Guilty Creatures : Renaissance Poetry and the Ethics of Authorship

Guilty Creatures

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GUILTY CREATURES Renaissance Poetry and the Ethics of Authorship

Dennis Kezar

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

20O1

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 2001 by Oxford University Press Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kezar, Dennis, 1968Guilty creatures : Renaissance poetry and the ethics of authorship / Dennis Kezar. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-514295-0 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and criticism. 2. Death in literature. 3. English drama (Tragedy)—History and criticism. 4. Poetry—Authorship—Psychological aspects. 5. Renaissance—England. 6. Violence in literature. 7. Guilt in literature. I. Title. PR428.D4 K49 2001 821.009'355—dc21 00-034660

135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For my parents with love and gratitude

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Acknowledgments

A shorter version of chapter 3 appeared as "Julius Caesar and the Properties of Shakespeare's Globe," English Literary Renaissance 28:1 (Winter 1998), 18-46. An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared as "Samson's Death by Theater and Milton's Art of Dying," ELH 66 (1999), 295-336. Part of the conclusion appeared as "Shakespeare's Guilt Trip in Henry V" Modern Language Quarterly 61:3 (November 2000) 431-62.1 thank the editors of these journals for permission to reprint. I am very grateful to Elissa Morris, my editor at Oxford University Press, for her encouragement of this project and her patience with me. Karen Leibowitz graciously helped arrange the cover print and allowed me to monkey with the title. My production editor, Robert Milks, has been responsible for some of the kindest and most judicious cuts and suggestions in the final version of this manuscript. Alastair Fowler introduced me to Milton, frequently helped me realize what not to say, and continues to read over my shoulder. Jahan Ramazani first interested me in the elegy and its cultural implications. Debora Shuger got me thinking about ethics and speech in new and ramifying ways. Gordon Braden early on disassembled the manuscript and helped me rethink its organization. I thank Stephen Orgel for suggesting that I throw away my first introduction and write several more. Arthur Kinney provided important advice for revision, especially with regard to Skelton and Shakespeare. Albert Labriola and Jonathan Goldberg gave me important criticism on the Milton chapter. David Bevington was the first non-relative to call the project a book and to encourage its publication. Jonathan Crewe was also a generous advocate for the book, providing substantial suggestions for revision. The Graduate School at Vanderbilt University has supported this project with a University Research Grant. It's a pleasant responsibility to record my debts to colleagues at Vanderbilt: Hal Weatherby and Kathryn Schwarz have read and helped me revise my reading of Spenser, who scares me; Lynn Enterline directed

VIII Acknowledgments

me to Harry Berger when I needed to know his work; Drayton Nabers has been a terribly energizing person to argue with and learn from; Tony Earley has been a real friend, a source of good sense and illumination humor, and a prose model I have not followed as much as I should. I record special gratitude to Leah Marcus, who in her generous readings of multiple drafts has helped me articulate ideas I hadn't recognized as mine; and to Katharine Maus, who keenly and kindly oversaw this book at its earliest and weirdest stages. I am proud to call both Leah and Katharine enduring friends and teachers. L. D. was companion throughout. Karen helped with el pelo del perro and much else.

Contents

Introduction: The Renaissance Killing Poem 3 ONE Courting Heresy and Taking the Subject: John Skelton's Precedent 17 TWO Spenser and the Poetics of Indiscretion 50 THREE The Properties of Shakespeare's Globe 86 FOUR The Witch of Edmonton and the Guilt of Possession 114 FIVE Samson's Death by Theater and Milton's Art of Dying 339 SIX Guilt and the Constitution of Authorship in Henry V and the Antitheatrical Elegies of W. S. and Milton 172 Notes 207 Index 263

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Guilty Creatures

This would be especially dangerous in a case where the facts follow the narrative form: in the first act, the defendant dreams about killing his wife; in the second act, she is killed; and in the third act the defendant is placed on trial for the killing. Alan M. Dershowitz

Introduction The Renaissance Killing Poem I dare not, learned Shade, bedew thy Hearse With teares, unless that impudence in Verse Would cease to be a sinne; and what were crime In Prose, would be no injurie in Rime. My thoughts are so below, I fear to act A sinne, like their black envie, who detract. Dudly Diggs, in Jonsonus Virbius

IN THE FAMILIAR PLATONIC DEBATE between Poet and Philosopher, imitation elicits indictment and defense. The failure of mimesis to correspond exactly with its object does not necessarily threaten the object itself, but it constitutes a potential social problem in its seductive distortion of truth. Early modern poetry, however, engages a Platonic critique that goes further—substituting for "imitation" a "representation" not merely deficient but capable of destroying its subjects. Even Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie—which exculpates the poet by removing literature from history and locating it in a harmless imaginative realm where nothing is affirmed—concludes by threatening its critics with this capacity: if the enemies of poetry are not "to be rhymed to death, as it is said to be done in Ireland," their "memory" will nevertheless "die from the earth" through a reciprocal literary antagonism.1 That this threat seems playful does not remove it from the cultural context that calls for the Defence, a context in which the boundaries between representation and sociohistorical violence are increasingly insecure. Indeed, by claiming for literature an ethical and political relevance, Sidney himself contributed to a conception of poetry that required this insecurity and an attendant reflexivity. His poet becomes both defensible and in need of defense in his claim to "the mistress knowledge, by the Greeks called architectonike, which stands (as I think) in the knowledge of a man's self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only."2 Cross-examining Sidney's justification of literature is the charge of destructive literary "doing" and consequence. Prosecuting Renaissance authors and audiences 3

4 Introduction

is an allegedly culpable representation and reception. When Renaissance poems perform this "ethic and politic consideration" themselves, they offer us important evidence of literature's implication in the violence of representation as constituted by historically contingent social relations. This study concerns a poetics of accountability—a poetics defined by its victims, and by the guilt attending their injury. Again and again, and in different genres, the poets and poems considered in the following chapters wrestle with a literary consequence that Sigurd Burckhardt has given a name: "A tragedy—to define it very simply—is a killing poem; it is designed toward the end of bringing a man to some sort of destruction. And the killer is, quite literally, the poet; it is he, and no one else, who devises the deadly plot; it is he, therefore, who must in some sense accept responsibility for it."3 Burckhardt assumes for his "killing poem" a number of terms and relations I dilate and qualify for my own employment of the phrase here. Specifically, I clarify what I mean by the victim of such a poem, distinguishing this subject as much as possible from what seems to be Burckhardt's post-Romantic conception of "a man" destroyed by a socially and communicatively autonomous poet "and no one else."4 Relatedly, I explain what "sort of destruction" such a literary victim can meaningfully be said to experience in the works I consider. The nature of this experience—the degree of vulnerability established by the poet's sympathies, the injuries of which the poet declares his representation capable-—can provide an important and dynamic understanding of both the Renaissance author and the Renaissance literary subject. If an author's acknowledged responsibility to his subject can illuminate his conception of the subject, then we must establish the criteria for evaluating the kind of "responsibility" (even guilt) the poet imagines for himself and his art. An ethical critique of literature that undermines the anti-platonic defense proposed by Sidney5 seems especially timely today. The heterogeneous motivations of this study certainly include aspects of contemporary discourse, such as hatespeech, that point to certain conceptual limitations in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As we become increasingly familiar with the premise that language can have deleterious social consequences, and that it can inflict real harm on its referents, "free speech" becomes increasingly contingent if not untenable. The ethics of representation, in fact, are often debated in terms more analogous to those of America's Second Amendment controversies.6 But the Renaissance offers examples for which this analogy is less projective than descriptive. In a period of increasingly substantial "paper bullets" for instance, Milton's Areopagitica asserts that literary proliferation makes recall impossible, and that if books are strictly licensed only outlaws will have books: I am not able to unfold how this cautelous enterprise of licensing can be exempted from the number of vain and impossible attempts. And he who were pleasantly disposed could not well avoid to liken it to the exploit of

Introduction

5

that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his park gate.... Do we not see, not once or oftener, but weekly, that continued court-libel against the parliament and city, printed, as the wet sheets can witness, and dispersed among us for all that licensing can do? Yet this is the prime service a man would think wherein this order should give proof of itself. If it were executed, you'll say. But certain, if execution be remiss or blindfold now, and in this particular, what will it be hereafter, and in other books? If then the order shall not be vain and frustrate, behold a new labour, lords and commons, ye must repeal and proscribe all scandalous and unlicensed books already printed and divulged, after ye have drawn them up into a list, that all may know which are condemned and which not; and ordain that no foreign books be delivered out of custody till they have been read over. Unwilling to complete the transfer of culpable agency (books don't kill people; people kill people), however, Milton concedes the logic of censorship as gun control: I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the church and commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves, as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors; for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.7 Books can act, and act malevolently. We may recognize the social implications in this extravagant admission through our current sensitivity to a language charged with the violence of history, and through new technologies that continue to produce new ethical questions as they alter the nature of representation and communication. But in this study, such historical sympathy is valid only to the extent that it helps us take seriously the consequence imagined for early modern poetry by the poets writing it. Prompting this study, then, is the sense that we occupy a historical position that enables the appreciation of an ethical interrogation of language in Renaissance poetry and culture. This historical position is arguably complicated, however, by the rhetorical and ideological demands of an inalienable Freedom of Speech: as Milton realized 350 years ago, ethical criticism can quickly entail censorship; absolutely free speech must be entirely inconsequential. The same tension marks our theoretical moment, in which radical ethical questioning coexists with a literary criticism frequently uncomfortable with the same consequential poetics it has called into

6

Introduction

being.8 Current ideological commitments can obscure and distort the ethical terms by which speech and censorship were understood in earlier periods. If our own age privileges transgression as "an imperative peculiar to literature,"9 it has also made us less responsive to earlier claims regarding the potentially harmful effects of speech on people and society. "Subversion" has not always been conceived as automatically desirable simply because it is defined against an automatically undesirable hegemony. In this study I address the question of representational violence with readings consistently focused upon an ethical accountability so obscured by formal containment that it appears sporadically and elusively in early modern studies. Rather than by any single theoretical commitment, this book's motivations are better explained by the dialogue it seeks with and between scholarly sources of ethical pressure. My emphasis on the self-consciousness attending literary killing—the representation of a violence that itself reflects upon the violence of representation— approaches a familiar paradigm from a different angle. I am indebted throughout this study to Stephen Greenblatt, who has influentially labeled and explored the Renaissance rituals for such violence: "Self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile. This threatening Other ... must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked or destroyed."10 Kenneth Burke's earlier description of self-fashioning even more clearly anticipates my focus on the conscious aspects of the killing poem, as it anticipates my argument that much of the killing poem's reflexivity arises from a palpable change in the poet's conception of himself and the function of his art: A poet's identification with the imagery of murder ... is, from the "neutral" point of view, merely a concern with terms for transformation in general.... And the frequent psychoanalytic search for "unconscious" desires to kill... puts the emphasis at the wrong place. For the so-called "desire to kill" a certain person is much more properly analyzable as a desire to transform the principle which that person represents.11 "When we ask why... analysis comes upon the death experience so often and in such variety," echoes James Hillman, "we find primarily, death appears in order to make way for transformation."12 Death is always anthropologically revealing, a telling site of history, an embodiment of culture;13 and the imposed death, the coextensive creation of an absence and a body, literally makes history—shaping social texts and selecting cultural subjects. When viewed as an act of imposition, a forced transformation or reinscription of the social text, killing in fact has a poetics remarkably similar to killing in fiction. This poetics both defines and is defined by the killing poem.14 What happens, however, if we relax our anti-intentionalist anxieties long enough to acknowledge a truth avoided by Greenblatt's passive constructions15 and Burke's "'neutral' point of view"? Self-fashioning, after all, is not simply

Introduction

7

"achieved" by faceless cultural fiat; in texts as in the world it has specific agents, designated victims, and collateral damage. Nor are the "terms for transformation" negotiated by the killing poem bloodless or unproblematically "general." What happens when the ritual of self-fashioning is held up to critique by its own priests; when we revoke the tacit benefit of clergy whereby mastery of the word mitigates authorial responsibility for the deed of murder;16 when the poet's fictions of alterity are also invested with a vulnerable selfhood, and the poet reflects upon his opportunistic role in their victimization? If the social power of literature involves "the ability to impose one's fictions upon the world,"17 where are the contact points of this imposition, and how does such contact blur boundaries between fiction and world? If to be imitated or dramatically rendered by Shakespeare is somehow "fatal,"18 what does it really mean for Shakespeare to kill for a living? In what ways do poet and audience collaborate in producing a literary death? Where is the distinction between representational and interpretive killing? Where the boundary between textual and social violence? Such questions define the reflexive consciousness of the killing poem, which revolves around the ambiguities engendered by the meeting of literature and crime: the word authentes can mean both "one who does something himself" and "a murderer." Such questions also lead us to reconsider the assumptions of an antihumanist theoretical movement that has, in the extreme, "presented language and ideology as all-pervasive and ultimately unconscious structuring influences on the individual 'subject.'"19 Historicist readings such as those performed here can accommodate many of the terms of speech-act theory, with J. L. Austin's "illocutionary" or contextual significance focusing our attention on the conscious acts and selfconscious concerns of author and interpretive community. We cannot assess all that a text performs unless we include for consideration the ways the text understands its own performance as an exchange between author and community. If speech-act theory addresses the shortcomings of a radical poststructuralism, however, poststructuralism provides its own critique of blithe invocations of agency and conscious signification.20 In fact, the readings that follow, while positing subjects and objects of speech-acts, treat texts poststructurally. There is no natural antagonism between these approaches, and indeed their coexistence appears in the eclectic "practice theory" of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens.21 In an account of this eclecticism, Giddens constellates a group of social theories that with notable exceptions, such as structuralism and "post-structuralism"— emphasize the active, reflexive character of human conduct. That is to say, they are unified in their rejection of the tendency of the orthodox consensus to see human behaviour as the result of forces that actors neither control nor comprehend. In addition (and this does include both structuralism and "post-structuralism"), they accord a fundamental role to language and

8

Introduction

to cognitive faculties in the explication of social life. Language use is embedded in the concrete activities of day-to-day life and is in some sense partly constitutive of those activities.22 Giddens's "practical consciousness"—"what agents know about what they do, and why they do it"23—could label my focus in the texts studied here. These texts, however, are not simply reflections of this consciousness but interrogations of its representation in language. Because the consciousness considered is one of unconvicted guilt and transgression, my focus is on authors who test and reflect upon the effects of a language whose entire consequence is by their own admission beyond them. Such analysis is not directed at holding early modern poets anachronistically responsible by convicting them of some form of guilt apparent only to us; nor does this study aim at diagnosing unconscious or irrecoverably displaced forms of authorial guilt and anxiety. Any historical analysis invoking such phrases as "authorial responsibility" and "authorial guilt" must appreciate that in literature as in life "murder is where history and crime intersect,"24 a point in texts defined by the communicative conditions and consequences conceptually available to their author. In what degree does a poem kill? To what extent does it consciously perform violence while admitting the transgression of this performance? To answer these questions, we must consider the audience or reception a poet imagines for his words. Of course the space between authorial intentions and textual meaning is always contested; and any speech-act can have perlocutionary effects beyond the ken of its original setting. But while the contingencies of interpretation and misconstruction interest me as they do all of the authors considered in the following pages, my analytical focus remains on the potentialities of reception as they are meditated in specific texts. This focus isolates some of those puzzling passages in Renaissance literature where the poet seems to have internalized the arguments of his critics and accepted the possibility that art can destroy its subject. Such an approach does not entail reinvesting the Renaissance author with an autonomy recent scholarship has done so much to challenge. This approach does, however, engage with a relatively "new ethical inquiry" that "tends to favor recuperation of authorial agency in the production of texts, without ceasing to acknowledge that texts are also in some sense socially constructed."25 Milton himself seems to have subscribed to a similar model of textual production when in Areopagitica he approved of Parliament's legislation of literary accountability: "That no book be printed, unless the printer's and the author's name, or at least the printer's be registered."26 For Milton literary accountability should identify both the authors and distributors of texts, though identifying the person materially responsible for a text's production can be enough. On the issue of the reader's individual responsibility Milton is of course less receptive to gen-

Introduction

9

eral legislation; but Areopagitica leaves little doubt that the individual can interpret any text to unethical ends. When Renaissance authors confront the terms of literary accountability—terms that include themselves, their methods of textual production, their audiences—they offer us an important opportunity for historical understanding. The texts this book considers enact dialogues with their audiences, and the ethical dilemmas of these texts confront authors and audiences meditating their functions within literary systems. In a study that anticipates my focus on poetic self-consciousness and accountability, Harry Berger, Jr., has recently distinguished the "reflex" of shame—"the avoidance of the sight of others"—from the reflexivity of guilt he finds in Shakespearean texts: I wanted to give a more central role to the textual indications of conscience because my interest in the stories speakers tell themselves about themselves and each other was centered on shades of expression that display or betray sensitivity to the failure of acknowledgment—the failure, that is, to acknowledge one's complicity in what has been done to others or to oneself.... The textual evidence I gathered ... persuaded me that the sinner's "reflex" or desire isn't reducible to "the reflex... to avoid discovery" and that, indeed, as an ethical language-game the sinner's discourse may tempt those to and through whom it speaks to court exposure and get themselves punished.... Under guilt, what must not remain covered up is yourself.... and the sinner is forced to become his or her own confessor, audience, judge, and inquisitor.27 For Berger, this realization was the product of a development from which I have tried to benefit: I spent several years entranced by the sound of my moral rhetoric before coming to the realization ... that the whole project of ethical appraisal was misguided so long as it led the critic simultaneously to preempt it from dramatic speakers and ignore the signs of its activity in their speech.28 Having begun such "imaginary audition," however, "in which one imagines one can 'hear' what speakers hear in their utterances as they listen to themselves and monitor the effects of their speech on others,"29 I was unwilling to follow Berger in limiting it to dramatic speakers. For such limitation, as Peter Erickson has observed, involves a cost: "The self-imposed restriction of [Berger's] focus to political effects within the play's community... leaves unanswered the question of the play's political effects in the outside world of the larger culture."30 A historically responsive metapoetic criticism cannot really limit itself to the ethical reflections

10 Introduction

of literary characters, for the dynamics of metapoetry move outward from textual self-reference to the implications of textual production and consumption. When the texts I consider thematize themselves, they thematize themselves as historical artifacts rather than as formal ones. If the literary work's interior community can be critically confessed, why not the community of which the author and reader are parts? Why should we not include the poet and his audience, for instance, in Hamlet's model of representation and accountability? I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ.31 And how should we respond to Stanley Cavell's provocative assertion of our accountable consent to the murder of Desdemona? Do I believe he will go through with it? I know he will; it is a certainty fixed forever.... I appeal to him, in silent shouts. Then he puts his hands on her throat. The question is: What, if anything, do I do? I do nothing; that is a certainty fixed forever. And it has consequences. Why do I do nothing? Because they are only pretending?... Othello is not pretending.32 Through what model of theatrical "community," then, should we limit the accusatory you, as Othello nears the end of play: "Look on the tragic loading of this bed. / This is thy work" (Othello 5.2.373-74)? What opportunity for historical and social analysis lies in Cavell's claim of a kind of spectatorial Good Samaritan Law: "Tragedy shows that we are responsible for the death of others even when we have not murdered them.... As though what we have come to regard as our normal existence is itself poisoning."?33 Such questions became more pressing for me as my investigation took me to nondramatic texts in which the speakers more explicitly involved the poet. And Berger's "self-imposed restriction" finally proved impossible in the context of the killings performed by these texts; for their "miraculous organs" often resonate beyond literary to social communities. But here I wish to address an objection that has dogged my study from its inception. In its most charitable form this objection expresses concern for my critical sanity—my ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, to calibrate my response appropriately to the different degrees of literary violence considered. Am I, as Cavell would say, drinking from the finger bowl?34 Even Hamlet, after all, recognizes with almost clinical interest the "monstrous" rehearsal of an apparently delusional speech-act theory:

Introduction

11

Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann'd, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, an' his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing, For Hecuba! What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?35 Hamlet's skeptical analysis here might just as well interrogate Burckhardt's "killing poem," or the unpublished notebook in which Ludwig Wittgenstein pursues the grammar of linguistic violence to its vanishing point: Suppose we ask the question: "Are people murdered in tragedies or aren't they?" One answer is: "In some tragedies some people are murdered and not others." Another answer is, "People aren't really murdered on the stage and they only pretend to murder and to die." But the use of the word "pretend" here is again ambiguous for it may be used in the sense in which Edgar pretends to have led Gloucester to the cliff. // But you may say: oh no! Some people really die in Tragedies, e.g. Juliet at the end of the play whereas before she pretended to have died. // "Oh no they don't pretend at all: Edgar pretends to be a peasant to lead Gloucester to the edge of the cliff [but] he is really blind." // We shall say the words "really" "pretend" "die" etc. are used in a peculiar way when we talk of a play and differently in ordinary life. Or: the criteria for a man dying in a play aren't the same as those of his dying in reality. But are we justified to say that Lear dies at the end of the play? Why not.36 In yet another contrived dialogue between the Poet and the Philosopher, it would seem that only the Philosopher manages to hypothesize the imaginative terms on which both the violence and the guilt of the killing poem are predicated. But this is not the end of the dialogue, for both Hamlet and Hamlet take up Wittgenstein's questions. In the same soliloquy that seems to criticize the player's misguided attempt to literalize fiction through an acting that borders upon action, Hamlet hits upon a plan for catching the conscience of a criminal.37 It is a plan that entails striking the souls of "guilty creatures sitting at a play" with a cunningly presented scene. Hamlet intends to hail his uncle with the representation of a murder that has not as yet been publicly owned in the play; in its substitution of a murdering "nephew" (3.2.244), this representation furthermore predicts the punishment of

12 Introduction

the crime it works to discover—thereby identifying uncle and nephew as killers. And it makes some sense that Hamlet's part in this prelude to murder effectively marks him as an author (setting down and inserting into the playtext "a speech of some dozen lines, or sixteen lines" [2.2.541-2]), for his own attempts at selfidentity repeatedly involve making words kill.38 To argue that in the play-within-the-play Hamlet has invested a hollow and inconsequential "fiction" with social consequence and the sympathetic validity denied the player is of course still to stay in some sense "within the play's community." Even in this thoroughly metadramatic play, the "real" killing would seem to be defined against its representation. But it is precisely in Hamlet's social deployment of drama that we can understand both the conceptual limitations and the imaginative force of the killing poem: selves exist in the texts under consideration here only to the extent that their violation or nullification occasions guilt, an admission of injury, or a desire for innocence rendered untenable by the evidence the poet presents against himself; subjects exist in these texts only to the extent that their authors encourage us to reflect sympathetically or with uncomfortable alienation upon the process whereby they are killed into objects. And adjudicating both the conceptual limitations and the imaginative force of such a killing requires attention to its historicity. To illustrate, I cite Plotinus, whose argument (a commonplace in early modern consolation) might at first sound like a definitive refutation of Wittgenstein's attempt to literalize stage violence: [Death] comes to no more than the murder of one of the personages in a play; the actor alters his make-up and enters in a new role. The actor, of course, was not really killed; but if dying is but changing a body as the actor changes a costume, or even an exit from the body like the exit of an actor from the boards when he has no more to say or do—though he will still return to act on another occasion—what is there so very dreadful in this transformation of living beings one into another?39 For Plotinus, the distinction between disposable "personages" and the essential and continuous "actor" was a simple one. But adopted by the mortals of the Renaissance, the theatricalized conception of dying and the blurred distinction between deaths literary and literal could leave Wittgenstein's more radical questions unsatisfied. We hear this in Walter Ralegh's imperfect application of Plotinus's strategy to himself, an application that concludes with the indispensability of one's "role," which now assumes the suddenly mortal position of Plotinus's "actor": "Thus march we playing to our latest rest, / Onely we dye in earnest, that's no Jest."40 Elegists of Renaissance players similarly conflate the life of the actor with those of the parts he played. With a pun that condenses personhood into internalized "personages," Richard Burbage's elegist laments he will see "No more young Hamlett, ould Heironymoe / Kind Leer, the Greved Moore, and more beside, / That lived in him." Like Plotinus, Burbage's elegist attempts to provide the

Introduction 13

actor with an ontological status independent of the illusive discontinuities of the stage and its "parts" (here, the specific part of Hamlet): Oft have I seen him, play this part in jest, So lively, that Spectators, and the rest of his Sad Crew, whilst he but seem'd to bleed, Amazed, thought even then he died indeed.41 By distinguishing his diachronic witness ("Oft have I seen him") from the synchronic fiction of a performative stage death ("then he died indeed"), this elegist may present skeptical limitations to the concept of an authentic poetic killing. But an important irony appears in the fact that this elegy for Burbage has silently become an elegy for Hamlet; Burbage's identity merges with the "part" he has finally perfected in a silence that genuinely is the rest. Such irresolution invites a reevaluation of the age's reciprocal mimesis between dying "in earnest" and dying in fiction. A short but significant conceptual step separates Plotinus's analogy for death from Ralegh's—and from Milton's metaphor for censorship ("homicide") and Sidney's for his mistress (a "book").42 If in the Renaissance death indeed "comes to no more than the murder of one of the personages in a play," the new valence of "no more"—not minimizing death but amplifying its fictional equivalent—directs us to the complex logic of early modern sympathies with textual and theatrical homicides. This logic recognizes both the constructed nature of character and its vulnerable consciousness. Ethical analysis directed toward this logic attends to what I have called admissions of textual agency and responsibility, identifications of the elided murderer strangely introduced by Plotinus's metaphor for death. If (as I suggest later) the killing poems of the English Renaissance present us with symptoms of the contingency and textualized nature of early modern selfhood, they also offer us important evidence of the idea of self that must accompany any act of victimization. On this broader metapoetic level, the killing poem invites both our complicity and our censure. We feel both invitations in our recognition of Hamlet's murderous authorship, brought to a point in the "fair" unblotted lines that kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and in his dying call for a public that will restore his "wounded name." We may even feel, in our participation with the desires of the killing poem, the full metapoetic force of questions such as that which Isabella cries over the body of her son in The Spanish Tragedy: "O where's the author of this endless woe?"43 If the question flies beyond the characters who have murdered Horatio to that figure of generic desire, Revenge, who beholds the dramatic action from above, why does it not also hail Kyd? And how are Kyd's paying customers somehow to avoid this interpellation? On the register of authorial, spectatorial, and readerly investment—whereby sympathetic subjectivity or the power to suffer is bestowed—we cannot. And in this limited but forceful incapacity must lie our answer both to Isabella's question and to Wittgenstein's.

14 Introduction

To do so is not to follow Burckhardt's prosecution of the solitary author "and no one else." The mediations and complicities that shape any performance of a text, whether through reading or acting, resist such a reductive idea of responsibility. But such focus can provide an introductory grammar for reading the guilt of representation in each of the poems considered in the following chapters. For the subjects of these chapters—poets and playwrights, readers and spectators— are responsible not for their self-identifications and self-presentations, but for their representations and interpretations of others. The killing poem can in fact be defined as requiring this extrinsic and expanding quest for responsibility, since in each of the examples offered here no intermediary internal to the poem presents itself to absorb and satisfy completely the onus of death. Perhaps because so much of early modern life was conceived as an act of representation, representations were themselves understood as possessed of a violable selfhood, a terminable life. Thus Elaine Scarry, in an analysis of Donne's displacement of physical bodies with literary equivalents, reveals how such a poet could describe texts as if they had vulnerable bodies—and bodies as if they could be read as texts.44 Perhaps too the ontological contingencies understood as shared by represented and representation informed the frequent Renaissance practice of destroying by effigy, and the related belief that uncivil treatment of names should be criminalized—since such treatment could do actual harm to the things they signified.45 If to represent one's self is to live, to be misrepresented by others is to undergo a kind of death, as Hamlet (extending Sidney's threat) suggests when he warns Polonius of the players' power: "After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live" (Hamlet, 2.2.512-14). Such a comparative threat surely takes much of its force from post-Reformation England's legal and doctrinal rejection of the belief that human words or actions had any consequence for the soul of the deceased.46 The prohibition of prayers for the dead quite evidently did not dispossess Protestant England of many of the cultural practices with which they were imaginatively associated: tombs and corpses were still desecrated in acts of punishment; the bodies of the condemned were still mutilated and displayed according to vestigial or recusant belief in postmortem suffering; monuments and effigies were still carved; elegies and funeral sermons still written and read.47 The theater could be an especially inviting venue for indulging in the conceptually proscribed; in the "Catholic" world of Measure for Measure, for instance, Claudio's terrified projections of death include the souls "of those that lawless and incertain thought / Imagine howling" (3.1.127-28). The Reformation, then, did not put the dead beyond the imaginative reach of the living; rather it officially put their souls beyond the advocacy or prosecution of those who remained behind. And while this development may have limited the spiritual consequence of the living's treatment of the dead, it also raised the social consequence of representation to a matter of life and death. It is no coincidence,

Introduction

15

then, that England's courts did not determine that the dead could in fact be criminally defamed until 1604—when the social effects of theological reform might be understood and articulated clearly.48 By this date both the logic and the literal force of Edward Coke's claim that a man's "good name ought to be more precious to him than his life" was recognized by law.49 When the purpose of art is no longer to influence a soul's divine judgment in the hereafter, but instead to fashion an individual's earthly reception and afterlife in fame and memory, the artist's power becomes executive. When the transcendent soul is putatively offlimits, the "social body"50 is fair game—and all the more vulnerable because it not only defines but focuses the power of representation. At the most figurative level—the level at which this study begins—the killing poem destroys its subject not by representing its death, but by revealing that subject's lack of ownership of its own representation. Before exploring tragedy, the killing poem's inevitable destination, we start with the funereal poetics Hamlet subordinates to the publishing power of theater; for the poetics of commemoration introduce to the Renaissance the possibility, meditated in Diggs's elegy, of "act [ing] / A sinne" in criminal representation. By starting with the figurative killing in John Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe, I acknowledge that the killing poem need not shed blood to produce a body. Skelton's poem, which may introduce the word elegy to English, also establishes the trajectory of this book, which coordinates specific and increasingly consequential instances of self-reflexive textual violence with inaugural moments in England's literary and social history that reposition the stakes of artistic performance. Sidney and Milton, conflated here to exemplify an abstract early modern mentality, occupied very different literary and historical moments. I acknowledge some of this difference by accounting for the Reformation's shaping of the ethics of representation in chapter 1 (Skelton at the beginning of the sixteenth century) and chapter 2 (Spenser at the end of the sixteenth century). In the next two chapters, I consider an increasingly self-conscious public theater and the anxieties of its playwrights as they evaluate the consequences of misrepresentation and appropriation on a powerful stage. Chapter 3 reads Julius Caesar as an inauguration of Shakespeare's Globe, an inauguration celebrated by a theatrical killing that is at once an admission of authorial guilt and a declaration of professional power. Chapter 4 presents the multi-authored Witch of Edmonton as an anatomy of the courtroom drama it performs—a performance that compels the audience to question the theatrical execution in which it participates as jury. Both plays—one appearing at the end of the sixteenth century and the other two decades into the seventeenth—are conscious of their victims and critical of their constituency. Both plays might even be called antitheatrical in the ethical questions they pose. More conclusively critical and self-consuming is Milton's Samson Agonistes, interpreted in chapter 5 as a product of the Civil War, as a consequence of Milton's participation in the killing

16

Introduction

of a king, and as an attempt to frustrate the predatory interpretive appropriation that it invites. Chapter 6 reconsiders a generic antagonism, between drama and elegy, developed throughout this book. Comparing Henry V with two explicitly antitheatrical elegies (one possibly by Shakespeare, the other written by Milton), I suggest that the antitheatrical elegy articulates many of the ethical tensions considered in the earlier chapters. The concluding comparison between Shakespeare's public drama and these two elegies also enables us to understand the function of guilt and responsibility in the Renaissance conception of authorship. Drama, and particularly the public stage investigated in chapter 3, occupies a thematically central position in this book. This stage presents early modern authors and audiences with a metonym for a public recurrently imagined as hostile, and for the violent communicative transactions of the killing poem. The transition from nondramatic to dramatic texts also has a more specific literary-historical purpose, for the continuum reveals how reflexivity and ethical self-evaluation move from page to stage.51 Discontinuity, however, serves an analytical purpose every bit as important as continuity in this study. While each chapter poses questions that arise from a related set of concerns, each also presents an essay on a poem in which the ramifications of these concerns take different directions and require different responses. This variety of response proceeds necessarily from my acknowledgment not only of the different contexts in which these poems appear, but also of the individual selves that constitute the subjects of these poems.

1

Courting Heresy and Taking the Subject John Skelton's Precedent Mens tibi sit consulta, petis? Sic consule menti; Emula sit jani, retro speculetur et ante. Skelton, Garlande of Laurell

LIKE MOST OF JOHN SKELTON'S POETRY, Phyllyp Sparowe eludes classification and description, reflecting the spirit of an author who seems to have "tried to write himself out of literary history" in an almost "perverse refusal to act like a 'transitional' figure."1 Such an assessment is at least the sensible response to the work's critical history. The poem has been labeled both "reactionary" and "revolutionary," "medieval" and "Renaissance."2 Applauding its bubble-like levity, C. S. Lewis has called the poem England's "first great poem of childhood." Focusing on its graver, more disturbing rhetorical moments, however, Stanley Fish has argued that the poem gives voice to artistic world-weariness and despair. The lyric has also presented challenges for those attempting to reconcile Skelton's roles as devout priest and satirical poet. In an early study, Ian Gordon tentatively compared Phyllyp Sparowe' s liturgical allusions with the tradition of goliardic parody; but more recently F. L. Brownlow and Arthur Kinney have claimed that the poem's liturgical fabric—based specifically and extensively on the Catholic burial service—should be read as a devotional adaptation of church ritual. These last two scholars warn us of the peril of judging an old work by modern sensibilities—a special temptation of Skelton (whom Pope found "beastly"), and of Phyllyp Sparowe (half of which seemed scandalously pedophiliac to E. M. Forster, a "supreme blasphemy" to H. L. R. Edwards). And yet their salutary reminder that the poem's bizarre admixtures might have seemed comfortably familiar to its contemporaries has not satisfied critics such as Ilona McGuiness, who argues that Phyllyp Sparowe is a work of conservative Catholicism—parodying both humanist classicism and the quasi-religious language of fin amor to demonstrate the sacrilege and fallacy of mixing secular art forms with traditional liturgy.3 In short the subject of this chapter continues simultaneously to invite and frustrate historical, formal, and biographical analysis; to complicate notions of poetic orthodoxy; 17

18 Guilty Creatures

to require apology from readers who find the moral censure or critical observation of its apparent transgressions either anachronistic or misconceived. That Phyllyp Sparowe requires apology in our own time seems appropriate when we consider that its author saw fit to defend it twice—once by incorporating a response within the revised poem, and again some years later in a work that sought to evaluate and justify his own bibliography. The parallel is not lost on Kinney, who aligns himself with Skelton against a succession of unfit audiences: Earlier the poem had been misunderstood too—perhaps, as Skelton implies, by envious poets who deliberately misconstrued the Commendations, much as some modern critics have—but in a third section to the poem, the Addicyon (1267-1382), he manages to fashion his outspoken reply.... Yet the Garlande of Laurell tells us that even with a third statement of what Skelton was attempting to do in "Phyllyp Sparowe" some missed the point.4 Well, what was Skelton "attempting to do" in this ambiguous poem? And how does one assess an artist's transactions with a critical audience that seems bent on deliberately and repeatedly misconstruing this attempt, missing his point? These are the questions to which this chapter leads, but I approach the complex issue of Skelton's artistic purpose by first saying what can be said of the forms in, if not the form of, Phyllyp Sparowe; for the genres that this poem explicitly calls to our attention reveal an important source of tension for the poet-priest writing in the first decade of the sixteenth century, and provide a glimpse of Skelton operating as a fascinatingly self-conscious "transitional figure." We can observe this selfconsciousness as the guilt and anxiety of an artist participating in a liturgy suddenly rendered unstable and consequential by poetry. FORMAL ANXIETIES Phyllyp Sparowe is as much about the composition of an elegy and epitaph as it is constituted by these literary forms; and though both genres have liturgical analogues—the elegy with the Vespers of the Office of the Dead, the epitaph with the burial rite's Ordo Commendationis and prayer over the tomb5—their history in the early Renaissance records the literary appropriation of this liturgy. Angelo Poliziano's late-fifteenth-century tribute to Albiera Albitia, a composite elegy and epitaph strikingly similar to Skelton's work in many respects, suggests the logic of this appropriation; as the poem modulates to epitaph at its conclusion, marmoreal verse marks the culmination of liturgical mourning and the installation of a literary monument: Praecedit iam pompa frequens, iam moesta sacerdos Verba canit, sacris turribus aera sonant,. . . O quantum implexi crines, oculique, genaeque

Courting Heresy and Taking the Subject

19

Noctis habent! Quantus nubilat ora dolor!... Et tandem gelidos operosi marmoris artus Includit tumulus, & breve carmen habet. Hoc iacet Albierae pulchrum sub marmore corpus Nulla quidem tantum marmora laudis habent Exornat tumulum corpus, sed spiritus astra. O quanta accessit gloria, lausque Polo! [The crowded procession now leads the way, the priest sings sorrowful words now, and the bronze bells ring from the church towers.... Oh how much gloom do their uncombed hair, their eyes and their cheeks express! How much grief clouds their faces!... And finally the tomb of elaborately worked marble shuts in the icy limbs, and has on it a short verse: "The beautiful body of Albiera lies beneath this marble. Surely no marble has such fame. Her body adorns the tomb, but her spirit the stars: oh how much glory and fame are added to the heavens!"]6 Poliziano's smooth transition from collective lament to figurative tomb inscription glosses over a claim that later Renaissance poets made in increasingly bold and secular terms—that poetry itself can confer a lasting, post mortem fame and glory. We may be only vaguely aware, as we read the last four lines of his poem, that Albitia now exists in the lapidary words of a poet rather than in the chanted rhythms of church ritual; but this awareness Poliziano's heirs do not let us escape. The elegy and literary epitaph, as O. B. Hardison has argued,7 served as critical sites in the early modern poet's redefinition of himself and his art. As conventional consolations, whether for death or frustrated love, were replaced by Petrarchan self-assertion, as the will to create (and to assume the title of author) overpowered Boethian apathy and the anonymity of such medieval forms as the danse macabre, a new voice marked the poetry of praise. Indeed, this voice often concurs with a telling generic identification: Or I shall live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten. From hence your memory death cannot take, Although in me each part will be forgotten. Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Though I, once gone, to all the world must die. The earth can yield me but a common grave When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie. Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o'erread; And tongues to be your being shall rehearse

2O

Guilty Creatures

When all the breathers of this world are dead. You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.8 The "virtue" Shakespeare confidently claims for his "pen" here is a distinctly Renaissance phenomenon. Poliziano's subtle contest between singing priest and writing poet has resolved into a liturgy wholly secular and literary; Shakespeare's "you" (much like Ben Jonson's elegized Shakespeare) is promised a monument without a tomb, an eternity that only textual circulation and the worship of readers can provide. With this promise, however, come conditions. Like the epitaph, the poetically bestowed "immortal life" enshrines its recipient both in "gentle verse" and in the less fixed medium of "men's eyes." The poetic monument, then, is contingent upon the iterative act of "o'erread[ing]" and "rehears[ing]," a contingency Shakespeare dilates by fragmenting the reading process into the work of subjective "eyes," articulate "tongues," and exhalant "mouths"; and by imagining the scrutiny of eyes "not yet created"—an unforeseeable audience that the poet nevertheless entrusts with the future "being" of his poem and its subject. If Sta viator is the exhortation of innumerable classical epitaphs, Sta lector becomes the implicit (and sometimes explicit) direction for the commemorative poetry of praise in the Renaissance. But this imperative renders the commemorated subject a voiceless object, even as it preserves that object by making it something gazed upon, something talked about, by an unending succession of passers-by. Much "virtue" in effigy; and Shakespeare celebrates his representational and eternizing power at the end of a century in which not a few sonneteers and elegists made monumental claims for their art. At the beginning of this century, however, this power is for Skelton both more strange and more generically inchoate. Phyllyp Sparowe reveals a poet exploring its literary forms anxiously and irresolutely, but not innocently. The poem contains the only reference to "elegy" in Skelton's poetry, perhaps the first such reference in English.9 As we shall see shortly, Phyllyp Sparowe also contains two references to "epytaphe" that define the poem's structural and thematic center. In the Henrician period, neither term enjoyed the precise meaning that George Puttenham was still striving to fix well into Elizabeth's reign: An Epitaph is but a kind of Epigram only applied to the report of the dead persons estate and degree, or of his other good or bad partes ... for the passer by to peruse and judge upon without any long tariaunce: So as if it exceede the measure of an Epigram, it is then ... rather an Elegie than an Epitaph which errour many of these bastard rimers commit, because they be not learned.10 By the criteria of The Arte of English Poesie, Skelton's sole poem published as "Epitaphe"—actually a set of biting mock-epitaphs on "Two Knaves of Diss"—might

Courting Heresy and Taking the Subject 21

be judged the work of a bastard rhymer. Yet in this 125-line poem, and in his Latin epitaphia, there is evidence that Skelton understood the conventions and epigrammatic concision of this form.11 Of far more confusion in the early Renaissance, however, was the designation of "elegy." Even Puttenham discusses "elegie" as a "long lamentation" primarily concerned with love rather than funerary grief; and other English critics frequently employed the label to describe both love poems and funeral laments in the Renaissance, only sometimes distinguishing between "love elegies" and "mourning elegies."12 Throughout the Renaissance, of course, elegia referred to a classical meter that ancient poets used in poems of love and mourning;13 and Skelton's Latin poetry is hardly unique in its employment of the quantitative elegiac distich.14 But the ambiguity of the elegiac subject was inevitable for early modern readers who encountered these distichs in the erotic verse of Catullus and Ovid, in the Idylls of Theocritus, in the eclogues of Virgil and Boccaccio, in the neo-Latin elegies of Petrarch. Scaliger hardly resolves this ambiguity when he remarks that the love elegy, like the funeral elegy, concerns a kind of "death."15 Petrarch concludes his Rime Sparse with elegies on Laura's death that merge almost seamlessly with his obsessions on her living image and its absence; Shakespeare projects epitaphs in sonnets that are themselves more eternizing and eternal than gilded monuments: perhaps such generic confusion troubles Renaissance theorists so little because it suits Renaissance poets so well. In Phyllyp Sparowe, however, the blurry line between In vita and In morte epideictic elicits both concern and excitement; and both emotions are appropriate for Skelton's drama of generic inauguration, in which the poet explores—through personae that include himself—the fatal consequences of elegizing the living. For this drama Skelton's female speaker sets the stage by underscoring her need for a permanent tribute to Philip, a need that the traditional medieval lament simply does not satisfy. Jane Scrope finds a certain solace in her conventional excoriation of the felonious feline and "the hole nacyon/Of cattes"(27-323); she reconciles herself to Philip's death by meditating on the fickleness of fate ("Of fortune this the chaunce / Standeth on varyaunce"[365-66]), and on the de casibus nature of life ("No man can be sure / Allway to have pleasure" [369-70]); she concludes the medieval birdmass with the comforting thought that her "prety cocke" will take his rightful place in "heven emperyall"(597); and the progression of her mourning—which corresponds precisely with the phrases of the Office of the Dead echoing about Carrow Abbey—culminates when she declares at line 602, "Amen, amen, amen!"16 But the consolation of contemptus mundi leaves Jane with a lack that can only be filled by a worldly art that is beyond her: Yet one thynge is behynde, That now cometh to mynde; An epytaphe I wolde have For Phyllypes grave;

22

Guilty Creatures

But for I am a mayde, Tymerous, halfe afrayde, That never yet asayde Of Elyconys well, Where the Muses dwell... (603-11) This passage equates the aureate style and literary form she seeks with an experience unthinkable in the female world of Carrow Abbey. Jane can identify this golden style in a bibliography of classical and early Renaissance writers which later poets would make the gatekeepers of all high art;17 but she herself is limited to the copious medieval romances that now leave unsatisfied her desire to commemorate Philip: Thou I have enrold A thousand new and old Of these historious tales, To fyll bougets and males With bokes that I have red, Yet I am nothyng sped, And can but lytell skyll Of Ovyd or Virgyll, Or of Plutharke, Or Frauncys Petrarke ... These poetes of auncyente, They ar to diffuse for me. For as I tofore have sayd, I am but a yong mayd, And can not in effect My style as yet direct With Englysh wordes elect. (794-58,767-73) Richard Halpern has described this maid's inability to "direct" her "style" as a phallic lack that inhibits discursive control.18 Jane's style-envy is directed toward a distinct group of authors credited in the sixteenth century with monumental poetry, and her bibliographical commentary reveals her lack as a generic one as well. That the comparatively modern Petrarch should be numbered among these inaccessible "poetes of auncyente" suggests the almost immediate classicism bestowed upon him by his sixteenth-century cult, and effectively distinguishes a Renaissance poetic genealogy from the medieval literature Jane comprehends (including the work of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate, which she evaluates with

Courting Heresy and Taking the Subject 23

some sophistication [784-812]). Necessary for the commemorative poetry she wants, this genealogy also excludes Skelton's female speaker while creating an opportunity for Skelton to assert himself "with Englysh wordes elect." STYLE AND ITS OBJECTS Stanley Fish has called Phyllyp Sparowe "a drama of style," a study of rhetorical innocence and experience,19 and this insight can illuminate the poem's more fundamental drama, which concerns fame and its generic manufacture. Indeed, Jane brings us to the very stage where fame is produced when she decides to create Philip's monument with her verse: But, for my sparowes sake. Yet as a woman may, My wyt I shall assay An epytaphe to wryght In Latyne playne and lyght. Whereof the elegy Foloweth by and by. Flos volucrum formose, vale! Philippe, sub isto Marmore iam recubas, Qui mihi carus eras. Semper erunt nitido Radiantia sydera celo; Impressusque meo Pectore semper eris. (819-33) [Best of birds, beautiful one, farewell. Phillip, beneath that marble now you rest, who were dear to me. Always there will be shining stars in the clear sky; and you will always be stamped in my heart.] This passage, containing Jane's second call for "an epytaphe" and the poem's only mention of "elegy," probably reflects the indiscrimination with which these generic labels would be applied through the mid sixteenth century. Jane seems to suggest, after all, that elegy is a subgenre of epitaph, or that an elegy will follow the epitaph; later neoclassical authors such as Jonson, however, would recognize that the epitaph provides closure to elegiac performances. If Jane's Latin lines are meant as an epitaph, moreover, they also resemble the distichs of classical elegy.20 Does Skelton intend for us to ascribe this taxonomic muddle to the increasingly inadequate speaker he has created, or is the muddle his? If the latter is the case,

