2 Seneca 33, 73; Hippolytus 145; Medea 141 Shakespeare, William 9, 15, 28, 143, 160; Antony and Cleopatra 90; As You Like It 153–64; Coriolanus 90; Hamlet 26, 44–5, 51–2, 90; 1 Henry IV 90, 101–8; Henry V 5; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 137–50; Much Ado About Nothing 85; Romeo and Juliet 9 Sidney, Philip: The Defence of Poesie 83, 85, 122

Silvestris, Bernardus 140 Speed, John: Description of the Ciuill Warres of England 101–2, 103 Spence, Jonathan 10 Spenser, Edmund 9, 15; The Faerie Queene 53–63, 122–32, 166, 170–7; The View of the Present State of Ireland 5–6 Stallybrass, Peter 10–11 Stewart, Susan 94 Stillman, Robert 124 Strier, Richard 112, 114–18 Themistocles 74 Tonkin, Humphrey 126, 129 Traub, Valerie 162 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 111 Tudor chronicles (Hall, Holinshed) 107 Tyndale, William 168–9, 173 Vaughan, Alden 126 Vergil, Polydore: Historia Anglicana 170 Virgil: The Aeneid 2, 60 Viswanathan, Gauri 112–13 Vives, Juan Luis 47–8, 143 Walker, D. P. 147 Walkington, Thomas 6, 77, 81 Wars of the Roses 101–2, 105 Weever, John 38 Williams, Grant 111 Willis, John: The Art of Memory As It Dependeth Upon Places and Ideas 8, 56; Mnemonica 7–8, 11, 84, 92, 95 Wilson, Thomas: Art of Rhetoric 68 Wither, George 29 Yates, Frances: The Art of Memory 7, 11, 13, 14, 22–3