24

Guilty Creatures

Skelton's understanding of the literary epitaph exceeded his grasp of what would become the Renaissance elegy; and this is itself significant, for as Joshua Scodel has shown, the literary epitaph—in its concision, classicism, epigrammatic focus on craft, and pretensions to permanence—was one of the early Renaissance's most important formal rediscoveries.21 This confusion notwithstanding, Jane's authorship clearly ceases to be credible as the poem modulates to monumental poetics. The Latin epitaph hardly strikes us as the work of the "Tymerous, halfe afrayde" young virgin who has stood in awe of Parnassus's height; it is, rather, the product of a masterful hand, as Skelton quickly makes explicit by tearing Jane's "feigned likeness" to assert his own authorial voice. Jane's Latin is claimed by the poet; her words of mourning are overwritten with his of praise: Per me laurigerum Britonum Skeltonida vatem Haec cecinisse licet Ficta sub imagine texta. Cuius eris volucris, Prestanti corpore virgo ... (834-39) [Through me, Skelton the laureate poet of Britain, these compositions were allowed to be sung under a feigned likeness. She whose bird you were is a maiden of surpassing physical beauty . . . ] It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this literary moment, for it interpellates not only the poem we are reading and the voice to which we are listening, but also the generic tradition in which this poem plays a transitional part. If, that is, Phyllyp Sparowe belongs in the elegiac tradition, we must recognize in this moment a departure from generic convention: it is the exposure, and even explosion, of the commemorative speaker or persona that begins to distinguish the Renaissance elegy from its medieval predecessors. Medieval laments such as The Pearl and The Book of the Duchess typically offer no alternative to the perspective of the dream vision in which the speaker participates; concluding with the rupture of this vision, such ostensibly autobiographical poems afford little space between speaker and poet. In their amoebean or dialogic structure, such poems suggest no audience other than the interlocutor with whom the poet-dreamer works toward consolation. In contrast, as Renaissance poets begin to reconceive the elegy, the increased value they assign to selfassertion seems to correspond with both a heightened awareness of audience and, in seeming paradox, an increasingly artificial speaker. Spenser's elegy for Chaucer, in the "June" section of The Shepheardes Calender, illustrates: his fictiveness revealed both by archaic diction and by the conventions of pastoral elegy,

Courting Heresy and Taking the Subject 25

Colin distances his "rudely drest," "rough" rhymes and "pitiful plaints" from the technical virtuosity of Tityrus's mourning ("Well couth he wayle hys Woes"); indeed he constructs a generic hierarchy distinguishing the low style available to him as a shepherd-poet from the epideictic accessible to those with more "skil": Nought weigh I, who my song doth prayse or blame, Ne strive to winne renowne, or passe the rest: With shepheard sittes not, followe flying fame: But feede his flocke in fields, where falls hem best. I wote my rymes bene rough, and rudely drest: The fytter they, my careful case to frame: Enough is me to paint out my unrest, And poore my piteous plaints out in the same.22 Like Jane Scrope, whose rhetoric is limited by her reading matter and whose mourning takes the shape of archaic lament or simple needlework, Colin's styleheight is determined by his social status and he must be satisfied with a rudimentary "paint [ing] out" of his loss. Like Phyllyp Sparowe, moreover, the fictive text of the "June" eclogue has been licensed by an extrinsic authority: whatever else they are, E. K.'s glosses serve to supplant the simple pastoral fabric of these poems and to insert a critical apparatus of relative sophistication.23 It is in anticipation of one of Britain's most ambitious and career-minded sixteenth-century poets, then, that Skelton effectively glosses his own text. Indeed, we might understand the allure of the pastoral elegy for most of the vocational poets of the English Renaissance—from Spenser to Milton24—as an opportunity thus to reveal the master's hand; for artificiality presumes an artificer, and the self-proclaiming fictions of Renaissance elegies advertise the components of fame's manufacture: a malleable theme and a protean poet able to present and re-present this theme to the court of fame which is a public audience. It is therefore no accident that Skelton shows his hand and ruptures his text as it modulates toward the epitaph, the public monument. As in Robert Henryson's The Testament of Cresseid, where the "golden leterris" of Troilus's "superscriptioun"25 reduce Cresseid's woeful narrative to a permanent and public account of the way in which she was perceived by others, Skelton's appropriation of this epitaph marks a radical shift in perspective: hereafter, this mourning girl will be seen through a man's eyes; the innocence of Carrow will become accessible to an experienced male gaze. Investing himself with an epithet that suggests the Renaissance conception of an inspired and nationalistic poetry (Per me laurigerum /Britonum Skeltonida vatem), Skelton enters into the commerce of fame-making that Jane could not. He brazenly invokes "the Muses nyne"(858), gratefully thanks Apollo for imbuing his pen "With the aureat droppes" of Tagus (873), and makes it quite clear that his illustris stylus will proclaim Jane's merits to the ends of the earth:

26

Guilty Creatures

Ryght so she doth excede All other of whom we rede, Whose fame by me shall sprede Into Perce and Mede, From Brytons Albion To the Towre of Babilon I trust it is no shame, And no man wyll me blame, Though I regester her name In the courte of Fame. (883-92) With Skelton's assertion of the authorial "I," Jane is elevated to a poetic theme, and we become aware of our position as the audience of "The Commendacions" (for the first time in the poem, "we" are addressed as Skelton confides that his lady "doth excede/All other of whom we rede"). Appropriately, this disorienting moment seems to coincide with an allusion to Chaucer's House of Fame. The poet's reference to "the courte of Fame" is strikingly suggestive of the courtly Castle of Fame that Geffrey tentatively explores in the third part of his dream; and Skelton's boast that his high praise will waft all the way to "the Towre of Babilon" echoes the babbling din of Chaucer's Whirling Whicker, that maelstrom of rumor and miscommunication where no word remains constant. But this is no dream. Here Skelton actively and consciously performs the process Chaucer's Dreamer merely observed passively. He enters the poetry of public fame that left Geffrey somewhat baffled. The defensiveness in Skelton's voice ("I trust it is no shame / And no man wyll me blame ..."), then, may even reveal his awareness of one of the fundamental truths disclosed by Geffrey's vision: poets such as Virgil (and now Skelton) often achieve lasting fame at the expense of the women they celebrate, such as Dido (and now Jane). It is Dido, after all, who in the Temple of Venus complains that an ambitious man has caused her infamy, submitting her to the rumor of many mouths: "... of oon he would have fame In magnyfying of his name ... O welaway that I was borne, For thorgh you is my name lorne, And al myn actes red and songe Over al thys londe, on every tonge. O wikke Fame, for ther nys Nothing so swift, lo, as she is!" (305-6, 345-50)26

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And though she explicitly refers to Aeneas here, we know that it is really Virgil, who enjoys permanent status in the pantheon of poets in book 3, through whom Dido's acts are read and sung. As we shall see, these associations with the darker side of The House of Fame have a special resonance in Skelton's "Adicyon," where the "janglynge jayes" of gossip and envy, the uncharitable interpreters of "The Commendacions," seem to elicit Jane's shame and his guilt (1269ff.). But Phyltyp Sparowe offers us many earlier opportunities to question the morality of a poetry purporting to eternize its theme, of a poet declaring a subject's selfrepresentation his textual property ("Per me.../Haec cecinisse licet"). At the start of her lament, for instance, Jane reverently mentions a classical female poet who has achieved much the same permanence as those poets "perpetually ystalled" in the Palace of Fame: Dame Sulpicia at Rome Whose name regystered was For ever in tables of bras, Because that she dyd pas In poesy to endyte, And eloquently to wryte ... (149-54) In a poem that starkly genders literary ability, Sulpicia would seem to offer Jane a solitary model for the role she herself desires as Philip's elegist. Almost immediately after this reference, however, Jane takes us on a long digression that crystallizes the tensions between a literary achievement such as Sulpicia's and the consequences commemorative poetry can have for its subject: I toke my sampler ones, Of purpose, for the nones, To sowe with stytchis of sylke My sparow whyte as mylke, That by representacyon Of his image and facyon, To me it myght importe Some pleasure and comforte For my solas and sporte: But whan I was sowing his beke, Methought, my sparow did speke, And opened his prety byll, Saynge, Mayd, ye are in wyll Agayne me for to kyll, Ye prycke me in the head!

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With that my nedle waxed red, Methought, of Phyllyps blode. Myne hear ryght upstode, And was in suche a fray My speche was taken away. I kest downe that there was And sayd, "Alas, alas, How commeth this to pas?" (210-32) If the sampler is in fact Jane's miniature version of Renaissance poesis, an art capable of eternizing the dead through "representacyon" and blazon,27 then Philip's words of protest reveal that such art may "kyll" even as it immortalizes. The representation briefly comes alive only to announce its capacity to suffer and die in the hands of another. Philip's accusation has the effect of recasting Jane's intention, her "wyll," as a redundant murder—recalling perhaps the "double dying" suffered by Eurydice under the transgressive gaze of Orpheus, a figure of the poet on whom I focus many of the ethical tensions considered in this study.28 Out of sympathy for Philip, Jane throws away her needle "for drede" (236), retreating into the more familiar (if now somewhat inadequate) consolations of lament and prayer: The best now that I maye, Is for his soule to pray: A porta inferi Good Lorde, have mercy Upon my sparowes soul, Wryten in my bederoule! (235-42) Jane may want a lasting tribute to her pet, but she seems all too aware that the poet's power of representation, and of creating a work of epitaphic permanence, in some way violates the theme being celebrated. What may be her "pleasure" and "sporte" draws Philip's blood and protest at the precise moment she begins to "prycke" his beak—the instrument of voice and agency—into her own textual property.29 This young maid, whose "speche" is about to be "taken away" in another's poem, clearly identifies a potential violence in the literary appropriation of a self's "image and facyon." As we have seen, when Skelton assumes authorship of the whole poem, when Jane's endearing needlecraft is succeeded by his "sharp pen," there is much the same nervous tension between fame and injury. But the master poet decisively enters into what John Scattergood has termed the "occupation" of the neoclassi-

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cal elegist.30 Skelton's verse becomes Jane's monument, and the pious refrain that punctuates the "Commendacions" eternizes this "gloriosa foemina" giving her an immortality contingent upon his own poetic powers: For this most goodly floure, This blossom of fressh coloure, So Jupiter me succoure, She floryssheth new and new In beaute and vertew. Where Jane had demurred at the task of reproducing Philip's "image and facyon," then, Skelton proceeds to publish several descriptions of her in what can be disturbingly close detail. Even the most reserved of these descriptions border on the tactile and gustative: Her lyppes soft and mery Emblomed lyke the chery, It were an hevenly blysse Her sugred mouth to kysse. (1037-40) And the more prurient explore, in Catullan fashion, the darker recesses of an avian fantasy: Her kyrtell so goodly lased, And under that is brased Such plasures that I may Neyther wryte nor say; Yet though I wryte not with ynke, No man can let me thynke, For thought hath lyberte, Thought is franke and fre; To thynke a mery thought It cost me lytell nor nought. (1194-2003) As in Chaucer's Knight's Tale, where the speaker slyly hints that "it were a game to heeren all" of Emelye's revealing rites to Diana (2286), Jane's obsequies to Philip in Carrow are here thrown open to the libertine imaginations of poet and reader alike with an indeterminate occupatio. But Skelton's freely roaming "thought" is also coercive; and his assertion of poetic ownership creates a gap of suggestibility (does Jane's sampler associate her with Philomela's voiceless speech? is her comparison with "Fayre Lucres" [1018] merely part of a harmless catalogue of praise?31) in which the sinister is irrevo-

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cably possible. Such possibilities flicker in one of the poem's more opaque passages. In an episode that echoes Jane's recollection of her abortive effort to sew Philip into art, Skelton calls into "remembraunce" a particular encounter with the girl—an encounter that begins to sound like Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" narrated from the perspective of this different kind of bird: And to amende her tale Whan she lyst to avale, And with her fyngers smale, And handes soft as sylke, Whyter than the mylke, That are so quyckely vayned, Wherewyth my hand she strayned, Lorde, how I was payned! Unneth I me refrayned, How she me had reclaymed, And me to her retayned, Embrasynge therewithall Her goodly myddell small With sydes longe and streyte; To tell you what conceyte I had than in a tryse, The matter were to nyse, And yet there was no vyce, Nor yet no vyllany, But only fantasy. (1116-35) For some time the obscurity of this passage has been compounded by an earlier editor's conjecture that its first two lines are corrupt;32 but John Scattergood gets us on the right track when he paraphrases their meaning: "'And in order to enhance what she was saying when she wanted to accomplish her purpose ...' (It seems Jane Scrope had pressed the poet's hand to give emphasis to something she said)."33 Perhaps we might entertain the possibility that here Skelton recalls a moment when Jane tried to amend her "tale" as it is constituted in his poem; perhaps she has attempted to persuade the poet to revise by straining with his compositional hand. At the end of Phyllyp Sparowe, as we shall see, Skelton admits retrospective evidence for such a reading. In either case, however—whether Jane tries to tell her own story or to edit Skelton's story of her—in this passage it is clear her demonstrative rhetoric fails to move the poet whose "fyst" is led by Apollo (972). Her body language yields to his discursive control, in fact, at the same moment that her authorial agency dissolves, the moment when her amendatory hands, metamorphosing into "fyngers smale" and palms "soft as sylke," touch his.

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The yielding occurs, more accurately, the moment her hands are touched by his: just as these aestheticized hands are quickly veined in their milky whiteness (the easily inscribed surface of a blank monument and an unmarked page), so is their suasory power immediately rendered vain by such conventional blazonment.34 We witness the grammar of this artistic appropriation when we assign subjects to the passage's verbs: Jane's "strayn[ing]" hand seems to "reclaym" the poet's wandering thoughts (and pen?) at line 1125; but the next line's double object leaves unclear the subject of "retayned"; and by line 1127's "Embrasynge" the subject has become the poet who now holds her securely in his arms and in his "conceyte." Again occupatio exculpates "fantasy," but only by positing a difference of degree that nears its vanishing point ("And yet there was no vyce, / Nor yet no vyllany..."). Jane's victimization certainly falls short of Philomela's and Lucrece's; Skelton's will and satisfaction take a different form than Tereus and Tarquin's. But no, for the poet, means no such thing; and if he ultimately resists comparison with Tarquin, his decision to publish Jane as an object of praise raises a different kind of culpability—that of Collatine.35 "The Commendacions" have the effect of a contrapuntal response to part I: in the above passage where Jane unsuccessfully tries to "amend" her own representation, we hear Skelton's antiphon to Jane's sampler episode, just as his blazons symmetrize Jane's descriptions of her own "spayre," "gore," "fynger," and "lippes" (345,346, 356, 359). But Skelton's are not true echoes; they are refracted through a different communicative situation and medium—songs that publish what had been private. The occupatio itself assumes an audience ("To tell you what conceyte ...") never implied when Jane is the direct speaker. We have participated in the private mourning of part I—right up to its rupture at the epitaph—without really questioning our part in the interior monologue of Jane's lament.36 Indeed, Jane never addresses "us" at all, and we read her lines expecting all the unmediated authenticity of soliloquy. Only after we learn that her words were composed "ficta sub imagine" do we cast a suspicious and revisory eye on their Catullan insinuations; only after we become aware of the poet's intermediary voice does "mery thought" color our perception of the bird's transgressive meanderings. From the beginning of "The Commendacions," however, Skelton never lets us forget our role as interpreters of an equivocal text, accessories to the disclaimed disclosures of occupatio. His rhetoric is meant for us; and in such passages as his long apostrophe to "odyous Envi" (902-69), and his Puckish concluding call for our discretion, he seems to tell us how to read—and how not to read—his eternal tribute: And where my pen hath offendyd, I pray you it may be amendyd By discrete consyderacyon Of your wyse reformacyon;

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I have not offended, I trust, If it be sadly dyscust. It were no gentle gyse This treatyse to despyse Because I have wrytten and sayd Honour of this fayre mayd; Wherefore shulde I be blamed That I Jane have named, And famously proclamed? She is worthy to be enrolde With letters of golde. (1245-59) The rhetoric of this passage slips from an admission of discursive if not phallic guilt to a displacement of responsibility onto those interpreting the poem. Demanding our "wyse reformacyon" of anything we find amiss, the poet concludes with a casuistical interrogatio designed to preclude any criticism of his commerce with fame, a Skeltonic "blame not my lute." Perhaps Susan Schibanoff is right to detect in Skelton a desire "to possess Jane, the text, and the readers."37 But the problem introduced by this passage—a problem to which we and Skelton shall return—is that its defense rests on collective textual ownership. Jane may be easily "possessed," but the "offendyd" response Skelton here anticipates—the charge of "wantonnes" that would provoke an addition to Phyllyp Sparowe some years later—is beyond the control of an author who invites his readers to reform his text. By including his readers in the imaginative collaboration of occupatio, by allowing these readers constitutive power over his text's meaning, Skelton has fallen into the communicative contingencies glancingly acknowledged by Shakespeare's "eyes not yet created" and "tongues to be your being." Having inscribed Jane's fame in Henryson-like "letters of golde," having subsumed her identity in his monumental verse, Skelton turns with increasing anxiety toward the reformational audience he has in a sense created for this poem. The aureate words that follow are more subtly offered to our wise reformation. Concluding the poem with what amounts to an epitaph for Jane, Skelton echoes his former epitaphic intrusion in which he claimed the text as his: Per me laurigerum Britonum Skeltonida vatem Laudibus eximiis merito hec redimita puella est: Formosam cecini, qua non formosior ulla est; Formosam potius quam commendaret Homerus. Sic juvat interdum rigidos recreare labores, Nee minus hoc titulo tersa Minerva mea est. Rien que playsere. (1261-67)

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[Through me, Skelton, the laureate poet of Britain, this girl is deservedly crowned with choice praises. I have sung of the beautiful girl than whom there is no one more beautiful; a beautiful girl preferable to any Homer might commend. Thus, it is pleasant occasionally to refresh hard labors; nor is my wisdom any less brief than this inscription. "Only to please."] "Rien que playsere": it might be a motto lifted from Marot in The Shepheardes Calender, which concludes with an Epilogue to the reader enjoining, "The better please, the worse despise, I ask nomore." It might be sung by Shakespeare's Feste, whose last line promises to "strive to please you every day." The object of Skelton's pleasing is less determinate than these later examples and hovers ambiguously between the girl the poet crowns with praise, the self-recreating poet laureate, and his audience. But the terms of pleasing, in this poem that begins with a liturgical "Pla ce bo," have changed radically by its conclusion. "I shall please the Lord in the land of the living": thus begins and ends the first psalmic unit in the Office of the Dead. Certainly Skelton continues to evoke this liturgy throughout "The Commendacions" with a refrain of psalmic allusion— including specific references to the burial service's Commendations of the Soul.38 Yet the lord that Skelton begs to please at lines 996, 1061, and 1114 is gendered feminine (domina),39 and in several passages he modifies his psalmic refrain into an extrabiblical encomium on his "maystres": Omnibus consideratis, Paradisus voluptatis Hec virgo est dulcissima. (1216-18) [All things considered, this sweetest of all girls is a paradise of delights.] Even if we account for the argument Kinney makes persuasively—that Jane's "dolorous mater" (398) has made her Skelton's Mater Dolorosa, that the sight of the piously grieving girl invites the weirdly erotic aesthetics conventionalized by the Marian hymn40—we must feel that the language of fin amor obtrudes on and exploits its occasion in this poem. We must feel this because Skelton makes quite clear the self-serving, appropriative nature of "The Commendacions'" comfort. A bird's death, and Jane's inward grief, could not be farther from the mind of a poet who declares himself so "ravyshed" by Jane's exterior That in wordes playne I cannot me refrayne To loke on her agayne. (1008-10) These "wordes" are even more "playne" than we may think; for in them Skelton admits the dangerously irresistible desire for an image ("It wold make any man /

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To forget deadly syn," "And any man convert / To gyve her his hole hert" [108081,1101-2]) that can only be placated by looking on that image again in the idolatrous refrains of his lines. The pain to be consoled in "The Commendacions" is that of a poet who has seen: She made me sore amased Upon her whan I gased, Me thought min hert was erased, My eyne were so dased. (1103-6) And the consolation for this pain is to represent an amazing presence, "To make a relation / Of her commendation" (961-62). This desire, and this textual placebo, the poet also recommends to his readers (and "any man") with a conspiratorial wink. Skelton's commendation, his stated purpose "Her beautye to commende" (859), requires an audience responsive to descriptive appetizers but willing to be fed on the air of occupatio. This air, however, is promise-crammed; and in eating it one finds one's self at Skelton's table, giving hungry ear to a poet in search of an imaginative audience: But whereto shulde I note How often dyd I dote Upon her prety f o t e ? . . . Whereto shuld I disclose The garterynge of her hose? It is for to suppose How that she can were Gorgiously her gere. (1145-47,1175-79) The invidious reader Skelton protests against throughout "The Commendacions" exercises the same invasive supposition and imputational fantasy invoked in this partial exfoliation of a "daysy delectable" (1051). Such a reader merely dilates Skelton's own unprovoked defensiveness ("Wherefore shulde I be blamed . . .?") into admissions of guilt, thereby assuming the precarious stance of a censuring voyeur. But envy and innuendo—the "serpentes tonge" that remains "never styll" (920,994)—are possibilities Skelton himself allows by admitting an audience that can take offense (just as easily as pleasure) from his interactive text: it is impossible to invest the reader with the power to reform and suppose without also granting him the privilege to make of the text what he will. Skelton's need not just to represent Jane for himself, but to commend her to someone ("Whereto shuld I disclose ...?"), may suggest an analogy with the epitaph, which relies

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upon the passerby to give significance to words that mean nothing by themselves. This reliance is of course fundamental to a poetics of praise that pretends to any monumental permanence; but the inclusion of a validating public audience—dismissed by Donne as "the laity"—can have dire consequences for the object of praise. It is instructive to note, for instance, that in his erotic poems on a girl's "passer? even Catullus makes no explicit reference to an onlooking and corroborative reader; and in his most famous love poem, Song 5, he creates a world of private intercourse—shared only with his love—by excluding the rumors of senes seueriores and confounding the prying eyes of a kiss-counting villain.41 For Catullus publicity is punitive. Only when his beloved has ceased to be a secondperson subject (and ceased to be loved) does he invite others to read between his lines and gossip about her exposed sexuality (see especially Song 58). In "the Commendacions," however, there is no such dualism between private exchange and public utterance. Indeed, by referring to Jane in the third person throughout, and by inviting a vaguely defined spectatorship to gaze upon her image in his verse, Skelton converts his private visions into public property there for the taking. Such is the translation from Petrarch's Rime 190 to Wyatt's "Who so list to hount," a contaminatio anticipated by the advertisement—"Who so lyst beholde" (1073)—that hangs elliptically over Skelton's commendations. The rhetorical terms of Song 5, or of Spenser's Amoretti (introduced with a declaration of the importance of pleasing an audience of one: "Whom if ye please, I care for other none"), circumscribe the contingencies of communication and judgment. If Spenser can make his sentiments known and persuasive to Elizabeth Doyle, he can dismiss the "Venemous toung" of public scrutiny as an uninvited guest—retiring to the Epithalamion, where both lovers share "an endlesse moniment" of embowered understanding. As we shall see in chapter 3, this idea of a narrowly defined audience distinguishes Jonson's conceptual efforts to limit the potential for misconstruction inherent in public drama: "Where if I prove the pleasure but of one / So he judicious be; He shall b'alone / A Theatre unto me."42 But the rhetoric of Skelton's commendations has far less strategic focus; it hovers indeterminately in the space between a poet and his unspecified audience, where it exists "only to please." Nor does Skelton define the purpose of his rhetoric, the nature of its pleasure. We are told, in several prolepses, that he intends "no vyce," "but only fantasy"; that he deserves no blame for publishing the "honour of this fayre mayd." But one feels increasingly that such apologies protest too much. And too little: "fantasy" provides no definitive antithesis for "vyce," and Jane's "honour" hardly seems the epideictic object of the poem's fantastications. For Alexander Barclay, author of the only contemporary criticism of Phyllyp Sparowe that survives, vice and fantasy in fact merge in Skelton's dishonorable verse:

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Holde me excusyd: for why my will is gode Men to induce unto vertue and goodnes, I wryte no jest ne tale of Robyn hode Nor sawe no sparcles ne sede of vyciousnes. Wyse men love vertue, wylde people wantones; It longeth nat to my scyence nor cunnynge For Phylyp the Sparowe the Dirge to synge.43 It is easy to discount this censure, as it is easy to discount the puritanical rants of the antitheatricalists later in the sixteenth century, if one adopts an anachronistic notion of literature's intrinsic entertainment value. But such was no defense in the early Renaissance, when even the most fervid advocates of humanism sought to legitimize art by demonstrating its ability to induce virtue: Skelton's "Rien que playsere" cuts in half Horace's imperative to teach and delight, producing a far less stable statement of poetic purpose. Of course we can answer that Barclay reads Skelton too literally, takes too seriously his talk of a desire verging on "deadly syn." Skelton makes this his own defense in the "addicyon," where he claims that Jane's "commendacyon" Can be no derogacyon But myrth and consolacyon Made by protestacyon, No man to myscontent With Phillyppes enterement. (1276-81) And readers such as Lewis corroborate this defense by celebrating the poem's pleasant levity. Like Catullus's, however, Skelton's is an "intense levity,"44 and James Russell Lowell comes nearer to its effect in this poem when he makes "the ignominious confession that [he] relish[es] Skelton's 'Philip Sparowe.'"45 For the "addicyon" calls into question not only the defense it submits, but also the pleasure the poem has provided—and the transactions that have yielded it. Stopping just short of his own ignominious confession, Skelton turns—like Shakespeare's Pandarus—on an audience of his own making and seduction. THE POET' S WORDS AND THE WORLD This discussion began with the suggestion that Phyllyp Sparowe is an exploration of new and poorly articulated poetic forms, a venture into the representational power of a distinctly Renaissance conception of poetry. The danger of such an approach is that of a simplifying retrospective analysis that imposes upon his work prophecies of what is to come.46 Skelton's dates do not encourage talk of his influence by what we call Petrarchism, as the conventional terminus a quo of

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this aspect of English literary consciousness still lies some years off.47 Indeed, we cannot even be certain of the extent of Skelton's direct exposure to Petrarch's vernacular poetry, and the seemingly Petrarchan elements of Phyllyp Sparowe merge frustratingly with their origins in the lyrics of fin amor. But Skelton's poem can accurately be read as the moral drama of an artist entirely conscious of the alluring and dangerous power held by such laureate poets as "Frauncys Petrarke"—the power to erect an art of obsessional desire with all the permanence of a classical monument. A limited justification for this reading lies in the genres transmuted in this diptychous poem, the literary epitaph and funeral elegy mentioned by a girl and converted to a poetics of praise by her admiring poet. A stronger argument for this reading appears in the self-consciousness with which Skelton executes this poetry, the bravura with which he tests its dissective fetishism, the friction produced by his own commerce with fame—a psychomachy not unlike that of Petrarch's De secreto, which equates the worship of Laura and the desire for the laurel with the sins of lust and pride. We need not look forward to a time when Edmund Waller could knowingly declare of a poet's successful failure to please his mistress: Yet what he sung in his immortal strain, Though unsuccessful, was not sung in vain; All, but the nymph that should redress his wrong, Attend his passion, and approve his song. Like Phoebus thus, acquiring unsought praise, He catched at love, and filled his arms with bays.48 Nor need we wait for Sidney to remind us, in voices both feminine and masculine, that the poet's ulterior desire to publish can threaten the honor of a woman.49 For in the middle of his own defense in the "adicyon," "Mayster Skelton, poete laureate" reveals that "Laura" has returned from voicelessness to make a critical response: Alas, that goodly mayd, Why shuld she be afrayde? Why shuld she take shame That her goodly name, Honorably reported, Sholde be set and sorted, To be matriculate With ladyes of estate?.. . Inferias, Philippe, tuas Scroupe pulchra Joanna Instanter petiit: cur nostri carminis illam Nunc pudet? Est sero; minor est infamia vero. (1282-89,1371-73)

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[Phillip, the beautiful Jane Scrope urgently asked for your obsequies. Why now is she ashamed of our song? It is too late; shame is less than truth.] As Philip returned from the dead to object to Jane's commemorative stitching—a bit of poetic ambition that drew his blood and threatened to "kyll" him "agayne"— so here has the mourning girl been newly pained by Skelton's sharp style. We learn of this pain as we learn of Philip's, in those textual gaps through which the "dead" speak. The effect of her displeasure, implied in an otherwise caustic rebuttal and execration of "suche as have disdayned / And of this worke complayned" (1374-75), is unsettling for both Skelton's justification and the reader attempting to accept it. If Jane is among the poem's plaintiffs, how do we distinguish between her shame and Barclay's outrage? If the putative object of the poem's consolation (and this speech situation is quite removed from "The Commendacions'" dramatic monologue) remains anything but consoled by the poem, how do we assess the pleasure of Phyllyp Sparowe* To whom is this pleasure offered? What response is left the reader, after Jane's demurral, besides censure or a guilty interest in the ambiguous "truth" Skelton seems to have promoted over her infamy?50 "If I speak the truth," Skelton would wonder at the conclusion of Agaynst the Scottes, "why do you not believe me?"51 Fish is right to point to this frustrated response to skepticism as the Cassandra-like stance assumed by Skelton as religious vates.52 And this question, which appears in Latin at the end of an indignant subiectio entitled "Unto Dyvers People that Remord this Rymyng Agaynst the Scot Jemmy"—a defense mingled with invective against those who "wrangyll / Agaynst this my making"—comes very close to the position and tone of Phyllyp Sparowes "addicyon." But the differences between the poems are crucial: the "truth" of the ostensibly encomiastic "Commendacions" is far less determinate than the meaning of Skelton's satirical verse; as a performative utterance, moreover, Phyllyp Sparowe has had the (apparently) unintentional effect that is the intended effect of Agaynst the Scottes. The poet can defend himself from the latter poem's misreaders by claiming that they are simply defending the wrong people. But how can a poet protest against willful misconstruction when his poem offers only interpretive invitation, when Jane herself objects to her ambiguous representation? Skelton has realized (and allowed us to realize) the displeasure of his "maistres," the poem's failure at the level of intersubjective rhetoric; but not for him a recusatio of the laurel he has embraced instead. It is too late. In fact the "truth" that Phyllyp Sparowe publishes is an allegory of both the inevitability and the irreparability of fame-making, an allegory that appears in the poem's very structure. As we turn the panels of its diptych, panels that hinge on a neoclassical epitaph, all is changed; and the terrible beauty born—the spawn of revision, interpolation, and appropriation—is finally one in which the words and wishes of the beautiful girl no longer matter. Or at least they do not matter enough to

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return to the poetics Skelton has rendered belated, anachronistic. This is not to say, however, that he can keep from looking over his shoulder at what he has wrought. Near the end of the "addicyon," Skelton breaks from 70 lines of cursing the poem's misreaders to express a bewilderment not unlike the Dreamer in The House of Fame—a future shock Lewis has compared with one's "first introduction to what theologians call 'the World' and others 'the racket' or 'real life,'" where "things are overheard, things are misunderstood."533 When the poem futilely beckons back its eponym—ignored throughout "The Commendacions"—to explain Jane's displeasure, we feel at once a nostalgic urge and the urgency of this new world: But, Phylyp, I conjure thee ... That thou shortly tell, And shew now unto me What the cause may be Of this perplexitie! ... (1362,1367-70) In the sampler episode, Jane's confusion ("Alas, alas, / How commeth this to pas?") arose from the imagined complaint of her mourned subject, a complaint that caused Jane to abjure the art of commemoration. But the "cause" of Skelton's "perplexitie" is the poetic power he continues to wield despite such complaints; and this power proves far more adumbrative of Sidney's conception of poetry than reminiscent of Chaucer's. Like Phyllyp Sparowe, The Defense of Poetry ends with a mocking curse of its misreaders. Stopping just short of a literal killing poem, Sidney dismisses the enemies of poetry with a declaration of the power he has defined: Though I will not wish unto you the ass's ears of Midas, nor to be driven by a poet's verses (as Bubonax was) to hang himself, nor to be rhymed to death, as it is said to be done in Ireland; yet thus much curse I must send you in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favor for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.54 Skelton's envoy claims a similar power of erasure; his kills not with malign neglect, however, but with a living epitaph: Than suche as have disdayned And of this worke complayned, I pray God they be payned

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No worse than is contayned In verses two or three That folowe as you may se. Luride, cur, livor, volucris pia funera damnas? Talia te rapiant rapiunt que fata volucrem! Est tamen invidia mors tibi continua. (1374-82) [Why, green envy, do you condemn the pious obsequies of a bird? May the same fate which seized the bird also seize you! Yet death is continuous for you through envy.] In the "addicyon" we may have seen a gesture toward Chaucer's "Retraction," a momentary admission that his tale "of best sentence and moost solaas" verged "into synne."55 But Skelton's final defiant note drowns out self-incrimination, reveling in the retributive infliction of wasting pain, the poetic conferment of mors continua. His reference to "the fate that seized the bird" threatens not simply with death, but with subjection to literary representation: it has been Philip's fate to become Skelton's poem. In the period of Phyllyp Sparowe's composition, Skelton in fact uses a poem entitled "Epitaphe" posthumously to humiliate two of his enemies—the poetic equivalent to the early modern practice of exhuming bodies for further punishment. The problem with Skelton's poetically bestowed "payne" in Phyllyp Sparowe, however, is that it admits the same potential for literary harm that his defense denies. Similarly, his curse upon the poem's misreaders reminds us of those many instances of parallelism in which Jane has herself experienced "the fate that seized the bird." "Why should our endeavor be so loved, and the performance so loathed?" Pandarus inquires of a theater filled with suddenly uncomfortable voyeurs; "O world, world! thus is the poor agent despised," he complains of unidentified but imminent censure—before promising to bequeath to all his "diseases."56 Skelton's too is the communicative crisis of an agent of the world—caught between endeavor and performance, between desire and its consummating articulation. Indeed the poet likely had cause to identify with the "Pandaer" disapprovingly described by Jane as a bearer of "bylles / From one to the other" (682—83). As Greg Walker has observed, the method in which Skelton first circulated many of his manuscripts is less than clear.57 Speke, Parott, for instance, seems directed toward a small number of readers in the Court and royal household; like Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? however, Collyn Clout seems to assume eventual publication as a broadsheet or pamphlet, since its author complains against the "saducees" who "Nor wyll suffre this boke / By hoke ne by croke / Printed for to be."58 But the distinction between print and the kind of public dissemination available to Skelton as priest and performing poet may have been unclear even to him: while Why

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Come Ye Nat to Courte? announces itself as a fixture "at every solempne feest," Skelton also calls it a work of "pen [and] inke," a "memoryall," a "wanton scrowle" of fouled paper, and—in the epilogue—a "byl."59 Though written earlier in the poet's career, Phyllyp Sparowe occupies the same gray area between confined occasionality and public utterance; it vacillates between an odd form of pastoral comfort (the grieving parish girl, after all, has heard the poem) and divulged confession (we have heard it, too). For Skelton, of course, even court poetry is not privileged with the privacy and guaranteed reception of an ideal coterie audience.60 But the fame Skelton meditates in Phyllyp Sparowe (for himself and for Jane) requires an even more diffuse audience, in which the possibilities for misunderstanding and miscommunication proliferate. It requires, in fact, commerce with the world— the unpredictable arbiter but necessary constituent of fame. Uncomfortable with his role as go-between, aware of the subjective volatility of voyeurism, Skelton nevertheless conveys his "byl" to customers beyond his interpretive control and evaluative trust. The communicative drama produced by such a transaction is hardly unique to Phyllyp Sparowe. Indeed, it is a recurrent theme for Skelton, and one would search with difficulty for a sixteenth-century poet more consistently torn between the desire to share his works with the world and the contrary urge to retain sole ownership of their meaning (again Jonson—whose proprietary prologues and epilogues differ so strikingly from Shakespeare's in their attempts to control the interpretive and evaluative contingencies of public theater—comes closest). But this drama is heightened in Phyllyp Sparowe, which records the growing pains, rhetorical and formal, of a public poetics. For neither Jane nor Skelton is the private and belated mourning of part I adequate; for both, the consequences of "The Commendacions" are troubling. For Skelton, the poem's consequences reached beyond its first publication. Evidence of the poet's continued obsession with the fate of Phyllyp Sparowe appears in the Garlands or Chapelet of Laurell, Skelton's most audacious visit to Chaucer's House of Fame. This long poem, much of which concerns the justification of Skelton's bibliography to the "Quene of Fame," spends more lines defending Phyllyp Sparowe than it devotes to any other work. Skelton's advocate in Fame's court is "Occupacioun," who generally catalogues "sum parte of Skelton's bokes and baladis" with curt editorial glosses. When Occupacioun arrives at Phyllyp Sparowe, however, she transports Skelton's entire 114-line "addicyon" into her testimony.61 But Occupacioun introduces this prefabricated defense with an addition of her own, an invitation for all readers to fashion the poem as they like it: Of Phillip Sparow the lamentable fate, The dolefull desteny, and the carefull chaunce, Dyvysed by Skelton after the funerall rate; Yet sum there be therewith that take grevaunce

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And grudge therat with frownyng countenaunce; But what of that? Hard it is to please all men; Who list amende it, let hym set to his penne.62 In Phyllyp Sparowe Skelton had briefly solicited the amendatory powers of "wyse reformacyon"; and the Garlande of Laurell concludes with an envoy in which the fame of this "litill quaire" "will sprede / In length and brede" "With toleracyon / And supportacyon / Of reformacyon."63 Skelton's most ambitious attempt to assemble his oeuvre, to constitute its collective merit and meaning in a triumphant courtroom performance, still includes protestations "Ageyne envy, / And obloquy." But for the early Tudor poet capable of imagining such works as "lykely / Over all the worlde to sprede,"64 the indeterminacy of textual reformation is an increasingly inescapable occupational hazard. Skelton's desire to define for his poetry a fit audience, however few, resists his need to communicate with "all men." "ENGLISH WORDES ELECT" AND THE REFORMED TEXT The epigraph introducing my study suggests the self-consciousness with which Renaissance poets came to wield their commemorative power, the uncomfortable proximity of apparently genuine elegiac tribute and injuring verse. Dudly Diggs hesitates to contribute to Jonson's poetic monument not because his motivations are privileged with authenticity, but because they are not—because his "thoughts" remain "below," indistinguishable from the impudence and envy of Jonson's detractors. Shakespeare's Claudius, whom Diggs probably has in mind, dramatizes such earthbound linguistic hypocrisy as repentance nullified by an unwillingness to let go of property—a tenacity that defaults covenants divine as it does contracts mercantile. While "still possessed / Of those effects for which [he] did the murder," the fratricide's thoughtless words will never to heaven go.65 Like Diggs, the author of Phyllyp Sparowe invites a hermeneutics of suspicion, providing many opportunities to question the true altitude of his "mery thought." And though in the "addicyon" Skelton struggles fiercely to separate his intentions from those invidious readers who twist the poem to Jane's shame, he cannot tenably deny complicity with this reading—he can only condemn those who do not like it. Perhaps Claudius's aborted prayer for forgiveness, however, comes closer to the odd mixture of eruptive guilt and willful tenacity that makes Skelton's posture in Phyllyp Sparowe a contortion of kneeling and standing. If Skelton allows us to intimate—through Jane's disembodied complaint and his own uneasy defense—that he has somehow injured the subject of his poem, he also leaves the poem still possessed of those effects for which he did the injury. For Skelton, as for Claudius, these unrelinquishable "effects" include a queen and crown; Skelton's queen, however, is fame, his crown the laurel—both achieved through a kind of killing, perhaps, but both worth the price.

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What killing has Phyllyp Sparowe performed? What price has the author paid for the poem? We need not trivialize with hyperbole the subtlety with which Skelton explores the injury of representation; nor ignore the obvious differences between Jane's horrible vision of murderous "representacyon"—which has her needle waxing red with Phillip's blood—and her less violent (mis)treatment by Skelton's pen. It would seem that Skelton has chosen the most innocent and inconsequential of poetic occasions to ponder the physics of a poetry of experience and potential consequence; and though in the next chapter later Renaissance poets make the connection between representation and killing more unmistakably literal,66 Skelton's early contribution to this genealogy is principally allegorical: Jane dies only to the extent that she is put to silence and shame by the gaze of readers invited to an interpretive feast, only to the extent that the objections she is allowed to voice after Skelton kills off his speaker are those of a ghost. But the price of Phyllyp Sparowe is nevertheless significant, for what Skelton surrenders in this poem is the possibility of an entirely defensible poetry—the intentions and consequences of which the author can claim as his private property. Entrusting Phyllyp Sparowe to his readers' "reformacyon" may afford a kind of expedience, but Barclay's response would not be the only instance in the first decades of the sixteenth century when this bird came home to roost. In fact the interpretive energies and textual reassessments of a more radical reformation were already sweeping Europe during these years, perhaps giving Skelton cause to reconsider the collaborative participation he had solicited from his individual readers. In 1522—a year before the publication of the Garlande of Laurell and its open invitation to set a pen to any offensive passages in Phyllyp Sparowe—Skelton protests against Cardinal Wolsey's dissolute and parasitical court in lines that startle us with a political and theological resonance conferred by history: "God of his miseracyon / Send better reformacyon."67 Six years later, however, when the pressures of the Reformation began to consolidate the cause of conservative Catholics in England, Skelton's ideal poetic communication became much less open-ended. In the Replycacion, the poet's last work and "final statement" on his craft,68 Skelton narrows the scope of his text's meaning by declaring it "alway canonically prepensed [premeditated]"; and he is just as careful to delimit the audience and the interpretation he expects for this poem, submitting it only "unto the ryght discrete reformacyon of the reverende prelates and moche noble doctours of our mother Holy Churche."69 The Replycacion is many things. It is almost certainly an answer to two Cambridge scholars—Thomas Arthur and Thomas Bilney—recently abjured for preaching the "literalist heresy" against the "idolatrous" veneration of the Virgin Mary and other saints.70 It may also represent Skelton's more general participation in an officially orchestrated attempt to eradicate the "heretical movement" in England with "the weapon of eloquence."71 And it surely constitutes Skelton's grandest claims for a poetry at once socially salutary and heavenly inspired. But as a poem that puts Skelton on the giving

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end of censure, the Replycacion also becomes an ironic companion piece to Phyllyp Sparowe. Indeed, in its critique of a false and dangerous theological poetics, Skelton's last poem replicates many of the ethical and artistic issues provocatively raised by his earlier work; and this chapter concludes with a brief consideration of how the Replycacion's response to the threat of heresy redounds onto Phyllyp Sparowe's invitations to haeresis, or textual "taking." The verses of the Replycacion seem easily distracted from the purpose Skelton announces in prose: to controvert those who have preached "howe it was idolatry to offre to ymages of our blessed lady, or to pray and go on pylgrimages, or to make oblacions to any ymages of sayntes in churches or elsewhere." In a few verse passages Skelton does raise specific doctrinal charges,72 but his real concern is with the motivation behind such heterodoxy. The abjured scholars are aligned with a triad of heretical reformers, for instance, but principally to illustrate the graspingness for individual fame that has led them to doctrinal nonconformity: Ye scored over hye In the ierarchy Of Jovenyans heresy, Your names to magnifye, Among the scabbed skyes Of Wycliffes flesshe fives. Ye strynged so Luthers lute That ye dawns all in a sute The heritykes ragged ray, That bringes you out of the way Of Holy Churches lay. (161-71) If "Luthers lute" merely hints at Skelton's conception of heresy as a poetic phenomenon, elsewhere in the poem this figuration is made more explicit. In fact Skelton seems to echo Barclay's criticism of Phyllyp Sparowe as he complains of the heretics' "wytlesse wantonnese, enbrased and enterlased with a moche fantasticall frenesy of their insensate sensualyte." In Skelton's eyes the abjured preachers are predatory poets who have sought "to magnifye their names" (10) through prurient representation that confuses sacred and erotic: Ye heretykes recrayed, Wotte ye what ye sayed Of Mary, mother and mayed? With baudrie at her ye brayed; With baudy wordes unmete Your tonges were to flete; Your sermon was nat swete;

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Ye were nothyng discrete; Ye were in a dronken hete... For shamefully ye have wrought, And to shame your selfe have brought. Bycause ye her mysnamed, And wold have her defamed. (45-53, 57-60) For Skelton at the end of his career, "discrete[ness]" is the better part of virtue for an epideictic poetics that ventures into the religious realm; and he blasts the fameseeking reformers for a "fantasticall frenesy" that is anything but contained—for "Wytless wandring to and fro" (74) that fashions Mary ("mother and mayed") into the bawdy body imputed by Jovinian. This may seem an odd rhetoric with which to counter the reformers' iconoclasm: if anything, it was the perception that Marian devotion had become too distractingly erotic and extraliturgical that motivated their scriptural purification; one may feel, moreover, that the author of Phyllyp Sparowe projects too much by attacking these reformers for exploiting Mary as an erotic object in their own soaring quest for fame. And yet Skelton's rhetoric—a rhetoric we shall hear again from sixteenth-century Puritan antitheatricalists—has a kind of logic. Arthur and Bilney are "bad poets" because they have disturbed a text that should not be disturbed, held up to scrutiny and reinterpretation ritualized reading practices, thrown open to indeterminacy the continent and contained image of the Virgin Mary, and solicited from their audiences a participatory response— actions Skelton rightly identifies as socially seductive and disruptive: Before open audyence, Howe falsely ye had surmysed, And devyllysshely devysed The people to seduce, And chase them thorowe the muse Of your noghty counsell... Of the gospell and the pystels Ye pyke out many thystels, And bremely with your bristels Ye cobble and ye clout Holy scripture so about, That people are in great dout And feare leest they be out Of all good Christen order. Thus all thyng ye disorder Thorowe out every border. (208-13, 219-28)

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Barclay had accused Skelton of sowing seeds of "vyciousness"—of pandering "wantones" to "wylde people"—in Phyllyp Sparowe. Nearly twenty years later, Skelton levels much the same charge against two threatening harbingers of an international movement ("Before open audyence," "Thorowe out every border") that will soon find a kind of patronage in England from his sometime pupil, Henry VIII. The transformation from Phyllyp Sparowe to the Replycacion resembles the transformation that led Thomas More, a more direct prosecutor of the ultimately executed Bilney, to reassess Erasmus's Praise of Folly; and Skelton's late career certainly finds an analogue in the trajectory Stephen Greenblatt has plotted in More, a movement toward a consensus fidelium that had the quality of a palinode. In his Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, More remarks how Erasmus could once safely "jest upon the abuses" of saints' images "after the manner of the dysours [jester's] part in a play,... yet hath Tyndale by erroneous books in setting forth Luther's pestilent heresies, so envenomed the hearts of lewdly disposed persons that men can not almost now speak of such things in so much as a play, but that such evil hearers wax a great deal the worse."73 More's late antitheatricalism echoes in Skelton's poetic critique of heresy; and we might even identify in Skelton's Replycacion More's tendency—in anxious response to Reformation contagion—to exorcise many aspects of his earlier self. But More's strategy for such exorcism depends upon an abjuration and distinction that Skelton cannot really make: "And as for my poetry verily I can little else, and yet not that neither. But it had been good for Tyndale's soul and a thousand souls beside that he had meddled but with poetry instead of holy scripture all the days of his life."74 Skelton, by contrast, cannot cede a harmless poetry to the heretics because poetry and scripture, for this poet-priest, are inseparable from each other and from himself. Whether or not McGuiness is right to detect in Phyllyp Sparowe a satire of liturgical corruption, moreover, the problem for the author of the Replycacion is that his earlier "play" has become the ambiguous property of an untrustworthy audience and an uncertain history. The "open audyence" solicited by Phyllyp Sparowe returns as a stranger to its creator; and the authorial drama of the Replycacion— an intensification of tensions in Phyllyp Sparowe—involves the washing of hands. The Replycacion concludes with a defense of poetry just as assured as the "addicyon" is truculent and equivocal. Placing himself in the tradition of "Kyng David the prophete, of prophetes principall, / Of poetes chefe poete" (329-30), Skelton declares the divine provenance of his commendatory power: Than, if this noble kyng, Thus can harpe and syng With his harpe of prophecy And spirituall poetry, And saynt Jerome saythe,

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To whom we must gyve faythe, Warblynge with his strynges Of suche theologicall thynges, Why have ye than disdayne At poetes, and complayne Howe poetes do but fayne?... With me ye must consent And infallibly agre Of necessyte, Howe there is a spyrituall, And a mysteriall, And a mystical Effecte energiall, As Grekes do it call, Of suche an industry And suche a pregnacy, Of hevenly inspyracion In laureate creacyon, Of poetes commendacion. (333-53, 362—74) Skelton can make this bold justification of poetry (he enlists the authority of Plato to his defense in the poem's coda75) in part because he has identified an external poetic threat that only "spirituall poetry" can counter ("For be ye wele assured, / That frensy nor jelousy / Nor heresy wyll never dye" [406-8]); in part because the Replycacion, written "Cumprivilegio a rege indulto" enjoyes a propagandistic status conferred by the state; but chiefly because he has siphoned off as heresy the very qualities that make Phyllyp Sparowe indefensible. Having himself brought a girl to shame by praising her publicly in a poem that extracts freely from scripture and the tradition of Marian devotion, he indicts the reformers for cobbling together scriptural passages in an effort to defame Mary. Having reveled in "mery thought" and invited his readers to share in the fantasy of his para-erotic verse, he condemns the heretics for preaching similarly open-ended seductions. Having flirted with a commendatory poetics in which his own fame overshadowed the fate of his subject, in which interpretive license took the place of authorial responsibility, he charges them with seeking to magnify their names by erasing Mary's saintly identity—and by empowering every reader to reinterpret sacred text. The dreamy author of Phyllyp Sparowe could not specify the "truth" that was more important than Jane's shame, could not define the "pleasing" that was his vague intention, (like Claudius) could not even identify a single audience as the proper recipient of his unyoked thoughts and words. The prophetic author of the Replycacion speaks a fact defined diametrically by

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others' fiction, finds a purpose in defending a virgin from misrepresentation, and designates the exegetical boundaries of his utterance by invoking only the "discrete reformacyon" of orthodox interpreters. By silencing Jane and subjecting her ambiguous image to the undetermined constructions of the world, Skelton ventures into the killing poetry that is the focus of the following chapters. By removing Mary from the interpretive maelstrom of the world, by refuting the heretics' representation of her as an accessible object of revisionary reading, he attempts to police such poetry. In her study of the "Renaissance Voyeuristic Text," Wendy Wall identifies a representational strategy in late-sixteenth-century poetry: by figuring their texts as female bodies imperiled by a rapacious public readership, transgressive authors at once advertise their titillating crimes and displace onto their audience the violent disclosures the authors themselves commit.76 "The Wife is another mans commoditie," argues a fictional bookseller to a prospective buyer in Samuel Rowlands's 'Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete (1602); "is it not a prettie thing to carry Wife, Mayde and Widdow in youre pocket.. .?"77 My reading of Phyllyp Sparowe locates the frisson of such commodification in Skelton's much earlier poem. And while in both Phyllyp Sparowe and the Replycacion Skelton certainly experiments with the strategy of displacing guilt onto a profane audience that mis-takes texts, the former poem reveals a fascinating instance in which this strategy does not entirely succeed. In a passage through which we can look both back to this poem and forward to the subject of chapter 2, the printer of Norton's and Sackville's Gorboduc (1570) complains against a rogue printer who has released an unauthorized and corrupt version of the text: As if by meanes of a broker for hire, he should have entised into his house a faire maide and done her villaine, and after all to have bescratched her face, torne her apparell, berayed and disfigured her, and then thrust her out of dores dishonested.78 In this printer's continued analogy, the authors (and the authorized printer himself) seek to provide the violated text a haven from shame and violence by amending the corruption it has suffered in the hands of others: In such plight after long wandring she came at length home to the sight of her frendes who scant knew her but by a few tokens and markes remayning. They, the authors, I meane, though they were very much displeased that she so ranne abroad without leave, whereby she caught her shame, as many wantons do, yet seing the case as it is remedilesse, have for common honestie and shamefastnesse new apparelled, trimmed, and attired her in such forme as she was before.79

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If, warns the printer, the reader does not similarly observe the honesty of the text by taking it home for private consumption, "the poore gentlewoman wil surely play Lucreces part & of her self die for shame, and I shall wishe that she had taried still at home with me."80 In the literary period of which Wall writes, those concerned with textual and communicative integrity frequently avail themselves of such mythological paradigms—in which an utterance, invested with vulnerable subjectivity, might be beset upon by a savage public. In subsequent chapters we shall in fact see that several Renaissance authors seek to identify with this vulnerability, fashioning themselves and their texts into figures of Orphic victimization.81 For the author of Phyllyp Sparowe, however, the poet's complicity in having both his text and its subject figuratively "play Lucreces part" is too mesmerizing to be displaced entirely by myths of poetic self-pity. Before discovering, in the Replycacion, an effective strategy for this exculpation, Skelton gives us a glimpse of the poetic hand that first silenced Jane and offered her to us as a body. It is a sight revealed again in The Faerie Queene, where the poet again brings a woman to the point of "d[ying] for shame."

2

Spenser and the Poetics of Indiscretion Shee, after whom, what forme soe're we see, Is discord, and rude incongruitee, Shee, shee is dead, she's dead; when thou knowst this, Thou knowst how ugly a monster this world is: And learnst thus much by our Anatomee, That here is nothing to enamor thee: And that, not onely faults in inward parts, Corruptions in our braines, or in our harts, Poysoning the fountaines, whence our actions spring, Endanger us: but that if every thing Be not done fitly'and in proportion, To satisfie wise, and good lookers on, (Since most men be such as most thinke they bee) They're lothsome too, by this Deformitee. For good, and well, must in our actions meete: Wicked is not much worse then indiscreet. John Donne, An Anatomy of the World

HH

OW CAN THE ELEGIST DISCLAIM culpable opportunism when his poem renders its subject a spectacularly linguistic "occasion";1 when the theatrical audience of his poem is imagined as a predatory "monster" of misconstruction and slander; and when the poet's epistemological transactions with a sick world, a world apparently bereft of "good lookers on," necessarily implicates him in the economy he would abjure? Like Phyllyp Sparowe, Donne's Anatomy presents less a precise example of elegy than a fascinating exploration of generic motivations, consequences, and contaminations.2 In fact the possibility of formal "discord" and confusion informs one of the most startling lines in a poem full of surprises: "Wicked is not much worse then indiscreet."3 As for Skelton, Donne's venture into the poetry of praise coextends with a recognition of the "rude incongruitee" 50

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between private and public modes of expression.4 Even more clearly than Phyllyp Sparowe, the Anatomy registers the indiscrete relation between lyric praise and the public theatricalism implied by an audience of "lookers on." Donne's awareness in this poem thrusts us into the midst of an increasingly pressing and articulate self-consciousness in English poets writing in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: one need not write specifically for the theater to be involved with a potentially dangerous public spectatorship. When one's audience is so conceived, violent "actions" become a possibility of any artistic transaction; "Deformitee" becomes a possible consequence of any representation. In a discussion of the literalized performance of killing in The Spanish Tragedy, Peter Sacks has suggested that such deformity has its origins in the breakdown of elegiac conventions: when the mourner behaves not as Orpheus, but as one of the Maenads, the lyric voice devolves into a public theater where violent action subsumes mediating language.5 The generic choices of my own study reflect an appreciation of this insight, but also a desire to extend it into other Renaissance literary forms. In this chapter the threatening ethical proximity of wickedness and indiscretion (and indiscreteness)6 meditated in Donne's first public poem illuminates a trajectory between Phyllyp Sparowe and a poem that appeared fifteen years before the Anatomy. Through Donne's later poem we can plot the connections between Skelton's realization that the encomiast can murder to dissect and Spenser's recognition that discourtesy is not much worse than publicity. In the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, Jane Scrope has become Serena; Skelton's predatory poetics has been distilled into a scene of savagery and cannibalism presided over by another poet-priest; and the vague image of a misconstructing, heretical audience has resolved into the peripatetic Blatant Beast—a creature identified by one Spenserian as Skeltonic.7 Such genealogies become more apparent when we collate Jane, Serena, and Elizabeth Drury; when we frame the self-conscious indiscretions of Skelton and Spenser with those of Donne; and when we understand the threat of poetic heresy—of a textual opportunism committed collaboratively by speaker and audience—as a source of energy and concern for all three poets. Chapter 1 argued that Skelton's "elegy" (like Poliziano's) participates in the complex process whereby the commemoration of the Requiem Mass—"with its potential for infinite repetition, endless accumulation"8—was appropriated as a distinctly poetic liturgy, and that in Skelton's case this appropriation coextends with a troubled look at the potential fate of such representations in the hands of a mis-taking audience. Moving us more recognizably into the realm of Renaissance funeral elegy, and more clearly into the world divided by the Reformation, Donne writes from the other side of the confusingly unassimilable "nuw fassyon" recorded by a London undertaker who in 1559 witnessed with bewilderment his first Protestant funeral:

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Ther was a gret compene of pepull, ii and ii together, and nodur prest nor clarke, the new prychers in ther gowne lyk ley [-men,] nodur syngyng nor sayhyng tyll they cam [to the grave,] and a-for she was pute into the grayff a [collect] in Englys, and then put in-to the grayff, and after [took some] heythe and caste yt on the corse, and red a thynge... for the sam, and contenent cast the heth in-to the [grave], and contenent red the pystyll of sant Poll to the Stesselonyans t h e . . . chapter, and after thay song pater-noster in Englys, boyth prychers and odur, and [women,] of a nuw fassyon, and after on of them whent in-to the pulpytt and mad a sermon.9 Dennis Kay has observed much of the significance of this diary entry for the history of the increasingly secularized Renaissance elegy: What struck [the undertaker] was the disruption of accustomed order. The new preachers, "in their gowns like laymen," were indistinguishable from the company of people; the congregation seemed to him to be assembled indiscriminately, mingling ranks and sexes both as they walked in procession and as they prayed. Perhaps because English rather than Latin was used, he could not tell which chapter of the Epistle to the Thessalonians was read; and to him the Lord's Prayer was the "pater-noster" even in his native tongue. For the same reason, perhaps, he records merely that one of this assembly "red a thynge"—some sort of prayer over the body—and then that one of them "made a sermon." Confronted with these shocking sights and sounds, [the diarist's] system of note-taking seems to have broken down. He could not record what was happening before his eyes.... No less crucial to the development of the funeral elegy was the example of the funeral sermon, the innovation which, within weeks of being remarked by [the undertaker], had become, according to the evidence of his diary, common practice.10 At the broader level of this study, however, the undertaker records an anxiety and confusion that both precedes and lingers after the specific funereal innovations of mid-sixteenth-century England—a disruption audible in Skelton's own supplanting of familiar Latin cadences with his own vulgar praise, and in the cacophonous "noyse" through which Spenser's savages pray over Serena's body. Symptoms of the poetics of indiscretion, such anxiety and confusion can be referred to—but not cleanly circumscribed by—the communicative consequences of the Reformation, which ordained the individual with an exegetical power that could at the same time destabilize the interpretive community. In the passage above, the undertaker observes a scene in which every person (man and woman) is a poet and a priest: it is not clear whether the "thynge" they read is from the recently revised Book of Common Prayer1: or whether it is a recently penned eulogy, nor is it clear which of them goes into the "pulpytt" to preach. What does be-

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come clear in both the funeral customs and the literary responses to death in post-Reformation England, however, is that the question of "decencie" becomes increasingly controversial and urgent.12 "Decent buriall," writes John Weever in 1631, "according to the qualities of the person deceased ... is an honour to the defunct."13 Such an esthetic and moral emphasis on propriety makes sense as an anxious response to the Reformation's devolution of interpretation, and to the improvisational nature of the sermon and eulogy—which like Phyllyp Sparowe supplanted shared liturgical traditions with individualized texts. Less obvious, though, is why this concern with decency should coextend with the doctrinal and legal rejection of the belief that human words or actions had any consequence for the deceased: "The most shattering and irreversible action of the Reformation in England," claims one historian, "was the proscription of prayers for the repose of the souls of the dead."14 If funereal prayers and verses are in vain, wholly unable to help or hurt their subject, why construct social categories of the decent and indecent (let alone the notion of "sinne" mentioned in Diggs' elegy)?15 Such a question contains its own subtle answer: when the legitimizing efficacy and purpose of a speech-act are revoked, the speaker's burden becomes one of justifying his own motivations. Compounding this burden is a correlative to Protestant poetics: if words can do no harm to the dead's soteriological status, they can do mortal injury to the very representation by which the dead are offered an individualized and secular life on earth. By denning biographical representation, rather than spiritual advocacy, as the service of the living to the dead, post-Reformation England left its poets the problem of distinguishing such service from disservice. Donne's anxious fascination with the limits of discretion arises from the potentially indiscrete relation between devotion and "mis-devotion" that troubles Spenser as it troubled Skelton. Like Phyllyp Sparowe, Donne's First Anniversarie met with the censure of contemporary readers troubled by the poem's failures of categorization, by its startling mixture of religious and secular praise. Finding the poem "profane and full of Blasphemies," Ben Jonson is reported to have informed the author that "if it had been written of the Virgin Marie it had been something."16 Jonson is not far from Barclay's own objections over the blurring of subjects in Phyllyp Sparowe; nor does Donne seem far from Skelton when he defends his rhetorical extravagance in the First Anniversarie by claiming that "it became me to say, not what I was sure was just truth, but the best that I could conceive," that for his poetic subject he "took such a person, as might be capable of all that I could say."17 As we shall see, the poet-priest who prepares Serena for sacrifice in Spenser's epic also brings the poetry of hyperbolic praise (in this case, a clearly erotic praise) into dangerous intersection with sacrilege. But in order to understand the reflexive poetic indiscretions wickedly enacted in the cannibals' anatomy of Serena, it will be helpful first to ponder the full weight of Donne's taking of "such a person, as might be capable of all that I could say." For this imaginative acquisition implicates the

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poet with an audience similarly given to haeresis and assumption; this opportunistic dispossession of a subject ("such a person") with matter ("all that I could say") defines representation as a violent act of appropriation and disclosure. Of course the First Anniversarie is not the only Renaissance elegy to strike readers as "not done fitly'and in proportion." Valuing epanorthosis and discreteness more than Milton, Samuel Johnson famously condemned Lycidas as "indecent," as an indecorous and "irreverent combination" of "trifling fictions" with "the most awful and sacred truths" that "approachfed] ... impiety." Twentiethcentury readers sometimes echo Johnson in their description of the poem's lack of integrity—its "willful and illegal... form," its "accumulation of fragments."18 But as Zailig Pollock has argued, modern scholarship has with some success answered Johnson's objections to Lycidas's formal crimes by appreciating more fully the conventions evoked by the poem; by contrast Jonson's criticism of the First Anniversarie remains a problem for readers today. Like its bewildering formal admixtures, the poem's disproportion between occasion and rhetoric continues to provoke anxious debate.19 What particularly interests me in Pollock's own brilliant engagement with this debate is the argument that our seemingly intractable critical problem "is not an unfortunate flaw; it is what the poem is about": "That is, the poet's essentially fanciful claims for Elizabeth Drury, so obviously ungrounded in reality, should be seen, in dramatic terms, as an enactment of the concern which is central to the Anatomy as a whole, the gap between the object and the wit."20 By this argument, the Anatomy's essential indecorum—the "desperate fictions" and "obtrusive ingenuity" that give its language its distinctly violent energy—reflects on both the epistemological disease of the world, and the epistemological exploitation performed by the poem.21 Observing that Donne's imagined audience silently transmogrifies, in the Anatomy, from a select group of regenerate readers to a thoroughly depraved world, Pollock claims that the degenerate wit projected onto the poem's audience also reflects back onto the poem itself.22 By taking for his occasional subject "such a person, as might be capable of all that I could say," Donne converts Elizabeth Drury into a fanciful palimpsest not unlike those astronomical charts variously inscribed and contested by Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo. He subjects her to the radical subjectivism of which the poem is critical: the "new Philosophy" that renders "all in pieces, all cohaerence gone; / All just supply, and all Relation" (Anatomy, lines 213-14) thus infects the poet's own panegyric, ironically appearing in verse that is itself "not done fitly' and in proportion." Donne's famous lines on the "new Philosophy" have often been read as an acknowledgment of the force of empiricism, as a rather terrified acceptance of the messy consequences of scientific objectivity. But the Anatomy represents the new Philosophy, no less than the old, as a mode of perception necessarily involved with violent misconstruction. Brahe's more recent observations in Cassiopeia, for instance, appear just as roughly subjective as the zodiacal constructs they antiquate:23

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But yet [the heavens'] various and perplexed course, Observ'd in divers ages doth enforce Men to finde out so many Eccentrique parts, Such divers downe-right lines, such overthwarts, As disproportion that pure forme. It teares The Firmament in eight and fortie sheeres, And in those constellations there arise New starres, and old do vanish from our eyes: As though heav'n suffred earth-quakes, peace or war, When new Townes rise, and olde demolish'd are. (Anatomy, lines 253-62) As Frank Manley has observed of this passage, "In referring to the loss of old stars Donne has shifted his ground from the disproportion observable in the sky to the disproportion projected upon it by the confused notions of the astronomers."24 Like the old, the new science thus becomes a play of wit, an act of imaginative imposition that vainly tries to "controule" and "net" the cosmos but instead contributes to a "Disformity of parts," a "disproportion [of] that pure forme." Having represented the world as an epistemological abattoir, Donne presents in his anatomy the poetic equivalent to such appropriative stargazing. The irony of the First Anniversaries conclusion, which modulates rather awkwardly to a more conventional elegiac closure,25 is the affinities it admits with the poem's violently dissective astronomers. Even as he excuses his presumption by comparing his elegiac and devotional "song" with Moses' divinely appointed "Office," Donne reveals in his language the violence of his cartographic lines: Such an opinion (in due measure) made Me this great Office boldly to invade. Nor could incomprehensiblenesse deterre Me, from thus trying to emprison her. Which when I saw that a strict grave could do, I saw not why verse might not doe so too. Verse hath a middle nature: heaven keepes soules, The grave keeps bodies, verse the fame enroules. (Anatomy, lines 467-74) Barbara Kiefer Lewalski remarks the paradox of this passage (only to dismiss it as witty levity): "The song ... intends praise and the preservation of Elizabeth Drury's fame in this world, even while it anatomizes and displays the world's rottenness."26 In fact the passage presents us with a distinction that collapses upon itself. The parenthetical "in due measure" is belied by a poetics that has arrogated the distorting and killing power of the grave; that has imprisoned its incomprehensible subject in what Donne, in The Funeral! Elegie, critically terms "Those

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Carkas verses" (line 14); that has participated in the same degenerate science lamented by the poem: "The art is lost, and correspondence too" (Anatomy, line 396). In a coda that ostensibly fixes the proportion and "measure" of his elegiac performance, Donne reveals the "Deformitee" Elizabeth Drury suffers in his own imagination. The Anatomy finally offers itself as evidence for its central ethical and esthetic claim: "She, after whom, what forme soe're we see, / Is discord, and rude incongruitee." Before turning to similar moments of professed "measure" and underlying immoderation in Spenser's epic, I briefly elaborate on the violent heresy that Donne's Anatomy both represents and performs, and suggest some of the consequences of indiscretion for a poet who imagines his audience as heretical. Clearly I assume some latitude in my equation of heresy with radical subjectivity, but I do so mindful that in post-Reformation England the notion of a heretical reader, interpreting not by institutional canons of legitimacy but by individual criteria, was often so equated. In fact Donne's trenchant comment on mental illnesses— pathologies Pollock finds explored and enacted in the Anatomy—employs the metaphor of a schism of one: "But, of the diseases of the mind there is no criterion, no canon, no rule, for our own taste and apprehension and interpretation should be the judge, and that is the disease itself."27 Donne's "new Philosophy," in which "every man alone thinkes he hath got / To be a Phoenix, and that there can bee / None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee" (Anatomy, lines 216-18), similarly turns upon the idea of interpretive solipsism (directed in this case toward a celestial text, but still refereed only by the self). And though this "new Philosophy" is inevitably historicized with reference to the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century astronomical discoveries that would seem to be among the poem's most explicit concerns, the threat of scientific heterodoxy figures a much more pervasive cultural anxiety in the England of Spenser and Donne. Writing seven years after the publication of Brahe's De Nova Stella (1573), for instance, Gabriel Harvey describes Cambridge University as disintegrated by a new philosophy that pays no respect to disciplines: All inquistive after Newes, newe Bookes, newe fashions, newe Lawes, newe Officers, and some after new Elements ... as of olde Bookes, so of auntient Vertue, Honestie, Fidelitie, Equitie, new Abridgements: every day freshe span newe Opinions: Heresie in Divinitie, in Philosophic, in Humanitie, in Manners, grounded much upon heresay: Doctors contemned: the Text knowen of moste, understood of fewe, magnified of all, practised of none.28 Harvey describes a universal interpretive energy that would complicate the pronouncements of Spenser no less than those of Donne. His image of a "magnified" text, "knowen of moste" but "understood of fewe," suggests the "violent enlargement" that Wendy Wall has characterized as a self-conscious aspect of late-sixteenth-century poetry, a preoccupation with exposure that responds to

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the changing communicative conditions and consequences of print technology.29 His depiction of an interdisciplinary heresy that has abridged not only "olde Bookes," but also familiar humanistic conceptions of "Vertue" and "Equitie," suggests the discourteous and misconstructing world that impinges upon The Faerie Queene and the Anatomy: not onely faults in inward parts, Corruptions in our braines, or in our harts, Poysoning the fountaines, whence our actions spring, Endanger us: but that if everything Be not done fitly'and in proportion, To satisfie wise, and good lookers on, (Since most men be such as most thinke they bee) They're lothsome too, by this Deformitee. For good, and well, must in our actions meete: Wicked is not much worse then indiscreet. Donne's contempt for the world succeeds Harvey's contempt for the academy: "Since most be such as most thinke they bee"—in a poem that has provided no examples of "wise, and good lookers on"—can only be read as a cynical confirmation of misanthropic skepticism. But how can one deliver epideictic in the same breath that utters corrosive contemptus mundi? How can the poet distinguish his own violent abridgements and disfiguring imagination30 from those of his unfit audience (in the Second Anniversarie, the "worthiest booke" of Elizabeth Drury has become a "worse edition" [lines 309,320])? How can the act of publication be much better than wickedly indiscreet when the medium and foundation of heresy is hearsay, when the epistemological and consequential infection is shared by author and reader ("our braines," "our harts," "our actions")? Such questions lie beneath fascinating authorial dramas in which Renaissance poets seek to define themselves as priests, not as prurient and dismembering savages; as types of Orpheus, not as associates of the Bacchantes. This drama of self-definition, however, coextends with the possibility of a more fearsome metamorphosis: when the Renaissance poet's self-legitimizing identification with the music of natural and social order is disturbed—when he finds in his craft not an embattled and solitary verbal harmony but the sticks and stones that victimize others—the self threatens to collapse upon the predatory world around it.31 When mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the ceremony of innocence that survives ceases to convince. In Donne's Holy Sonnets, perhaps the most obvious stage for this drama, the rhetoric of erotic violence competes with sanctified devotionalism for the poet's pen and our attention. The Communion of the Church, in "Show me deare Christ," threatens to become a communal rape perpetrated by "adventuring Knights":

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Betray kind husband thy spouse to our sights, And let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove, Who is most trew, and pleasing to thee, then When she'is embrac'd and open to most men. (lines 11-14) We have here the rhetorical inverse of a poem such as "Epithalamion made at Lincolnes Inne," where a literalized sacrifice disturbs the quotidian facts of sex, where familiar liturgies estrange each other—reminding us of the potential violence of truly'knowing' a sacrament (paschal or matrimonial):32 And at the Bridegroomes wished approach doth lye, Like an appointed lambe, when tenderly The priest comes on his knees t'embowell her. (lines 88-90) In "Show me deare Christ," Donne's provocative association of disclosure with betrayal relies upon such a violent and profane caesura, and upon the doubleedged possibilities explored in the Anatomy, where the violation of satirical exposure complicates the strategies of encomiastic display: if the Church is to be opened up to the same "most men" surveyed in the elegy, she will be betrayed indeed. While this holy poem attempts to define a fit spectatorship for its imperative "Betray," moreover, its geographical and theological distinctions provide little assurance of a gentle reception anywhere: What! is it she, which on the other shore Goes richly painted? or which rob'd and tore Laments and mournes in Germany and here? (lines 2—4) Have England's Protestants and Germany's Lutherans provided a less hostile world than Rome? Can Donne's courting "amorous soule" be distinguished—in a poem that prays for publicity—from the social energies that have left its subject "rob'd and tore"? Can the poet fashion himself into an innocent priest when his subject is necessarily betrayed by language, exposed to the dubious "sights" of his audience? With such questions in mind, I turn to Serena's beastly reception in The Faerie Queene. NAMING THE BEAST It is never safe to wander or rest in Spenser's epic, even (especially) in its legend "Of Covrtesie." In book 6, still suffering rankling wounds got through error, Serena makes the mistake of seeking Morpheus's bosom. The "wylde deserts" in which

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she alights are inhabited by a "saluage nation" that subsists on the labor and flesh of those who come too near its amorphous "border," a boundary improvised upon the opportunities of preying: So round about her they them selues did place Vpon the grasse, and diuersely dispose, As each thought best to spend the lingring space. Some with their eyes the daintest morsels chose; Some praise her paps, some praise her lips and nose; Some whet their kniues, and strip their elboes bare: The Priest him selfe a garland doth compose Of finest flowers, and with full busie care His bloudy vessels wash; and holy fire prepare.33 The allegory concentrated in this stanza, and developed throughout the scene in which the savages intend to make a "common feast" of Serena, has recently been treated as ecclesiastical satire in which preying represents a perverse praying and unholy Communion. Observing the rhetoric with which Protestants such as Reginald Scot and Huldreich Zwingli likened the doctrine of the Real Presence to anthropophagy, James Nohrnberg suggests that Spenser's scene can be read as a critical representation of the Roman Catholic Mass.34 In a subsequent article, however, Kenneth Borris persuasively argues that Serena's episode in this canto allegorizes the extreme liturgies of radical Protestantism.35 Marshalling contemporary controversialist rhetoric that compared Puritans with cannibals, Borris claims that Spenser's theological politics had shifted, by book 6, from the strident anti-Catholicism of book 1 to the fashionable anti-Puritan satire of 1596. Serena, in this reading, figures a vulnerably languid Church of England threatened by the zealous schism of bare-elbowed reformers.36 The possibilities opened up by such ecclesiastical interpretations are important for my own analysis, but Spenser's savages—like his Blatant Beast—are hard to capture with any single chain of exegesis, however long and tight the reasoning. If, for instance, we infer from Ben Jonson's identification of the Blatant Beast with Puritanism that the radical reformers are Spenser's only religious target in book 6,37 we construct a rather artificial division between this book and book 5, where the "sinfull sacrifice" and idolatrous "altar" in Gerioneo's chapel clearly represent the Catholic liturgy (5.10.28-29); and if the episode of Serena's near sacrifice upon the cannibals' altar represents a narrowly focused satire of Puritanism, Borris's conclusion appears problematic to say the least: Whether Spenser's religious affinities can best be described as Puritan or Anglican has been often disputed; but, whatever his earlier sympathies, Spenser totally rejects Puritanism and the whole radical Reformation in

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Book VI. When the Blatant Beast attacks "the sacred Church," Spenser finds "Images" "goodly" and monastic vows "holy," in full conservative reaction against felt Protestant excesses (VI.xii.24-25). The Beast's befouling of "Altars" and robbery of "the Chancell" further evidence Spenser's religious conservativism, because Puritans objected to altars and chancels, and even to favourable use of the term "altar."38 The cannibals, of course, do not hesitate to erect and decorate an altar (6.8.44); nor do they refrain from the idolatrous and sacrificial liturgies with which Spenser associates Catholicism in book 5. In fact, the difficulty of assigning a specific doctrinal position to the allegory of book 6 confronts the reader of many coeval satires that touch upon theology. An intriguingly apposite case appears in "The Lie," a poem that has been attributed to atheists and radical Puritan reformers—though more generally and convincingly judged the heterodox work of Walter Ralegh. If written by Spenser's patron, and if composed (as most scholars agree) in the mid-i59os,39 "The Lie" presents a startling example of the ambiguous versatility of satirical paradigms in late-sixteenth-century England. For in this poem the anarchic and calumnious spirit of the Blatant Beast has been transfused into the virtuously defiant "soul" of the morally outraged speaker. Like Spenser's neological monster, the maw invoked by this poem is a blatant or "blabbing" one,40 respecting the sanctity of neither court nor church: Say to the Court it glowes, and shines like rotten wood, Say to the Church it showes whats good, and doth no good. If Church and Court reply, then giue them both the lie. ("The Lie," lines 7-12) Spenser's Beast spares "Ne Kesars... nor Kings," blotting lovers and leaders alike with "infamie" (6.12.28) and biting even the poet's back with his "venemous despite" (6.12.41); "The Lie" extends to "Potentates" and "men of high condition" (lines 13,19), exposing all love as lust and all arts as unsound. So convincingly does the speaker of "The Lie" play the part of the Blatant Beast in his own peripatetic pasquinade that one censorious contemporary calls the poem the "Ages monster."41 Unlike the author of "The Lie," of course, Spenser in the sixth book of The Faerie Queene is at pains to distinguish himself from the invasive slander of an entirely unbridled satire: his Blatant Beast may in part represent the dangerously tumultuous satire that would cause parliamentary and episcopal authorities to shut down England's busy broadside industry in the last years of the sixteenth

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century.42 If Spenser's portrayal of the Beast constitutes a "full conservative reaction," then, it would seem to take the form of a general caricature of the uncourtly beastliness that threatens to leave neither religious nor political subjects sacred during this period. But Spenser is not always as far from the speaker of "The Lie" as this juxtaposition might suggest, nor is his attitude toward the Beast's wide-ranging rampage always as obvious as Borris claims. In the proem to book 6, for instance, Spenser gives the lie to a hypocritical court; and the church "Images" the Beast casts to the ground in 6.12 are described by the narrator not simply as "goodly," but of "goodly hew," leaving the reader to wonder if theirs is merely the sheen of "rotten wood"—showing "whats good," perhaps, but doing "no good." In his search for doctrinal tidiness, Borris also overlooks the fact that the Beast in 6.12 follows the narrator's tracks through Gerioneo's chapel. Perhaps only a beast can enact satire in the Legend of Courtesy, but the narrator does not refrain entirely from an opportunistic hint at the monster's discoveries in the "Monastere": "Into their cloysters now he broken had, / ... And searched all their eels and secrets neare; / In which what filth and ordure did appeare, / Were yrkesome to report" (6.12.24). We remember that the Beast annoys the guilty as well as the innocent, "Albe they worthy blame, or cleare of crime" (6.12.40). Reading Spenser's Blatant Beast alongside "The Lie" is salutary for several reasons: it reminds us that the satire of the period was often concerned less with defining religious orthodoxy than with exploding pervasive cultural enormities, and that the Cankered Muse could muddle doctrinal issues to such an extent that even a strong attribution of "The Lie" to Ralegh (who by all accounts despised the Puritans) must concede "that the poem could have been written by a Puritan";43 it reminds us, too, that such broad satire could itself assume a generically monstrous pose, and that Spenser's apparently obvious self-differentiation from the "Ages monster" in book 6 is in fact complicated by some subtle affinities. And it reminds us, perhaps most importantly, that any satire enacted by this book functions antithetically to the nominal topic of the book: echoing Sidney's description of the poet's ethical and political function, Francis Bacon advised the would-be courtier that "a habit of secrecie is both political and moral"; satirists, observed George Puttenham, are "spiers out of all secret faults" who flourish by publishing the private.44 We have seen in Donne's Anatomy the disharmonious union of satire and encomium: praising Elizabeth Drury before the world becomes a morally dubious enterprise for the very reason that the poem defines its audience—the world—as violently misinterpretive; having discovered his audience as inherently monstrous, however, Donne recognizes the possibility that any public speech-act can have violent consequences. "For good, and well, must in our actions meete: Wicked is not much worse then indiscreet": the physics of satire and anatomy have rendered discourteous the poetry of praise.

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Shortly we shall consider Spenser's meditation on the intrinsic problems of praising discreetly in book 6—problems crystallized in the cannibals' killing "praise" of Serena, problems figured as well by Calidore and Colin. But in the criticism of Spenser's essay on courtesy, it should be noted that the palpable satire to which scholars such as Borris respond is itself at odds with the virtue explored by the book, a virtue threatened by "spiers out" and maintained by those who make "an habit of secrecy." Keeping in mind the allegorical satire that Borris detects in book 6, we must also remember that this important and complex aspect of the poem puts the poet in a difficult position. To be satirical, as Puttenham, Ralegh, and Donne remind us, is to be blatant. But if the imagined audience of one's satire consists of heretics, of textual takers, praise itself can transform into violent exposure. We have seen Skelton in a similar dilemma. Though the theological world figured in the 1596 installment of The Faerie Queene—like the world in which it appeared—is in many respects more blurred than the dichotomies tendentiously assumed in the Replycacion, Spenser, like Skelton, seems responsive to the atmosphere of interpretive carnival permeating so much Reformation controversy. As for Skelton, moreover, Spenser's authorial drama involves both the rejection of this carnival and the recognition that the poet is necessarily implicated in its rites. The surprising moment of analogy that briefly joins Beast and narrator in the monastery points to a recurrent episode in Book 6: the collapse of carefully constructed boundaries between the predator and the poet. Such fusion, the focus of this chapter, appears with unmistakable literality in the scene of Serena's near sacrifice among the cannibals; and it is toward the poetic coordinates of this scene that Borris's thesis should be aligned. If the cannibals' intended sacrifice represents the energies and anxieties attending the Reformation, such religious allegory frames and amplifies a violence that is also a primitively poetic act. Before interpreting the encomiastic savages and their self-laureating priest as satirized alterities, then, we should consider the extent to which Serena's victimization is for Spenser a self-reflexively poetic one. The fifth book of Spenser's epic concludes with a reformation that has, if anything, not gone far enough; and we may hear echoes of Skelton's "God of his miseracyon / Send better reformacyon" in the regretful narration of Artegall's premature departure from Irenae's "ragged common-weale" "ere he could reforme it thoroughly" (5.12.26-27). Primarily, of course, Artegall's imperfect reformation has redressed social injustice. But into the void left by his return to Faerie Court rush Skelton's figures of poetic and scriptural heresy—agents of a predatory hermeneutics who revel in textual carnage. Accompanying Envy—who feeds on others' injuries "like one vnto a banquet bid" (5.12.32), and whose mouth inscribes her victims with a "marke" that is "long ... to be read" (5.12.39)—is Detraction, who exists "to misconstrue of a man's intent," and whose joy is "to publish" her corrupt

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readings "to many" (5.12.34-35). The Blatant Beast enters the poem as the conscripted pet of these two furies, but we may note in passing that this creature (who receives more than one genealogy in the epic)45 first appears to be the progeny of a beast with two backs, begotten by the perverse copulation of Envy and Detraction: These two now had themselues combynd in one, And linckt together gainst Sir Artegall... Besides vnto themselues they gotten had A monster, which the Blatant beast men call... (5-12.37) Such is at least the figurative genesis of the "open mouth" that marauds through book 6—first, injuring Serena with a rankling wound that becomes "inwardly vnsound" (4.16); second, defiling church and clergy with "the tract" (a phrase with alimentary and literary associations) "of his outragious spoile" (6.12.22); and third, biting the hand that made him as he "raungeth through the world againe" with all the unconstrained social energy of the "Ages monster": "Ne spareth he the gentle Poets rime, / But rends without regard of person or of time" (6.12.40). It was the fear of "gealous opinions and misconstructions" that motivated Spenser to discover, in his Letter to Ralegh, "the general intention & meaning" of his allegory, "which in the whole course thereof I haue fashioned, without expressing of any particular purposes or by accidents therein occasioned." The author who realized in this letter "how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed," and who sought safety from invidious misconstruction by moving his poem into a past "furthest from the daunger of enuy, and suspition of present time," complains in the final stanza of book 6 that he is still being misread by the wicked and misrepresented before the great. Thus summarized, this book would seem neatly to catalogue the poet among the victims of a world "runne quite out of square" and growing "daily wourse and wourse" (5.Proem.1).46 We could in fact conclude with a generalization of Borris's argument: the bestial and cannibalistic energies that victimize both Serena and "the sacred Church" in a parody of the radical reformation take a secular and diffuse form in the perverse interpretive community that jeapordizes all communication in the poem: "the malice of evill mouths, which are alwaies wide open to carpe at and misconstrue my simple meaning."47 But complications appear as soon as we interrogate Spenser's victimized pose with the questions we have asked of Skelton. What does it mean, for instance, that book 6 concludes with an ambiguous negotiation with this misinterpreting world, with an emphasis on duke (divorced of utile) that seems to echo Skelton's problematic "Rien que playsere"?48

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Therefore do you my rimes keep better measure, And seeke to please, that now is counted wisemens threasure. (6.12.41) What does it mean that this stanza's protestations of innocence toward the "mighty Peres displeasure" are undercut with the admission that the poet's "rimes" have in fact been out of "measure"; and that Spenser has repeatedly repented the licentious "faults" of his "looser rimes" and "lewd layes"—not only to William Burghley, The Faerie Queene's highest placed negative critic, but also to friends and patrons such as the countesses of Cumberland and Warwick?49 Even the cannibals, after all, are held in "measure" by an authority who restricts their appetite with cultural ceremony; from him they learn to locate their "sacred threasure" in the act of pleasing the gods with sacrifice (6.8.43). Like the Blatant Beast—whose bite causes Serena to depart "her fraile mansion of mortality" (6.3.28), and whose shaming afterimage has her flinchingly "afeard / Of villany to be to her inferd" several cantos later (6.8.31)—the cannibals bring her to the point of "Being alreadie dead" with apprehension (6.8.45), a mortification that lingers in the "inward shame" with which she leaves the poem (6.8.51). Clearly there is a strong analogical relation between both episodes of victimization; and it would seem equally clear that this relation suggests a typology whereby the Beast's broad cultural ruination receives a local habitation and a name in the cannibals' religio. Again, though, Spenser's religious affinities prove most elusive when most apparently obvious. Why, for instance, do the monotheistic cannibals who prepare Serena as a sacrifice "Vnto their God" (6.8.38) become, five stanzas later, sacerdotalists vowing obedience "to the gods"? This shift, ignored by Borris, might further complicate his argument—since from the Protestant point of view, it was the Catholics who risked polytheism in their iconic worship of the saints. Donne reminds us that this view was not restricted to the Puritans: Here in a place, where mis-devotion frames A thousand praiers to saints, whose very names The ancient Church knew not, Heaven knowes not yet, And where, what lawes of poetry admit, Lawes of religion, have at least the same, Immortall Maid, I might invoque thy name. Could any Saint provoke that appetite, Thou here shouldst make mee a french convertite. (The Second Anniversarie, lines 511-18) Coinciding with the marked if less than determinate ecclesiastical allegory that distinguishes the cannibals from the Beast, however, is a distinction that can be made with greater certainty: if the Beast represents the kind of slanderous and satirical pamphleteering from which Spenser studiously distances himself through-

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out his career,50 the cannibals who bestow upon Serena a murderous "praise"— and who deck their sacrifice with "flowres" (6.8.39, 40)—mix their religion with the poetical tools of Spenser's trade.51 As in The Second Anniversarie, "lawes of religion" and "lawes of poetry" blur in an act of "mis-devotion." In the scene of the cannibals' congregation around Serena, the Beast's spoliating energies have been ritualized not only by a liturgy but also by the cadences of a specifically erotic encomium ("Some praise her paps, some praise her lips and nose"). Near the end of this chapter, we will see how Spenser's poetic selfconsciousness in this scene coextends with the topicality of his representation of Serena, a recognizable figure he could hardly expect to be "furthest from the daunger of enuy, and suspition of present time"; when read alongside the disclaiming Letter to Ralegh, in fact, this scene presents the kind of transparently "coded" commentary—the deniable transgression—that Annabel Patterson has associated with communication that would otherwise be censored.52 But first we should consider how the expressly poetic aspects of this scene implicate the poet in a ceremony no less violent for its ritualism, and why the language of the Elizabethan love lyric should resonate so clearly in Spenser's dramatization of a cannibalism converted to sacrifice, of a predatory desire passed off as pious devotion. STEALING AND REVEALING Book 6 has long been read as a general portrait of the moral turpitude of perverted love, and the specific questions I ask of Serena's fate in this book have been in part anticipated by Donald Cheney's argument that the savages represent a Petrarchism run amok. Cheney's broad point, that the savages bring to the surface both the latent primitivism and the idolatrous tendencies of the Elizabethan erotic lyric, seems to me an incisive one. With his conclusion that the scene of Serena's near sacrifice presents a simple and localized warning against excessive poetic praise, which becomes more moderate in the ideal glorifications of Pastorella (6.9) and the poet's lady (6.10), however, I agree less.53 Put very simply, the image of the self-laureating priest is less easily contained, for the epicist, than Cheney's reading suggests; and the violence of this scene problematizes, rather than validates, Spenser's excursions into pastoral as it complicates his meditation on proper courtesy. Serena wakes as the host of a voracious congregation, and for three stanzas it seems as though her body—which provides its own "Altar" (6.8.42)—will suffer the same fate as did her clothes: "The which amongst them they in peeces teare, / And of the pray each one a part doth beare" (6.8.41). The irony into which Serena awakens is that of a guest only belatedly conscious of her provisional status, for the cannibals have decided "to let her / Sleepe out her fill" (6.8.38-39) while with their eyes they begin an imaginative banquet. Since C. S. Lewis, critics have

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found an analogous irony in the hero's encounter with the Lestrigoni in Orlando Innamorato: "Now the count heard one of them whispering to another:—He's nice and fat.—and the other replied:—I don't know; once I see him roasted, or for that matter when I have a taste of him, I'll know better whether I'll want a full helping.—Orlando wasn't paying attention to this conversation.... "54 At this point we can only ask if a similar irony might have presented itself, in 1596, to the author and addressees of the final dedicatory sonnet to The Faerie Queene, "To All The Gratious and Beautifull Ladies in the Court": The Chian Peincter, when he was requirde To pourtraict Venus in her perfect hew, To make his worke more absolute, desird Of all the fairest Maides to haue the vew. Much more me needs to draw the semblant trew, Of beauties Queene, the worlds sole wonderment, To sharpe my sence with sundry Beauties vew, And stealefrom each some part of ornament. If all the world to seeke I ouerwent, A fairer crew yet no where could I see, Then that braue court doth to mine eie present, That the worlds pride seemes gathered there to bee, Of each a part I stole by cunning thefte: Forgiue it mefaire Dames, sith lesseye haue not lefte. Before taking at face value the apology of the final line here, we should consider for a moment the "cunning thefte" revealed in this poem. The reference to the painter from Chios, who assembled the features of various courtesans into the perfect image of the court lady, is somewhat misleading: Apelles, as Spenser makes even more clear in a subsequent reference (4.5.12), depended upon posing models for his montage. In a disclosure suggestive of the false focal point of certain forms of Renaissance portraiture,55 however, the author of The Faerie Queene admits that while he has seemed to gaze upon his nominal subject at the center of court his eyes have actually been bearing away "parts" from unwitting beauties that happen into his view. Like Serena and Orlando, these women have been the subject of cannibalistic discourse—a gourmandizing that is in this case poetic connoisseurship—without knowing it. In a sonnet that serves both as courtly compliment and wake-up call, Spenser alerts the handmaids of the Faerie Queen that his composition consists of their dismembered bodies. Though "To All the Gratious and Beautifull Ladies in the Court" had appeared in 1590, its republication six years later situated it in a significantly expanded historical and literary context. In the 1596 publication of the six-book poem, Spenser's letter to Ralegh—emphasizing The Faerie Queene's ethical exemplar-

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ity and defending the poem against misconstruction—is not reprinted, as if tensions between ethics and text had resulted in a kind of architectural breakdown.56 The absence of this letter, if read as a retraction, changes the resonance of the sonnet's disclaimer. Indeed the ironic etymology Spenser provides for the topic of his 1596 installment's final book—"Of Court it seems, men Courtesie doe call" (6.1.1)—returns us to the scene of this sonnet's crime.57 Certainly the proem to book 6 expresses skepticism toward this venue, portraying it as a glass of "forgerie, / Fashion'd to please the eies of them, that pas." And Spenser suggests a radical alternative to theatrical courtiership when he states, in anticipation of Hamlet's distinction between "seems" and "that within," that "vertues seat is deepe within the mynde, / And not in outward shows, but inward thoughts defynd" (6.Proem.5). But even here the idea of courtesy is remanded to the "patterne" and "mirrour" of Elizabeth and her "Court, where courtesies excell" (6.Proem.6-7); this proem may introduce a " [re] defyned" virtue resident in "inward thoughts," but such courteous inwardness cannot exist apart from the public and theatrical epistemology of the court critically described in Donne's Second Anniversarie: Are there not some Courts, (And then, no things bee So like as Courts) which, in this let us see, That wits and tongues of Libellars are weake, Because they doe more ill, then these can speak? The poyson'is gone through a l l . . . (lines 331-35) Theresa M. Krier has observed that for Spenser the question of "How to show hiddenness without violating it and turning it into display becomes [in The Faerie Queene] an ethical issue and... a representative problem."58 And Richard Rambuss offers an important coordinate to the Chian painter's awkward position in his discussion of the problematic conclusion of Mother Hubberds Tale, published between The Faerie Queene's installments: Even Mercury, eventually sent by Jove to impose order in the animal kingdom and depose the "impostors," too closely resembles them to secure the impression at the end of the poem that the court has been wholly purged of what they represent. For like the Fox and the Ape, Mercury is characterized by his "cunning theeueries" [Mother Hubberds Tale, line 1287], by his skill at altering his shape [lines 1266,1289-90], and of course—being the god of secrecy, Hermes—by his ability to pry "into each secrete part" [line 1303].59 Like the mercurial pose of the satirist, a "spier out of all ... secret faults," the shape-shifting guise of the Chian painter collapses the distinction between poet and beast. For Spenser, the admittedly voyeuristic thief of others' parts, the re-

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peated violations of privacy that constitute the action of The Faerie Queene 6 would thus seem to represent a dilative exploration of the problem set forth in the book's proem: how can one bear witness to courtesy in a poetics of praise without also exposing it in a discourteous act of display? How can the published poet's appreciation of an inward virtue escape the strategies of espionage through which secrets are rendered public property? If the court itself threatens a slander more consequential than the libelous world around it, to what court can the poet innocently appeal? Observing that book 6 is "the only one in the entire epic that lacks a suitable allegorical representative for Elizabeth in its fiction," Rambuss has argued that the tensions introduced in the proem are resolved in a recession from the court, "from the realm of public conduct in the direction of a secret, interior condition."60 In his reading, this movement toward interiority peaks on Mt. Acidale, where the proem's promised image of Elizabethan concentricity ("Right so from you all goodly vertues well / Into the rest, which round about you ring" [6.Proem.7]) yields instead the scene of Colin Clout's lady dancing within "a ring most richly well enchaced" by three Graces, themselves surrounded by "An hundred naked maidens lilly white, / All raunged in a ring" (6.10.11-12).61 This pastoral substitution does indeed seem to signal a truancy from court: Colin in fact admits the digression from epic that has foregrounded his "countrey lasse" at the Faery Queen's epideictic expense (6.10.28), a nervous apology that recalls similar moments in the Amoretti where Spenser enjoys a lyric otium at The Faerie Queene's expense.62 And the relation between Colin and his mistress ("she to whom that shepheard pypt alone" [6.10.15]) resembles the exclusivity sought of Elizabeth Boyle in the Amoretti; and of Rosalind elsewhere in Spenser's poetry.63 But the "pleasant mew" that is Spenser's image of a safe and private retreat into lyric (Amoretti So, line 9) becomes, in his epic, an embattled pastoral vision similar to Prospero's masque—not only surrounded by a world in which beasts and brigands walk at large, but also gazed upon by a courtier in shepherd's clothing. It is unnecessary to quarrel with the rather inevitable reading of Colin ("who knowes not Colin CloutV} as a representative of Spenser's lyric self on Mt. Acidale: the dance that he orchestrates, protected from "all noysome things" and embowered by woods that answer with a ringing "Eccho" (6.10.7, 10), could appear in the Epithalamion. It is crucial, however, to recognize that in this passage Spenser dramatizes an interview between such lyric self-presentation and what we might call his public pose.64 If Colin, in what Harry Berger has termed "a digression from a digression,"65 figures a strikingly anachronistic version of this former self, Calidore figures the "Chian Peincter" of Venus's court, "Beholding all, yet of them vnespyde" (6.10.11). Before treating Acidale as a complete escape from the court, we should recall that the Graces and naked "Damzels" of Venus are similarly gazed upon from behind the easel in "To All the Beautifull Ladies in the Court." The onlooking outsider who threatens the private intercourse of the

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Amoretti and Epithalamion continues to define and impinge upon the boundaries of Acidale; but here he does so in a guise resembling the epic poet's. "But why when I them saw, fled they away from me?" (6.10.19): the grammar of Calidore's plaintive question to Colin may betray some discomfort with the facts of the preceding stanzas, in which the ladies flee the voyeur when they see him; and perhaps the faint skepticisim in Colin's reply, "Then wote thou shepheard, whatsoever thou bee" (6.10.21), suggests a hypocrisy beyond Calidore's borrowed weeds. Spenserians, at any rate, have found it difficult to take at face value Calidore's protestations of innocence in this episode, and in his earlier intrusion upon the covert "solace" of Serena and Calepine (6.3.20-22).66 And while Krier offers a salutary corrective to the complete suspicion that can obscure Calidore's acts of genuine courtesy, she nevertheless fails to interrogate the signaled envy with which he beholds the Acidalean pageant.67 Viewing Serena's dainty parts with "loose lasciuious sight" and "craftie spyes," the cannibals become solipsistic in their "lustfull fantasyes": "Each wisheth to him selfe, and to the rest enuyes" (6.8.41). We cannot know for certain whether Serena has earlier enjoyed true protection "from enuious eyes" in her dalliance with Calepine (6.3.20). But on Acidale Calidore becomes a civilized microcosm of the cannibals as he beholds the naked ladies: "There he did see, that pleased much his sight, / That euen he him selfe his eyes enuyde" (6.10.11). Nor is Calidore's defense without incriminating echoes. Indeed the "fortune" he invokes to exculpate his intrusions upon Serena and Calepine (6.3.21), and upon Colin and the ladies of Venus (6.10.20), resembles the "fortune blynde" that graciously provides the cannibals with their prey (6.8.36). Even the chastening exchange between Colin and Calidore, through which the latter realizes he has "rashly sought that, which I mote not see" (6.10.29), recalls the priest's (and narrator's) rebuke of the cannibals for prophaning "sacred threasure" with "common eyes" (6.8.43). "But why when I them saw, fled they away from me?": the question rings with the same poignancy, with much the same bewilderment, that marks Thomas Wyatt's comment on changed subject relations—"They fle from me that sometyme did me seke." Krier is right to remind us that Calidore learns from his encounter with Colin on Acidale;68 as a juxtaposition of two modes of poetic selfpresentation, however, this encounter illustrates not moral progress but the almost elegiac loss of a former innocence. Willing to "put theimself in daunger" at Colin's hand,69 the Graces vanish before the advancing interloper, leaving not a rack behind. Calidore's desire "to know" through autopsy never finds complete satisfaction on Acidale; as in Wyatt's poem, the rules of the game seem to have changed in the space between Colin and Calidore, and accustomed poetic subjects have new motive to flee the latter's courtly gaze. It says much of book 6, and much of the poetics in which this invasive shepherd-courtier is somehow implicated, that—as we watch him feeding his "greedy fancy" on Colin's words—we take some comfort in Calidore's inability to "restore" this fugitive vision (6.10.20).

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Even as we observe Calidore's implication in the predatory poetics illustrated so graphically elsewhere in book 6, we must acknowledge the manners and social graces that seem to distinguish his intrusions upon privacy from the more violent violations carried out by the cannibals, the Blatant Beast, and the brigands. Indeed, situating Calidore in the complex allegory of courtesy represents one of the more difficult interpretive challenges in this book. Should the reader find him guilty by association with these more obviously discourteous figures? There is a continuum, after all, between the courtier gone native and the courtly savages; and Rambuss has suggestively described the relation between Calidore and the Beast not as adversarial, but as catalytic: It is significant, then, that the Blatant Beast makes its initial appearance in the Legend of Courtesy only after Calidore himself has first intruded upon Serena and Calepine's secret lovemaking in the glade. The Blatant Beast is soon to follow—as though it were the knight's originary violation of a private space that has created an opening for the monster's disruptive entrance into the narrative... Calidore and the Blatant Beast thus appear to be nearly inseparable: where there is one, the other is sure to follow. And rather than containing the monster, Calidore appears to be disseminating its destructive energies in every corner of Faery Land.70 But Spenser never lets us forget that Calidore's nature is essentially opposed to the bestial and rude; as even a skeptic toward Calidore's behavior observes, Spenser's character is no more ambiguous than the virtue with which book 6 is concerned: Calidore—the extraordinarily gifted man who combines graciousness with the physical prowess necessary to impose his standards of behavior on others—is an appropriate arbiter in a society which at least pays lip service to those standards; he is a fitting champion of courtesy against its ultimate opponents.71 Again, however, we confront an interpretive problem, a distinction that collapses the moment we rely upon it too heavily: even the cannibals say grace (6.8.37).72 In fact the difficulties we encounter in such attempts to discriminate between the savages and Calidore—a figure wandering between ceremonial courtesy and effective discourtesy—cannot be resolved entirely by the reader because they are not entirely resolved by the poem. This analogical irresolution is Spenser's point; but to bring this point into some kind of focus, we must coordinate it with his meditation, throughout book 6, of the public poet's similarly bleared implication in the hostile world from which he would differentiate himself. A paradigmatic moment in Spenser's Legend of Courtesy—a recurrent moment in Spenser's struggle, throughout his literary career, to define a virtuous poetics by exorcising the bestial—appears in the preparations for Serena's sacrifice, where the cannibals get religion:

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Those daintie parts, the dearlings of delight, Which mote not be prophan'd of common eyes, Those villeins vew'd with loose lasciuious sight, And closely tempted with their craftie spyes; And some of them gan mongst themselues diuize, Thereof by force to take their beastly pleasure. But them the Priest rebuking, did aduize To dare not to pollute so sacred threasure, Vow'd to the gods: religion held euen theeues in measure. (6.8.43) John Upton's rather startling eighteenth-century gloss on this allusive passage, a comment that "our truly theistical and Christian Poet exclaims 'Tantum religio potuit suadere bonorum,'" has been moderated by Cheney: "The 'temperance' to which their religion enjoins them is clearly of scant consolation to Serena; there is no substantial difference between the 'beastly pleasure' of the savages and that of their hungry gods.... Spenser's echo of Lucretius' description of the sacrifice of Iphigenia confirms rather than refutes the Roman's argument."73 Yet Upton's instinct to view the cannibals' religio as redemptive of an otherwise carnal appetite seems to find sanction elsewhere in Spenser's poetry. In Amoretti 77, for instance, the poet's lady—like Serena described as the eroticized banquet table of the Song of Songs74—provides food for thought: Was it a dreame, or did I see it playne, A goodly table of pure yvory: All spred with juncats, fit to entertayne The greatest Prince with pompous roialty. Mongst which there in a silver dish did ly Twoo golden apples of unvalewd price: Far passing those which Hercules came by, Or those which Atalanta did entice: Exceeding sweet, yet voyd of sinfull vice, That many sought yet none could ever taste, Sweet fruit of pleasure brought from paradice By love himselfe and in his garden plaste. Her brest that table was, so richly spredd, My thoughts the guests, which would thereon have fedd. Like Serena among the cannibals, the poet's beloved becomes the hostess of a whetted imagination. And like Serena in the gustative eyes of her beholders, this lady is conceived as manna from heaven, not as forbidden fruit.75 "Yet voyd of sinfull vice": we may hear in this qualification an echo of Skelton's "And yet there was no vyce"; we certainly hear in it the anxiety over a prodigal

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delight sans instruction that Richard Helgerson has described as Spenser's laureate burden.76 It is as an emblem of such anxiety that the savage priest becomes most like a neoplatonic poet, cleansing his instruments of corporal residue with purgative ardor: The Priest him selfe a garland doth compose Of finest flowers, and with full busie care His bloudy vessels wash, and holy fire prepare. Ceremonial formalism, however, fails to contain the carnality of this transaction (or its final extrasyllabic line—"Vow'd to the gods: religion held euen theeues in measure"). Rather than confine to a single definitive act (such as the destruction of the Bower of Bliss)77 Spenser's self-reflexive struggle against the threateningly predatory and bestial, we must recognize that his too is the "full busie" and assiduous "care" of one who would have his garland without blood: "Let's be sacrificers," as Shakespeare's Brutus will untenably enjoin his fellow conspirators in the next chapter, "not butchers." We must also realize that this habitual self-ablution reveals, in book 6, some of the same indelibility encountered by Ruddymane in book 2, and by Lady Macbeth after she has become an accessory to murder. ORPHEUS AND THE THEATER OF HOSTILE WITNESS In Sonnet in Shakespeare laments a vocational "infection" that has marked him with a damned spot: The guilty goddess of my harmfull deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds: Thence comes it that my name receives a brand; And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. (lines 2-7) Not only is this plainant's name passively branded with the social stigma attached to popular drama; his hand also testifies to his participation in the "harmfull deeds" of this corrupting venue. As we shall see in chapter 3, the means and manners of the public theater elicit from Shakespeare metadramatic reflections upon the playwright's red-handed complicity with "what [he] works in"; and Serena's victimization by the "common eyes" of a congregated mob easily translates to the violence performed for and by Shakespeare's spectators. Indeed, there is a possibility that Spenser presents Serena's episode among the cannibals as an antitheatrical critique. The savages resemble groundlings as they "diuersely dispose" themselves "Vpon the grass" (6.8.39); and Serena is raised above them not

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only as an altar, but also as an actor upon a proscenium. As critics of the Renaissance stage portrayed its actors as social parasites who produced nothing, so does Spenser represent the cannibals as fed by the work of others (6.8.35; compare the brigands' predatory economy at 6.10.39). More suggestive is Spenser's description of the mobile vulgus that "round about her flocke[s], like many flies, / Whooping, and hallowing on euery part" (6.8.40), a near approximation of Michael Drayton's description of the terrible and tempting energies of public theater and its crowds: In pride of wit, when high desire of fame Gave life and courage to my lab'ring pen, And first the sound and virtue of my name Won grace and credit in the ears of men, With those the thronged theaters that press, I in the circuit for the laurel strove, Where the full praise, I freely must confess, In heat of blood a modest mind might move. With shouts and claps at every little pause, When the proud round on every side hath rung.78 We know that Spenser scrupulously resisted Gabriel Harvey's promptings to turn from epic to the "circuit" of this other generic career; and it is plausible that Spenser's laureate cannibal represents a satiric response to the increasingly successful dramatist of the 1590s—the "servant of the manie" mocked in The Teares of the Muses.79 But to read Serena as a victim only of the "loose lasciuious sight" that aroused so much antitheatrical anxiety in this period is to ignore the lyric aspect of the savages' blazonic praise. Rather than a narrowly focused condemnation of the theatrical economy from which Spenser is safely removed by his own more legitimate vocation, his portrayal of the cannibals and their priest—his garland composed of the "finest flowers" of poesie—represents an economy from which he is less easily sequestered: a lyric celebration on the verge of savage theater; a scopophilia blurring almost imperceptibly with participatory, hands-on sacrifice; a verse overflowing its measure and thereby engendering "loose affection."80 We remember from chapter 1 the weird fantasy of Gorboducs printer, in which a text violated by unauthorized publication returns "after long wandring ... whereby she caught her shame"; further hostile reception, we are told, will lead "the poore gentlewoman" to "play Lucreces part & of her self die for shame." If Serena is brought to the point of "being alreadie dead" through "inward shame" and fear "of villany to be to her inferd," does not this mortification result from a similarly coerced publication? In Serena, the trope of gendered text threatens to become a primitively textualized gender, a transformation that reveals the violently theatrical commerce that lyric poetry is often at pains to conceal.

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Etymologically and rhetorically, the poetry of praise that the cannibals take to dissective extremes evokes the theatron, where things are exposed to common view. The verbal root of panegyric roughly means "to convene a public meeting," while that of epideictic means "to show around"; and to engage in encomium is to participate in a komos, or "staged revel". In the Renaissance, however, this revealing nexus was frequently denied by poets who perceived an essential enmity between lyric and drama. The irresistible figure of self-identification—for those Renaissance poets concerned both with the threat of popular drama and with distinguishing their art from this degenerate influence—was Orpheus, whose dismemberment by the Thracian women could offer a euhemeristic account of lyric poetry's violent replacement by Dionysiac drama.81 In his reading of Milton's A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, for instance, Donald Bouchard perceives a "mythic antagonism" between Dionysus, "the god of crowds, of'the rout of Monsters,'" and Orpheus, "the harmonizer of misrule and undisciplined crowds."82 A self-conscious dramatization of the poetics of praise, Milton's Masque at once stages the earl of Bridgewater's family in a highly wrought encomium and represents the dangers to inward, continent virtue as the "barbarous dissonance" of Cornus and his rout.83 As in Lycidas, where elegist and elegized are aligned with an Orpheus victimized by "the rout that made the hideous roar," the Lady of the Masque adopts the embattled pose of the Lady of Cambridge as she threatens Comus with Orpheus's power:84 Yet should I try, the uncontrolled worth Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt spirits To such a flame of sacred vehemence, That dumb things would be moved to sympathize, And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and shake, Till all thy magic structures reared so high, Were shattered into heaps o'er thy false head. (Ludlow Masque, lines 792-98) The situational correspondences between Serena and Milton's Lady, who is finally rescued by a Spenserian character ("Which once of Meliboeus old I learnt"), are suggestive: both have been left by their male protectors; and both are held captive by a bacchant, theatrical mob led by a priest figure who perverts the poetry of praise into penetrative coercion. For both Spenser and Milton, moreover, this theatrical mob would seem to offer a clearly defined antithesis to the genuinely courteous regard for privacy and inward virtue with which the Masque and the sixth book of The Faerie Queene are concerned. Comus's "well placed words of glozing courtesy" specifically afford the power to intrude upon "the unpolluted temple of the mind," to "wind ... into the easy-hearted man" (Ludlow Masque, lines 161, 460,163); while the cannibals' disclothing and planned vivisection of Serena, an extreme version of Comus's "be not coy," renders absurd the agenda

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of such "gay rhetoric" (Ludlow Masque, line 789). If the Lady's "marble venomed seat" bears the glutinous evidence of a breached sexual and philosophical chastity (Ludlow Masque, lines 915-16), Serena's "inward shame of her vncomely case" reveals a similar collapse of mind-body dualism, a collapse effected by the cannibals' performative words and invasive gaze. For both Spenser and Milton, on the other hand, the Dionysiac energies of drama would seem to represent a threatening alternative to their own artistic values: if Comus's insinuating "power to cheat the eye with blear illusion" (Ludlow Masque, line 155) figures the hypocrisy Milton would deny in his own poetic tribute, for instance, it also reminds us of the genre Milton has chosen for his own patronage performance. Like Milton's Masque, the sixth book of Spenser's epic alludes to the "mythic antagonism" between Orpheus and Dionysus—between lyric and dramatic forms of poetic presentation—as it considers the violence of publishing the private.85 Even more strikingly than for Milton, however, Spenser's identification with Orpheus in this antagonism becomes complicated, in book 6, by his involvement in the poetics of display. Several fine studies have claimed convincingly that Orpheus's dismemberment at the hands of a debased and invidious community provides Spenser with an image for the interpretive contingencies surrounding his poetic self.86 And though he does not express his vocational anxieties in the explicitly generic terms that distinguish Jonson's Orphic antitheatricalism in chapter 3, Spenser nevertheless suggests—in his most extensive meditation on the contemporary decline of poetry—the victimization of the solitary voice of social and natural order by the Bacchantes of public drama. Significantly, The Teares of the Muses begins with reference to the death of Calliope's "Twinnes," a mythological revision that would seem to offer Spenser the necessary imaginative space for his claim to Orphean consanguinity.87 The refrain of this serial elegy is a distortion of the pleasant antiphony celebrated in the Epithalamion, where song is answered with a confirmatory echo that suggests Orpheus's lyric harmonizing of the stones and trees: For all their groves, which with the heavenly noyses Of their sweete instruments were wont to sound, And th' hollow hills, from which their silver voyces Were wont redoubled Echoes to rebound, Did now rebound with nought but ruefull cries, And yelling shrieks throwne up into the skies. (Teares, lines 19-24) A consequence of Spenser's disposition of the Muses' plaints in this poem, moreover, is an implied causal relation between the degeneration of drama and the general falling off of poetry.88 Only after Melpomene has lamented a world populated by men "without understanding," a world filled with "rufull spectacles"

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(lines 128,163); only after Thalia has bewailed a "Barbarisme" and "brutish Ignorance" that "in the mindes of men now tyrannize, / And the faire Scene with rudenes foule disguize" (lines 187-88,191-92); does Euterpe observe the ruination of pastoral that Spenser holds off by prayer in the twentieth stanza of the Epithalamion: Our pleasant groves, which planted were with paines, That with our musick wont so oft to ring, And arbors sweet, in which the Shepheards swaines Were wont so oft their Pastoralls to sing, They have cut downe and all their pleasaunce mard, That now no pastorall is to bee hard. In stead of them fowle Goblins and Shriekowles, With fearfull howling do all places fill; And feeble Eccho now laments and howles, The dreadfull accents of their outcries shrill. So all is turned into wilderness, Whilest ignorance the Muses doth oppresse. (lines 277-88) It was the "wilderness" of England's popular drama, according to Philip Sidney, that caused "her mother Poesy's honesty to be called into question."89 Spenser's Erato seems to suggest a similar contamination when she ascribes the defloration of "Sweete Love devoyd of villanie or ill, / But pure and spotles" to a "base-born brood" prone to "lewdness" and "riot" (lines 387-88,384,392,395). In such a world, the Muse of love poetry asserts, once sacrosanct generic conventions are vitiated by common use, and only one legitimate note remains to mark their passing: Now change the tenor of your joyous layes, With which ye use your loves to deifie, And blazon foorth an earthlie beauties praise, Above the compasse of the arched skie: Now change your praises into piteous cries, And Eulogies turne into Elegies. (lines 367-72)90 The last to elegize poetry's appropriation as public entertainment, Polyhymnia memorably represents the declension of rhetoric into babble as both an architectural event and a disfiguring rape: Heapes of huge words uphoorded hideously, With horrid sound though having little sence, They thinke to be chiefe praise of Poetry;

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And thereby wanting due intelligence, Have mard the face of goodly Poesie, And made a monster of their fantasie: Whilom in ages past none might professe But Princes and high Priests that secret skill, The sacred lawes therein they wont expresse, And with deepe Oracles their verses fill: Then was shee held in soveraigne dignitie, And made the noursling of Nobilitie. But now nor Prince nor Priest doth her maintayne, But suffer her prophaned to be Of the base vulgar, that with hands uncleane Dares to pollute her hidden mysterie. And treadeth under foote hir holie things, Which was the care of Kesars and of Kings. (lines 553-70) The Muses' tears flow for the entropic world represented in the sixth book of Spenser's epic, where a peripatetic monster spares "Ne Kesars ... nor Kings" as it paws through "cels and secrets neare" (6.12.28, 24); where harmonious sylvan echo is rent by shrieking bagpipes that make "the woods to tremble at the noyce" (6.8.46); where "inward thoughts" succumb to "outward shows" as even the most private pastoral vision—"in the couert of the wood," but "Simple and true from couert malice free" (6.10.11,24)—is subjected to hostile witness; where serene interlude yields to savage serenade, the venerated poetic subject to the grasping hands and "peoples voyce / Confused" (8.46) of public drama. If book 6 portrays this devolution with something of the generic antagonism suggested in The Teares of the Muses, however, it also complicates the mythological coordinates of this antagonism. For while we may find an etiolation of the Orpheus myth in Colin, whose Graces recede from view like Eurydice, we find in the cannibal priest a complete perversion of this figure: Polyhymnia's high priest, wont to fill verses "with deep Oracles" and "secret skill," has become in The Faerie Queene a Magus of the theater; no longer a victim of the maenads but their ringleader, this Orpheus metamorphosed presides over the "diuelish ceremonies" of Dionysian carnival as an agent of dismemberment (6.8.45). In its devilishness, the theatricalized poetry of praise he directs not only slanders (diaballein) but tears asunder (divellere).91 Such claims appear more credible when we consider the ambiguity with which Orpheus sometimes appears in Spenser's earlier poetry. When he turns from Orpheus's dismemberment by the Bacchantes to the fatal respect shown to Eurydice, in fact, Spenser indicts the archetypal poet for discourtesy; and the

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nature of Orpheus's transgression, a killing gaze, provides an important motif for the visual violence enacted throughout The Faerie Queene's sixth book. Indeed, attention to this aspect of Spenser's conception of Orpheus will help us understand that the Orphic avatars in book 6 represent not simply an injured poetry, but also an injuring poetry—embattled, perhaps, by the savage theater around it, but also implicated in this theater. The blame attached to Orpheus in Virgils Gnat (1579), exceeding that of the Culex and departing entirely from the sympathetic defense offered in the Georgics,92 startles most: And sad Eurydice thence now no more Must turne to life, but there detained bee, For looking back, being forbid before: Yet was the guilt thereof, Orpheus, in thee. Bold sure he was, and worthie spirit bore, That durst those lowest shadowes goe to see, And could believe that anie thing could please Fell Cerberus, or Stygian powres appease ... But cruell Orpheus, thou much crueller, Seeking to kisse her, brok'st the Gods decree, And thereby mad'st her ever damn'd to be. (lines 433-40, 470-72) In a poem later included in the Complaints volume with The Teares of the Muses and Virgils Gnat, but first published in the English translation of Jan van der Noot's A Theatre for Worldlings (1569), Spenser sees Eurydice through Orpheus's fatal eyes.93 This poem, which epigrammatizes the sixth vision in Petrarch's Rime 323, does not make explicit the culpable cruelty of Orpheus's gaze; but by translating Petrarch's "vid' io" as "did I spie," Spenser seems to intensify the causality already implied in the Canzoniere. Eurydice is no sooner spied than stung: Above the waste a darke cloude shrouded hir, A stinging Serpent by the heele hir caught, Wherewith she languisht as the gathered floure. (Epigram 6, lines 7-9) Serena's first appearance in Spenser's epic has suggested to some readers the figure of Proserpina.94 Spied by Calidore, however, and consequently "caught" by the Cerberus-mouthed and aspic-tongued Blatant Beast (6.3.23-24), Serena seems closer to the Eurydice Spenser imagines as victimized by his own Orphic gaze. Throughout book 6, in fact, Calidore plays Orpheus's part: it is his desire "to know," to allay his epistemological doubts with a forbidden interview, that causes the Acidalean vision to recede (6.10.17); and his rescue of Pastorella from the brigands' sunless netherworld suggests the Eurydice Redux nearly achieved by Or-

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pheus's katabasis. But Calidore's espial of Serena not only exposes her to the cur of Detraction, "that closely kils, / Or cruelly does wound" (5.12.36); it also prefigures the cannibalistic "craftie spyes" that render her "alreadie dead with fearefull fright" (6.8.43, 45)- In book 6, even the most courteous gaze can cooperate with the Blatant Beast and anticipate the glancing murder enacted by the savages in their theater-in-the-round. Like the Orpheus of Virgils Gnat and Epigram 6, Calidore's respect seems to precipitate (not merely precede) a mortifying doom. We may now ask why Spenser, the "Chian Peincter" of Elizabeth's court, might dwell in book 6, and particularly in the episode of Serena's near sacrifice, on such consequences. BEYOND REPENTANCE? The Renaissance poet's concern that his verse may inflict harm is not confined to the elegiac anxieties we have seen in Diggs, who worries that his stated intention to praise the deceased in rhyme may paper over an affinity with "their black envie, who detract" in criminal prose. Shakespeare gives this same concern memorably epigrammatic expression in a quite different lyric setting: "Were it not sinful then, striving to mend, / To mar the subject that before was well?" (Sonnet 103, lines 9-10). A familiar humility topos, "thou art too great a theme for my rough and rudely dressed lines," has reflected back on itself to consider the effects such poetic ungentleness can have upon "the subject." Like the sixth book of Spenser's epic, Shakespeare's sonnets depict a world in which communicative privacy is threatened by the prying eyes and traducing mouths of a predatory public; and the speaker of these poems, realizing that "that love is merchandized whose rich esteeming / The owner's tongue doth publish everywhere" (Sonnet 102, lines 3-4), also realizes that failure to hold one's tongue in such a world can expose the poetic subject to the "hands of falsehood" as "the prey of every vulgar thief" (Sonnet 48, lines 4, 8). A certain sincerity may underlie Shakespeare's emphasis on an embattled lyric privacy, since what we know of his sonnets suggests that they were originally intended for limited circulation and first merchandized in a pirated publication.95 Four years prior to the divulgence of two of Shakespeare's poems, however, Spenser went public with the Amoretti and Epithalamion. And though the antagonism of an invidious and misconstruing public provides both poets with a paradigm through which their idea of lyric exclusivity can be defined, Spenser's complicity in the business of publication complicates any disavowal of a "merchandized" love: Ye tradefull Merchants that with weary toyle doe seeke most pretious things to make your gaine: and both the Indias of their treasures spoile,

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what needeth you to seeke so farre in vaine? For loe my love doth in her selfe containe all this worlds riches that may farre be found: if Saphyres, loe her eies be Saphyres plaine, if Rubies, loe her lips be Rubies sound: If Pearles, hir teeth be pearles both pure and round; if Yvorie, her forhead yvory weene; if Gold, her locks are finest gold on ground; if silver, her faire hands are silver sheene, But that which fairest is, but few behold, her mind adornd with vertues manifold. (Amoretti, 15) Can religion hold even thieves in measure? Certainly the neoplatonic couplet here, like the cannibals' restrictive high priest, suggests a dainty part "whiche mote not be prophan'd of common eyes." But like the priest's injunction, this couplet serves ironically to underscore, rather than escape, the plunderous economy that is its setting and occasion. In body and mind, the lady of Amoretti 15 is offered as a homegrown India, a continent of convenient discovery, "gaine," and "spoile." In such a poem, "that which ... few behold" functions not to preserve an ineffable secrecy, but to advertise—to the commodities traders Spenser has invoked—yet another acquisition to be held and exchanged upon, yet another content to be itemized and catalogued as an available rarity. If Shakespeare in Sonnet no laments such commerce as selling "cheap what is most dear" (line 3), Spenser in Amoretti 15 seems to cater to Renaissance ambition at its most opportunistic; he becomes the poet dismissed by Shakespeare's twenty-first sonnet: "Let them say more that like of heare-say well, /1 will not praise that purpose not to sell" (lines 13—14). By presenting his lady as a microcosm of "all this worlds riches," as the focal point of eyes intent on getting the goods, Spenser makes spoliation a literary business legitimized only by the couplet's subclause. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he allows the dubious economy of mercantilism to subtend the immaterialism of this couplet, subverting the neoplatonic maneuver of his final lines by reminding us that his lady's "mind" is no less up for grabs than her blazoned body. Of course an audience composed of opportunistic takers can elicit authorial anxiety as well as professional aspiration. Not only does such an audience define the subject of the poem as merchandise; it can also raise troubling questions about textual property and ownership. As Rambuss observes, William Ponsonby's preface to the 1591 Complaints volume, "The Printer to the Gentle Reader" expresses an "Orphean anxiety of scattered limbs, a response of poets of this period more regularly associated with the recent practice of anthologization, which presented variously authored small lyric poems in piecemeal miscellanies":96

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Since my late setting foorth of the Faerie Queene, finding that it hath found a fauorable passage amongst you; I haue sithence endeauored by all good meanes (for the better encrease and accomplishment of your delights,) to get into my handes such smale Poemes of the same Authors; as I heard were disperst abroad in sundrie hands, and not easie to bee come by, by himselfe; some of them hauing been diuerslie imbeziled and purloyned from him, since his departure ouer Sea.97 If we accept the rather persuasive argument that Spenser here speaks through his printer ventriloquially,98 this Orphic pose may seem slightly disingenuous. Association with the maenads may serve to stigmatize those who have not paid Spenser for his own "weary toyle," but getting a text "disperst abroad in sundrie hands" is of course the printer's task. Ponsonby's "Gentle Reader' differs from his Thracian counterparts merely, it would seem, by observing a set of commercial rules only vaguely established in the 1590s. The "Orphean anxiety" related by Spenser's printer becomes even more complicated when one considers that the author of the Complaints, at least from the perspective of state censors, would himself appear (like "Mother Hubberds" Mercury) an embezzler, divulging purloined court secrets to the greedy hands of a broad public audience. In his Black Book, Thomas Middleton explains that Mother Hubberd in fact occasioned the "calling in" of the Complaints volume for "selling her working bottle-ale to book-binders, and spurting the froth upon courtiers' noses."99 The difference between Ponsonby's and the state's "calling in" of Spenser's widely distributed texts is revealing: the first figures the poet as the victim of unauthorized publication, the second as an agent of such injurious scattering—as a blatant maw spurting venom on those at court; the first portrays his works as pirated, the second as the piratings of others' secrets—as the caricatures of a mercenary Chian painter. From its prefatory Letter to Ralegh to its last injured stanzas in book 6, The Faerie Queene represents its maker as a victim of misconstruction, the "gentle Poets rime" as rent and backbit by an invidious and bacchant audience. But as already demonstrated, the poet's identification with the victims of book 6 is complicated by the poetic nature of their victimization: Serena is rendered effectively "dead" by a beast in priest's clothing, by a murderous act of poetic indiscretion disguised as an innocent ceremony "which mote not be prophan'd of common eyes." Calidore's suppression of the Beast may read as an allegory of censorship,100 a silencing like that encountered by Artegall and Arthur as they approach Mercilla's throne: they saw Some one, whose tongue was for his trespasse Nayld to a post, adiudged by law: For that therewith he falsely did reuyle, And foule blaspheme that Queene for forged guyle,

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Both with bold speaches, which he blazed had, And with lewd poems, which he did compyle; For the bold title of a Poet bad He on himselfe had ta'en, and rayling rymes had sprad. (5-9-25) But the clarity by which Malfont "was plainely to be red" in book 5—the correspondence between ascribed name and "th'euill, which he did" (5.9.26)—proves a fantasy of reformation in book 6. The Beast has no single, determinate name; and the fainter "title of a Poet bad" hovers threateningly above all those who venture in the profession. If book 6 does not make the poem's projected continuation ethically impossible, it certainly makes untenable the claim to allegorical legibility and ethical purpose in the Letter to Ralegh. Book 6 also contradicts the Letter's claim of topical innocence. Both the indiscretion and the indiscreteness of Serena's episode—its violent divulgences and its failure to distinguish between poets and cannibals—reflect and concentrate Spenser's own occupational concerns in his legend of courtesy. "Despite the pressures of his generation, Spenser took poetry beyond repentance and, in so doing, gave England its first laureate poet":101 in this summational comment on The Faerie Queene and its author, Helgerson makes an astute point about the careerist's rescue of English literature from apologetic amateurism. But it is not impenitence that characterizes the poetry and the poets in the last book of Spenser's epic. Rather, as the garlanded priest's fervid washing of his "bloudy vessels" suggests, the newly consequential poetics presented in this book would seem to require a different kind of atonement—directed not toward inutility, but toward a violent potential. If, in Spenser's famous rejoinder to Sidney, "verses are not vaine," their consequence depends upon their contents. What newly consequential poetics does this book present? Part of the answer lies in Spenser's rhetorical question, "Who knowes not Colin Clout?"—a question that by 1596 would have received knowing nods not only from a relatively small coterie audience, but also from a much broader readership familiar with Spenser's printed texts.102 We cannot know whether this book's references to Ralegh's poetic name for Elizabeth Throckmorton—"who knows not Serena?"—would have had a similarly wide currency in this year.103 But these much-remarked and thinly veiled allusions to Elizabeth's lady in waiting—impregnated and secretly married by Ralegh in 1591, and discovered, disgraced, and imprisoned with Ralegh in the Tower by an angry queen the next year104—represent a significant departure from the discreet Colin Clout we know and love. In The Shepheardes Calender, for instance, Colin presents his "countrie lasse" in a perfect Acidalean vision, inaccessible to topically minded readers. Rosalind's name, notes E.K., is a "feigned" anagram, "which being wel ordered, wil bewray the very name of hys love and mistress."105 But it is precisely the indecipherability

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of this name that protects his lady from the possibilities of "betrayal" we have seen meditated in Donne's "Show me deare Christ." The speaker in Colin Clouts Come HomeAgaine may come a shade closer to divulging the identities highly allegorized in the story of Bregog and Mulla;106 but this shepherd firmly denounces the publication of one's love for political purposes, portraying the discourteous courtiers who do so as so many savages: All full of love, and love, and love my dear, And all their talke and studie is of it. Ne any there doth brave or valiant seeme, Unless that some gay Mistresse badge he beares ... But they of love and of his sacred lere, (As it should be) all otherwise devise, Then we poore shepheards are accustomd here, And him do sue and serve all otherwise. For with lewd speeches and licentious deeds, His mightie mysteries they do prophane And use his ydle name to other needs, But as a complement for courting vaine. So him they do not serve as they professe, But make him serve to them for sordid uses, Ah my dread Lord, that doest liege hearts possesse, Avenge thy selfe on them for their abuses. But we poore shepheards whether rightly so, Or through our rudenesse into errour led, Do make religion how we rashly go, To serve that God, that is so greatly dred. (Colin Clouts Come Home Again, lines 777-80,783-98) The last four lines construct an opposition between the courtly and the pastoral, between the exploitative and the devotional, that is more subtly explored on Acidale—but that dissolves in the cannibals' sacrifice of Serena, where such "religion" mixes with "lewd speeches and licentious deeds," where predator poets "serue their owne necessities with others need" (6.8.35). By 1596, the opposition between private devotion to the god of love and such public manipulation had also become muddled for Colin's creator—who could not stay long from England or its court.107 We remember that the Chian painter serves Venus ("as a complement for courting vaine"?) by displaying parts stolen from her "fairest Maides," a group that at one time included Elizabeth Throckmorton. Of course the representation of Serena in The Faerie Queene 6.8 seems to comment critically on more than the "cunning theeueries" and "craftie spyes" of an epic poet who, like Mother Hubberd's Mercury, is a journalistic voyeur at court:

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Which yet to prove more true, he meant to see, And an ey-witness of each thing to bee. Tho on his head his dreadfull hat he dight, Which maketh him invisible in sight, And mocketh th'eyes of all the lookers on. (Mother Hubberds Tale, lines 1277-81) Earlier in the poem, Spenser seems to have indicted Ralegh for unwittingly wounding Amoret (probably another figure of Throckmorton) with "his own rash hand" (4.7.35).I08 And it is possible that in the Serena episode Spenser obliquely blames Ralegh for exposing Throckmorton to the ruinous envy of the queen and her court, for failing to practice the poetic discretion he had preached in his own courtly verse: Thus those desires that aime to high, For any mortall Louer, When Reason cannot make them dye, Discretion will them Couer.109 Certainly poems such as "Now Serena bee not coy" and "Nature that washt her hands in milke"—however limited their original manuscript circulation—had constituted a potentially dangerous indiscretion; and the latter's lingering blazon of the mistress's succulent lips and belly "of the softest downe" echoes in the cannibals' "lustfull fantasyes"—directed toward Serena's lips and nose, her "yvorie necke" and "alabaster brest," her paps "which like white silken pillowes were," and "her bellie white and clere." Spenser's pregnant description of Serena's stomach, moreover—"which like an Altar did it selfe vprere"—may allude to the most undeniable evidence that Ralegh's wooing of "Serena" had been consummately successful. Serena's departure from the epic, in fact, suggests the shamed and burdened condition in which Throckmorton was permanently banished from court: So inward shame of her vncomely case She did conceiue, through care of womanhood... (6.8.51) Like Calepine—who poltroonishly hides behind Serena when attacked by the Blatant Beast (6.3.49), and who has left her vulnerably alone in this scene—Ralegh failed to stand by his woman as their affair became public, disclaiming his love for Throckmorton and leaving her to languish in the Tower three months after his early release.110 But just as the allegory of this scene cannot be reduced to simple and unreflexive satire, so its criticism of an indiscreet and discourteous poetics cannot be removed from self-criticism. The ethical and representational problem of book 6, as Krier reminds us, is Spenser's. Writing not only for an invidious court but

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also for the misconstructive world around it, the epicist (much more so than his patron, who typically resisted publication) comes nearer to the paradox of the cannibal priest—fashioning gentlemen out of savages by presenting an act of violent disclosure as a virtue. As in Donne's Anatomy, the consequences of display in the sixth book of The Faerie Queene are conceived in terms of the poem's imagined audience—an audience that had received Elizabeth Throckmorton in fact much as it receives Serena in fiction. And as in Donne's Anatomy, negative exemplum threatens to become poetic practice in Spenser's legend of courtesy: like his reader, the poet cannot witness Colin's vision on Acidale except through the eyes of Calidore. Of course for Calidore as for Spenser—-moving at large across a literary landscape, negotiating the contingencies of the wide world as well as the court's gravitational pull—such a way of seeing could be a career requirement: "Our indiscretion," as another Renaissance man reminds us, having judiciously sacrificed two of his former friends to fatal interpretation, "sometimes serves us well."111 But if the sixth book of Spenser's epic enacts the poetics it criticizes, it also criticizes the poetics it enacts. The cannibals' ceremony in this sense functions like the "monster" Harry Berger invokes to describe Shakespearean performance: In a manner similar to such Spenserian monsters as ... the Blatant Beast in book 6 [Shakespeare's performance] diverts us with perceptible embodiments that conceal their true nature by their very form and existence as embodiments. To externalize what the monster means as a monster is to make us forget temporarily that the meaning lies within the observer, and thus to covert spectatorship to scapegoating.112 Nor will this monstrous ceremony completely enable the conversion of authorship into scapegoating: the bloody vessels attending the garland are washed, but we never see them clean. As we turn now to the public drama of a Renaissance poet who, as far as we know, never claimed the laurel, we will hear Spenser's muffled confession of guilt rephrased as a complex declaration of power. In the theater for worldlings that terrified and repelled Spenser, Shakespeare accepts as customers the spectatorship that intrudes upon The Faerie Queene 6. On a stage where secrecy and discretion are epistemologically impossible and commercially undesirable, the tensions of the sacrificial priest resolve in the professional playwright, who collaborates with this spectatorship to kill his poetic subjects into interpretive property. Sigurd Burckhardt has observed that, for Shakespeare, "it is not in dreams but in names that responsibilities begin."113 In the foregoing analysis Spenser's poetic responsibility has become more legible in both a name, "Serena," and the fate to which its signified is subjected. If Julius Caesar appears in chapter 3 as a "power play" familiar to today's critical audience, my emphasis on a name and a killing in Shakespeare's text will show that this power also comes with responsibility.

3

The Properties of Shakespeare's Globe The World makes many vntrue Constructions of these Speaches. Rowland Whyte, describing the interpretive response to a device displayed by Essex at an entertainment for the queen in 1595 Of unconcerning things, matters of fact; How others on our stage their parts did Act; What Caesar did, yea, and what Cicero said. John Donne, Of the Progress of the Soule

FOR AN ANTITHEATRICALIST LIKE STEPHEN GossoN, the

Renaissance stage travesties the courtroom, leaving the defendant with no voice and replacing a single judge with an injudicious jury: At stage plays it is ridiculous, for the parties accused to reply, no indifference of judgment can be had, because the worst sort of people have the hearing of it, which in respect of their ignorance, of their fickleness, and of their fury, are not to be admitted in place of judgment. A judge must be grave, sober, discreet, wise, well exercised in cases of government, which qualities are never found in the baser sort.1 In his indictment of drama, Gosson charges poets and players with reducing the accused to a lifeless and common text, "openly blown into the ears of many and made a byword" (167); and he charges the audience, "carried away with every rumor," with blind injustice: "they run together by heaps, they know not whither; and lay about with their clubs, they see not why. Which thing the ancient Philosophers considering called them a monster of many heads" (164).2 In his sympathy with "the parties accused" by the stage, and in his anxious sense of a "baser sort" given to traducement, Gosson adapts an early modern concern with defamation 86

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that paid particular respect to the dead—in whom, according to Samuel Daniel, "no power remains ... to hold / The tongues of men, that will be talking now":3 The worthier sort, who know we do not liue With perfect men, will neuer be so vnkinde; They will the right to the disceased giue, Knowing themselues must likewise leaue behind, Those that will censure them ... And will not vrge a passed error now, Whenas he hath no party to consult, Nor tongue, nor aduocate, to shew his minde.4 While the representations of theater might seem to offer a means both for biographical advocacy and for showing the "minde" of a historical personage, Gosson's theatrical victim—like Daniel's dead—enjoys no "reply," relying instead on the questionable judgment of those who survive. Conspicuously, few apologists for Renaissance theater directly engage Gosson's assertion that the stage is a law court perverted, that it harms its object of representation, that it submits false evidence to a biased, bacchant audience. Indeed, Thomas Heywood admits the malleability of this audience only when insisting upon the virtues of fictionalized exempla: "Lively and well spirited action... hath power to new mold the hearts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt."5 Philip Sidney may obliquely concede the contingency of such modeling upon the audience's evaluation when, for instance, he claims for the poet power "to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him"6 But Sidney and the protheatricalists celebrate the bloodless "sweet violence"7 of an exemplary and embellished drama that moves the spectator to virtuous and prescribed behavior; Gosson argues not only that this same transaction can promulgate vice— both intentionally and unintentionally8—but also that it commits felonious violence against the object of representation itself.9 Far from a "glass of behavior," Gosson's theater presents men as silent exteriors before a dangerously subjective audience, an inversion of the ideal courtroom: "For the place, no private man's life ought to be brought in question or accused, but where he may plead in his own defense and have indifferent judges to determine the case" (163). Thus he approves of Roman theatrical censorship for restoring the judiciary to its rightful place: "[the Roman censors] would not have the life and behavior of the citizens, subject either to a poet's inkhorn, or a player's tongue, but to the seat of justice" (165). In contrast to this fixed institution of judgment, he finds the Renaissance "common" stage an interpretively open-ended venue, where the inwardness of a "private man's life" becomes the property of a public both ductile and unpredictable.10 At its most penetrating, Gosson's criticism of drama reveals the violence of other-fashioning—

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the coercion involved when a playwright silences a subject, appropriates that subject as spectacle, and displays it before dubious and numberless judges. Ironically, we find the most unflinching response to this definition of theatrical violence not in the prose of Gosson's opponents, but in the very public drama he seeks to censor. In the reading of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar that follows, Shakespeare explores this same violence with acute self-consciousness; more specifically, the dismemberment of Cinna the poet at the center of the dramatic action emblemizes the potentially ruinous energies of other-fashioning—focuses the anxieties about theatrical appropriation and audience response—that preside with thematic centrality over the play. Such a reading will involve an inversion of the paradigm typically imposed on the Renaissance stage when "self-fashioning" is the emphasis: rather than a cultural space that enables or contains a potentially subversive auto-poesis,11 Shakespeare represents in this play a stage selfless and incontinent, a theater in which self-presentation dissolves before the alterative gaze and indeterminate interpretation of the spectator. Julius Caesar has a dual role in this chapter, however. While I demonstrate that in his play Shakespeare metatheatrically considers the relation—as conceived by the antitheatricalists— between the playwright, his matter, and his audience, I also historicize this selfconsciousness, arguing that the play appears in a time (1599) and a place (The Globe) at which the nature of this relation is being energetically redefined and debated. In reading Julius Caesar, then, I present the play as a dramatic reading of a contentious contemporary issue, a critical representation of the public theater's epistemological economy. For it is through this critique that Shakespeare defines both the dramatist and his customers as possible rough handlers of the representations they fashion and watch; it is through this critique that Shakespeare considers public drama's potential for irresponsibility. In so doing, he defines the playwright as implicated in a process of which many apologists for theater would absolve him: guilty by association with an untrustworthy audience, a corrupt jury, Shakespeare's dramatist knowingly violates the subjects he stages.

"FASHION IT THUS" It might be objected that Gosson's view of theater as mistrial arises merely from his concern with a topical stage's potential for libel, a concern in fact shared by the state censors in Renaissance England.12 But Gosson conceives the injury of theatrical misrepresentation much more broadly, so that even Roman history can be victimized by Elizabethan dramatic adaptations: If a true history be taken in hand... the poets drive it most commonly unto such points, as may best show the majesty of their pen ... or wring in a show, to furnish the stage, when it is too bare; when the matter of itself

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comes short of this, they follow the practice of the cobbler, and set their teeth to the leather to pull it out. So was the history of Caesar and Pompey... when the history swelled, and ran too high for the number of the persons that should play it, the poet with Procrustes13 cut the same fit to his own measure; when it afforded no pomp at all, he brought it to the rack, to make it serve. (Plays Confuted in Five Actions, 168-69) Sidney's alchemy, whereby the brazen world of nature and history becomes golden, is here described as a violent and opportunistic craft. For Gosson does not seem to share Sidney's view of the inutile specificity of history; nor does he justify poetic fiction as the conversion of mundane fact into Neoplatonic Truth. Rather, Gosson's "true history" exists as a prior authenticity endangered by subsequent authors who take it "in hand" and "make it serve" their own artistic designs—by playwrights who falsify historical evidence and wring in shows in order to construct compelling theatrical cases. Something of this rhetoric of coercive and manipulative representation distinguishes Shakespeare's own metadramatic reflections upon the act of staging history. In the prologue to The Life of Henry the Fifth, for instance, the Chorus admits the difficulty of dramatizing epic and concedes the impossibility if not the impropriety of "cram [ming]" the play's historical subject "Within this wooden O"; and as the audience, we become accomplices to this constrictive, farcical force when we are instructed to "suppose within the girdle of these walls / Are now confined two mighty monarchies."14 While Shakespeare's "Chorus to this history" grapples with the presentational problem of daring "to bring forth / So great an object... On this unworthy scaffold," however, it also introduces the interpretive consequences of treating an historical subject as a spectacular "object": by invoking the audience's "imaginary forces," this Chorus indicates that dramatist and spectator must collaborate in fashioning and evaluating the evidence before them, and implies that the ultimate meaning of dramatic representation resides in the response of the audience. If one subscribes to Gosson's dark view of the playwright and the "imaginary forces" of his audience, moreover, this collaboration not only misrepresents "true history" through the dramatist's self-interested manipulation of the record, but also subjects the characters of that history to the equally suspect reception of spectators who—like an autonomous or nullified jury—follow their own ends in arriving at their verdict. Julius Caesar dramatizes both sides of this exchange, demonstrating the potential violation of history and its subjects by theatrical representation and audience response. Replying skeptically to Casca's reading of the wonders and prodigies that herald the fifteenth of March, in fact, Cicero might be said to epigrammatize the open-ended process of other-fashioning:

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Indeed it is a strange-disposed time. But men may construe things after their fashion, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves. (1.3.33-35) Primarily, of course, these lines warn against the inadvertent misprision central to tragedy—the defiance of augury, omens, and prophecy that generically signals Caesar's fall; the "hateful Error" that ruins Cassius, who dies having "misconstrued everything" (5.3.84). But in Shakespeare's history play, Cicero's words resonate with a significance beyond the tragic myopia that can doom such interpreters. For the hermeneutic he describes—the subjective speculation and objectified spectacle that, for Gosson, corrupts the courtroom and reduces history to histrionics— also describes the theatrical mode by which men knowingly victimize others in Julius Caesar.15 Like the word theater itself (at once a place where one goes "to view" and a place where scenes are staged "to the view"), his verb construe blurs the distinction between the act of interpretation and the act of representation. Indeed, Cicero's insight becomes the conspirators' strategy as they construct their plot. Like the portents and soothsaying Caesar must ignore if this plot is to succeed, for instance, Calphurnia's dream has an internal validity and "purpose" that the conspirators must construe "after their fashion" if the show is to go on: thus Decius claims that she has "all amiss interpreted" (2.2.83) her vision, and he provides an alternative reading that effectively leads Caesar to his slaughter. Similarly Brutus, though regretting "that every like is not the same" (2.2.128), realizes the republicans must represent Caesar as a simulacrum of himself in order to alienate him in the people's eyes. Thus he admits—in a soliloquy that rehearses the apology for tyrannicide he will soon deliver to the plebeians—the expediency of construing Caesar after his own fashion, clean from the purpose of the thing himself: And since the quarrel Will bear no color for the thing he is, Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented, Would run to these and these extremities. (2.1.28-31) For Brutus as for Gosson's violator of "true history," "the matter of itself comes short"; and the solution to the troublesome limitations of fact which threaten to impede his plot and obstruct his case lies in theatricalized fiction, in fashioning the audience's perspective on the scene he is to perform by altering the evidence and ascribing to Caesar a new telos. Refusing the passive role of Sidney's historian— "so tied not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things"16—Brutus instead plays the poet and forces the awkwardly sui generis Caesar into the generic catastrophe of the de casibus tradition.

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This scene, however, draws blood, and herein lies the play's specific self-consciousness: men die in Julius Caesar not only from accidental misreading, not only from accepting the intentional misreadings of others, but also—much more unusually—from being consciously misread. As we shall see, Cinna the poet, dismembered for his name by an audience that has become actors, falls as the superlative victim of this last category, the archetypal sacrifice of a "private man's life" to the mistrial of public theater. For Cicero's words apply as much to the plebeian audience of this theater as to those who attempt to control their perspective on the evidence put before them: if representations can be manipulated after the politicians' fashion, so can they be misconstrued by the people's reception; if men and women can be appropriated by the political theater, so can they become the property of those who observe them. And if men and women can be subjected to this estranging process, so can "true history." If Cicero's observation pertains to those who inhabit Shakespeare's play, it also pertains to the playwright himself. On this metadramatic level, in fact, Cicero's acknowledgment of the construction to which omens and prognostications are susceptible attains further significance and irony. For by the late sixteenth century, a great deal of skepticism had arisen in England over an illusionistic strategy that Julius Caesar, like many Renaissance history plays, employs dramaturgically: the temporal sleight of hand whereby history is fashioned into ex post facto prophecy, the revisionism whereby past events are given a compelling predictive force and narrative shape. As Marjorie Garber and others have demonstrated, this art of retrospective anticipation—stretching back in a venerable tradition to Virgil's deterministic national history, biblical typology, and Augustinian providential design—provoked in Renaissance England a heightened scrutiny as self-authenticating political teleologies (from the Tudor and Stuart "myths" to imperialist and revolutionary movements) were manufactured by much the same method.17 The strong rhetoric with which such manipulations of omens and prophecy were attacked, moreover, suggestively resembles that of the antitheatricalists. Most shrill, perhaps, is Raphael Holinshed's condemnation of Peter of Pomfret, "a man in great reputation with the common people" whom Holinshed brands a "pseudoprophet or false foreteller of afterclaps... a deluder of the people."18 Francis Bacon likewise regrets that "the nature of Man... coveteth divination"; approves of the "many severe laws made to suppress" such prophecies, "for they have done much mischief"; and claims "that almost all of them, being infinite in number, have been impostures, and by idle and crafty brains, merely contrived and feigned, after the event passed."19 Holinshed and Bacon object to these anachronistic predictions for much the same reason that Gosson objects to the dramatization of history; facilitating the "emplotment"20 or arrangement of history's chaos into an orderly story, they are the instruments of deceivers rather than decipherers, the means by which the past can be exploited by the present in the collaborative "force" invoked by Henry Vs Chorus: "Linger your

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patience on, and we'll digest / Th' abuse of distance, force a play."21 If we accept that the status of all prodigies and prophecies in a history play is similarly suspect, then Cicero's lines also speak for Shakespeare and his dramatic transformation of the casual into the causal. There are obvious reasons for the author of Julius Caesar to consider his use of history so self-consciously. Of course Shakespeare's principal source for the play— North's translation of Amyot's French version of a Latin translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans—already suggests the transformation of historical fact by collaborative human manufacture. As Sidney remarks, moreover, this poeticizing of history began with the first chronicler: "And who reads Plutarch's either history or philosophy, shall find he trimmeth both their garments with guards of poetry."22 Shakespeare fashions his play, then, from a text already read and fashioned, moralized and translated. Significantly, the short scene of Cinna's apprehension occasions a disproportionate degree of poetic departure from this text: Shakespeare chooses to specify that this Cinna is "the poet"; chooses to subject this poet to a crowd that, realizing he is not Cinna the conspirator, nevertheless kills him because "his name's Cinna"; and chooses to suggest that Cinna's offstage fate will be dismemberment. In contrast, only one of the two accounts of "the murther of Cinna" in North's Plutarch describes the victim, in passing, as "a Poet." In this account, moreover, the crowd that kills Cinna genuinely confuses him with the conspirator; and of his death this account tells us only that the plebeians "presently dispatched him" and "slue him outright."23 In his first dramatic adaptation of a Plutarchan narrative, the playwright thus reads into, and in some cases clean from the purpose of, his historical source to present us with an innocent poet's dismemberment by an inquisitorial crowd that consciously misreads his words. Focusing on these and similar authorial decisions, Gary Taylor has recently concluded the most extended discussion of Cinna's death to date with a judgment that would have pleased Gosson: "To tell the truth boldly, the more I think about Shakespeare's scene, the less I like it. It is wrong historically, it is wrong morally; it was wrong then, it is still wrong now."24 Taylor does not, however, share Gosson's conception of the dramatist as an unabashed panderer to "the worst sort of people." Instead he indicts Shakespeare for both exaggerating the historical rabble's indiscriminate violence in this scene, and depicting an apolitical poet's victimization at their hands—thereby creating a false opposition "between poet and plebeians, between poet and conspirator."25 The playwright, charges Taylor, creates a defense of poetry at the expense of truth; he stages "a dramatic opposition between the muse and the masses," between a poet who affirms nothing and a politically corrupted mobile vulgus: "For Shakespeare ... the poet is not part of a complex economic, political, and cultural system ... he envisages poetry as a publicly intimate relationship between poet and patron. The plebeians are vulgar

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interlopers who do not understand what Cinna is."26 If we accept this argument, then Cinna's murder by the mob in 3.3 involves a program—extending to the camp poet's encounter with Cassius and Brutus in 4.3—whereby Shakespeare erects a false distinction between the poetic and political spheres. Far from a selfconscious exploration of the potential violence of the public theater, the scene appears by this reading a facade of false consciousness, a nefarious attempt to deny the implication of art in the chaotic social world around it. Is this the case? Taylor marshals strong evidence for his assertion that Shakespeare goes out of his way to enhance the fickleness of the rabble in this play:27 in North's Plutarch, for instance, the funeral orations that precede Cinna's murder are separated by a day, and the crowd is constant in its disapproval of Caesar's assassination;28 in Shakespeare's version, the orations are juxtaposed, and "the popular voice" becomes a rhetorical barometer. Taylor also seems justified in arguing that the poets in this play conspicuously make nothing happen: whereas in Plutarch it is a philosopher who intervenes in the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, successfully reconciling them, in Shakespeare a poet enters after the reconciliation has already occurred, and his well-intended but untimely doggerel is subsequently ridiculed (4.2.187-91). But the distinction between the men of the word and the men of the world in Julius Caesar is not as clear as this reading suggests. And if the nominal poets in this play seem to emphasize the division between art and politics, the politicians bridge this gulf in their representation as dramatists playing to an audience. Taylor foists upon the author of Julius Caesar (1599) the conception of poetry expressed by the author of Venus and Adonis (1592—93)—"a publicly intimate relationship between poet and patron" above history, ideology, and the vulgus.29 A skeptic might object, of course, that intimacy is always a fictive pose for poets operating in a print culture; that by submitting their words to fame's court such poets consciously (if surreptitiously) offer them as public property.30 Whether or not this was Shakespeare's awareness when he composed his nondramatic poetry for individual patrons, however, it must have become so in 1599, when a pirate divulged two of "his sugred Sonnets"—previously circulated only "among his priuate friends"—to the world.31 Thus by 1599, if not before, there was irony, intentional or imposed, in the patronage poet's occupatio: That love is merchandized whose rich esteeming The owner's tongue doth publish everywhere. (Sonnet 102, 3-4) But the protoromantic view of the poet Taylor ascribes to the author of Julius Caesar ignores more than the complex status of patronage poetry in the late sixteenth century (and the significant body of recent criticism that has demonstrated this complexity).32 It also ignores Shakespeare's awareness of the altogether different

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socioeconomic mise en scene that produced the play itself. Indeed, Julius Caesar dramatizes the irrelevance and obsolescence of the very mode of poetry Taylor accuses Shakespeare of perpetuating under false pretenses. "A S T R A N G E - D I S P O S E D TIME"

Though poet remained both the popular and technical term for "playwright" during Shakespeare's lifetime,33 there are reasons both historical and textual to suppose that dramatists working in England's increasingly public theaters had occasion to reevaluate and revalue this appellation. As Elizabeth's court blurred the distinction between private courtship and public courtiership, so did her elaborately theatricalized self-presentation erase the boundaries between stagecraft and statecraft.34 When political power can be dramatized, however, drama is necessarily invested with political consequence. And when the audience is socially heterogeneous—when the relatively focused and confined communicative venue of the royal court opens out into the court of common opinion—power itself devolves to a public where interpretive possibilities ramify and proliferate. On the Renaissance public stage, sovereign self-presentation is necessarily subjected to representation; the autonomous production of ideology (like selfhood) is rendered an object of the contingencies of reproduction. It was less theatrical self-assertion, therefore, than a complaint of theatrical vulnerability that underlay Elizabeth's remark to a deputation of Lords and Commons: "We princes are set upon stages in the sight and view of all the world."35 Shakespeare's Hamlet shares this insight, fears becoming such a prince; like Elizabeth, he realizes the danger of playing to the world, recognizes that those words and thoughts are merchandised whose private meaning the owner's tongue publishes everywhere. The collaborative social act of public theater, however, demands this economy, and Hamlet must finally submit to theatrical appropriation: "High on a stage ... placed to the view"; reduced, like the court jester he has elegized, to a silent and portable synecdoche of the self; he becomes an erased mouth, a silence inviting spectators' glosses, the quietus ultimately required of the observed of all observers. For Hamlet and Elizabeth, the stage inexorably transforms the self into a passive spectacle fashioned for and by "the sight and view" of others. In 1601—while the prince of Denmark was vainly struggling to be the subject, not an object, of his play—the queen of England identified herself as the property of a politicized theater beyond her control: "I am Richard II. Know ye not that?... He that will forget God, will also forget his benefactors; this tragedy was played 40 times in open streets and houses."36 Stephen Greenblatt has observed that Elizabeth responds here to the potential for iteration and indeterminacy— the "open"-ness—of a play construed after a subversive fashion, a play that seems to have broken the boundaries of its house and emerged into a world of limitless audience and multiple factions.37 To this we should add that her response is

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concomitant with a perceived disintegration of patronage assumptions ("He that will forget God, will also forget his benefactors"), and with her recognition that she has become a victim of other-fashioning. "I am Richard II. Know ye not that?": this royal self-identification—an ironic anagnorisis for a monarch who subscribes herself, like an emblem of immutable essentiality, with the motto "Semper Eadem"—is literally a world apart from the allegoric narcissism produced by the sanctioned patronage poet ("I am Gloriana. Who knows not that?").38 Whether referring to Shakespeare's play or to Hayward's tract, the anger and anxiety of Elizabeth's self-identification with Richard responds to the fact that this identification is thrust upon her, and it threatens her identity. Like the commissioning viewer of an anamorphic painting, she looks to the story of Henry of Lancaster and Richard of Bordeaux for a familiar reflection of her self-image and finds instead—from another's perspective—a radically subversive alterity, a subrogated persona that troubles the semiotics of the whole composition.39 Neither England's queen nor England's playwrights, however, needed to wait until the February 7, 1601, performance of Richard II to recognize that the dramatist writing for the world is implicated in the world. Two years earlier the Chamberlain's Men had completed a metaphoric transition—from the Theatre, through the Curtain, to the Globe—40 that seems appropriately responsive to a self-conscious shift, in England's public drama, from the aesthetically insulated to the politically fraught. It was on the Globe's stage, in 1599, that an actor playing the Chorus in Henry V anticipated "the general of our gracious Empress" returning triumphantly from Ireland (5.30-34). And it was earlier in this same year, most scholars agree, that Julius Caesar was first produced as the inaugural play in "this wooden O."41 1599, the year the "newly built" Globe became "the possession of William Shakespeare and others,"42 would have been particularly unaccommodating for the vision of playwrighting "as a publicly intimate relationship between poet and patron." For the preceding year, the Privy Council responded to the annual letter of complaint from the lord mayor and the Court of Aldermen (containing the usual antitheatrical invective) with a resolution that was unprecedented: it declared that all public playhouses were to be "plucked down" due to the "lewd matters that are handled on the stages" and the "very great disorders" resulting from the "resort and confluence of bad people." This Privy Council order (28 July 1598), which might have given specific topical resonance to the antitheatrical and anticongregational Tribunes in the first scene of Julius Caesar, was of course never executed; but it marked the beginning of an intense period of legislation against London's public theaters. In 1599, the year satires were prohibited, the bishops also forbade the printing of any English histories unless approved by the Privy Council. Apparently responding to much the same anxiety Elizabeth would locate in the Essex party's commissioned play—the potential for interpretive license and proliferative reenactment—the Privy Council would pass another order in 1600 restricting to two both the number of London playhouses and the number of public

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performances allowed per week.43 To gain "possession" of the Globe near the end of the sixteenth century was to enter a theater of contest in which topicality was increasingly dangerous, in which the theater's capacity to render proper "judgment" was increasingly questioned, in which private enterprise and state power were frequently at odds. Indeed, the Globe itself was constructed of contested property: on 28 December 1598, James and Richard Burbage, together with a master carpenter and a dozen tradesmen, dismantled the deserted Theatre and transported its valuable timber to the Bankside, where it was erected as the new home of the Chamberlain's Men; Giles Allen, the increasingly antitheatrical landlord of the Theatre who had requested the departure of his tenants earlier that year, seems to have desired to "convert the wood and timber thereof to some better use." In the lawsuit that inevitably followed, Allen's plaint is remarkable for its representation of the defendants as a mob run amok, threatening city and crown. The Burbages and their accessories, he charged, then and there armed themselves with divers and many unlawful and offensive weapons, as, namely, swords, daggers, bills, axes, and such like, and so armed did then repair unto the said Theatre. And then and there, armed as aforesaid, in very riotous, outrageous, and forcible manner, and contrary to the laws of your Highness' realm, attempted to pull down the said Theatre, whereupon divers of your subjects, servants, and farmers, then going about in peaceable manner to procure them to desist from that their unlawful enterprise, they (the said riotous persons aforesaid) notwithstanding procured then therein with great violence, not only then and there forcibly and riotously resisting your subjects, servants, and farmers, but also then and there pulling, breaking, and throwing down the said Theatre in very outrageous, violent, and riotous sort, to the great disturbance and terrifying not only of your subjects, said servants, and farmers, but of diverse others of your Majesty's loving subjects there near inhabiting.44 It is tempting to compare this riotous representation to Shakespeare's of the plebeians, "moved"—by Antony's promise of a new recreational park "On this side Tiber" fit for "common pleasures" (3.2.249—50)—to "Pluck down benches! Pluck down forms, windows, anything!" (3.2.258-59). Less conjecturally, we can observe that Allen's no doubt embellished account of the ruinous energies with which the Globe was built comes very near the energies Shakespeare represents in the Globe—the energies of which he declares the Globe capable in its inaugural play. It seems appropriate, then, that immediately upon its construction the Globe became a contested site among the poets themselves as they variously negotiated the terms of theatrical "ownership" on its new stage. The Globe was not the first or the only theater in England, of course, to mediate "the law of writ and the liberty"45

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as a public stage constrained by government jurisdiction yet appealing incontinently to popular judgment. But Hercules' load rested heavily upon the shoulders of England's playwrights, working in the last years of Elizabeth's reign, as they sought to define the poet's place in this politically consequential space. An intriguing insight into Shakespeare's complex response to this moment of artistic reassessment appears in Andrew Gurr's demonstration that, around the year 1600, the dramatist began to reconceive his customers as spectators rather than auditors.46 Shakespeare's dramatic "cases" were increasingly seen, not heard. Some of the epistemological and political implications of this transformation appear most clearly when we consider the altogether different response of a rival playwright to this same period of change. For Ben Jonson, always preoccupied with the occupation of poetry, the War of the Theaters provided a dramatic context in which to consider the power and danger of a profession conducted in, for, and with "this faire-fild Globe."47 The recurrent metaphor of the "Poetomachia" is that of the trial or arraignment, so that the warring dramatists present, in Tibullus's phrase, competing "Law-cases in verse."48 But Jonson's problem, even as he goes about denning the role of the socially relevant public poet, lies in determining that court to which he wishes to appeal his case. In Poetaster (1601), for instance, he legitimizes his ideal, politically and morally salutary poets (Horace and Virgil) by banishing the socially marginal (Ovid), and by purging the civically deleterious (Crispinus and Fannius).49 Jonson's poetic ideal proves less than efficacious on the public stage, however, where cases are tried not in Augustus's court, but by a corrupt jury finally resembling Gosson's description of the theater milieu. Jonson sends "An armed Prologue" to defend his play from rooms filled with "base detractors, and illiterate apes."50 And in his "apologeticall Dialogue," addressing not a multitudinous spectatorship but an individual reader, he declares the world a "baud" and promises his next dramatic effort will seek a fit audience, however few: "Where, if I prove the pleasure but of one / So he judicious be; He shall b'alone / A Theatre unto me" (213-15). But in the public theater, such retreats into Stoic self-sufficiency are as impossible as imposing a fixed, textual meaning on a script intended for common consumption.51 In the Globe, to turn one's back on the world is inevitably to invite backstabbing; to solicit an audience of one is simply not to play the game. Though he has his own harsh words for the world, Thomas Dekker therefore prefaces his theatrical response to Jonson in terms perfectly pitched to elicit the latter's anxiety: Horace hal'd his Poetasters to the barre, the Poetasters untruss'd Horace: how worthily eyther, or how wrongfully, (World) leave it to the jurie.52 Before this jury, Dekker in Satiro-Mastix (1601) does with Horace much what the Essex party does with Richard II in the same year: as a deposition scene appears subversive when placed in the contemporary political context, so does Horace

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look ridiculous when dropped "into the middle of a flamboyantly romantic tragi-comedy."53 For Jonson, as for his queen, the public theater submits one to an audience composed of both predatory rival playwrights—barristers bent upon injurious misrepresentation, recontextualization, and reiteration—and an injudicious and ductile tribunal. Finding his case altered by 1603, then, Jonson replaces the Augustan court with the Tiberian to reflect the willful misreading and misinterpretation of evidence to which the public poet is vulnerable; and in his dedicatory epistle to Lord Aubigny, he at once identifies the reception of Sejanus with that of its dismembered "subject" and seeks to appeal the Globe's unjust verdict to a single patron: It is a poem that—if I well remember—in your Lordship's sight, suffered no less violence from our people here than the subject of it did from the rage of the people of Rome, but with a different fate, as (I hope) merit.54 Here, perhaps, is a case for Taylor's criticism of the dramatist disingenuously posing as an apolitical creature victimized by a world he claims the right to ignore, a playwright for whom "our people here" are indeed "vulgar interlopers" intruding upon and mangling the intimate artistic utterance of a play that has silently become "a poem."55 For Jonson, at least for the Jonson of 1603, theatrical values ultimately prove corrosive to his conception of artistic integrity; the Globe, engaged in a bacchanalia of epistemological and evaluative indiscrimination, must either consume the Orphic poet or exile him to a private, meritocratic world elsewhere. What would later in his dramatic career become an effort to prevent this indiscrimination by seeking a poetic audience, not a theatrical spectatorship,56 takes an early shape in his desire to place his literary evidence before a single judge, not a common law jury. As late as 1611, in fact, he intermittently appeals to a higher evaluative court. His epistle to the earl of Pembroke, published prefatorily to Catiline, reveals an attempt to convert drama into patronage poetry: "Now, it approcheth your censure cheerefully, and with the same assurance, that innocency would appeare before a magistrate."57 Like Milton after him, Jonson inhabits a "solitude" threatened by "evil tongues," a fragile kingdom of intentionality "with dangers compassed round"; and he seeks to define his hermeneutically "fit audience" by insulating it from "the barbarous dissonance" of those inimical to his poetic meaning.58 But this defiant, embattled stance must not be confused with Shakespeare's in the same period. If any Shakespearean dramatic text seems to invite such confusion, it is that problematic aggregate we now call The History of Troilus and Cressida (1601-03?)—with its appended preface addressing an "eternal" reader in an ideal act of literary communication independent of history, the staling stage, and "the palmes of the vulger."59 To the extent that one can speak of a play proper,60 however, Troilus and Cressida in fact represents a self-conscious departure from Jonson's conception of the theater poet. This strange play may even be Shake-

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speare's fullest acknowledgment of the fact that the public playwright is complicit in, not an innocent victim of, the interpretive energies of a place such as The Globe. His revision of Poetaster's "armed Prologue," for instance, underscores the futility of authorial prophylactics against interpretively promiscuous reading or watching; rather than guarding his play from the audience's subjective misconstruction, Shakespeare's "prologue arm'd" (Prologue, 23) invites the audience to participate in this martial drama as autonomous, potentially combative judges: Like or find fault, do as your pleasures are, Now good or bad, 'tis but the chance of war. (30-31) If the preface contemptuously dismisses the clapper-clawing hands of the multitude, this prologue submits the play's reception to the multiple "pleasures" of a similarly arbitrary jury. And in his epilogue Pandarus suggests that all those who have participated in this sullying "performance" are not only infected by a venereal clap, but also equipped with a rapacious claw. The "traders in the flesh" (5.10.45) who fill "Pandar's hall" (47) figure the collaborative spectatorship of a disturbingly carnal theater, a spectatorship that would hypocritically distance itself from the prurient and purveyant drama—and dramatist—it has employed. In a rebuke that reminds us his name means nothing but "to go between," however, Pandarus refuses his customers such a voyeuristic withdrawal: O world, world, world! thus is the poor agent despis'd! O traders and bawds, how earnestly are you set a-work, and how ill requited! Why should our endeavor be so lov'd and the performance so loath'd? (36-39) Pandarus's diction here, if not his sense, is that of the antitheatricalist excoriation of a Babylonian stage endeavoring to satisfy a devouring world—a pandering playwright vending his diseased images to an easily infected audience in the market of bawdry.61 His almost postcoital regret and eruptive self-aversion, in fact, seems to anticipate the contrition, as described by I. G. in A Refutation of the Apology for Actors, of playgoers who "know the Histories before they see them acted [and] are very ashamed when they have heard what lies the Players insert among them, and how greatly they deprave them."52 Far from a defense of poetry, this epilogue incorporates the antitheatrical position in an unrepentant admission of dramatic guilt that finally indicts the audience as an accessory. To show, claims Pandarus, is to violate; to watch is to participate. Such a conclusion is the caustic culmination of a play that metatheatrically considers its own role in the deflation, even perversion, of classical heroic characterology. The "strange fellow" whose argument Ulysses reiterates to lure Achilles to battle, for instance, articulates merely a benign version of this role:

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[N]o man is the lord of any thing, Though in and of him there be much consisting, Till he communicate his parts to others; Nor doth he of himself know them for aught, Till he behold them formed in th' applause Where th' are extended; who like an arch reverb'rate The voice again, or like a gate of steel, Fronting the sun, receives and renders back His figure and his heat. (3.3.115-23) Of course one must always quote Shakespeare's Ulysses with suspicion. But as James Calderwood has argued, the manipulative Greek here speaks what is by this point in the English dramatist's career an occupational verity: the collaborative enterprise of representation necessarily involves "a generative intercourse between bearer and observer."63 Indeed, we might go further and suggest that in Ulysses' theatrical conception of public display, the communication of one's self depends entirely upon the formative process of reception: though in and of a subject there be much consisting, selfhood counts for no "thing" until recognized by the constitutive and appropriative applause of "others." In a play that itself refracts the epics of Homer and Virgil through several generically and perspectivally divergent "recuyells" of the histories of Troy,64 the fate of history and its subjects ultimately rests in the hands of the dramatist and his audience. Like Pandarus, the playwright can commodify the "parts" of historical subjects by assembling a textual pastiche for a predatory public; like Thersites—who is himself addressed as a "fragment"65—the playgoer can reduce all such representations to scabrous objects through dissective evaluation: the same hands that manufacture validating applause can serve as claws of misconstruction.66 By dramatizing such a transaction and transformation, Troilus and Cressida explores the darker possibilities of a theatrical economy that defines the dramatist not as a victim, but as a conspirator. We can trace the trajectory of this exploration back to the Globe's inaugural play—in which the problematic implications of producing spectacle for a world peopled by patrons, of offering words as currency in the exchange of multiple interpretations, receive metadramatic attention. "CENSURING ROME" Julius Caesar seems to know no other medium than the public stage, as critics have long demonstrated by pointing out its preference for the rhetorical mode over the lyrical, for public declamation and customary proverbs over private reflection and soliloquy.67 Few suggestions of an extrapolitical, offstage, or private life, more-

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over, provide the sense of inwardness we find in the characters of Shakespeare's other tragedies. No mention is made, for instance, of the literary careers of Caesar and Cicero; and the brief domestic moments in this childless play are quickly intruded upon by public men who call husbands from their wives. While the exteriorized self is a major concern in all of Shakespeare's Roman plays, Julius Caesar investigates with special interest the definition of the self by public representation. As Brutus responds when asked if one can ever properly know one's self: No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself But by reflection, by some other thing. (1.2.52-53)68 Frequently, this "other thing" proves to be the speculum of theater itself, and almost all of the play's main characters come to know themselves or others in this dramatic epistemology. Cassius himself, for example, offers to serve as a "glass" whereby Brutus may discover "that of yourself which you yet know not of" (1.2.68,70). In a marketplace reeking of the commoners' breath, Caesar is clapped and hissed for his political dumbshow "according as he pleas'd and displeas'd" his plebeian audience, "as they use to do the players in the theatre" (1.3.259-61). Brutus urges his fellow conspirators to dissemble their purpose by bearing the staid countenance of "our Roman actors" (2.1.226). And Antony, the lover of plays who most successfully exploits political theater, drops a telling term as he urges Octavius to reevaluate Lepidus, the least consequential and most easily manipulated member of the triumvirate: Do not talk of him But as a property. (4.1.39-40) Indeed, one of Julius Caesar's central dramas is the appropriation of the private by the public; the denotation of "that within which passeth show" by "actions that a man might play"; the reduction of autonomous men into communicable parts and transferable stage properties. It is the potential violence of this drama that our play concedes in the central, emblematic scene of Cinna's dismemberment. In Julius Caesars earlier consumption of its eponym, however, the play suggests that such physical violence can serve as a metaphor for the injury of theatrical other-fashioning. Shakespeare's later Roman tragedies pluck out the heart of mystery with the ceremony of sacrifice and the savage coolness of an anatomy.69 Cleopatra would prefer to lie a "stark-nak'd" corpse rather than face her audience as a conscious property in the figurative dismemberment she imagines Octavius staging in his theatrical triumph—"pinion'd," "hoist," and displayed "to the shouting varlotry

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I Of censuring Rome." And she ruins her mortal house unwilling to become an audience to the "Mechanic slaves" who will expose Antony and herself "to the view," distorting their biographies through mannered theatricalism.70 But while Cleopatra may resist theatrical appropriation by playing the Roman, the irony of this refuge is as inescapable as the theater that subsumes her. For the theater imagined in Shakespeare's Roman tragedies is populated by an intrusive public and exploitative actors; it tolerates no inscrutable inwardness, no self-sufficient independence from the theatrical economy; it sheds blood and breaks bodies to render the private public, to sacrifice individual subjectivity to theatrical viability and spectacle. Coriolanus may refuse to play to such a crowd—"turn[ing]" his "back" in a consummately antitheatrical gesture of introversion; standing instead "as if a man were author of himself"; seeking, in fact, to be "every man himself" and "not ... other than one thing." But he is stabbed to death as the people shout, "Tear him to pieces!" He is downtrodden, like Tamburlaine's Turkish footstool, on a stage that requires "some death more long in spectatorship," a stage that allows no man to be a theater unto himself.71 For what is the public theater but the people? What are these people but Gosson's Hydra-like "monster"? What is the carefully fashioned self in this theater but the prey of "the beast / With many heads," the property of numberless "voices"? As a proleptic and definitive answer to such questions, Julius Caesar digests its subject (who has proclaimed "always I am Caesar" [1.2.212] with the same self-consciousness, the same ironic untenability, and perhaps the same anxiety toward protean theatricality that underlies Elizabeth's "Semper Eadem") early in the third act, when the conspirators decide that Caesar must die to be seen. Brutus tries and condemns his friend not for what he is, but for what he might be, for the undetermined and undisclosed subjunctive mood of his spirit: He would be crown'd How that might change his nature, there's the question. (2.1.12-13) O that we then could come by Caesar's spirit, And not dismember Caesar! But, alas, Caesar must bleed for it! (2.1.168-70) Caesar must bleed because the conspiracy of Caesar can have no unscrutinized spirits. Caesar must bleed because the conspirators—no less than the plebeians who come to his funeral shouting, "We will be satisfied! Let us be satisfied! (3.2.1)— wish to see his body opened before them like a text. Caesar must bleed for a theater whose liturgy is hamspication,72 whose medium is synecdoche, and whose privileged jury invariably comprises multiple observers of a silenced object.

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The constituents of this jury, however, proliferate wildly the moment the courtroom is confused with theater, the moment the accused is converted into evidentiary spectacle. A number of critics have demonstrated that Caesar's death coincides with his historicization and textualization.73 His famous (paene) ultima verba, in fact, seem to function antithetically to the infamous anachronism that strikes in 2.1: as Sigurd Burckhardt has argued, the clock that punctuates the conspirators' plot resonates with the timelessness and interpretive indeterminacy of their action;74 in an English stage-play, however, Caesar's marmoreal Latin appears to italicize the alterity of history, its distance from the drama that relates it. Yet his last words are themselves the product of theatrical appropriation: though they live in the popular memory in Shakespeare's translation, they were originally delivered in Greek.75 Caesar may die in his native tongue, then, but his speech is rendered alien by his maker. It is a fundamental irony of Julius Caesar that its most self-conscious presentation of the autonomous past of history proves inextricably bound to the eternal present of dramatic reenactment and reinterpretation, a fact of which Polonius (of all people) reminds us: "I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i' th' Capitol; Brutus killed me" (Hamlet, 3.2.99-100). Indeed, while Caesar's blood is still warm, this metadramatic irony operates at the conspirators' expense as they celebrate the conclusion of their case and their authorship of a history play: CASSIUS: Stoop then, and wash. How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown. BRUTUS: How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport; That now on Pompey's basis lies along No worthier than the dust! (3.1.111-16) Cassius and Brutus here assert the historical primacy of their action while anticipating the future stage history of this "lofty scene"; they attempt to distinguish between a gory event and its aestheticized dramatization as "sport." But history exists as no such privileged terminus a quo in Julius Caesar. Rather, it is conceived a priori in theatrical terms, by actors who recognize its perspectival malleability. It is his presumed dramatical control over the history in which he participates, in fact, that signals Brutus's hubris. Just as he seeks to mold Caesar into a figure of deservingly punished pleonexia, for instance, so does Brutus attempt to assign and direct the roles of his fellow conspirators. Calling for Caius Ligarius, he prepares to convert a man with undetermined political allegiances into a character with an unambiguous part to play: "Send him but hither, and I'll fashion him"

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(2.1.220); thought by some stage historians to have been played by the same actor who played Cassius, Caius exists as a less determined role to be filled by a "Roman actor" of more "formal constancy" (2.1.225,226).76 And after assuming direction of an assassination rehearsed in "Pompey's Theatre" (1.3.152), Brutus insists on the conspirators' billing as sacrificers, not butchers, as purgers, not murderers— ever regarding their reception by "the common eyes" (2.1.179). Julius Caesar, however, proves to be beyond Brutus's perspectival management; and his reversal from conspirator to conspired against coincides with the deposition of his selfpresentation and an authorial usurpation of the play for which it was intended. Restaging the scene of tyrannicide around the property of Caesar's corpse, Antony in 3.2 assigns to the conspirators the very parts they had eschewed. Cassius and Brutus condemn themselves when they draw a false distinction between bloody history and bloodless drama; when they practice Jonson's Roman law and ignore Shakespeare's common law; when they declare the case closed while the jury is still out; when they abandon the public stage to Antony and permit him to construe them after his fashion. Having reduced Caesar's body to a text with wounds that gape "like dumb mouths" (3.1.260), they forget the instability of this text; they fail to recognize the invitation to alternative readings presented by the ambiguous body of the condemned, "that may signify equally well the truth of the crime or the error of the judges, the goodness or evil of the criminal."77 Thus, like their victim, the conspirators become objects of other-fashioning. A much more perspicacious conspirator, Shakespeare reveals his awareness that his own plotting of history is subject to the same interpretive energies it employs. Critics such as Taylor would deny this consciousness of contingency, reading Shakespeare's public drama as the literary "work" of an entrenched patronage poet rather than the "play" of an author willingly de-centered by the common theater.78 An instructive corrective to this anachronism, however, appears in the complaint of an eighteenth-century editor, not unfamiliar with the stage and its actors, who also seeks to treat Shakespeare's plays as "works": But of the works of Shakespeare the condition has been far different [from that of works published under the direct supervision of their authors]: he sold them, not to be printed, but to be played. They were immediately copied for the actors, and multiplied by transcript, vitiated by the blunders of the penmen, or changed by the affectation of the player; perhaps enlarged to introduce a jest, or mutilated to shorten the representation; and printed at last without the concurrence of the author, without the consent of the proprietor, from compilations made by chance or by stealth out of the separate parts written for the theatre.79 In Samuel Johnson's description, the original "condition" of Shakespeare's dramatic texts resembles Gosson's description of history adapted to the theater, a description

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that applies equally well to Caesar's body: "mutilated" as occasion demands and opportunity allows; divided into, and reconstituted from, the "separate parts" of different participatory perspectives; they exist less as intrinsic meaning than as material to be reinscribed by performance, interpretation, reproduction. If this metaphor of a corporeal text subjected to the unkindest cuts of all implies a distinction between victimhood and aggression, moreover, it is clear that Shakespeare identifies with the latter. To insist—like a Jonsonian prologue—upon a fixed, hermeneutically determined textualism is almost invariably to be a victim or a fool on Shakespeare's stage. Calling for a judgment consonant with his inflexible reading of a bond he has authored, Shylock becomes a victim of alternative interpretation when the court to which he appeals continues to construe this text after another fashion. Fashioning himself in a letter that seems to reflect the greatness of his own self-image, Malvolio becomes a "propertied" fool when he realizes his ridiculous part and cross-gartered fashion have been assigned by unseen witnesses who appropriate his amour-propre as spectacle.80 Nobody's fool and never—outside of the sonnets—a self-proclaimed victim, Shakespeare recognizes the terms of the theatrical economy in which he operates: while the theater is open, no case is closed; when the jury is "the common eyes," a moment can transform plaintiff into defendant, text into pretext, the carefully wrought self into an appropriated other; when the price of admission buys the audience something as insubstantial as a play, the theater compensates by procuring all that it represents as the interpretive property of this audience. There is evidence suggesting the special inevitability of this economy for the Renaissance author of Julius Caesar. By imagining "states unborn" and "accents yet unknown," of course, Cassius prophesies the linguistic and cultural differences Shakespeare encounters as he recovers this "lofty scene" from history. Simultaneously, then, this play looks back to an anterior future when the English state and language were "yet unknown" and forward to a present when those restaging the scene might have "Small Latine and Lesse Greek," a time when Cicero's linguistic inaccessibility to Casca might reflect Plutarch's to Shakespeare: it was Greek to both of them. But like the playwright's history, Cassius's prophecy is construed after a dramatic fashion clean from the conspirator's purpose. On a level we have already considered, this prophecy becomes for Shakespeare an opportunity for dramatic irony; we know what for Casca is tragically "unknown" and "unborn"—that the conspirators' "lofty scene" will be first "acted over" by Antony's accent, that the play will conclude with the conspirators' deaths and the birth of the Second Triumvirate. From Shakespeare's literary and historical moment, however, the irony goes further. For by the end of the sixteenth century, Cassius and Brutus's first performance had long been the stock of artists and the debated exemplum of moralists and political theorists—receiving different "accents" or evaluative emphases as monarchy and republicanism, tyrants and traitors, were

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viewed from different perspectives. The words and actions of the dead had long been modified in the guts of successive generations of the living.81 For a playwright capable of imagining an audience of "eyes not yet created,"82 though, the shortest path to obsolescence and revisionary victimization is to deny the contingency of such accentuation upon the historical moment, to assume a unanimous and monological interpretive community, and to forget that his play is the property of the very history it represents—that his text (before the posthumous First Folio) has no status, only unforeseen "states." The stubborn political ambiguity of Julius Caesa.r—its diptychous structure and bifurcation of the tragic hero's role—is therefore the design of a survivor, not a victim. With Aufidius, Shakespeare acknowledges a theatrical and historical truth fatally denied by Coriolanus: the doors of the public theater and the limina of history are presided over by Janus, and in both history plays and history, "virtues / Lie in th' interpretation of the time."83 Accordingly, if Julius Caesar has a central reference point, it is assigned to none of the main characters, but to an audience at once constitutive and prone to metamorphosis. The plebeians who compose this audience, however, also embody the ruinously misconstructive jury, the bacchanalian rout, posited by the antitheatricalists in their indictment of the public stage as a courtroom travestied. Indeed, in the central scene of Cinna's apprehension by this audience, Shakespeare seems to concede many of the terms of the antitheatrical position as he looks critically at the economy in which he is implicated. This scene presents a mock treason trial, made disturbingly ridiculous by the fact that the accused withholds no interior allegiances to be discovered. If Caesar represented for the conspirators a mysterious "serpent's egg" of potentiality (2.1.32), Cinna discloses his innocence in direct, brief, wise, and true replies to his interrogators. The plebeians' response is to collapse the distinction between body and spirit that Brutus himself honored in the breach his dagger made; and the result is a savage farce, a brutal simplification of the theatrical appropriation that pervades the play. As Cinna speaks his last vain words, he becomes what the plebeians wish him to be—a silent stage property to be mentioned in the third person, a dramatis persona fashioned as an insistent audience likes it: CINNA: I am not Cinna the conspirator. 4. PLEBEIAN: It is no matter, his name's Cinna. Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going. 3. PLEBEIAN: Tear him, tear him! Exeunt all the Plebeians dragging off Cinna. (3.3.32-35)

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We might follow Taylor in reading this passage as a self-conscious reference to Orpheus's dismemberment.84 But we must make a crucial distinction between Shakespeare's apparent allusion to the archetypal poet-victim here and the similarly oblique suggestion of Orpheus's fate we have seen in Jonson's dedication to Sejanus. Unlike Jonson, Shakespeare does not represent this figure—and the violence inflicted upon him by "the rage of the people of Rome"—in a moment of injured self-identification. Rather, Shakespeare seems to conjure the specter of Orpheus's sparagmos to demonstrate the fate of a kind of poet, a kind of voice, when subjected to the abattoir that is public theater's courtroom. Such a generic application, in fact, had precedent in the Renaissance: the euhemeristic reading of the Orpheus myth as the displacement of Greek lyric poetry by Dionysiac ritual drama might, for instance, have presented itself to the playwright in Golding's Ovid.85 If Cinna indeed serves as a figure for Orpheus, moreover, then we have in Julius Caesar an important early example of what Kenneth Gros Luis has described as a seventeenth-century poetic and iconographic development: the shift from representations of Orpheus triumphant to representations of Orpheus dismembered—a shift (by Luis's reading) that reflects an emergent skepticism toward poetry's ability to communicate clearly and to achieve its desired humanistic effects on its audience.86 In the world of Julius Caesar, at any rate, to treat the nominal poets as Shakespeare's self-representations is to confuse the purpose of the play's conscious differentiation between victims and victimizers, between an obsolescent mode of poetic subjectivity and the drama that consumes it. Far from an insidious defense of drama's innocence and inconsequence, Julius Caesar enacts a farsighted, metatheatrical critique of the dramatist and his diverse clientele. Cinna is no more Shakespeare than is the officious camp poet dismissed later in the play for his inutility and for his decidedly unheroic couplet: POET: For shame, you generals! what do you mean? Love, and be friends, as two such men should be, For I have seen more years, I'm sure, than ye. CASSIUS: Ha, ha! how vilely does this cynic rhyme! BRUTUS: Get you hence, sirrah; saucy fellow, hence! CASSIUS: Bear with him, Brutus, 'tis his fashion. BRUTUS: I'll know his humor, when he knows his time. What should the wars do with these jigging fools? Companion, hence! (4.3.130-38)

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Like Cinna, though by verbal rather than physical violence, this poet is removed from the stage because he is an anachronism, a "fashion" in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nearly ten years before Julius Caesar first appeared, Christopher Marlowe had introduced a revolutionary play with a prologue defining his theater in negative terms remarkably similar to Brutus's rejection of the camp poet: From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine Threatening the world with his high astounding terms, And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. View but his picture in this tragic glass, And then applaud his fortunes as you please.87 For Shakespeare as for Marlowe, "the stately tent of war" offers little shelter for poets who do not know their time or stage, exposing them instead to ridicule and to the ruinous energies of a theater that has overtaken them. For Shakespeare as for Marlowe, the "tragic glass" of this public theater confines mighty men in little room, represents historical figures through dramatic spectacle, and proffers this dramatized exterior to an uncertain reception. The final line of Marlowe's prologue reveals this evaluative uncertainty and attests to the difference between the Elizabethan public playhouse of the 1590s and private poetry kept in pay by patron or coterie: if the patronage poet knows his audience and can fashion his rhetoric toward the focal point of a highly specific, private, and determined communicative occasion, the theater poet writes for a miscellaneous, public, and undetermined audience. If Jonson belatedly appeals to Roman law in an effort to focus and limit the court of judgment, the public playwright accepts the mobilities and indeterminacies of common law—its many-headed jury endowed with the multiple and mobile sight-lines of the groundlings. Regardless of his authorial intentions, therefore, the dramatist who accepts the terms of this epistemological economy can hope for no more control over his customers than Antony claims over the people he has "moved" through a carefully staged scene: Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot, Take thou what course thou wilt! (3.2.259-60) In this mischievous envoy, Antony articulates a potential tacitly assumed by the interpretive license of the public stage, a license explicitly transferred to the audience by not a few Renaissance prologues and epilogues. When every man is a

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patron and a juror, when a heterogeneous group of spectators views a spectacle from multiple perspectives, miscommunication becomes the dramatist's donnee; for these men may construe things after their fashion. And when the dramatist presents historical figures as evaluatively ambiguous as Tamburlaine or Caesar or Brutus—their characters fashioned from received texts—it is far from clear that such an audience can or will learn aright why and how that maker made them. When the stage is the world, every act of reading or writing, watching or showing, may have unpredictable interpretive consequences that reach well beyond the originative occasion and venue. Significantly, every act of writing in Julius Caesar draws blood. In several cases—such as the broadsheets Cassius writes "in several hands," "wherein obscurely Caesar's ambition shall be glanced at" (1.2.316,319-20); the anonymous notes Cinna the conspirator throws in Brutus's way (1.3.145); and the proscription list on which Antony damns lives with spots of ink (4.1.6)88—the injury textually inflicted seems to correspond with the author's intention. And yet the conspirators, as we have seen, involuntarily involve themselves in their own plot the moment they script it and declare it finished. Antony, moreover, loses sole authorship of his counterplot as it becomes the collaborative product of the other triumvirs: having judged the proscription list complete, he is forced by Octavius to add the name of Lepidus's brother, a revision Lepidus makes contingent upon the inclusion of Antony's nephew. Similarly, once a text is composed in this play, it is subject to politicized readings beyond the author's control; and of this pervasive process the poet's death once again provides a central, emblematic image. Culminating a scene in which he amplifies the plebeians' outrage by gradually undressing Caesar's torn corpse, Antony publicly reads the dead man's will as a last incitement to riot (3.2.240-52). Just two scenes later, however, Caesar's will is figuratively dismembered as Antony determines "how to cut off some charge in legacies" (4.1.9). The intervening scene of Cinna's murder, of course, presents the literal dismemberment of an author whose will counts for nothing and whose audience chooses to misread him. In this scene, Shakespeare schematizes the fate of all communication in the play: when the audience is both mobile and prone to action, when spectators become collaborators, when the jury arrogates the dual privilege of constituting meaning and executing its sentence, a speech-act's illocutionary intention dissolves into its perlocutionary effect. From the vantage point of 1601, such an awareness can only appear prophetic; for two years earlier Shakespeare claims for his drama the dangerous power to bestow an Exton on the world to make many Extons.89 But what justification have we for treating Julius Caesar's plebeians as an unflattering, unmitigated representation of the Globe audience's potential? To what extent is Shakespeare's metadramatic antitheatricalism contained by Rome and the play that concerns it? A limited answer lies in recognizing the diachronic

no

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transformation of the crowd in Julius Caesar. The plebeians who make their final exit bearing Cinna at the end of act 3 first took the stage preparing for Caesar's triumph at the beginning of act 1, and we must include the facts of this metamorphosis in our assessment of Shakespeare's representation of the audience in this play. Instead of a pack of marauding plebeians pursuing a poet, we find in 1.1 "certain commoners" (s.d.) set upon by inquisitorial tribunes; instead of an indistinct rabble seeking blood we find a remarkably individuated cobbler able to pun with the best of Shakespeare's English tradesmen.90 Indeed, the line distinguishing sixteenth-century England and ancient Rome in Julius Caesar is never more blurred than in this scene. The tribunes alternately seem like London aldermen policing sumptuary laws and Puritan antitheatricalists censuring the license, social confusion and spectacle of the public theater:91 Flavius and Murellus chastise the keepers of this shoemaker's holiday for doffing "the sign" of their profession and donning their "best attire" (4,48); and having dispersed the crowd, they set out to "Disrobe the images" decked with Caesar's "ceremonies" (64-65). The "certain Commoners" who cross the stage in 1.1 would appear to have no more objectionable motive than the desire for spectacle, the wish "to see Caesar and rejoice in his triumph" (31). And yet the tribunes' antitheatrical anxiety in this scene is justified (and, significantly, left unchallenged by a play that does not make them the conventional object of pro theatrical satire). Not only do the masquerading commoners represent a mobile vulgus, ranging about the liberties dislocated from their social station; they also represent—as the cobbler's relentless punning reveals—a miscellany of individuals, each capable of construing the meaning of words after his fashion. When the vulgar can divest themselves of their social signifiers, when the vernacular can be invested with paronomasial significance, the theatrical audience acquires interpretive agency and the theater itself thereby becomes epistemologically open-ended and politically consequential. In 1.1, the plebeians enter as political innocents, and Murellus remonstrates them for failing to realize that the triumph they yearn to watch "comes... over Pompey's blood" (51); in 3.3, the plebeians exit bloodied with the experience of political theater, having demonstrated that to watch in this play is also to act. In 1.1, they observe a social carnival; in 3.3, they effect political carnage. In 1.1, the cobbler's playfulness with language, his witty misreading of the tribunes' sense, appears innocuous; in 3.3, the fourth plebeian's wordplay is fatal, his misreading of Cinna a literal pun that tears name from thing. In 1.1, finally, Shakespeare's sixteenth-century audience might have recognized itself in the protheatrical image of a harmless, recreational spectatorship; in 3.3, this audience would have seen itself transformed into (or revealed as?) the misconstruing miscreation that elicited Roman theatrical censorship. Such is the plebeians' metamorphosis from "stones" (1.1.36) to "men" (3.2.142),92 from theatrical nai'fs to initiates in the political theater. Like all metamorphoses,

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it involves less a break than a continuum: the difference between culling out a holiday and killing a man depends only upon the degree of the spectators' participation, the consequence of their perspective. And like many initiations, it involves a ceremonial rite. If Caesar dies at the hands of republican fellow players unwilling to cede the theater to a single monarchical actor, Cinna dies as a sacrifice to an audience that has taken the stage. It may seem strange for Shakespeare to inaugurate his Globe in these terms, to baptize his audience with the blood of a poet, to figure its interpretive autonomy in a literal act of dismemberment. But dismemberment is his metaphor when, less than a year after Julius Caesar's first performance, Shakespeare invokes his audience's imaginative collaboration in Henry V: Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts; Into a thousand parts divide one man.93 In the theater of the world, every character is subject to synecdochic reading, every act and representation is imperfect and unfinished, every text is submitted to the cutting room—the deceptively "little room" where spectators, no less than actors, conspire to "force a play." It is as an emblem of this theater's censurable energies and properties that Cinna is dragged offstage. Throughout this chapter I have avoided countless tempting puns on the word Caesarean, but the term here is a reminder that those who enter the social world by such a process rely to an extraordinary degree upon the grasping hands and cutting instruments of those already in that world. To borrow from the language of Macbeth, agency in birth is defined by the one who does the ripping.94 Of course such agency can also be cooperative. If we can speak of appropriability as an authorial intention, it would seem that in the case of Julius Caesar Shakespeare's will has been observed to the letter. As Caesar's triumph comes "over Pompey's blood," so has Shakespeare's laureation been achieved by the violent other-fashioning that the play both participates in and represents; in this sense the drama renders unto Shakespeare what is Caesar's. Michael Dobson has recently observed—in an extensive account of the various Royalist and Parliamentarian employments of Julius Caesar from the Restoration to the mideighteenth century—that the play's adaptability (and indeed mutilatability) has been instrumental in Shakespeare's canonization.95 On 28 April 1738, the committee appointed to erect Shakespeare's monument in Westminster Abbey inaugurated its project by commissioning a performance of Julius Caesar at Drury Lane. In Noel Porter's explicitly Whiggish, pro-Brutus prologue to this performance, Shakespeare enjoys the coronation denied Caesar: While Brutus bleeds for liberty and Rome, Let Britons crowd to deck his Poet's tomb.

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To future times recorded let it stand, This head was lawrel'd by the public hand.96 Like Caesar's ghost, the disembodied playwright became for this memorial committee a name to conjure with; in 1739 Lewis Theobald invoked both spirits for the final theatrical observation of Shakespeare's monumentalization, an exhumation of Hamlet at Covent Garden: Immortal Shakespearl we thy claim admit; For, like thy Caesar, thou art mighty yet! Thy spirit walks abroad; and at our hands The honorary tomb, thy right, demands.97 Like Brutus, who must "dismember Caesar" to "come by Caesar's spirit," Shakespeare's executors abstract his genius in the same stroke that renders his image (and his texts) the property of a less predictable "public hand." Nothing is more conducive to the ideological appropriation of literature than the creation of such a malleable author and authority; and few things ensure canonicity more effectively than ideological appropriability.98 It is not surprising, then, that Shakespeare's Abbey monument was constructed in a period during which his plays were willfully misconstructed for blatantly political purposes; a period during which the invocation of his transcendent and timeless spirit could serve the most transitory and historically specific ends. We do not know if the dramatist ever meditated the laurel crown, but in Julius Caesar he accepts the "accents yet unknown" that will continue to provide him with it. In chapter 1 of this study, I argued that Skelton reflects upon a poetic triumph that comes over Jane's objection and objectification, a self-laureation that makes her public property with a dismembering blazon and a literary monument. We have seen this process intensified in Spenser's representation of Serena among the cannibals—where a predatory poetics is both critically emblemized and selfconsciously performed. I have claimed in this chapter that Julius Caesar dramatizes Shakespeare's investment in, and investiture with, the economy of the killing poem. The strong reading that kills Cinna, like the one that renders Plutarch's Lives victims of Shakespeare's dramatic executions, is what Julius Caesar has invited generations of audiences—starting with its first—to perform. On one level, then, Taylor's objection to this bardicidal play is valid: Cinna's death, and the transformation of the poet's place in the theater it represents, does constitute an invitation to customers who will seek to cover Shakespeare with the mantle of bardolatry. But only by ignoring the self-consciousness with which Julius Caesar explores the power of playwright and audience can one forget that this mantle, like those which cover Caesar and Agamemnon, bears its own scars of imperfect violence. Whatever power Shakespeare asserts in this play in fact results from and coextends with a comfortable, continued vulnerability.

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We turn now to playwrights who look at Shakespeare's declaration of power with increased suspicion, and who deploy the theatricalized death less in complicity with a self-serving audience than in critical reaction to that audience's interpretive appetites. In chapter 4, Dekker, Ford, and Rowley submit Mother Sawyer to much the same process that yields Cinna a stage property. And like Julius Caesar, The Witch of Edmonton centers upon the theatrical production of guilt and execution. While Julius Caesar offers no epistemology other than the public stage, however, The Witch suggests the radical incompatibility between this stage and the subjects it violates and falsifies. While Shakespeare's play invites us into the jury box, even as it admits the lack of judgment we may exercise, Dekker and Ford reject the theater's fatal arrogation of the law.

4

The Witch of Edmonton and the Guilt of Possession These are no jestes, for they be written by them that were and are judges upon the lives and deaths of those persons. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft

I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been strook so to the soul, that presently They have proclaim'd their malefactions: For murther, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. Hamlet

nNo RENAISSANCE ART FORM calls more loudly for our ethical response

than that representing the persecution and execution of witches; and none raises more clearly the analytical problem of "guilt" or "responsibility" in historical discussions of early modern texts. If, more than any other literary genre, drama interacts with a culture's ways of seeing, the theater of witchcraft involves an epistemology in which looks really can kill. And yet, though works of dramatic journalism such as The Late Lancashire Witches (1634)1 may have influenced the legal process in offstage witch trials, we search in vain for an actual corpse with which to accuse Renaissance drama's fascination with the subject.2 Though there is much to suggest that early modern skeptics such as Reginald Scot and Samuel Harsnett recognized the function of theatricality in the cultural production of the bewitched and bedeviled, moreover, these skeptics never charge the institution of the stage with responsibility for persecution and execution. In fact, as Stephen Greenblatt has demonstrated, the opposite is the case: The "freely acknowledged fictionality" of 114

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the theater provides Renaissance skeptics with a zone of inconsequentiality where otherwise dangerous witch beliefs can be safely contained. In the Renaissance, only a thoroughgoing antitheatricalist like Stephen Gosson, suspicious not of the theatricalization of evil but of the evil of theater, seems willing to blame plays for performing the devil's work: "The Devil is the efficient cause of plays."3 But Gosson's voice, though muffled, is audible in criticism implicitly concerned with the instrumentality of the stage in perpetuating and enabling social persecution. Etta Soiref Onat's response to The Late Lancashire Witches illustrates what has for some time been the fashion of displacing ethical with formal or aesthetic criticism when the subject is the damningly orthodox representation of witches. Observing that the play was produced between the examination of the accused and their pardon by King Charles, and that the playwrights "undoubtedly knew the rumors which were circulating about the pardon and the suspicions of the good faith of t h e . . . chief witnesses for the prosecution," Onat struggles with the dramatists' decision to represent the accused as unquestionably bewitched: Such a choice is, of course, entirely within the province of the playwright; even when he is working with sources of such topical nature, he does not work like a reporter.... We do have the right, however, to ask that, once having made a choice, he should not be superficial in his portrayal. Thus, without agreeing that the authors "hadpendente lite, done their utmost to intensify public feeling against witches," we may regret perhaps that The Late Lancashire Witches is so completely orthodox and positive in its presentation of the popular superstitions. But we cannot really censure the authors for making that choice. What we can censure them for is that their portrayal is superficial and trivial; throughout the entire play the emphasis is upon the sensational for its own sake.4 In earlier debates over Shakespeare's troubling dramatization of witches, the underlying assumption that such representation can have harmful social consequences seems to inform the desire to exculpate Shakespeare for authorial responsibility, even if this defense requires aesthetic condemnation. Joan la Pucelle in 1 Henry VI, for instance, has been indignantly labeled "un-Shakespearean"—a product of a disintegrated text that does not reflect Shakespeare's intentions and does not, therefore, require his accountability.5 The "interpolated" witches' song in Macbeth, a crowd-pleasing round taken from Thomas Middleton's The Witch, has similarly appeared "spurious"—a dismissal that has until quite recently foreclosed analysis of Shakespeare's employment of it.6 The bold questions beneath such partial indictments and defensive strategies have recently been brought into open air by Greenblatt, who responds to feminist and psychoanalytic recognition of Macbeth's "radical excision of the female"7 by

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asking why the play should not be equated with such socially consequential texts as the witchmongering Malleus maleficarum: Why should we not say that the play, with immeasurably greater literary force, undertakes to reenchant the world, to shape misogyny to political ends, to counteract the corrosive skepticism that had called into question both the existence of witches and the sacredness of royal authority?... Why should we not say that this play about evil is evil?... What is the point of speaking at all about the historical situation of works of art if ideological entail ments and practical consequences are somehow off-limits, and if they are not off-limits, how can we avoid moral judgments?8 Inevitable objections present themselves to such questions, which Greenblatt himself finally disregards as "smug moral critique":9 post-Enlightenment rationalism and tests of "progressive politics" are notorious impediments to historical empathy with early modern texts; assessing the artistic intentions and social consequences of a play such as Macbeth requires missing biographical and historical evidence; and, perhaps most importantly, subjecting Macbeth to a modern-day inquisition ignores the ways in which the play "questions from within itself its own theatrical representation of witchcraft."10 Metadramatic reflexivity would indeed seem to offer the theater a powerful defense against such probing questions: how can we indict the stage for substantiating the theatricalism for which and by which witches were killed, after all, if the theater clearly designates such imaginary enchantment as manipulative illusion? Does the explicit and self-conscious dramatization of witchcraft not always provide its own skeptical critique? Interestingly, such questions are posed forcefully by the very play Greenblatt chooses to contrast with Macbeth in an effort partially to exonerate Shakespeare's play; unlike Macbeth, he claims, The Witch of Edmonton apparently "sanction[s]" the legal prosecution and execution of witches.11 This chapter argues largely to the contrary—suggesting that Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley collaboratively produce in The Witch of Edmonton (1621) one of the most radical dramatic challenges to the legal and cultural production of witches in the Renaissance.12 Complicating this argument, however, is the coextensive claim that such a reading—which locates invitations to skepticism within a text—should not necessarily disentangle or exculpate a text from its acknowledged legal and cultural complicities. Calls for light within the theater can have enchantments of their own; they can also cast long shadows of guilt across the text that gives them being. The contribution of Greenblatt's reading of Macbeth in "Shakespeare Bewitched" lies in its articulation of the possibility that witchcraft drama might be socially consequential and ethically accountable—an anxiety harbored not only by critics of this drama but also by Renaissance playwrights. By identifying the terms by which theater can both collude with and skeptically destabilize a culture's

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witch beliefs, Greenblatt subjects to historical analysis the question of literary responsibility. If his essay has a disabling omission, however, it is an inattendance to the textual experience of this responsibility. When asked to choose whether a play like Macbeth "is evil" or "about evil," the latter proves more demonstrable, and more historically responsible, than the retrospective ascription of guilt. And this is presumably why Greenblatt's analysis of the play's "political and ethical consequences" becomes increasingly attenuated by qualification until Shakespeare is finally placed "on the side of a liberating, tolerant doubt."13 But if, in a historicist reading of Macbeth, "objective" guilt ultimately proves inapplicable, the formal defense of reflexivity would at least seem limited; reflexivity, after all, does not automatically exculpate a text from the consequences of what it self-consciously performs, any more than a flickering expression of social conscience justifies attendant, strategic evil: If th'assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease, success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and [shoal] of time, We'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases We still have judgment here, that we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague th'inventor. (Macbeth, 1.7.2-10) Even to imply that the author of a witchcraft play could consider his part in and responsibility for "teach [ing] / Bloody instructions," however, is to supply the missing category in Greenblatt's analysis—the category of subjective guilt. This category is accessible to historical analysis precisely because it is produced by, and respondent to, historical and cultural pressures. In the following reading of The Witch of Edmonton, listening for expressions of subjective guilt can expand the possibilities of metadramatic reflexivity to include not only skeptical challenges to the theatricalization of witchcraft, but also complex confessions of the theater's capitalization on this phenomenon. Such a reading concerns the playwright's acknowledged complicity with the fairly diffuse economy that supported witchmongering in Renaissance England. We see the ways in which this complicity is "redistributed"14 in the play's deceptively collaborative plots, and in the terrible collusion they reveal between the tragicomedy of religious punishment and forgiveness and the entertainment industry of the stage. First, though, we consider the chief complicity Dekker, Ford, and Rowley undertook the moment they chose the subject of their play—a complicity with the law that had already provided for Elizabeth Sawyer's representation and execution.

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THE LAW'S EYE AND THE THEATER'S CAPITAL Though in obvious ways the playwright does not, in Onat's words, "work like a reporter," authors of Renaissance witchcraft dramas had special reason to meditate upon the mediation performed by their texts. Their subjects could be unusually topical, recognizable as offstage persons unprotected by the laws against libel and slander that customarily governed the stage. As a legal category, the Renaissance "subject" of witchcraft was for several more specific reasons exposed to acute theatrical vulnerability. In early modern England, where uniquely in Europe the jury (rather than the bench) was charged with "finding fact" in the adjudication of guilt or innocence, the theater could influence not only the court of public opinion but also the generic perspective of potential jurors.15 When we consider a related legal distinction between Renaissance England and the rest of Europe—that in England criminal trials were typically public and well-reported affairs, while on the Continent they were conducted in relative secrecy16—the epistemological analogies between courtroom and drama further suggest consequential social connections. Indeed, if the English theater occupied a position of what we might call "culpable mediacy" in a culture that created and killed witches, it was because these analogies placed the stage on the verge of the legally produced "real": the epistemological conviction deliberated by jurors and required of spectators sought to alter the ontology of the accused and staged.17 The plea we have heard in Henry Vs Prologue to see more than meets the eye, for instance, echoes in John Gaule's mid-seventeenth-century call for evidentiary latitude in judging a witch: "Neither is it requisite that so palpable evidence for conviction should here come in, as in more sensible matters. It is enough if there be but so much circumstantial proof or evidence, as the substance, matter, and nature of such an abstruse mystery will well admit."18 In 1616, John Cotta similarly recommends a fantastically "curious view" of witchcraft cases, since (as Duke Theseus observes of the theatergoer's need for epistemological charity in A Midsummer Night's Dream) such cases are "neither manifest to sense, nor evident to reason"; without the active engagement of the juror's "presumptions," Cotta suggests, the theatrical mysteries of witchcraft will fail to convince.19 Five years later another interpretive community is enjoined "from suspicion to proceed to great presumptions," a reliance upon the evidence of things not seen that produces both a witch "on whose body law was justly inflicted" and a made-for-theater account.20 In The Wonderful Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a "Witch, Late of Edmonton, Her Conviction and Condemnation and Death, the minister Henry Goodcole provides a catalogue of witnesses and transcripts of testimony in defense of the prosecution—"thereof to stop all contradictions of so palpable a verity" as that which he represents in narrative and dialogue (388). As hard as he strives to leave nothing to the imagination in his proof of Sawyer's guilt, however, Goodcole must finally resort to the imagination

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as he confronts the airy nothing of her possession. In order to ascribe to Sawyer the agency that will define a host of unfortunate events as her evil acts, Goodcole must demonstrate that she really trafficked with a spirit unwitnessed by anyone else in the courtroom. To do so he requires that Sawyer produce against herself a convincing bit of theater that renders tangible the privately spectacular: "Did you ever handle the Devil when he came unto you? (I asked of her this question because some might think this was a visible delusion of her sight only)" (Wonderful Discoverie, 396).21 Goodcole never comes closer to fantasizing of the special effects—the talking dog, the touching "familiar"—with which the authors of The Witch of Edmonton give the devil a local habitation and a name in the play. But the circumstantial proof and spectacularly produced "real" of the theater always, at the final curtain, discredit themselves as insubstantial pageantry. In fact we might take any theatrical representation (however orthodox or unreflective) of an embattled legal belief structure as a subversive call to skepticism; Thespis, after all, has always made Solon nervous—perhaps by drawing attention to the uncomfortable homologies between courtroom and drama, legal fiction and theatrical illusion.22 The Renaissance stage, moreover, was especially well situated to expose the machinery and motivations of illusion-mongering, the contingency and capitalism of credibility. When, for example, two characters in The Witch of Edmonton's comic subplot propose adding a make-believe witch to the cast of their morris dance, we are reminded with a metadramatic wink that the play's 'real' witch is really a counterfeit too: YOUNG BANKS: I'll have a Witch; I love a Witch. 1.MORICE-DANCER: Faith, Witches themselves are so common now a days, that the counterfeit will not be regarded. They say we have three or four in Edmonton, besides Mother Sawyer. Such winks, however (and the play is replete with them), can also produce a blind eye: by establishing a distant focal point on the obvious fiction of a playwithin-the-play (here, the carnivalesque morris), the dramatist also blurs those categories by which his spectators maintain distinction between the framing action and the real world that frames it. The self-conscious deployment of an act of makebelieve, as the mannered mimesis of The Murder of Gonzago famously illustrates, can paradoxically contribute to the making of consequential belief—especially when accompanied by appeals to the process of legal conviction. By reifying "the play" as the conscience-catching "thing," Hamlet joins his spectators in a theater transformed by the judicial discovery of fact and production of evidence. Hamlet performatively authenticates itself by producing, in a case of conscience, an authentes, or "murderer," who interrupts the theatrical counterfeit of his crime with a disillusioning call for light.23 The Witch of Edmonton, first published with the

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subtitle "A known true Story,"24 achieves an even firmer referential authenticity by borrowing from the specific legal precedent represented by Goodcole: "For my part I meddle here with nothing but matter of fact, and to that end produce the testimony of the living and the dead, which I hope shall be authentical for the confirmation of this Narration" (Wonderful Discoverie, 381). I say "borrowing" because the prologue attached to a revival of the play, acknowledging that Edmonton has already provided the theater with diabolical source material,25 describes the transaction in these terms: The Town of Edmonton hath lent the Stage A Devil and a Witch, both in an Age. (Prologue, 1-2) In the scene of the Young Banks's morris preparations, this conception of the witch as theatrical capital appears in the diabolical "Spirit's" distinction between comic subplot and the play's more serious economy: We'll sport with [Young Banks]; but when reckoning call, We know where to receive: th'Witch pays for all. (3.1.75-76) Certainly these lines reveal the terrible calculus of scapegoating—a symbolic math that the play frequently graphs metadramatically: "The Witch must be beaten out of her Cock-pit" (5.1.49).26 More specifically, they unravel the twisted logic of a culture whose king (the play was performed not only "often at the Cock-pit" but "once at Court, with singular Applause"27) authored both the Book of Sports and Daemonologie—the first an advocation of the kind of spirited civic revelry represented by the morris, the latter a complex legitimization of the prosecution of witches that accommodates skepticism.28 When sanctioned play threatens to undo such cultural work, a scapegoat typically gets stuck with the bill. Thus when Young Banks unwittingly contaminates the morris with the evil familiar, thereby confirming the Puritan argument that such festivities transform their participants into "deuils incarnate," a genuine crime intercedes to excuse his "deuil's dance" as innocent.29 "This news of Murder," he exclaims when informed of the main plot's homicide, "has slain the Morrice" (3.4.63-64); and the investigation of this crime, after false accusations, ultimately convicts Mother Sawyer as the efficient cause. But if "th'Witch pays for all" as the price of playing, the expense of spirit that satisfies social accounts, she also provides credit as a convincing spectacle—a commercial resource of theatrical prejudice. As capital, Elizabeth Sawyer offers the stage a prepaid product of its genuinely forensic counterpart, already examined and convicted for capital crimes by the jury which theatergoers can only approximate.

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That the transactions between legal and fictional representation can challenge the former's legitimacy appears in Goodcole's explanation of his desire to defend the truth of the cause, which in some measure hath received a wound already, by most base and false ballads, which were sung at the time of our returning from the Witch's execution. In them I was ashamed to see and hear such ridiculous fictions of her bewitching corn on the ground, of a ferret and an owl daily sporting before her, of the bewitched woman braining herself, of the spirits attending in the Prison: all which I knew to be fitter for an Alebench than for a relation of proceeding in Court of Justice. And thereupon I wonder that such lewd Balladmongers should be suffered to creep into the Printers' presses and people's ears. (Wonderful Discoverie, 381-82) Here as throughout the narrative Goodcole acknowledges the vulnerability of "the cause" to parodic devolution and textual circulation.30 Indeed in a few instances he is surprisingly willing to concede the dubiety of specific aspects of Sawyer's trial in order to contain the more radical skepticism that would expose his Wonderful Discoverie as tragic or farcical misapprehension.31 When relating the town's superstitious method of determining who was responsible for "the death of nursechildren and cattle," for instance, Goodcole interjects an editorial note that anticipates the commonsense objection to such a test: And to find out who should be the author of this mischief, an old ridiculous custom was used, which was to pluck the thatch of her house and to burn it, and it being so burned, the author of such mischief should presently come out: and it was observed, and affirmed to the Court, that Elizabeth Sawyer would presently frequent the house of them that burnt the thatch which they plucked of her house, and come without sending for. (Wonderful Discoverie, 382-83) Goodcole similarly acknowledges the uncomfortable fact that in prison Sawyer has confessed to him the murder of the two nurse-children "for the which I was now indicted and acquitted, by the Jury." On the other hand she has remained resolute to the gallows that she is innocent of the death of one "Agnes Ratcliefe," "for which [she was] found guilty by the Jury" (Wonderful Discoverie, 391). For Goodcole the "old ridiculous custom" of thatch-burning, like the "ridiculous fictions" of the "lewd Balladmongers," must be dutifully marked as suspect and counterfeit if his audience's limited credulity is to be reserved for, and focused upon, the central drama of his narrative. If in the faithful representation of this drama Goodcole must also admit the potential fallability of the jury that pronounced Sawyer guilty, moreover, he defends all the more firmly the fundamental

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justice of her conviction and execution. By converting the body and speech of the accused into self-incriminating evidence, the courtroom becomes an authentic and providentially directed theater: The Bench commanded officers appointed for those purposes, to fetch in three women to search the body of Elizabeth Sawyer, to see if they could find any such unwonted mark as they were informed o f . . . That tongue which by cursing, swearing, blaspheming, and imprecating, as afterward she confessed, was the occasioning cause of the Devil's access unto h e r . . . and to claim her thereby as his own, by it discovered her lying, swearing, and blaspheming as also evident proofs produced against her, to stop her mouth with Truth's authority... Thus God did wonderfully overtake her in her own wickedness, to make her tongue to be the means of her own destruction, which had destroyed many before. (Wonderful Discoverie, 387,383-84) Like the authors of The Witch of Edmonton, Goodcole advertises the marvelous fact of his discovery—a fact established by Sawyer's essential role as a legible body and a possessed tongue—by distinguishing it parenthetically from untenable fiction and corrupting superstition. In their similar and often complementary attempts to render Sawyer's case "a known true Story" with a future stage history, The Wonderful Discoverie and The Witch of Edmonton in fact suggest a cooperation between legal apology and self-authenticating theater. If in the defense of the law the condemned must be convincingly made-for-theater, the theater's appropriation of this product can involve a "loan" that respects the principle as the immutable stipulation of the borrower. Indeed, Greenblatt's argument that The Witch of Edmonton actually sanctions the legal execution of witches suggests how such a loan may be repaid with interest: theatrical representation, with its potential for limitless reproduction, can contribute to the process whereby an individual legal case lives in history as a constantly relevant and applicable precedent.32 Goodcole's strategies of incorporating skepticism for the purpose of authentic conviction at least provide the playwrights with a representational model. In a scene that may recall the morris dancers' rejection of a "counterfeit" witch for their festivities, the Justice examining Sawyer dismisses the bogus proofs of witchcraft offered by Young Banks's father and a group of rustics: 1.COUNTRY-MAN: This Thatch is as good as a Jury to prove she is a Witch.... OLD BANKS: ... a Witch: to prove her one, we no sooner set fire on the Thatch of her House, but in she came running....

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JUSTICE: Come, come; firing her Thatch? ridiculous: take heed Sirs what you do: unless your proofs come better arm'd, instead of turning her into a Witch, you'll prove yourselves starke Fools. (4.1.25,34-36,39-41) Like Hamlet, the playwrights' Justice (whose localized skepticism, sensitivity toward the judicially "ridiculous," and empirical focus upon the body of the accused transcribe Goodcole) will have "grounds / More relative than this."33 And the play obliges by arming its proofs against such popular superstitions and dubious juries; the play, in fact, enlists its spectators as jury, resolving into spectacle some of the evidentiary ambiguities raised by Goodcole's narrative. The instant Sawyer is left alone in the scene above, for example, the "Familiar" enters to "have the Teat" ("dri'd up / With cursing and with madness"), and to inform Sawyer that he has lamed a horse "and nip'd the sucking-childe" (4.1.151, 153, 159-60). In this very brief exchange, the playwrights compress the damning anatomical examination reported in The Wonderful Discoverie (387-88); they also establish Sawyer's role in the death of at least one of "those two nurse-children"— a crime of which she has been acquitted (apparently erroneously) in Goodcole's account. Such maleficia typically, as in The Wonderful Discoverie, can be reconstructed only in the confession of the accused or in the charges of the prosecution. Onstage, though, the Witch's commands to her familiar reveal what even a skeptic must acknowledge as a crime of intention. In a passage to which we shall return, moreover, The Witch of Edmonton redresses a further ambiguity in Goodcole's account by representing the consequences of Sawyer's cursing of Agnes Ratcleife: her commands that the Dog "pinch that Quean to th'heart" and "Touch her" are followed (post hoc if not propter hoc) by "Anne Ratcliff s" madness and suicide (4.1.71-207). Though the playwrights' witch, like Goodcole's, will deny in the end any responsibility for this crime (5.3.33-35), our witnessing of this scene amplifies and confirms the "insight" of those who have examined Sawyer's body for witch's marks in The Wonderful Discoverie: This view of theirs... gave some insight to the Jury, of her: who upon their consciences returned the said Elizabeth Sawyer, to be guilty, by diabolical help, of the death of Agnes Ratcleife... And thus much of the means that brought her to her deserved death and destruction.

(388) One cannot read substantial portions of the play without sensing the commercial value of this "insight" to the theater. As a satisfying supplement to interpretive appetizers offered in the courtroom, such a gaze endows the observed with enough agency to register the significance of its appropriation by the observer: "she has

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done killing now, but must be kill'd for what she has done: she's shortly to be hang'd" (The Witch of Edmonton, 5.1.101). As a solution to any perceived antagonism between the licit and the entertaining, legal and theatrical imperatives merge in a play that invites its spectators to continue the law's work. Of course reliance upon theatrical prejudice to establish and perpetuate the essential justice of legal precedent entails obvious liabilities. In Measure for Measure, Angelo's desire to execute a sex offender as a future warning to the rest of Vienna requires an admission of juristic hypocrisy that will return to haunt him: I do not deny The jury, passing on the prisoner's life, May in the sworn twelve have a thief or two Guiltier than him they try. What's open made to justice, That justice seizes. (2.1.18-22) The Witch of Edmonton involves theatrical exposures of legal abuse similar to the Duke's ultimate discovery of Angelo. The play's Justice may peremptorily claim, in response to Sawyer's indictment of socially tolerated forms of ruinous "Inchantment," "Yes, yes, but the Law / Casts not an eye on these" (The Witch of Edmonton, 4.1.117-18), but it is the panoptic privilege of theater to examine just such inequities. My foregoing analysis of The Witch of Edmontons substantial connivance with the law, however, has aimed at revealing the central complicity that defines much of the play's remarkable social criticism as self-criticism. If the play finally allows no uncomplicated scapegoating, the text forbids even itself the purifying displacement of its social implications. Before recognizing The Witch of Edmonton's representation of the social guilt that underlies local blame, then, I exemplify the play's reflection on the culpability of its own representations. The example focuses on what we have seen to be the playwrights' intertextual self-consciousness, their awareness of Goodcole's prior account as authenticating source and theatrical capital. Any latent tension between these two conceptions of their legal source has thus far, in my analysis, been resolved in the playwrights' "supplemental" representation of Sawyer's case. In the scene of Anne RatclifFs bewitching, however, the dramatists depart from Goodcole's narrative in an especially significant way; they create, in fact, a glaring intertextual contradiction that exposes the exploitative nature of Goodcole's account and their dramatization of it. In his trenchant discussion of cultural conflict in the play, Anthony Dawson has described this contradiction as "in essence an addition to the source": In Goodcole's pamphlet, Agnes Ratcliffe dies bewitched, a victim of Mother Sawyer's revenge for a petty neighborly trespass. In the play she runs mad and subsequently commits suicide. The difference may seem slight, moti-

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vated perhaps by the opportunity the change offered the dramatists for a theatrically effective mad scene. But I think there is more to it than that... As a social critic, she is allied with her enemy in the same scene, Mother Sawyer... So, Anne Ratcliffe, victim of witchcraft, is linked in her madness to the transgressive marginality of witchcraft itself. She thus joins hands with Mother Sawyer.34 Dawson's sensitivity to the passage's theatrical opportunism and legal satire is illuminating;35 but his premise that the exchange is "an addition to the source" leads him to conclude with a distorted sense of the dramatists' ventriloquized social criticism and sympathy in this passage. In this part of the scene the dramatists have not, strictly speaking, added to their sources; they have instead incorporated those "most base and false ballads" whose "ridiculous fictions... of the bewitched woman braining herself" Goodcole mentions in his pamphlet only to discount: and nothing in her mouth being heard, but the Devil, the Witch the Witch, the Devil; she beat out her own brains, and so she died. (The Witch of Edmonton, 4.1.205-7) What can seem (and what on one level is) a dramatic liberty taken to enhance social protest and marginal sympathy is actually (or perhaps also) an intrusive reminder of the commercial interests of theater.36 "Performance," writes Berger, "asks us to submit to its spell, and the text asks us to examine the implications of that submission."37 Like the authors of The Witch of Edmonton, Goodcole avails himself of illusionistic strategies—such as present tense dialogue—whereby a text can become a script. In so doing he strives mightily to distinguish his production and distribution of numerous "written copies of this ... Declaration" from the "lewd Balladmongers ... suffered to creep into the Printers'presses and people's ears" (Wonderful Discoverie, 381-82). To the extent that Goodcole makes us forget that "as Ordinary at Newgate [he] heard the dying confessions of the prisoners [and] eked out his livelihood by publishing the details of their trials and confessions,"38 this performance is successful. But as the profitable packaging of a prior performance, his text exposes itself and its consumers as implicated in a potentially insidious yellow journalism. If this self-interrogation appears only as an unwelcome by-product of Goodcole's text, moreover, it seems volunteered by a play that registers its own textual (and intertextual) self-consciousness. We can attribute this self-consciousness to the fact that the dramatists' capitalization on their sources is less easily effaced or ignored than the clerical reporter's; and to the ways in which their script authenticates itself on Goodcole's precedent even as it challenges the legitimizing disclaimers of his

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text. By considering those plots in The Witch of Edmonton less obviously implicated in The Wonderful Discoverie, however, we can understand the play's selfconsciousness as a more general product of tensions between social criticism and the conventions of dramatic representation. THINGS OF DARKNESS AND THE COMMUNION OF GUILT In 1658, Jacobean performance becomes Protectorate text when The Witch of Edmonton first appears in print. The date speaks both to the play's ideological adaptability and to its ability to satisfy theatrical appetites even without the stage.39 On the title-page of this publication, in type larger than the play's title, appears a generic identification every bit as arresting as this date: "Composed into A TRAGICOMEDY." We cannot know for certain whether the playwrights ever intended this specific label, though in its homiletic closure and gestures toward social reintegration the text seems to anticipate such an advertisement.40 The final scene's orgy of forgiveness, which pointedly excludes Mother Sawyer, defines the murdering bigamist Frank Thorney as the central spectacle of a communal drama of redemption. In the eyes of his father, Frank approaches his execution lost only to the law, not to this drama: Here's the sad Object which yet I must meet With hope of comfort, if a repentant end Make him more happy then mis-fortune would Suffer him to be. (5-3.53-56) In contrast to Sawyer, whose "resolution] / To die in my repentance" waivers as her zealous accusers tempt her with anger and despair (5.3.21-51), Frank is guided along an ideal preparatio mortis. Upon hearing evidence of his penitence, Winnifride (the surviving victim of the bigamy plot) informs him that "this Repentance makes thee / As white as innocence" (5.3.94-95). When asked for forgiveness, Winnifride acknowledges her required role ("'Tis my part / To use that Language" [5.3.106-7]), just as Sir Arthur Clarington, Frank's evil counselor in the bigamy plot, renounces his prior "part in thy wrongs" (5.3.127). The metadramatic hypostatization of these roles opens up a skeptical space in which the scene's scapegoating can appear mechanically imposed; but the selfconscious assignment of "parts" in this scene also reveals the playwrights' participation in The Witch of Edmonton's ambiguous tragicomic machinery. Such machinery was exactly what Harsnett had marked off as fraudulent theater when he described John Darrel's exorcism of William Sommers (which included accusations of witchcraft): "Of all the partes of the tragicall Comedie acting between him and Somers, there was no Scene in it, wherein M. Darrell did with more courage

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and boldnes acte his part, then in this of the discouerie of witches."41 Elsewhere Harsnett refers more generally to the "tragi-comedy" of exorcism,42 but his linking of witchcraft and exorcism in the exposure of Darrel seems especially apposite to The Witch of Edmontons final scene—where the community (and specifically the murderer Frank) is effectively exorcised through the identification of a witch as the all-responsible "instrument of mischief" (5.3.21). Recognizing the resonance of Harsnett's "tragi-comedy" in this play certainly helps us recalibrate any generic expectations derived from John Fletcher's bloodless definition: "A tragi-comedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy: which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned ... "43 Reading The Witch of Edmonton's witchcraft scenes within the context of an exorcistic tragicomedy also provides an interesting explanatory model for the play's tenuously connected structure and puzzling emphases: the witch plot's subordination to the bigamy-murder-repentance-forgiveness plot may suggest that the play should be understood primarily as an exploration of the social act of exorcism;44 as the scapegoat (she is unconvincingly accused of everything from Frank's murder of Susan to Old Banks's unnatural interest in his cow and an epidemic of male impotence and female promiscuity), Sawyer is also the symbolically exorcised, the thing of darkness whose violent removal makes the community "white as innocence." While "witchcraft" and "possession" should not be conceptually conflated—since the first ascribes agency while the second records its absence— there is in fact reason to allow some analogical intercourse between the terms in our analysis of this play. The possession/exorcism model best describes the social and theatrical transactions that mark the identification and persecution of witches. When these transactions are viewed from the social level, the community behaves like a possessed body and the witch like the threatening demon; in order for the community to regain possession of itself, it must effectively exorcise the witch. When these transactions are viewed through the playwright's eyes, the witch is always the possessed—always speaking words and performing acts not her own. Conceiving witchcraft as possession, in other words, results from the same kind of social criticism and dramatic reflexivity performed by the authors of The Witch of Edmonton. But Harsnett's skeptical dismissal of the "tragicall Comedie" of exorcism, while relevant to The Witch of Edmonton and certainly to the play's 1658 appearance in print, does not provide us with clear criteria for assessing the social function of the tragicomedy that appears on stage and page. If by labeling exorcism a "tragicomedy" Harsnett assumes that the mere acknowledgment of theater kills belief, the title of one of Goodcole's surviving pamphlets reveals a comfortable faith in tragicomic theater's service to belief in killing: A True Declaration of the happy Conuersion, contrition, and Christian preparation of Francis Robinson, Gentle-

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man. Who for covnterfetting the Create Scale of England, was drawen, Hang'd, and quartered at Charing Crosse... ,45 For Harsnett, to expose the theatricality of exorcism in A Discovery of the Fraudulent Practices of]. Darrel (1599) is to employ the skeptical strategy of Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584)—a strategy of tearing illusion into actors and roles. For Goodcole, however, the same rhetoric of "Discoverie" can stage Sawyer's witchcraft as an essential role; what the skeptic discovers as rough magic, the smooth magician discovers as wonderful fact: Here Prospero discovers Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess. Paulina draws a curtain, and discovers Hermione standing like a statue.46 The shared rhetoric, the reliance upon theater both to challenge and create credibility, present little difficulty in distinguishing between a Harsnett and a Goodcole: one writes a text against performance, the other a text in defense of performance. In a text intended for performance, however, skepticism itself has a tendency to become labile as the theater asserts its will to belief. If by marking off the conventional "parts" of their characters the authors of The Witch of Edmonton shine daylight on the social theater of scapegoating, they also write these parts for social consumption—a digestion that begins with the actor's internalization of his or her role and leads finally to Paulina's imperative to all witnesses of fiction: "It is required / You do awake your faith."47 Thus Sawyer's introduction to the stage, a soliloquy remarkable for its anatomy of scapegoating, also presents Renaissance drama with its only example of an actor being possessed by the witch's part:48 And why on me? why should the envious world Throw all their scandalous malice upon me? 'Cause I am poor, deform'd and ignorant? And like a Bow buckl'd and bent together, By some more strong in mischiefs then my self? Must I for that be made a common sink, For all the filth and rubbish of Men's tongues To fall and run into? Some call me Witch; And being ignorant of my self, they go About to teach me how to be one: urging, That my bad tongue (by their bad usage made so) Forespeaks their Cattle, doth bewitch their Corn, Themselves, their Servants, and their Babes at nurse. This they enforce upon me: and in part Make me credit to it. (2.1.1-15)

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With Dawson we can read Sawyer's partial "credit" as the cooperation of a conscious victim with the terms of her misrepresentation: "She complies with the process of social representation—indeed, what else can she do?—even as she insists on its injustice. Hers is a strong case of labeling."49 We can go even further: hers is a strong case of theatricalized power, which requires a Faustian pact with representation, a submission that in Sawyer's case promises the power of transgression, the ability to curse her enemies "to death or shame." Beyond the theatrical appropriation considered in chapter 3, where the selves of Shakespeare's theater futilely resist their fashioning into passive stage spectacle, Sawyer's "possession" involves the deceptive ownership of method acting: in owning her role, she is owned by it.50 But it would be a mistake to treat this passage's dramatization of such possession simply as another facet of its penetrating but unimplicated social criticism—for the simple fact that Sawyer's role here is "in part" a product of the dramatists' own "bad usage." Indeed this soliloquy, which both analyzes the scripted fictions of the witch's part and prepares us for Sawyer's convincing performance of it, establishes the ethical problem that The Witch of Edmonton puts not only to its audience but to itself: when a thing of darkness is acknowledged up front as "mine," at once a product and a possession of theater, all subsequent representation and interpretation is charged with the responsibility of ownership. When the play itself both admits the injustice of social representation and complies with it ("'Tis all one, / To be a Witch, as to be counted one" [2.1.114-15]), the guilty self-consciousness that troubles Goodcole not in the least becomes an inevitable consequence of dramatic participation. In the last section of this chapter we return to the partial "credit" Sawyer gives to her own representation, coordinating this unstable belief with the playwright's problematic "loan" from their legal sources, and with a final discussion of selfreflexive tensions in The Witch of Edmontons tragicomic machinery. But here I suggest that allowing Sawyer's soliloquy to criticize not only social representation, but also the specific dramatic representation of which it is a part, reveals the self-consciousness beneath what Dawson describes as "the play's dividedness" and the text's "ambivalence." That grounds can be found in The Witch of Edmonton for both the skeptical discovery and the theatrical perpetuation of witch belief seems clear; nearly as persuasive is Dawson's claim that the play's conclusion reveals how "the text and its authors, in speaking to the predominantly upper-class audience for whom the play was first performed ... , were seeking to assuage anxieties that they were at the same time raising about social division and conflict."51 But even such a pliant containment model does not accommodate disturbances introduced by the play's self-criticism—disturbances produced by the text's complicity with the same "bad usage" it dissects. The metadramatic selfconsciousness that surrounds the morris provides the most glaring example of such disturbance, and now we briefly consider the reflexive function of this interlude in the play's complication of tragicomedy.52

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Dawson insightfully demonstrates that The Witch of Edmonton dramatizes a breakdown of communal charity that in fact motivated many accusations of witchcraft in the period.53 From this perspective, witchcraft accusations are compensatory: "the accused is first a victim [of an emergent 'individualistic set of values'], and the accuser is assuaging his social guilt by proclaiming her evil, and hence undeserving of charity."54 When Dawson applies this insight to The Witch of Edmontons deployment of the morris, however, he has difficulty reconciling the play's subversive exposure of such scapegoating with the apparently conservative intentions of the text and its authors. On the one hand, he claims social criticism as a possible accident of the text: The morris can be seen as a comic alternative to witchcraft.... But the text's yoking of morris and witchcraft reveals, perhaps unwittingly [my emphases] , contradictory ideological positions in regard to value and change; that is, the playwrights, exactly like King James, treat the morris as a positive, if naive, force for communal solidarity and witchcraft as antisocial, but at the same time, by focusing on the similar social dynamics that give rise to these diverse practices, they undermine the stability of the opposition they seek to assert. On the other hand, he suggests that "the text's support for the morris" serves to enable the displacement enacted by witchcraft accusations with a simple and purposed "gesture aimed at assuaging social guilt."55 More recently Leah S. Marcus has powerfully argued that The Witch of Edmonton's probing of "a hypothetical connection between old holiday customs and demonism ... cannot be read as either advocacy or condemnation of the Stuart position," but that the play "repeatedly employs Stuart themes to undo the Stuart idealisation of the countryside and to expose the oversimplicity of the standard Stuart dichotomy between urban vice and pastoral virtue."56 While I agree with Dawson that the communal and comically clowny morris dance provides a seductive alternative to the failures of charity that result in Sawyer's persecution, Marcus's argument offers an important corrective: what is intentionally revealed in the morris is not a clear ideological program, but the fallacies and collapses that prevent the plausible displacement and limitation of a pervasive social guilt. I place Dawson and Marcus in dialogue, however, because the terms introduced by each can extend the reading of the other in an important new direction. If we agree that The Witch of Edmonton, in its representation of the morris, subverts the strategies of containment, we must also acknowledge the play's repeated emphasis upon the theatricality of social guilt—an emphasis that does not limit the play's criticism to "contradictory ideological positions" but intentionally includes the textual instabilities produced by its own negotiation with these positions. Adapting Dawson's terms, we can read the morris as a self-conscious gesture aimed at assuaging theatrical guilt, a gesture that metadramatically exposes itself

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as culpably complicit with the social maneuvers criticized by the play. Thus The Witch of Edmontons generic and economic discrimination between plots ("We'll sport with [Young Banks]; but when reckoning call, / We know where to receive: th'Witch pays for all"), like its acknowledgment of generic imperatives ("The Witch must be beaten out of her Cock-pit"), advertises a performance at once conventional and untenable. As we have already seen, the morris—which the play presents as a carefully marked zone of innocence—is infiltrated by Dog (the Familiar) and interrupted by the "news of Murder" from the main plot. This prophylactic failure certainly reveals "the oversimplicity of the standard Stuart dichotomy between urban vice and pastoral virtue"; but we should add here that the morris's failure to defend itself from the play's ambient evil also admits evidence of the play's indefensibility. The "news of Murder" that kills the morris comes from the author's most substantial addition to their legal source:57 in the bigamy plot, Frank kills his second wife after being touched by Dog (3.3.15); though Dog's part in Frank's crime has not been authorized or even recognized by Sawyer, the Familiar's role in this murder incriminates her in the eyes of the town. That Dog serves as the only real suture between bigamy and witch plot (and indeed, comic subplot) elicited a revelatory complaint from Algernon Swinburne: The want of connection between the two subjects of the play, Mother Sawyer's witchcraft and Frank Thorney's bigamy, is a defect common to many plays of the time... but in this case the tenuity of the connecting link is such that despite the momentary intervention of her familiar the witch is able with perfect truth to disclaim all complicity with the murderer. Such a communion of guilt might easily have been managed, and the tragic structure of the poem would have been complete in harmony of interest.58 In calling for firmer causal links and a "tragic structure... complete in harmony of interest," Swinburne seems actually to wish for a play that would justify the social scapegoating The Witch of Edmonton performs critically;59 his formal criticism establishes criteria for ignoring or containing the play's unsettling social criticism. But Swinburne's dissatisfaction with the play's structure is also a symptom of the play's self-criticism. By disrupting the morris with Dog, and with news of the crime he seems to have caused, the playwrights reveal the tenuity of the plot connections they also serve. Their dramaturgic desire to portray a communicable guilt, passed from Sawyer to Thorney through Dog, is undercut by the genuine and less exclusive "communion of guilt" in which they knowingly participate. The morris disappears from the play, then, as its enabling distinctions between social guilt and theatrical innocence collapse; though rendered unsustainable, however, it remains in the text as evidence of a desire for such distinctions that the playwrights share with their audience. Swinburne's reading of the play as a collaborative failure can therefore be redirected from artistic dis-

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missal or bibliographic conjecture to a complex level of signification: The Witch of Edmonton's "want of [simplifying] connection" between plots, like its generic antagonisms and its vacillations between skepticism and belief, self-consciously reflects upon the theater's collaboration with its audience. By producing a connective "want" (desire and lack), the play confronts expectations it creates but refuses entirely to meet. In a discussion of the counterfeit witch's exploitation of credibility, Scot suggests how a desire for plot and unambiguous causality provides ideal customers for theater: "Men in all ages have been so desirous to know the effect of their purposes, the sequele of things to come, and to see the end of their fear and hope; that a seelie witch, which had learned anie thing in the art of cousenage, may make a great manie jollie fooles." And as Greenblatt has shown, an important strategy in Scot's response to this desire is to disenchant witchcraft by revealing it as a metaphor that only the "carnallie minded" would murderously literalize. The tenor is a culturally pervasive tendency to misprision: "the world is now so bewitched ... with this fond error"; the baud's "eie infecteth, entiseth, and (if I maie so saie) bewitcheth"; "illusions are right inchantments."60 In A Mirrour of Monsters (1587), the antitheatricalist writer William Rankins turns such rhetoric against plays, accusing them of "inchaunting Charmes, and bewitched wyles," and urging his readers to "arme ourselves against the damnable enticings of these hellish feendes [the players] with the wise regard of prudent Ulises."61 In both the bigamy and the witch plot, the authors of The Witch of Edmonton deploy strikingly similar metaphors in an apparent effort to divest witchcraft and demonism of literal power, and to distribute guilt across the community. Thus Frank Thorney, who conceives the bigamy stratagem as an evil necessitated by his financial need for a paternal blessing, figures "beggery and want" as "two Devils that are occasions to enforce / A shameful end" (1.1.18-20). Thus Sir Arthur Clarington describes Frank's sexual desire for his first wife as "the nimble devil / That wanton'd in [his] blood" (1.1.78-79), a prelude to Frank's father calling his dishonest son "a Devil like a Man" (1.2.154). Thus Sawyer in her defense powerfully presents courtiers as "more Witch-like" than herself, just as she indicts the female "painted things" at court for "Inchantments" that "burn Mens Souls in sensual hot desires" and reduce "Lordships" "to Trunks of rich Attire" (4.1.88, 103, 105, 109-10). Sawyer's parting shot at "Men-witches" who "without the Fangs of Law" enchant women out of their honor elicits an anxious response from Clarington, who has seduced Frank's first wife in just such a manner. The threatening incontinence of her metaphor and its obvious application to him leads Sir Arthur to insist upon the literal fact of Sawyer's witchcraft (4.1.138-46).62 Clarington's emphatic literalism certainly appears suspect in a play that follows Scot in warning the superstitious that their gullibility may "prove" them "starke Fools"; but it also reminds us of the morris dancers' distinction between "real" witches and the "counterfeits'" who "will not be regarded" by a community both

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suspicious of representation and desirous of authentication. The morris dancers' savvy sense of theatrical "regard" in fact reflects the playwrights' commercial interest in satisfying the "carnallie minded" with an utterly convincing body—a body resistant to the disenchantment and dilution of Scot's skeptical wordplay. This commercial interest, we should note, is hardly conducive to what Swinburne calls dramatic "harmony of interest": the desire to convince, enchant, and concentrate the figure of witchcraft actually contradicts the play's skeptical distribution of evil and illusion through metaphor; and in this contradiction the playwrights confront the culpability of their own dramatic needs. In the character of Dog—an avatar of the demonic that provides the play with an apparent criterion for the real—the playwrights incarnate evil as an instrument of plot. To the extent that the Familiar establishes the guilt of Sawyer and Frank Thorney, the innocence of the morris, it presents the audience with the same literalistic escape desired by Sir Arthur. Ontologically distinct from the play's figurative distribution of evil, Dog offers a seemingly unshakable justification for scapegoating, and for the play's carefully calibrated degrees of guilt. But while The Witch of Edmonton acknowledges the theatrical and social desirability of such a justification, the playwrights admit antitheatrical evidence against its validity. They self-consciously present the Familiar, in fact, as a hallucinatory product of theater—a product that reveals once again the theater's capitalization on legal sources, its exploitation of tragicomic expectations, its collaboration with cultural fantasies of persecution. THE HAIR OF THE DOG Renaissance spectators clearly brought a wide range of reflexes to a theater that represented demonism with similar variety. If a play such as Doctor Faustus could incite a few of the hyper-credulous to see more devils than the actors onstage might account for, it no doubt reassured a great many more with the palpable theatricality—if not the completely safe fictionality—of its diabolic representations. When compared with the awesome otherness of Marlowe's devils, The Witch of Edmonton's furry Familiar would hardly seem a character designed to exploit the credibility and anxiety of such an audience. Renaissance England's broad cultural recognition of "the familiar" notwithstanding, the obvious contortions necessary for an actor to play a devil-dog in fact suggest an element of farce.63 And indeed in some of his comic interactions, such as his enticement of Young Banks into a muddy pond, Dog conjures up the disenchanting 'low' burlesque that appears especially in the B text of Faustus. It is therefore necessary to qualify the claim that Dog offers the playwrights a criterion for the real and a body resistant to metaphorical disenchantment, since both the canine and the diabolical status of this character constantly reveal themselves as ludicrously contrary to fact. That Dog presents so many obstacles to complete plausibility need not prevent us from

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observing his dramatic service to the interpretive desire—"Resolve me of all ambiguities"—that cues the devil's entrance in Faustus.64 As a domestication of the supernatural, this Familiar introduces to the play a means for distinguishing Sawyer's guilt from that circulating in much of the play's community;65 her pact, which enlists Dog as an instrument of revenge, defines even the hypocritical Banks as supernaturally innocent and invulnerable (2.1.152—61). We can certainly interject that the very implausibility of Dog's supernatural agency exposes such a distinction to skeptical critique; but to do so is both to ignore the play's substantial support for this distinction, and to foreclose analysis of the dramatists' more subtle interrogation of its construction. The legal and dramatic allure of the diabolic pact lies in the possession of the soul of the accused. Proof of such a pact provides the courtroom with evidence that its execution of justice upon the body of the accused reflects, and is confirmed by, divine punishment; proof of such a pact provides the theatergoer with the experience of soteriological access, an experience that offers body and spirit as properties of the stage. If the pact promises a kind of spiritual ownership not simply to its demonic signatory, but to its judicial and theatrical witnesses, an interesting contrast appears in the release of ownership that is forgiveness. In The Witch of Edmonton, Frank Thorney prepares us for the forgiveness that will render his soul "as white as innocence" by confessing his murder to Winnifride (his surviving wife) as a microcosm of the courtroom: for thou my evidence art, Jurie and Judge: sit quiet, and I'll tell all. (4.2.108-9) Winnifride is not alone in her quick forgiveness: the father of Frank's victim pronounces Frank "well prepared to follow" her to heaven (5.3.116), and one of the men Frank has blamed for his own crime laments the fact that such a redeemed character must still "make satisfaction to the Law" (5.3.122). By forgiving Frank and collaboratively preparing his spirit for its divine reception, the community assembled onstage in the final scene makes a proprietary distinction between his body (which still belongs to the law and the theater) and his soul (which belongs now to heaven alone). That this distinction does not apply to Sawyer, who is forced by the same community to spend her last words "in bawling" rather than in the resolution and prayer she desires (5.3.48—49), suggests a tenacious grasp on the absolute possession she has become. In important ways the play allows Sawyer to speak against this presumed legal and theatrical ownership of the spirit of the possessed. In a debate with the Justice over the charges of Old Banks, her chief persecutor, Sawyer invokes the socioeconomic oppression critically represented by the play to reveal the materialist component of Banks's accusations:

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By what commission can he send my Soul on the Divel's Errand, more then I can his? is he a Landlord of my Soul, to thrust it when he list out of door? (4.1.82-84) And in a complaint against the baying community that surrounds her in the final scene, Sawyer employs a rare metaphorical adaptation of her Familiar to describe Edmonton's effort to possess her spirit: These dogs will mad me: I was well resolv'd To die in my repentance. (5-3.41-42) Sawyer's language here may also recall the bear-baiting image through which Malvolio figures his exorcistic victimization in Twelfth Night,66 but in The Witch of Edmonton the "propertied" victim of tragicomedy is the much more secure possession of a community that has underwritten the diabolic pact. This community becomes a figurative pack of "Dogs" not as evidence against Sawyer's literal forfeiture of her soul, but as testimony to the social appropriation of this demonic deal. That the play does not enjoy a position of complete critical detachment from the community it represents, however, appears most clearly in the only other clear instance of a metaphorical adaptation of the Familiar. In her first scene— shortly after Old Banks has attacked her for gathering "a few rotten sticks" on the land of which he is lord, and after the morris dancers have fled from her while threatening "Away with the Witch of Edmonton"—Sawyer describes Banks as this black Cur, That barks, and bites, and sucks the very blood Of me, and of my credit. (2.1.112-14) Here Sawyer may recall Shylock, another tragicomic victim of a play that largely excludes him from its ethic of Christian forgiveness while preying upon his "credit." But in Sawyer's case the justification for persecution is presented not only in the dubious social terms of the play's community, but also in the equally suspect dramatic terms of the play itself. Banks's social power to scandalize Sawyer and suck "the very blood" of her credit in the community merges, just a few lines later, with the playwrights' exploitation of the theatrical credit offered by the witch to the stage: the moment Sawyer's metaphorical complaint ends, the literalized Dog enters to suck her blood, an act accompanied by thunder and lightening and witnessed only by the play's spectators. Such parasitism characterizes The Witch of Edmontons self-conscious borrowing of legal credit, and the portrayal

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of Dog reveals the dramatists' indictment of themselves (and not simply the community they represent) as guilty landlords of Sawyer's soul. In Goodcole's dialogue with Sawyer, several particulars emerge in her confession that she withheld at her trial ("thereby hoping to avoid shame" [Wonderful Discoverie, 397]). Among the details dramatically useful to the playwrights, such as those related to her method of nursing the familiar, Sawyer's disclosure that the devil-dog appeared to her in "two colours, sometimes of black and sometimes of white" receives special interest. When praying to the dog in the perversion of the Lord's Prayer he has taught her,67 Sawyer relates, "he then would come to me in the white colour" (Wonderful Discoverie, 391,397). In the play, this detail is imported but also italicized as the kind of textual disturbance I have ascribed to the playwrights' intertextual self-consciousness. No mention or indication is made of Dog's whiteness, for instance, when Sawyer prays to him in acts 2, 3, and 4; and when she conjures him with prayer at the beginning of act 5, she seems baffled by his chromatic transformation: SAWYER: Why dost thou appear to me in white, as if thou wert the Ghost of my dear love? DOG: I am dogged, list not to tell thee, yet to torment thee. (5.1.34-36) Dog goes on to explain that his whiteness is meant to put Sawyer "in minde of thy winding Sheet," that the devil's paradoxical appearance "as a Lamb" signals her imminent death (5.1.37,40). When Dog briefly attempts to account for his peculiar metamorphosis by referring Sawyer to the explanation provided in Goodcole's pamphlet, she still insists upon the novelty of this episode: DOG: Why am I in white? didst thou not pray to me? SAWYER: Yes, thou dissembling Hell-hound: why now in white more then at other times? (5.1.44-46) Only after Sawyer's reiteration of the question raises Dog's color to a pressing interpretive issue does he provide an answer that allows us to make sense of the exchange: Be blasted with the News; whiteness is days Foot-boy, a forerunner to light; which shews thy old rivel'd face: Villaines are strip't naked, the Witch must be beaten out of her Cock-pit. (5.1-47-49) In these lines, Dog reveals his lamblike appearance "in white" as a costume change that serves the play's grinding tragicomic machinery. Here, in other words, Dog

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discovers himself as a theatrical invention, a special effect created by the playwrights' alteration of their source for their own dramatic needs—needs that generically reflect the desires of the community they represent. As a spokesperson for genre, the white Dog, like the black Dog that substitutes himself for Old Banks in 2.1, admits the role of theater in shaping fantasies of persecution. As the protean connection between plots, he identifies Sawyer as an expendable property of the stage while adumbrating a conclusion that renders Frank's guilt "as white as innocence." The devil's desertion of the possessed as death approaches may be a common occurrence in Renaissance witchlore, but Dog's forsaking of Sawyer speaks powerfully (and, if my argument has persuaded, self-consciously) to the playwrights' "bad usage" of the subject they have borrowed from Edmonton: Out Witch! Thy tryal is at hand: Our prey being had, the Devil does laughing stand. (5.1.76-77) Such laughter is of course an impossible emotional response to the scenes that follow, despite some last-ditch foolery from Young Banks and Old Cartwright's concluding effort to leave us "as merry as we can" (5.3.169). But the dramatists' occupational proximity to Dog, whose whiteness Sawyer describes as a "puritanpaleness" (5.1.54), has created an alliance that causes shivers in their text. That alliance is not simply with Minister Goodcole and his commodified confession; nor is it simply an accedence to the dictates of genre. It also lies in a tense cooperation with the enemy: not Satan, but the Puritan appetites that in 1658 would provide The Witch of Edmonton its readership. This is not to imply that the play, first performed for altogether different audiences, ever had such a reception as its specific intention; nor is it to claim that Puritans ever cornered the market on the persecution performed by the play. Instead, it is to suggest how the play survived the closing of the theaters and the scrutiny of England's most antitheatrical period: suspicious of its own theatricalism and the economies it serves, The Witch of Edmonton also exploits the desire for material possession—a desire satisfied not by plays, but by texts. We now consider a Puritan text "never intended" for the stage, a text that responds to the spectator's possessive desire for the soul by amplifying the skepticism we have seen in The Witch of Edmonton, Like the authors of The Witch of Edmonton, Milton is suspicious of the audience for which he writes, and he allows this suspicion to reflect back on the motivations of his own text. Samson Agonistes goes farther than the muddled blend of opportunism and guilt that characterize The Witch of Edmonton, however; Milton's drama raises intertextual self-consciousness and self-reflexive antitheatricality to a point that finally frustrates the interpretive appetites stimulated by the text.

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The fifth chapter concerns another self-crowned laureate, just as critical as Spenser of those bays bestowed in a public theater, yet just as conscious as Shakespeare of the energies and expectations excited by a theatricalized death. In chapter 5 I show that Samson Agonistes frustrates these energies and expectations by moving its dying protagonist off the sacrificial stage, beyond the bounds of iconic representation and interpretive appropriation. But this frustration must be gauged in terms of the expectations Milton's closet drama itself creates. My chief interest in this play lies not in the fact that its hero dies (or is killed) into interpretive inaccessibility, since in itself the offstage death was nothing new.68 Rather, Samson Agonistes invites its spectatorship—a squinting group that includes the play's surviving characters and its readers—to a killing poem, to a theatrical death that will present Samson as interpretive property. That this proprietary urge is not ultimately satisfied appears in the contrast between the plebeians, who exit "dragging off Cinna," and the Danites, who leave their play planning to fetch Samson home to his father's house. Julius Caesar gives us no reason to doubt the total ownership of those who stake such claims (Antony's words on Lepidus, "Do not talk of him / But as a property," could just as well have been spoken over Caesar's corpse or Cinna's body); but Samson Agonistes reminds us that bodies are also actors—stubbornly resistant to such reduction, never entirely analyzable by the parts they play and die in. Thus while Plutarch's Caesar definitively becomes Shakespeare's, Milton's Samson plays others' characters (Shakespeare's Roman hero, as we shall see, among them) to the end. And while we may share the Danites' desire to appropriate Samson's remains and interpret his dying roles, doing so does not provide the one revelation this mortality play makes us need the most.

5

Samson's Death by Theater and Milton's Art of Dying In everything else there may be sham: the fine reasonings of philosophy may be a mere pose in us; or else our trials, by not testing us to the quick, give us a chance to keep our face always composed. But in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending.... In judging the life of another, I always observe how it ended.... All the other actions of our life must be tried and tested by this last act. Montaigne, Essais O, Death's a great disguiser! Vincentio, Measure for Measure Breath inward comforts to his heart, and affoord him the power of giving such outward testimonies thereof, as all that are about him may derive comforts from thence, and have this edification, even in this dissolution ... John Donne, Devotion 17 To die is to be counterfeit. Falstaff, 1 Henry IV

IN A HIGHLY THEATRICAL CULTURE that also invests a great deal of ideological energy in questions of soteriology, one is not surprised to find death privileged as a uniquely authentic and revelatory drama: a faithful picture of "that within" somehow unobscured by "actions that a man might play." But John Donne's prayer for a correspondence between "inward comforts" and "outward testimonies" reveals a source of anxiety for spectators in the Renaissance theater of death.1 On 139

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a stage inhabited by the likes of Falstaff and the first thane of Cawdor (the latter dying "as one that had been studied in his death"), nothing guarantees that one will perform one's last act with any more authenticity or biographical integrity than mark countless preceding acts. Mortal drama does not necessarily provide transparency; its actors might counterfeit and its spectators misconstrue. In Robert Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi," the medieval advice to the painter may echo with a consummation still devoutly wished in the early modern period: "Give us no more body than shows soul!" But to such a representational theory we must add the interpretive doubts (here voiced by Macbeth's Duncan) produced by Renaissance theatricality itself: "There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face."2 In an effort to keep the theater of death epistemologically viable, the Renaissance did in fact offer many forms of such an "art," providing self-representational ground rules for the dying actor and hermeneutic guidelines for the living spectators. Casuistical tracts, consolatory treatises, heavily glossed accounts of the deaths of martyrs and reprobates, and especially the ars moriendi or art of dying literature, which provided the period with its ultimate conduct book tradition— all offered theatrical conventions whereby the dying could present themselves as interpretively accessible to the living. For reasons that will be clear as we proceed, the theatrical conventions of the Renaissance art of dying must be adduced to Milton's interpretively vexed play if we are to appreciate the historicity of Samson Agonistes' representation of both dying and the hermeneutics of dying. First, though, this chapter begins with the faith and skepticism that cohabit in the Renaissance theater of death and its utterly displayed, yet utterly inscrutable, subject. This epistemological tension can explain not only Milton's dramatic treatment of seventeenth-century history, but also the central debate shaping Samson Agonistes' more recent and still unfolding critical history. To a degree unmatched by any other Renaissance play, the critical history of Samson Agonistes is preoccupied with interpreting its hero's death. Manoa's crucial question, "How died he?"3 speaks at some level for every interpretation of Samson Agonistes. But if Milton achieved this interpretive focus by deliberately designing the play as an art of dying, it is less clear that his text presents what the Chorus calls "self-satisfying solution" (SA, 306). After all, Samson Agonistes proves fatal to those spectators who directly witness the event defined as the play's central interpretive moment. Countless passages, moreover, remind us of the eye's vulnerability and epistemological limitations: why was the sight To such a tender ball as the eye confined? So obvious and so easy to be quenched, And not as feeling through all parts diffused, That she might look at will through every pore? (SA, 93-97)

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If the play reminds us of the interpreter's liability to aporia, moreover, it also challenges us with the impossibility of representing a subject as inward as the human soul: "For inward light alas / Puts forth no visual beam" (SA, 162-63). The solutions that have been offered to such challenges define the two broad interpretive categories of much of the play's criticism: one, that Samson Agonistes represents more than meets the eye; the other, that in Milton's play what we see is what we get. The former assumption underlies the more traditional regenerationist and typological readings of Samson Agonistes, which invoke the protagonist's deepening insight and the play's biblio-historical foresight, respectively, as heuristic guides to dramatic structure and imagery. The latter informs more recent skeptical or revisionist readings of Samson Agonistes, which assert the total unreliability of all its characterological perspectives; the causal indeterminacy that renders Samson's words, actions, and "rousing motions" (SA, 1382) radically inscrutable; and the essential ambiguity of all things visible in a play that converts all interpretation into groundless speculation, a play that leaves us feeling as though we have watched Hamlet in the dark. The former allows us confidently to read Samson's death as a proto-martyr's definitive act; the latter accepts our inability ever to pronounce with confidence on this performance. Illuminating as the exchange between these scholarly semichoruses continues to be, it also tends to prescribe and limit the terms of our discussion of Samson Agonistes, often eliding the prior question of Milton's purpose in simultaneously inviting us to interpret an act of dying, and presenting us with an apparent "absence o f . . . intelligibility t h a t . . . disables us at what is supposed to be its climactic moment."4 Thus Barbara Kiefer Lewalski calls for our cards upfront: "anyone who would join—or rejoin—this critical debate at this juncture should declare his or her assumptions at the outset."5 Before joining "this critical debate," we should ask how and why Milton might have produced it. Both the regenerationist and skeptical analyses of the events culminating in Samson's death represent symptoms of an undiagnosed crisis—the crisis of soteriology that makes the "interpretation" of his death such an imperative. This diagnosis involves two steps: first, to contextualize Milton's play within a set of literary conventions and cultural practices specifically devoted to the representation and evaluation of death in the Renaissance. In the diverse ars moriendi literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we find the roles of dying actors and living spectators, the rules for the theater of death, most clearly and self-consciously defined; and it is with reference to some specific cases of the Protestant art of dying that we can provide some overlooked generic context, perhaps even some intertextual coordinates, for Samson Agonistes.6 One consequence of this alignment will be a clarification of several conventions by which the play invites a regenerationist reading. Second, however, the increased scrutiny, even satire, to which the ars moriendi conventions were subjected in the late English Renaissance can help to explain the ambiguity with which these conventions appear

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in Milton's text. The skeptical response to Samson Agonistes need not be a postmodern phenomenon; rather, it should be historicized with reference to the representational and interpretive problems posed by the Renaissance ars moriendi— and posed by Milton himself in his skeptical response to that royal art of dying, Eikon Basilike. But first we must recognize the ways in which Samson Agonistes asks to be read as an art of dying, for it is only by recognizing those conventions the play ultimately complicates that we can coordinate our entrenched regenerationistskeptical debate with Milton's history. "To VISITANTS A GAZE": READING SAMSON CONVENTIONALLY In his famous complaint that Milton's play "must be allowed to want a middle, since nothing passes between the first act and the last, that either hastens or delays the death of Samson,"7 Dr. Johnson provided regenerationist readers of Samson Agonistes with a point of contention and skeptics with a point d'appui. The play's lack of a middle has thus become an inherited crux, and "the death of Samson" continues to strike many as an apparent non sequitur or mystery of motivation. When the play is read against the ars moriendi conventions it seems crafted to evoke, however, Johnson's Aristotelian objection proves an analytical red herring. For the arts of dying familiar to the Renaissance reader were concerned from the first with ending, almost exclusively beginning in extremis. Limited in scope to "the fifth act" of a central figure's life—beyond which (to quote Milton's remarks on tragedy that preface the play) "the whole drama" was "not produced"—the art of dying's mimetic emphasis on "the passions well imitated"8 designated the busy deathbed as the focus of activity and interpretive attention, represented the dying man as the observed of all observers, and defined those attending him as participants in a Visitatio infirmi.99 In such works, the causality Johnson considers dramatically essential might apply to the dying man's final choices and his corresponding spiritual conversion, or to the life—preceding the represented action—that necessitates and informs his repentance. But death itself, in the ars moriendi (as in a morality play such as Everyman, similarly liable to Johnson's complaint),10 was less an effect than an imminence or dramatic donnee; the object of the dying man's choice was not life or death, but how to die well; the plot consisted of choosing this good death, the denouement of its achievement and verification by spectators. From this generic point of view, in fact, Stanley Fish's startling claim that Samson's death is "the best of all possible things, the thing everyone in the play most desires"11 proves an astute and suggestive observation: Milton's drama is indeed a mortality play, a play that requires Samson's death as it seeks to ascribe to him a narratable life. For the characters who attempt to witness his dying and

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provide this narrative, interpretation takes a peculiar form of anatomy; the Danites seem to desire "no more of body than shows soul." Such observations must be referred to the ars moriendi tradition, however, if they are to distinguish between the remarkably idiosyncratic and the conventional. Before dwelling upon what seems strange to us in Milton's play, we should consider what would have been familiar for his contemporary audience. The seventeenth-century reader of Samson Agonistes might have recognized several resemblances to the earliest xylographic arts of dying—pre-Reformation works that remained extant in Protestant England. Indeed "the dying one," one of several possible Renaissance readings of Samson's epithet, suggests Mortens, the participial name ascribed to the protagonist of the first ars moriendi block books and tracts.12 And though the image of a man attacked by a series of temptations and comforted by a series of inspirations is a literary device as old as the book of Job, it was the ars moriendi that located this agon specifically at the deathbed—in a few instances representing even the dying man's wife as an instrument of temptation.13 The recumbent figure of Samson—"afflicted" by Harapha and Dalila, and administered "Counsel or consolation" (183) by the Danites— vaguely conjures the stage picture of Moriens, lying below a diabolic and angelic contest for his soul. But the externalized psychomachia of the late medieval arts of dying is hardly the most apposite model for Milton's interior drama. A closer analogue appears in those Protestant artes moriendi responsive to the Reformation's critique of such ceremonial dying. Despite the fact that this critique, as David W. Atkinson has observed,14 sought to deemphasize the ritualized hora mortis as determinate of a man's spiritual status, it nevertheless developed— under the influence of Calvinism—its own set of formalized criteria for judging the election or reprobation of a dying man. Samson, whose fear and fate is to lie "to visitants a gaze" (567), becomes the object of an interpretive scrutiny remarkably similar to that directed toward "the morphology of conversion"15 in such post-Reformation works. We can understand the interpretive frenzy surrounding Samson's body as it approaches the "double darkness" (593) of death, in fact, as an exercise in the hermeneutics of election—which becomes all the more clear when we compare Samson Agonistes with the most popular art of dying in the English Renaissance. Thomas Becon's The Sick Man's Salve (1561)16—a Calvinist closet drama concerned, like Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563), with teaching Protestants how to interpret the semiotics of election at the moment of death—reveals some of the strongest affinities between Samson Agonistes and the ars moriendi tradition. Becon's dramatic treatise begins with a group of Puritan burghers (Philemon, Eusebius, Theophile, and Christopher) preparing to visit a biblically named Moriens (Epaphroditus).17 Like Samson, Epaphroditus initially laments his condition in a foregrounded complaint while his approaching visitants discuss his

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case among themselves in a parodos. Concluding his soliloquy with a catalogue of physical ailments that includes his wasted strength and failing eyesight, Epaphroditus asks, "What other thing am I than a dead corpse breathing?" (Salve, 94). Near the end of his own Jobean soliloquy, Samson declares himself "a living death," a self-sepulchred "moving grave" awaiting only the "privilege of death and burial" (SA, wo, 102,104). (Indeed, the submerged literalism of this self-identification may lend special point to Harapha's insult that the "assassinated" Samson "has need much washing to be touched" [1107], since such ablution—as Manoa later makes clear [1725-28]—is best performed with the body still warm).18 A brief bout of aphasia grips both Epaphroditus and Samson when they are joined by their visitants.19 The prostrate figure of Epaphroditus, who "cannot hold up [his] head for weakness" (Salve, 94), resembles Samson lying "at random," "with languished head unpropped" (SA, 119). Epaphroditus complains that "the sorrows of death have compassed me round" (Salve, 159), while Samson enjoins his friends to see "how many evils have enclosed me round" (SA, 194). And both sprawled spectacles elicit elegiac commonplaces from startled witnesses who have known these men in better times: "What a sudden change is this!... O what a change is this, yea, and that within two days," declares Philemon as he beholds his "neighbor's agony" (Salve, 94-95); "O change beyond report, thought, or belief!" (SA, 117) cries the Chorus of Samson's "friends and neighbours" over his dejected body—a prologue to Manoa's "O miserable change! is this the man .. .?"(SA, 340). Becon's comforters conceive Epaphroditus's case as a predictive reflection of their own: "For in you, as in a clear mirror, we behold ourselves, and see what shall become of us hereafter" (Salve, 185). Milton's Chorus similarly describes Samson as a "mirror of our fickle state" (SA, 164). Of course such rhetoric and imagery are as ubiquitous as the ubi sunt? and de casibus traditions from which both authors draw; and the Danites' lamentation at the most obvious level bewails Samson's fall from national heroism into blindness and servile captivity, not his approaching death. But like Epaphroditus, who feels within himself "present tokens of death" as his "body grows weaker and weaker" (Salve, 185), Samson's physical suffering portends a literal death well before he makes his end in the Philistine theater: So much I feel my genial spirits droop, My hopes all flat, nature within me seems In all her functions weary of herself; My race of glory run, and race of shame, And I shall shortly be with them that rest. (SA, 594-98) As Adam and Eve are forced, at the Expulsion, to determine "where to choose / Their place of rest" (PI, 12.646-47), Samson's entire drama moves him toward the choice of a final resting place. Where to die and how—that is the question.

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Where and how can Samson "quit himself like Samson" and heroically finish "A life heroic" (SA, 1709-11)—constructing the tautologies necessary for a coherent subject of death? "Bed-rid" and "unemployed" at his earthly father's house (57980); folded within the annihilating "leisure and domestic ease" of Dalila's "widowed bed" (917,806); or "dispense[d] with" by God "for some important" though undisclosed "cause" (1377,1379)? Such paralyzing uncertainties and their attendant doubt and despair constitute the central passion that Johnson mistook for the omitted middle action of Samson Agonistes. Later in this essay I consider Samson's final response to this passion—his "resolution" to "go along" with the Officer to the Dagonalia (1410,1384)—as consonant with the one "great act" (1389) required of the subject of the ars moriendi. But first we must recognize that this passional aspect of Samson's agony designates him as a Moriens, a dying man, and thus a spectacular object of intense interpretive interest to the Renaissance reader. Further reference to Becon's work reveals the roles played by spectators in the Puritan art of dying—conventional roles approximated by those who attend and scrutinize Samson's drama. For both Epaphroditus and Samson, physical suffering signals a more fundamental and "more intense" crisis of conscience that their visitants attempt to address. Philemon invokes the "God of all consolation" as Epaphroditus's "grievously vexed, troubled, and disquieted conscience" creates "a very hell within [his] breast" (Salve, 156); reminding him of the divinely proffered "salve against this plague" (Salve, 106), Philemon counsels a "quiet conscience" for Epaphroditus's deliverance "out of this agony" (Salve, 160). Like Milton's Satan—whose conscience much more literally and irredeemably locates "Hell within him" through "the bitter memory / Of what he was, what is" (PL, 4.20, 24-25)—Samson's malady moves inward as he contemplates "what once I was, and what am now" (SA, 22): O that torment should not be confined To the body's wounds and sores... But must secret passage find To the inmost mind, There exercise all his fierce accidents, And on her purest spirits prey, As on entrails, joints, and limbs, With answerable pains, but more intense, Though void of corporal sense ... Thoughts my tormentors armed with deadly stings Mangle my apprehensive tenderest parts. (SA, 606-7, 610—16, 623-24) With characteristic incrementality, the Chorus proposes to comfort Samson by finding the same "secret passage" gained by his torment:

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We come thy friends and neighbours not unknown ... To visit or bewail thee, or if better, Counsel or consolation we may bring, Salve to thy sores, apt words have power to 'suage The tumours of a troubled mind, And are as balm to festered wounds. (SA, 180,182—86) Applying the medicinal metaphor of Becon's treatise (and of its many obvious imitations, such as William Perkins's The Salve for a Sicke Man [1595]), the Danites seek to minister not to a body, finally, but to a mind. For Epaphroditus and Samson, consolation takes the form of a narrative reconciliation of past and present—two states separated by a disjunctive "change" (seemingly "beyond report, thought, or belief") that threatens to throw their lives into unintelligibility. Of course in theory those branches of Protestantism most opposed to mediation urged that the patient, in such cases, minister to himself. But in practice the Puritan way of death (and Calvinist soteriology) demanded public intelligibility, if not of an "unsearchable" God, then at least of His ways to dying members of the "solemnly elected" (SA, 1746,678). However dubious doctrine rendered assurance, however private and inscrutable the terms of salvation were conceived, both the "internal peace" of the dying man and the "calm of mind" (SA, 1344,1758) of those attending his death depended upon representing the spiritual condition of God's secretary as an open secret.20 Thus the Puritan "salve" that replaces Catholic extreme unction operates not as a salvific agent, but as an interpretive solvent. Thus healing takes the form of revealing; consolation becomes a mode of spectatorship, a surrogate performance for the divine witness who observes the formal logic and generic expectation of the Puritan ars moriendi: "Of a good life cometh a good end" (Salve, 99). Thus the spectator becomes an interpreter of the past life of the dying man, an analyst of his present state of mind, and a judge of the signs accompanying his death—asking eschatological versions of the question so crucial to, and put so bluntly by, Manoa: "How died he? death to life is crown or shame" (SA, 1579). Camille Wells Slights has extensively and persuasively demonstrated that "in subject matter, structure, and language," the dynamic between Samson and his visitants "strongly resembles the prose cases of conscience in which English clergymen analyzed the workings of the Christian conscience"; and though her reading of Samson Agonistes does not consider the ars moriendi tradition, she suggestively illustrates the influence, on Milton's play, of Protestant casuistical authors who also contributed importantly to this tradition in England.21 In fact a work like Becon's reveals the special pertinence of the ars moriendi to Samson's case and can provide a partial solution to the problem Slights encounters in trying to contextualize Samson Agonistes within a casuistical tradition less directly concerned with dying.

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Much of The Sick Man's Salve falls within the casuistical program Slights identifies in Milton's play—the program of rehearsing the past actions and present situation of a troubled man in an effort to detect a comforting and unifying pattern, vindicating evidence for his case of conscience. Philemon and his cohorts, for instance, discover "sure tokens" and "manifest arguments" for Epaphroditus's godliness by recounting his faithful participation as a churchman. Excusing his lack of good works, however, they "certify" his conscience by finding in his biography "evident testimony" of his election (Salve, 172,185); and they alleviate his concern that he has "many times grievously offended the Lord ... and broken his holy commandments" by judging that "this is no let unto your salvation" (Salve, 168). In Slight's analysis, the Chorus and Manoa participate in a similar process as they "tell and retell their versions of Samson's marriages, his exploits as a champion of Israel, and his bondage," helping the Nazarite negotiate the strictures of "legal debt" (SA, 313) and the contingencies of his own case.22 The Chorus's exculpatory pronouncement on Samson's conduct with the Philistines, "Thou never wast remiss, I bear thee witness" (SA, 239), thus begins an exegetical narrative that concludes with the announcement that God "to his faithful champion hath in place / Bore witness gloriously" (SA, 1751-72). But Slights concedes that the evidentiary, indeed legalistic method of the traditional case of conscience does not adequately explain the ambiguity of Samson's "rousing motions" (the skeptics'trump): Traditionally [in prose cases of conscience], the movement from general law to particular action proceeded by logical demonstration. In Milton's poetic drama, the transition is more complex, since the resolution of particular cases of conscience combines with the psychological recovery of the conscience, processes the casuists treat separately. After all of Samson's vocal debates and self-analysis, silence envelopes the crucial moments of his last decisions. He enunciates the concept of freedom from the letter of the law before he decides to accompany the officer, but the actual process of applying the concept to his own situation defies analysis. The "rousing motions" signal his breakthrough, but the respective roles of reason and divine grace remain mysterious.23 Though this passage appears in an essay that contributes strongly to the regenerationist reading of the play, its implications differ only in degree from Fish's willful suspension of belief: "there is no way to be confident those motions correspond to some communication that is occurring between [Samson] and God."24 While it is questionable whether the "confidence" Fish problematizes (by finding Samson's "rousing motions" indeterminate) can ever be fully enjoyed by a spectator, the ars moriendi offered conventions—with which I supplement Slights's reading—for witnessing such ambiguous movements with faith.

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An irony of many Protestant arts of dying is that, like many casuistical works, they seek to provide general rules while at the same time recognizing their potential inapplicability to specific cases. In one of its more reflective moments, Milton's Chorus similarly questions not only the utility of its own "apt words," but also the efficacy of the literary tradition that included the ars moriendi: Many are the sayings of the wise In ancient and in modern books enroled; Extolling patience as the truest fortitude; And to the bearing well of all calamities, All chances incident to man's frail life Consolatories writ With studied argument, and much persuasion sought Lenient of grief and anxious thought, But with the afflicted in his pangs their sound Little prevails, or rather seems a tune, Harsh, and of dissonant mood from his complaint... (652-62) These lines introduce a choral meditation uncharacteristic for its theological doubt, and for its sympathy with Samson's suffering; and its singularity may also be felt as a gentle anachronism (one wonders what "ancient" and "modern books" the Danites might consult in the dust and heat of the Old Testament).25 But the Chorus's historical perspective would certainly have been familiar to the Renaissance student of humanist consolation literature, for whom classical models were frequently assimilated with modern.26 Moreover, the Chorus's shifted psychological perspective—from rigorist, formulaic comfort to a less restrained expression of shared grief—parallels a movement G. W. Pigman has traced in the elegies and consolatories of the English Renaissance.27 Indeed, the Chorus's surprising critique of proverbial consolation in this passage might have struck the seventeenth-century student of the ars moriendi as entirely contemporary: in his "modern" Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651), Jeremy Taylor observed that "men that are in health are severe exactors of patience at the hands of them that are sicke, and they usually judge it not by terms of relation, between God and the suffering man; but between him and the friends that stand by the bedside." Noting the dissonance often produced by too much "studied argument" in such cases, Taylor counsels against burdening a dying man's last hour with "knotty discourses of philosophy," recognizing with sympathy that, in extremis, "a Syllogisme makes our head ake."28 But Taylor's insight here is theological and epistemological as well: he realizes that the dying man moves beyond the register and "relation" of human intercession, beyond the probative logic of casuistry, beyond the realm of empiricism.

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Samsons Chorus similarly delimits its own effective and cognitive threshold by declaring the afflicted man remediless unless he experience a comfort necessarily inaccessible to spectators, Unless he feel within Some source of consolation from above; Secret refreshings... (SA, 663-65) In a passage with obvious relevance to Milton's play, Becon's work also reveals the limits of its own consolatory and interpretive program. Responding to a long homiletic performance by Philemon, Epaphroditus relates the passage of an event unwitnessed by any other character in the closet drama, an event whose cause and significance the dying man only intimates: In the time of this your godly communication had with me, (the Lord my God be thanked for it!) I felt the heaviness, trouble, and disquietness of my conscience by little and little go away, and certain sweet motions of true and inward joy to arise in my heart. (Salve, 161)

It is after a long and far from clearly resolved casuistical debate over the Mosaic law and individual action, an exchange concluded with the Chorus protesting its diagnostic and prognostic incapacity ("How thou wilt here come off surmounts my reach" [SA, 1380]), that the object of interpretive comfort becomes the interpreting comforter in Samson Agonistes: Be of good courage, I begin to feel Some rousing motions in me which dispose To something extraordinary my thoughts. (SA, 1381-83) Like Epaphroditus's "certain sweet motions," Samson's "rousing motions" are not a product or discovery of the human dialogue, the trial of interpretation, that they interrupt;29 nor are they an effect of the conscience or consciousness (the "thoughts") they influence. Tangible only to the sick men for whom so much analytical salve is spilt, they inhabit the interpretive blind spot of the ars moriendi, the private relation "between God and the suffering man." For a genre devoted to the "resolution"30 of such uncertainties through discursive performance and revelatory spectacle, a conduct literature concerned with literally going through the motions of death, this invisibility may indeed seem to threaten impasse; and one may hear the frustration of Milton's Chorus (and not a few Miltonists) in George Herbert's complaint of his library's refer-

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ential inadequacy at a similar moment: "Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me / None of my books will show."31 The period between Samson's "resolution" to depart (SA, 1390,1410) and the Hebrew messenger's report of his death (SA, 1570)—the period during which the spectacle of collective interpretation moves completely beyond their eyewitness—does dislocate the Chorus and Manoa from their prescribed literary roles: the uncharacteristic speculations ascribed to the Danites in the omissa (SA, 1527-35,1537), and the effects of this decontextualized passage itself,32 may reflect a disjointed narrative framework unable to assimilate the "noise" (SA, 1508) issued from the theater. But with the messenger's account of the "horrid spectacle" (SA, 1542) that is Samson's final act, the Chorus and Manoa regain both their interpretive "courage" and their purchase on the conventions of the ars moriendi. Indeed, they enter a mode of interpretation with which works such as Becon's stopped the gap created by the dying man's inaccessible inwardness: glossing the theatrical gestures of death in an effort at psychological and formal closure, an effort to comfort not the departed, but the surviving interpretive community. The relation between the removed, news-starved Hebrews and their eye-witnessing messenger suggestively resembles that which William Haller has demonstrated between the author of Acts and Monuments and his historical sources: like Foxe, the Hebrews seek to translate a primary account into "a coherent narrative with a single sustained point of view," to integrate an independent document into a pre-existing literary form.33 Manoa's plans to "fetch" his son's mangled body home for burial, in fact, may suggest in their evocation of the martyrologist's famous title a desire to appropriate Samson generically: there will I build him A monument, and plant it round with shade Of laurel ever green, and branching palm, With all his trophies hung, and acts enrolled In copious legend ... (SA, 1733-37, my emphasis) The Chorus's concluding declaration similarly attempts to entomb the remnants of history within a monumental teleology, to subordinate tragic action to the providential rubric of the art of dying ('all's well that ends well'): All is best, though we oft doubt, What the unsearchable dispose Of highest wisdom brings about, And ever best found in the close ... His servants he with new acquist Of true experience from this great event

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With peace and consolation hath dismissed, And calm of mind all passion spent. (SA, 1745- 48,1755-58) This closure may indeed seem to strain against the messenger's relatively objective report, which describes with "particular and distinct" detail the visual scene in the theater but leaves unglossed the import of Samson's meditation (SA, 1635-37) and the significance of his last words (1640-45). Only on the topic of Samson's doubtful death does the messenger contribute an evaluative note (1657), joining the play's Argument (79) and the Chorus's judgment (1664-68) in deeming it accidental.34 Otherwise, however, ambiguous gestures ("his arms on those two massy pillars," "with head a while inclined / And eyes fast fixed he stood, as one who prayed") are left to speak for themselves, and to be spoken for by removed exegetes who try to stabilize the messenger's simile. Such gestures are of course a staple in Foxe's retrospective analysis,35 which encloses the various dramas of history within the parentheses of Protestant England. But simple gestures also figure crucially in the ars moriendi, marking the moment when the dying man is converted entirely into a textual body and inscribed with imputed meaning, when the impulse to see and open up to show is replaced by a desire to close off and bury. In The Sick Man's Salve—a book first published by the future publisher of Acts and Monuments, a book whose author would become a character in Foxe's work36—the mere report of Epaphroditus's last vague act (a raised hand) provides all the "outward sign and token" of his "faith and godly departure" (SA, 189) required by Philemon. If, after the messenger's account, Manoa makes an interpretive leap by declaring that "nothing is here for tears" since Samson died "with God not parted from him, as was feared" (SA, 1721,1719), it is a leap familiar in such earlier texts. If, as Fish claims, the first untenably regenerationist reading of the play is that of Manoa and the Chorus— whose obituary consolidation and "peace and consolation" are constructed upon unsatisfactory evidence37—Philemon's concluding provision "for the comely furniture of the burial," and his thanksgiving for the "everlasting consolation" with which he and his friends depart (Salve, 191), seem similarly suspect. Both closet dramas involve epistemological categories—the search for "ocular proof" and "auricular assurance"38—much debated in Renaissance law, theater, and theology; but neither proves that a play (even one "never intended" for "the stage") is the thing for catching consciences or certifying godliness. Neither offers any revelation unsusceptible to the skepticism Manoa terms "fear." The preceding juxtapositions have shown only that Milton's characters operate within literary conventions inherited from the Protestant ars moriendi, conventions thus far unnoticed in criticism of the play. We must still ask, however, what these conventions might have meant to the seventeenth-century author of Samson Agonistes, and

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why Milton might foster doubt in his audience whereas Becon clearly expects unironic communication between author, speaker (Philemon is both his pseudonym and chief raisonneur), and reader. "SOME GREAT ACT": READING SAMSON SKEPTICALLY If Samson's epithet suggests "dying man," it also suggests "actor";39 and indeed it was the conception of the dying man as actor that both pervaded the Renaissance art of dying and exposed it to antitheatrical criticism. As Richard Macksey has observed, the ars moriendi problematizes the authenticity of dying by codifying it as an iterable art that blurs the historicity of a dying man's last actions and utterances by conferring upon them a transhistorical and "transtextual" status.40 Even the famous lines ascribed to Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, though they idealize an unrehearsed death, fall within the tradition of the Stoic contemplatio mortis—thereby preparing the Renaissance audience for his imminent assassination:41 Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. To Caesar's sharp distinction between a cowardly anticipation of death and a valiant, definitive encounter with it, however, the Renaissance responded with a self-conscious confusion of life and death, which made explicit the latent tension (between agency and subjectedness, disingenuousness and authenticity) in the phrase "art of dying." We see this confusion in the Samson-like "living death" and "moving grave" of John Donne's final portrait, commissioned by a living poet proleptically wrapped in his winding sheet, "graving all his life." We hear this confusion most clearly in Henry Vaughan's apparent rejoinder to Caesar, which defined holy dying as rehearsed, even pre-hearsed: But the good man lies Entombed many days before he dies.42 Donne's self-presentation, of course, had precedents not only in the death-in-life trope of Renaissance anamorphic painting, but also in late medieval tomb sculpture, which frequently juxtaposed living and dead figures, producing the visual effect of a moving grave;43 similarly, Vaughan's devotionalism echoes familiar memento mori and contemptus mundi themes. But a distinctive aspect of the Renaissance art of dying was its conflation with the obligations of the living,44 a conflation suggested by Adam's growing recognition of his fallen condition as "a long day's dying" (PL, 10.964), and by the De Doctrina Christiana's delineation of the several degrees of dying that precede physical death.45 One consequence of the increasingly indiscrete relation between the ars moriendi and the ars vivendi was that dying, like so much else in early modern life, became

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a dramatically scripted affair—predicated upon earlier textual performances. It was upon the idea of a transhistorical and intertextual "register, with commentary, of diverse deaths" that Montaigne edified "the house of death" ("the continual work of our life").46 This domicile, the last object of Renaissance self-fashioning, was thus also a fabric of constant imitation and referentiality—a theater in which the lines of earlier authors could be roughly appropriated, repeatedly practiced and delivered. Indeed, one reply to the question left forcefully unanswered by skeptical readings of Samson Agonistes—How does Samson get from his initial decision not to accompany the Philistine officer to his sudden and apparently unmotivated resolution to follow him to the temple?47—is that Milton's hero is prompted by such an anthologized script. As I have argued elsewhere, the perplexing progression of Samson's utterances, from "I cannot come" to "I will not come" to "I with this messenger will go along" (SA, 1321,1332,1343,1384), in fact echoes the verbal gradations of Shakespeare's Caesar in his response to a remarkably similar dramatic situation.48 Such resemblances, however, can amplify skepticism: the attribution of Samson's final decision to "some important cause," for instance, appears even less determinate when compared with Caesar's simple explanation for his actions, "The cause is in my will" (2.2.71); and while the regenerationist reader might observe in this contrast evidence of Samson's kenosis, it must be admitted that this process by definition (and particularly in Samson's case) is difficult to ascribe to a speech-act. Such subtle and relatively minor lexical correspondences can alert us to the evaluative difficulties posed by the establishment of a kind of curriculum mortis in the Renaissance. We need not apply the total skepticism of Patricia Parker—who finds Hamlet's "There's a divinity that shapes our ends" speech merely "a source of metaphors for dramatic structure, detached from belief or homiletic piety"49—to acknowledge the elusive nature of allusion at such moments. How does one assess a verbal performance in which the constitution and revelation of selfhood consists of convention, in which claims of theological insight are phrased in the conned quotations of an actor preparing institutionally for the "great act" of death? Caesar, after all, can be played by anybody, as Polonius (who accounts himself "a good actor") suggests in his own prologue to death. For Ben Jonson—arguably the English playwright most sympathetic to antitheatrical skepticism—the response to the potential hypokrisis of the art of dying, like his more general response to the pervasive histrionics of his culture, seems to have been satire. Volpone, for instance, can be read as a generic farce of the ars moriendi tradition, exposing in its vulpine title character and his central prop (a faux deathbed) the easily abused nexus between dying and acting. Much more specifically, Eastward Hoe's Quicksilver serves as a focal point for the skeptical reevaluation of two texts we have already associated with Samson Agonistes. But first this protean player—who delights in nothing more than "revel[ing] it in his prodigal similitude"50—explicitly transforms the Samson story itself into a model

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of theatrical dissembling by investing himself, in an elaborate costuming scene, with the role of a reprobate Machiavellian hero: I now am free; and now will justify My trunks and punks: Avaunt dull flat-cap then, Via, the curtain that shadowed Borgia; There lie thou husk of my envassaled state. I Samson now, have burst the Philistines' bands, And in thy lap my lovely Dalila, I lie and snore out my enfranchised state. (Eastward Hoe, 2.2.32-38) Even for Quicksilver, this self-identification may seem bizarre. And yet his caricature of Samson as both riddling actor and uxorious sybarite merely burlesques the biographical ambiguity—the motivational opacity and dubious "marriagechoices"—that puzzles Milton's Danites as they attempt to believe that what Samson earlier "motioned" was "of God" (SA, 222). Quicksilver's parody sanctions a reading of the Samson story that Milton's characters are at pains to dismiss, the skeptical reading of Samson as an agonist (or actor) in a drama neither divine nor heroic.51 In his implausible fifth-act conversion, moreover, Quicksilver demonstrates how easily regeneration can be conned by such an actor if versed in the appropriate scripts and prepared to go through the right motions. As related by a single "eye-witness," Quicksilver (now resembling Samson in his imprisoned, barbered state) proves a gifted student of Protestant dying, practiced in the art of mimetic conversion: I never heard his like! He has cut his hair too. He is so well given, and has such good gifts! He can tell you, almost all the stories of the Book of Martyrs, and speak you all the Sick Man's Salve without book. (Eastward Hoe, 5.2.55-58) Though Quicksilver (unlike Volpone) is not explicitly revealed as an absolute fraud at the end of his play, and though its collaborative authorship complicates the interpretation of Eastward Hoe,52 a skeptical reading of this passage is certainly warranted by Jonson's treatment—elsewhere in his drama—of the feigned repentance of a theatrical pseudo-martyr. In Epicoene, for example, Lady Haughty proposes remedying Morose's malady with the textbooks that reformed Trusty's parents, provoking a Jonsonian riposte from Truewit: HAUGHTY: And one of 'hem, I know not which, was cured with the Sick Man's Salve, and the other with Greene's Groats-worth of Wit. TRUEWIT: A very cheap cure, madam. (Epicoene, 4.2.171-74)

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That the deathbed performance of one of Jonson's dramaturgical predecessors should here be treated as interchangeable with the belittled Sick Man's Salve, that a character like Quicksilver can nimbly shift from playing a debauched Samson to reciting the culturally dog-eared scripts of Becon and Foxe, suggests the skepticism with which such a legacy might be received. In Jonson's drama, the Renaissance house of death is shown to be a tiring house of "prodigal similitude"; what Freud described as the human capacity to confront dying with "the plurality of lives which we need"53 is exposed as role playing, the rote performance of precedent parts. After Jonson, one finds few critiques of the Renaissance's theatricalization of dying that isolate individual ars moriendi texts so specifically (though Acts and Monuments receives skeptical glances from several sides, including Milton's).54 But Jonson's parodic invocation of the methods and authorities of the art of dying adumbrates a strategy Milton would put to polemic effect later in the seventeenth century. In what David Loewenstein has described as an "antitheatrical" response to Charles's self-fashioned martyrdom in Eikon Basilike,55 Milton's Eikonoklastes represents the king as a kind of Quicksilver—stage-managing the fifth act of his life with the same hypocrisy that characterized his reign. While readers tend to agree on the general deconstructive tactics of this response, however, the relation between Eikonoklastes and the iconic and theatrical tendencies in Milton's subsequent art has received less critical consensus. For Ernest Gilman, the tension that emerged in the 1640s between Milton's iconoclastic left hand and poetic right was fully resolved by the composition of Samson Agonistes—"a 'blind' tragedy that culminates in the destruction of a theater."56 For Richard Helgerson, Milton's explosion of Charles's auto-iconography cleared the way for the poet's surreptitious appropriation of the king's self-presentational method.57 And yet the conception of Samson as a complete theatroclast—though employed by antitheatrical writers such as William Prynne58—does not respond to the theatricality of Milton's Samson, which Mary Ann Radzinowicz and Laura Lunger Knoppers have connected with the spectacular representation of Foxean martyrology.59 While Helgerson's intriguing thesis accounts for this theatricality, moreover, it does not allow for the possibility that in Samson Agonistes Milton continued the skeptical program begun in Eikonoklastes—that the play subjects to scrutiny (even as it dramatizes) the very process by which Charles fashioned himself into a martyr. The appeal of this possibility lies not only in the startling representational similarities between Charles's and Samson's agonies, but also in the fact that Milton's play calls into doubt the same theatrics of dying that his tract interrogates systematically. Recognizing the ars moriendi conventions in "The King's Book," and the complex nature of Milton's response to them, will help us understand the space between Chorus and author in Samson Agonistes as the skeptical distance required by this earlier critical encounter with the art of dying. Indeed, by reading Charles's literary and iconic representation of his

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agony as a "great show of piety" (3:536), Milton conceded the semiotic and spectacular ambiguity that all dramatizations of death entail—including his own portrayal of Samson's "great act." To read Eikon Basilike through Samson Agonistes is to realize that much of the play's rhetoric and imagery were preempted by "The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings."60 Of course many of the general resemblances between the king's embattled situation and that of the betrayed, imprisoned Samson were analogies conferred by history.61 But the unsettling correspondence of the two texts can be ascribed not only to Charles's exploitation of the Judges narrative for his own storytelling, but also to Milton's apparent captivation—in his depiction of Samson—by the king's language. Nowhere is this captivation more apparent than those passages of Eikon Basilike in which Charles explicitly compares himself with the Old Testament hero. In the eleventh chapter, for instance, the king justifies his rejection of the nineteen Parliamentary propositions of 1642 by invoking the same "conscience" with which Milton's Samson qualifies his response to the Philistine officer: They cannot ask more than I can give, may I but reserve to myself the incommunicable jewel of my conscience and not be forced to part with that whose loss nothing can repair or requite.... How can they think I can consent to [the propositions], who know they are such as are inconsistent with being either a king or a good Christian? My yielding so much as I have already makes some men confident I will deny nothing. The love I have of my people's peace hath, indeed, great influence upon me; but the love of truth and inward peace hath more. Should I grant some things they require, I should not so much weaken my outward state of a king as wound that inward quiet of my conscience ... But to bind myself to a general and implicit consent to whatever they shall desire or propound ... were such a latitude of blind obedience ... This were as if Samson should have consented not only to bind his own hands and cut off his hair but to put out his eyes, that the Philistines might with the more safety mock and abuse him; which they chose rather to do than quite to destroy him when he was become so tame an object and fit occasion for their sport and scorn .. . But they would have me trust to their moderation and abandon mine own discretion; that so I might verify what representations some have made of me to the world that I am fitter to be their pupil than their prince (Eikon Basilike, 53-54, my emphases) Urged to comply with the Philistine proposition by both the threatening officer and his increasingly timorous "people," Milton's Samson similarly refuses to provide "sport with blind activity" for those who hold him "in their civil power" (1328,1367):

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Myself? my conscience and internal peace. Can they think me so broken, so debased With corporal servitude, that my mind ever Will condescend to such absurd commands? Although their drudge, to be their fool and jester ... But who constrains me to the temple of Dagon, Not dragging? the Philistian lords command, Commands are no constraints. If I obey them, I do it freely; venturing to displease God for the fear of man. (SA, 1334-38,1370-74) Like the Miltonic Samson, of course, the Samsonian Charles is in no political position to maintain this defiant posture. Indeed, Eikon Basilike—with its emblematic frontispiece alluding to Christ's agony and contemplatio mortis in Gethsemane—is composed under the sign of his imminent death.62 But Charles's strategy in the face of this "power resistless" is, like Samson's, to supplant a Dagonalian theater designed to validate his own subjection by rendering him a "scorn and gaze" ("that so I might verify what representations some have made of me") with a theatrical display that will confound his captors.63 And thus while John Cook, a lawyer for the prosecution, could triumphantly describe Charles's trial and execution as "the most Comprehensive, Impartial and Glorious piece of Justice that ever was acted and Executed upon the Theatre of England"64 the king himself took the stage determined to play another part: Here I am sure to be conqueror if God will give me such a measure of constancy as to fear him more than man and to love the inward peace of my conscience before any outward tranquility. (Eikon Basilike, 38) Like Samson, Charles recognizes the danger of "venturing to displease / God for the fear of man" (SA, 1373-74) during his fifth-act performance. For Charles, moreover, the transformation of Parliament's carefully stage-managed demystification of kingship into the "tragic scaffold" of the Restoration cause involves playing a "royal actor" martyred by regicide65—a part, rehearsed by the conventions of the ars moriendi, that further aligns him with Milton's Samson. "Meditations upon Death," the final chapter of the King's Book, claims as its titular occasion Parliament's vote of nonaddress and Charles's subsequent "closer imprisonment" in Carisbrooke Castle. Like Milton's Samson, Charles represents himself as burdened by an enemy's yoke, bearing "the heavy load of other men's ambitions, fears, jealousies, and cruel passions"; he laments that his service has rendered him a moving grave, "only the husk and shell" of life. And like Samson, who describes his evident extinction as a darkness "amid the blaze of noon, / Ir-

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recoverably dark, total eclipse / Without all hope of day!" (SA, 80-82), he anticipates death as "an eclipse which oft happeneth as well in clear as cloudy days" (Eikon Basilike, 172). Charles's second and final explicit self-identification with the biblical Samson in Eikon Basilike, moreover, stakes even more deeply such prior claims to Milton's linguistic and representational ground. Fashioning himself as a kind of Charles Agonistes in the "Meditations upon Death," the king declares himself inspired by that heroic greatness of spirit which becomes a Christian in the patient and generous sustaining those afflictions which as shadows necessarily attend us while we are in this body ... whose total absence is best recompensed with the dew of heaven. The assaults of affliction may be terrible like Samson's lion, but they yield much sweetness to those that dare to encounter and overcome them. (Eikon Basilike, 173, my emphases) Applauding Samson's audacious repulse of Harapha, Milton's Chorus similarly proclaims their "afflicted" hero endued "With plain heroic magnitude of mind" (1279), finding in his "patience" evidence of "some source of consolation from above; / Secret refreshings" that have restored his strength with "celestial vigour" (1280). Like Milton's Samson, finally, Charles intimates a privileged "converse with God" that directs him to comply with his captors in the service of an ulterior political and religious end. Preparing to depart for the scaffold "under God's sole custody and disposal," the king comforts his sympathizers by presaging a catastrophe for their enemies that will be both apocalyptic and architectural: The punishment of the more insolent and obstinate may be ... in such a method of divine justice as is not ordinary; the earth of the lowest and meanest people opening upon them and swallowing them up in a just disdain of their ill-gotten and worse-used authority, upon whose support and strength they chiefly depended for their building and establishing their designs against me, the church, and state. (Eikon Basilike, 177-78, my emphasis) Milton's Samson encourages his Chorus by hinting at "something extraordinary" to which his rousing motions dispose his "thoughts"; he observes that God may "dispense with" him "in temples at idolatrous rites / For some important cause"; and he appropriates the Philistine theater as the scene of his own "remarkable" "great act." Charles encourages his Royalist readers by describing his execution as the work of God's "disposal," its meaning to be revealed in some future political cause; and he appropriates Parliament's ideological theater by pulling down

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the pillars of the regicides' political support, subverting their perspectival management with his own spectacular performance. As we have seen, one important function of the ars moriendi is to consolidate the interpretive energies released by death, to inscribe an individual death with unambiguous meaning. By defining his surviving audience (few, however fit) as Manoa and the Chorus, Samson enjoys just such a consolidation by the end of the play: his prescribed audience expectations—"of me expect to hear / Nothing dishonourable, impure, unworthy" (SA, 1423-4)—are answered antiphonally in the final assessments of his "noble" death by Manoa ("no weakness, no contempt, / Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair" [1722—23]) and the Chorus ("All is best" [1745]). To judge by the carefully couched words of Andrew Marvell, Charles achieved a similar control over his audience's response, dying (like Samson) with a consummate theatrical gesture of rehearsed significance: He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene; But with his keener eye The axe's edge did try.66 Milton, of course, strenuously objected to both the theatricality of the king's death and the political reaction it seemed calculated to elicit. And yet one may ask how the author of Samson Agonistes—a play published under the political triumph of Charles's ars moriendi—could escape the skepticism he directed so forcefully at the King's Book. Indeed, by writing a play so implicated in the language and conventions of Eikon Basilike, Milton seems to have exposed Samson's own "remarkable" "great act" to the same questions with which he prosecuted Charles's "memorable scene." If Fish is right, then, in identifying the Chorus as the first proponents of the regenerationist reading of Samson Agonistes, we can find methodological precedent for his own skeptical reading in Milton's Eikonoklastes. As Fish finds Milton's play riddled with evidentiary gaps and spectacular indeterminacy, so does Milton find Charles's "stage-work" (Eikonoklastes, 3:530) "doubtfull and ambiguous" (3:598), full of "equivocal interpretations" (3:495) that destabilize its meaning. As Fish asks us to recognize the impossibility of interpreting Samson's inward condition by the final outward gestures recounted by the messenger ("with head a while inclined, / And eyes fast fixed he stood, as one who prayed" [1636-37]), so does Milton ask us to doubt the "Image and Memory" of Charles reproduced by William Marshall's frontispiece—a portrait that represents the king at prayer, with head inclined and eyes fast fixed on a heavenly crown.67 For Milton, this portrait was just one of the many emblematic devices by which Charles transformed "Tyranny into an Art" (3:344), an art of self-presentation that resembles—in its scripted performance of mimetic martyrdom—the ars moriendi. And as we shall see, Milton's specific criticism of the "King's Picture"

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merges—in his response to Charles's "Meditations upon Death"—with a generic criticism of the art of dying, which is the King's Book. But first note how Milton's response to one other tactic of this art, Charles's self-portraiture as Samson, further anticipates the skeptical reading of Samson Agonistes. Throughout his reign, Charles enjoyed considerable analogical association with the biblical Samson as his courtiers, and in at least one instance Milton himself, developed flattering homologies between the two leaders.68 One might expect the author of Eikonoklastes to recant this earlier mythography, to rescue Samson from his sullying association with the king; yet while Milton's regular practice in this work is to replace Charles's self-serving references to biblical heroes with types of hypocrisy,69 he leaves the Charles-Samson conceit intact. Indeed, Eikonoklastes' most extended reference to the Samson story elaborates the similarities between king and judge as an allegory of Charles's duplicity. Writing of the king's decision to seek refuge with the Scottish troops in 1646, Milton describes him as a Samson-like riddler and dissembler: However it was a hazardous and rash journey taken, to resolve riddles in mens Loyaltie, who had more reason to mistrust the Riddle of such a disguised yeelding.... What providence deny'd to force, he thought it might grant to fraud, which he stiles Prudence: But Providence was not couzen'd with disguises, neither outward nor inward.... Had he known when the Game was lost, it might have sav'd much contest: but the way to give over fairely, was not to slip out of op'n Warr into a new disguise. He layes down his Armes, but not his Wiles; nor all his Armes, for in obstinacy he comes no less arm'd than ever, Cap a pe. And what were they but wiles ... to persist the same man, and to fortify his mind before hand, still purposing to grant no more than what seem'd good to that violent and lawless Triumvirate within him, under the falsifi'd names of his Reason, Honour, and Conscience, the old circulating dance of his shifts and evasions. The words of a King, as they are full of power, in the autority and strength of Law, so like Sampson, without the strength of that Nazarite's lock, they have no more power in them then the words of another man. (Eikonoklastes, 3:545-46) Milton's reference to Samson here is surprising—not least because it appears unsolicited, if not gratuitous, in its polemic context (no mention of Samson appears in the section of Eikon Basilike to which this passage directly responds). In Milton's constitutionalist application, the shorn Samson seems to exemplify wily and fraudulent stratagem rather than divinely sanctioned guerrilla warfare—a perspective in fact shared by Milton's Harapha, who declares Samson "Due by the law to capital punishment" (SA, 1225; see also 1182—91). For Milton, of

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course, capital punishment was Charles's legal due; but the inescapable irony is that in presenting his case against this Samson-like king, Milton here adopts a Philistine perspective.70 It is also a skeptical perspective, easily transferred to his own representation of Samson: by deconsecrating "the words of a King," Milton deconstructs the triumvirate of "Reason, Honour, and Conscience" by which his own hero justifies his actions—the triumvirate upon which all regenerationist readings of Samson Agonistes depend. Like faith, doubt is a conviction based on the evidence of things not seen; and it is this latter verdict that Milton repeatedly delivers on the seemingly pious "words" of the king, such as when he judges Charles's Penitential Meditations an exercise in insincerity and fabrication: It is not hard for any man, who hath a Bible in his hands, to borrow good words and holy sayings in abundance; but to make them his own, is a work of grace onely from above. (Eikonoklastes, 3:553)

Samsons Chorus similarly observes the necessity of grace "from above" to render consonant the man "within" and his book-gleaned language. But the crucial difference between Milton and this Chorus, in their analyses of two remarkably similar cases of conscience, is that Milton responds corrosively to the same evidentiary deficiencies upon which the Danites construct their interpretive and integrative interpolations. Nowhere is this difference more apparent than in the last chapter of Eikonoklastes, where Milton declares Charles's Samson-like "Meditations upon Death" a work of hypocritical theater, a formal linguistic performance reflecting the easily conned "cheap cure" of literary precedent rather than a genuine internal drama. Milton introduces this chapter, a skeptical revision of the king's contemplatio mortis, by first acknowledging the hermeneutic privilege conventionally ascribed to the topic. Echoing claims we have already heard from Montaigne, he recognizes the culturally entrenched conception of dying as an art somehow above criticism or contestatory interpretation: It might be well thought by him who reads no further than the Title of this last Essay, that it requir'd no answer. For all other human things are disputed, and will be variously thought of to the Worlds end. But this business of death is a plaine case, and admitts no controversie: In that center all Opinions meet. (Eikonoklastes, 3:582)

But by exposing Charles's "business of death" as so much stage business, by exploding the "plaine case" of his dying as a piece of theatrical subterfuge, Milton reveals the artificiality of the ars moriendi conventions employed by the king. His

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criticism of Charles's self-fashioned death, then, also involves a more general critique of the generic assumptions that rendered such performances indisputable and uncontroversial (assumptions still operating in the more credulous regenerationist readings of Samson Agonistes). Indeed it is for dying by the book, for exploiting the literary and theatrical conventions of the ars moriendi in his own self-dramatized fifth act, that Milton condemns the king and the book that survives him. Equating publicity with duplicity, he declares Charles's testimony perjured, suspects the evidence of his meditations as the exhibition of a false witness: Such Prayers as these may happly catch the People, as was intended: but how they please God, is to be much doubted, though pray'd in secret, much less writt'n to be divulg'd. (Eikonoklastes, 3:601)

Equating Eikon Basilike with the seductions of theater,71 he declares Charles's sympathetic readers at once a visually besotted mob of relic-seekers and a blind chorus of acquiescent interpreters: an inconstant, irrational, and Image-doting rabble; that like a credulous and hapless herd, begott'n to servility, and inchanted with these popular institutes of Tyranny, subscrib'd with a new device of the Kings Picture at his praiers, hold out both thir eares with such delight and ravishment to be stigmatiz'd and board through in witness of thir own voluntary and beloved baseness. (Eikonoklastes, 3:601)

Earlier in Eikonoklastes, Milton remarked on the tendency of an autobiographical art of dying like the king's to falsify evidence, to identify a revealingly amorphous representation with deceptively determinate, epitaphic significance: Martyrs bear witness to the truth, not to themselves... He who writes himself Martyr by his own inscription, is like an ill Painter, who, by writing on the shapeless Picture which he hath drawn, is fain to tell passengers what shape it is. (Eikonoklastes, 3:575)

At the end of his work, Milton blames the perpetuation of the king's forged perspective—the pious guise of a protean actor—on a "credulous" audience that ignores the ambiguity of his artistic performance, complacently reproducing the self-portrait (and self-inscribed emblematic meaning) of a poseur. With Milton's iconoclastic critique of this ars moriendi in mind, it is tempting to treat his dramatization of Samson's death as a transposition of certain discredited aspects of Charles's literary dying; to correlate the Israelite judge's carefully

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calculated death by theater with that of the English king; to read the Hebrew messenger and removed Chorus as representatives of the Royalist propaganda machine that converted slim eyewitness accounts of Charles's execution into reliquarian hagiography. Indeed, this last temptation grows even stronger when we realize how closely the emblematic conclusion of Samson Agonistes approximates the iconographic frontispiece of the King's Book. As the messenger's description of Samson's gestures in the temple resembles Marshall's post mortem portrayal of Charles at prayer, for instance, so does the Chorus's gloss of Samson's meditations recall the interpretive apparatus included with the "Kings Picture": the Danites declare their hero's final act elucidated by spiritual insight ("But he though blind of sight, / Despised and thought extinguished quite, / With inward eyes illuminated / His fiery virtue roused ... [SA, 1687-90]); the king's portrait depicts a beam of light (labelled Clarior e tenebris) descending from dark clouds to the top of Charles's meditative head, while another beam (labeled Coeli Specto) emanates from his eyes to the heavenly crown he contemplates. The Danites proclaim the revival and reflourishing of Samson's "virtue given for lost, / Depressed, and overthrown, as seemed" (SA, 1697-98); Marshall represents Charles as a palm tree (with the motto Crescit sub pondere virtus), resilient despite pendent weights.72 As Manoa plans to reclaim Samson's body in an ancestral monument (shaded with "branching palm" [SA, 1735]) that will be both the object of future pilgrimage and the symbol of further contest, the Chorus—like Charles's portraitist—seeks to consolidate the meaning of its hero's death in an "embossed" (SA, 1700), iconic testimonial. Like Eikon Basilike's superadded "new device" of pictorial annotation, then, Samson Agonistes' visually charged conclusion provides an interpretive coda that also prefaces the "calm of mind" of future regenerationist responses to the work. But to accept the Danites' consolatory portrait of Samson as the "true experience" of his drama is to confuse the image with the man, a fallacy shattered in Eikonoklastes. By asking us to mistrust the king's final performance and the corroborative construction it received from his supportive readers, Milton also seems to ask us to doubt Samson's last act and its choric exegesis. The problem with such an imputational and intercalary reading, of course, is that it risks reducing Milton's play into either an exercise in perverse irony or a cynical act of artistic appropriation—in which ideology alone distinguishes between the representation of Samson and the misrepresentation of Charles. By holding the author of Samson Agonistes accountable for his textual criticism of the King's Book, moreover, we perhaps dislocate the drama from its historical context73— ignoring the possibility that the Restoration and its inaugural execution of the regicides may have caused Milton to reevaluate the art of martyrdom he had earlier rejected. Perhaps in Samson Agonistes Milton tries to recover those representations and hermeneutic conventions rejected in Eikonoklastesl

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These are legitimate interpretive possibilities that cannot be dismissed; the Civil War and its aftermath present us with many examples of contested and contaminated symbols—rejected and reclaimed as the occasion fit. Yet even the most persuasive reading of Samson as a figure of the martyred regicides concedes an almost metatheatrical skepticism that renders this interpretation problematic: Samson Agonistes does not so much make Samson a martyr as it shows how his fellow Israelites do so. The closure invoked by the Chorus is not closure for the reader, who knows that Israel does not "take hold" upon this occasion. .. The supreme irony is that Samson's act of iconoclasm makes him a kind of idol for his own people.74 As witnessed by the Quaker Edward Burrough, the regal funeral that the Protectorate provided for Cromwell was the occasion of similar irony; from the detached position of a critical reader, Burrough's republicans—like Milton's Danites— appear to be of the king's party without knowing it: What for him! Alas for him! Who was once a great Instrument in the hand of the Lord to break down many Idolatrous Images and grievous Idols ... and have they now made an Image of him?75 We need not read Milton's Samson or Burrough's Cromwell as an explicit allegory of Charles, then, to recognize the problematic legacy Eikon Basilike left to its critics: regardless of the authenticity of an individual's spiritual life, the King's Book rendered irrecoverably ambiguous the conventions by which that life could be witnessed in death. Indeed, though the skeptical response to Samson Agonistes is typically substantiated by the indeterminacy of its hero's dying, it is finally the overdetermined nature of this dramatic act—its inevitable evocation of the performance and reception of Charles's ars moriendi—that signals Milton's interpretive and evaluative disengagement from the play. We might in fact present this disengagement as a specifically postregicidal response, a further distancing from the hero whose militancy the First Defense blurs as "prompted by God or by his own valor."76 STANDING ALOOF: SAMSON AND THE DANGERS OF CONSTRUCTION This removal, the distance of a playwright refusing complicity in his own representation, is my final concern. This chapter has purposed not to contribute another installment in the regenerationist-skeptical debate, but rather to demonstrate how the seeds for such a debate exist in both Milton's age and Milton's text, not to take one exclusive side in a critical dialogue, so much as to locate the dialogue in Milton's drama of history. In conclusion, however, we can recognize how standing aloof from this dialogue might be the most responsible option Milton gives us.

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Within the text at least, interpreting Samson proves a sirenic temptation: "Irresistible Samson" confounds not only the Philistines who attempt to bring him to "public proof" (1314), but also those readers—beginning with the Danites— who feel compelled to witness Samson's regeneration and martyrdom by analyzing his life and death. Samson's threatening reply to the enemy come to "survey" him, in fact, also serves as a warning to such readers: "The way to know were not to see but taste" (1091). The two senses probably introduced by "taste" here (tactile and gustative) recall the "mortal taste" represented in Paradise Lost;77 but for the spectator in or reader of Samson Agonistes, this "way to know" remains as inaccessible as the eyesight proves unrevealing. For as with the forbidden fruit, knowing Samson is fatal: the only characters who directly "behold" Samson's single disclosive act in this play are struck forever dumb "with amaze" (1645); the judges who subject him to the only real trial theater can offer immediately taste death when he brings the house down. Those who survive to interpret, on the other hand, must accept the evidence of a spectator who "aloof obscurely stood" outside the theater of proof (1611)—whose central testimony on Samson's speech and act is based not on experience, but on hearsay "from such as nearer stood" (1631). If standing aloof from the interpretive seductions of Samson Agonistes attenuates one's commentarial authority, however, it also delivers one from the collapses (architectural and hermeneutic) that amaze all those involved less circumstantially in the play and with its text. In this sense the messenger is consistent: his detached perspective produces a relatively objective report modest in its claims and conclusions; and he remains silent as Manoa and the Chorus seize upon this representation with an interpretive zeal that implicates them more directly in the play's ambiguities. For the Danites, of course, this response is also consistent. Indeed, the Chorus—which neither resists Samson nor avoids Samsons interpretive pitfalls—says more than it means when it recalls the hero's exploits in Ascalon: But safest he who stood aloof, When insupportably his foot advanced In scorn of their proud arms and warlike tools, Spurned them to death by troops. (SA, 135-38) "Irresistibly," the invariable editorial gloss of insupportably in this passage, adequately conveys the Chorus's apparent meaning here; but when we acknowledge the collateral senses of this word in the Renaissance—such as "untenably" or "unaccountably"—the passage comments ironically on its speakers.78 For the very account the Danites provide of Samson's biography involves them in the unaccountable; their dogged attempt to witness his life as a consistently meaningful story implicates them in an implosive text. Of course the casuistical contortions required of these interpreters by Milton's Samson merely accentuate exegetical maneuvers long performed by biblical commentators; and the Chorus's kommos

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reiterates a reading as old as St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews (11:32), which transforms the ambiguous Old Testament representation of Samson by including him in a heroic catalogue recognized by the Renaissance as "a little Book of Martyrs."79 But the instability of the Judges text, and thus the untenability of such readings, had well before Milton moved exegetes to seek safety by standing aloof.80 As Joseph Wittreich has extensively shown, moreover, long and tumultuous periods of reassessing Samson in the Renaissance had the effect of challenging received allegories and typologies—further destabilizing the Judges story and questioning the reliability of its narrator.81 The demonstrated ambiguity of this story did not, of course, prevent its service to every conceivable ideology in the seventeenth century. On the contrary, the exegetical indeterminacy ascribed to Samson seems to have corresponded with (if not encouraged) his ideological appropriation, particularly in the contest for symbols that was prologue and epilogue to the Civil War. The status of the biblical Samson in the mid-seventeenth century, in fact, resembled that of Milton's Samson as increasingly polemical interpretations were based on a decreasingly probative proof text. A play that elides the Bible's annunciatory angels and authoritative narrators altogether, that leaves Samson alone to convince his fellow characters and readers that his dubious actions were "of God" (222), seems designed to invite the observer to make meaning. But such a play also draws all who so commit onto increasingly shaky interpretive ground, into a text that threatens to collapse and consume the participant with its own ambiguities. Indeed, such a play contains more perils than the precarious Judges drama Lancelot Andrewes warned his readers from engaging in as participatory spectators: "Wee were not best make sport with Sampson, lest he pull down the house about our eares, and so make us pay dearlie for our pastime."82 The criticism of Samson Agonistes has tacitly agreed to the applicability of such a warning to the play. Even the most fervidly regenerationist readers stand aloof from the interpretive misprision and historical myopia of the Danites;83 and the skeptic's instinct for distance from the conclusions of Manoa and the Chorus, at the play's close, is that of a survivor who has seen less withdrawn readers "immixed, inevitably" with an insupportable interpretive framework: The Chorus had never previously vested its confidence in Samson's interpretation of events, and we may find it difficult now to vest much confidence in its interpretation. Indeed, to the very end, Manoa and the Chorus are found contradicting Samson and, in the end, contradict Samson into a heroism he is perhaps not meant to enjoy.84 This same instinct is interestingly revealed in a critical desire for differentiation not only from the play's misreading characters, but also from its misreading critics. Johnson's claim that Samson Agonistes is a tragedy "which ignorance has admired,

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and bigotry applauded," for instance, still resounds in Wittreich's dismissive conflation of his predecessors with the untenable hermeneutic practiced by the Danites: "Miltonists have approached Samson Agonistes in much the same way that Peter Martyr pursued the Samson story in the Book of Judges, and with many of the same results."85 The irony in all such instances of diacritical assertion is less obvious than the dramatic irony literalized in the Philistines' death by theater, but with much the same effect: the Danites celebrate the destruction of Samson's captors, only to be portrayed themselves as a captive audience by readers who in turn court fallacious ruin by making a similar idol of interpretation. In a reminder of the hall of mirrors quality variously explored in Renaissance theater and painting, the drama of interpreting Samson has thus ramified into the drama of interpreting Samson: like the spectator in the play, the reader of the play risks making a spectacle of himself when he privileges his own perspective and forgets that it too is critically observed. Far from an anachronistic product of the play's criticism, moreover, this reflexive paradigm contrived what we might call the historical irony that Samson Agonistes offered to its original audience—which would have seen its own gaze problematized in Gaza. Milton's method of poetic education has often been described as the presentation of interpretive choices—with the more conventionally alluring option proving a temptation to error. For readers conditioned by his epics, however, his drama seems to complicate this hermeneutics of discrimination: if Paradise Lost instructs us vicariously through Adam's angelic lessons in interpretation, if Paradise Regained reveals to us the heroically exemplary decisions of the second Adam, Samson Agonistes seems to confront us with an "artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions,"86 whose dubious and censored actions provide no grounds for interpretive authenticity. Yet as a companion piece or coda to Milton's brief epic,87 certain aspects of the play's hermeneutical challenges appear less idiosyncratic—at least in the context of that moment in his career when the poet chose to make both works simultaneously public. If Paradise Regained tempts both its hero and its reader with plot, with a series of scenes designed to elicit an erroneous action (or a misplaced expectation of action),88 might not Samson Agonistes tempt with interpretation itself, with an almost irresistible opportunity to commit to a reading whose conventions the play itself renders insupportable? If Milton's "poem in IV books" exemplifies the divinely adiaphorous response of one who stands and waits for his tempter to collapse on his own hermeneutical hollowness, might not the play "added" to this poem test more directly the reader's ability to stand aloof from a drama that consumes itself? Before these questions become statements, qualification is necessary: Samson Agonistes does not ask not to be interpreted today;89 nor did Milton present in this play a meaninglessly relativistic text to his seventeenth-century audience. Rather, Samson Agonistes' invalidation of the interpretive conventions it dramatizes attains ironic significance as a Restoration publication. For this self-consuming drama

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recapitulates a drama of construction and de(con)struction that an audience in 1671 would have recognized as recent history. Surviving in the iterable state feared by its hero—"reserv'd alive to be repeated" (645)—Samson Agonistes also presents that hero as a victim of the same presumptuous publishing that is his "crime" (201,490, 498). But the "artificial Adam" that constitutes the interpretively liable and interpretively resistant subject of Samson Agonistes finally resolves into the object of Milton's own censorship and retraction. Hero and play resolve, that is, into a text accountable to its contexts and pretexts, a text that acknowledges the historical agency so strenuously displaced in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: But this I doubt not to affirm, that the Presbyterians, who now so much condemn deposing, were the men themselves that deposed the king, and cannot with all their shifting and relapsing wash off the guiltiness from their own hands.... So that from hence w e . . . show manifestly how much they have done toward the killing him.90 By evoking so forcefully the art of Charles's dying, the author of Samson Agonistes reveals his hand in killing him—an act initially textual that was performed into haunting theater. Rather than deny the responsibility of this former interpretive production, Milton in Samson Agonistes disables the means of its reproduction.

DYING AND KILLING We recall a stage picture: the younger Henry Percy, breathing his last at the feet of his vanquisher, striving to speak his ultima verba as "the earthy and cold hand of death / Lies on [his] tongue" (1 Henry IV, 5.4.83-84). Much about Shakespeare's representation of Hotspur's death might have terrified a Renaissance audience, but the chief cultural anxiety dramatized in this scene appears in the fact that he is killed into an ellipsis91—fashioned into an interpretive opportunity, perfected as the conventional gloss of his killer's tongue: HOTSPUR: No, Percy, thou art dust, And food for— PRINCE: For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well, great heart. Ill-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk! When that this body did contain a spirit, A kingdom for it was too small a bound; But now two paces of the vilest earth Is room enough. (iHenry IV, 5.4.84-91)

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As we have seen, Renaissance literature devoted to "killing" men and women into interpretive property frequently assumes that the last act of death marks the transfer of titles whereby a subject becomes the object of another. For the Renaissance agonist, death constituted a crisis of agency, and it makes some sense that this crisis should be explored especially on the stage, where selves are played by others. Lying on the stage with Hotspur, however, a corpulent and counterfeiting knight raises a parallel Renaissance anxiety: if Plotinus was right and death can be played as an actor plays his role, if the theater of death does not necessarily grant the spectator the interpretive property it advertises, that spectator must accept the total lack of ownership that is skepticism. By presenting Samson's death as an interpretive opportunity, then, Milton would seem to tempt his audience with the expectations of the killing poem; but by representing Samson as an irreducible actor, he would seem to frustrate those expectations. Adjusted to the terms of this study, such is in fact Henry McDonald's claim when he describes Samson as "a work that inscribes within it a conventionalized interpretation of its protagonist and his story, and then radically subverts ... that interpretation."92 In the Renaissance, the line distinguishing "dying" from "being killed" could indeed blur and even vanish, but the distinction itself seems to have rested on the uncanny ability of the early modern dying to complete their own lines.93 When the reductive and appropriative strategies of killing fail, the words and body of the dying can evade interpretive capture and continue to produce meaning. Eikon Basilike records Charles' refusal to be killed, his intent to die. Why then should Milton's play provide us with the mortal ambiguities of Falstaff (who, even when he really dies, does so with a notorious textual crux)94 rather the political malleability of Hotspur's corpse? Why should Milton leave us with an actor rather than a property? Much of the ambiguity of Milton's Samson arises from the poet's ongoing responsibility to the king's death—a political "act" that Milton helped produce only to realize, like Shakespeare's Brutus, the impossibility of controlling its theater history. In this sense Samson Agonistes completes the metatheatrical trajectory whose origins have been traced in Julius Caesar. Whereas Shakespeare inaugurates his Globe by at once celebrating and censuring his audience's dangerously constitutive power, Milton's last major poem is a dramatic palinode to the destructive constructions that had troubled him even as he praised Lord General Fairfax in 1648: For what can war, but endless war still breed, Till truth, and right from violence be freed, And public faith cleared from the shameful brand Of public fraud.95 To free its readers from an endless cycle of fraudulent iconic faith, Samson Agonistes confronts them with the most ambiguously portrayed figure in all of Milton's

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poetry—a figure whose brief appearance in Paradise Lost signals the disappearance of "Just confidence, and native righteousness" (PL, 9.1056); it tempts them with the idolatry that rendered Cromwell, no less than Charles, an "Image"; and it invites them to disembarrass themselves of the interpretive conventions that collapse upon the Chorus as they collapsed upon the Commonwealth. Chapter 3 considered Shakespeare's dramatic interaction with what Julius Caesar's Cicero describes as "a strange-disposed time," in which "men may construe things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves"; and I argued that in the theatricalized deaths of this play, Shakespeare reflects upon the dramatist's and audience's ability to exploit representations in the theater and culture of 1599. For the Parliamentarians, the first decade of the Restoration was in many respects a similarly "strange-disposed time"—in which providential interpretations once seemingly valid swerved from the ostensible purpose of history. When hermeneutic techniques conventionalized during the Interregnum were applied to the evidence of current events, in fact, they were challenged by Cicero's skepticism. Like the plague of 1665, for example, the conflagration of London in 1666 offered Royalists and Parliamentarians an opportunity to repeat the interpretive contest waged on the scaffold in 1649. But as one perspicuously aloof commentator on the annus mirabilis remarked, this dialogic casuistry was an epistemological plague on both houses: "Though all see the same desolation, yet, by looking on it with different opinions and interest, they make different constructions as if the object were so."96 Like the London fire, like the king's execution, the Samson story in Judges had before 1671 presented "the same desolation" to audiences that gave it "different constructions." Matthew Griffith was one of legions who read Samson's death as an ars moriendi imitated and perfected by Charles, "our Kingly Proto-martyr." Edward Sexby's Killing, No Murder read Samson's last act instead as an ars necandi, with the theatrical destruction of the Philistines figuring a justified regicide that might make a Charles of Cromwell. For the New Model Army, Samson was glossed as a hero in The Souldiers Pocket Bible. For Thomas Fuller, future chaplain to Charles II, the "murther" committed by Samson served as a homiletic admonition: "let us read histories that we be not made an history."97 As a postfiguration of one of the central interpretive sites of the Civil War, Samson Agonistes offers its audience a lesson surprisingly similar to Fuller's, though with an important difference: Milton wants his readers to recognize they have already been "made an history" so that they can effectively escape history; he wants them to discern the temptation to join the interpretation of Samson as a temptation to rejoin a losing battle, a lost cause. That cause is not political; nor should Milton's ambiguous play be understood as simply quietist. Rather, Milton in Samson Agonistes rehearses and finally rejects the poetics of killing that had wrought so much of England's recent political and

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literary history. When in De Oratore Tertullian remarked that "an idolater is also a murderer,"98 the ethical and representational consequences of such an equation had still to be pondered by the poets of the earlier chapters of this study. By the time of Samson Agonistes' publication, however, the dangers of presenting history with an idol of interpretation were all too apparent. By continuing to play the "great act" of death, Samson refuses to let us kill him into hollow opportunity.

6

Guilt and the Constitution of Authorship in Henry V and the Antitheatrical Elegies ofW. S. and Milton Death in Shakespeare's time, far more than in our own, was generally understood as an intended action. Stephen Greenblatt, "The Eating of the Soul" To draw toward an end with you. Hamlet

THE SUBJECT OF DEATH has always elicited last words belied by their own imperfection, and this conclusion can be no different. Perhaps Lycidas's "Yet once more" reveals a consummation devoutly to be wished, a desire to speak last not only in a mourning volume but also in a traditional genre—to punctuate a recurrent literary occasion with a definitive epistemic break, a "one last time." But while such periods may be as psychologically necessary for the Renaissance artist as they are for the modern critic, death the leveler continues to frustrate diacritical desire with threatening similarity and synchrony. Even as I wrote in chapter 5 that Samson Agonistes must be read within the context of the Protestant ars moriendi of the Renaissance, for example, I was confronted in Newsweek magazine by the timelessness of some of my claims. In a cover article titled "The Art of Dying Well," Kenneth L. Woodward and John McCormick described the recent death of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin—reminding me that the interpretive strategies of Milton's Danites are hardly peculiar to the seventeenth century: In dying, Cardinal Bernardin gave new and authentic definition to a phrase he feared had lost its meaning, Death with Dignity. . . "His way of death confirms that this man did not have two faces, one private, one public," says Rabbi Herman Schaalman, an old friend. "He was inside with his outside, outside with his inside, which is rare." For Bernardin, more than words, there were deeds.1 172

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One would not need to look far in this article for signs of our historical moment: the wonderful ecumenism that permits a rabbi to testify for his "old friend" the cardinal, for instance; or the troubling but familiar notice that the cardinal endured allegations of sexual impropriety during his lifetime—charges later dismissed as the false "recovered memory" of an AIDS victim. But beneath such details lies a performance very like Samson Agonistes and Eikon Basilike. Newsweek takes one step farther the self-fashioned holy death as collaborative media event, printing a portrait of the modern day Moriens on its cover, publishing an excerpt from the cardinal's "forthcoming" (posthumously published) memoir among eyewitness accounts of his dying. The rabbi's assertion that the cardinal's death "confirms" he was not a hypocrite must be read as a response to lingering rumors about sexual misconduct, rumors similar to the biographical ambiguities Manoa and the Chorus seek to quiet in their reading of Samson's death. The twentieth-century authors of this "Art of Dying Well" encourage no skepticism toward their hero's final act, his "authentic definition" of a dignified exit; and I intend no disrespect or imputation by mentioning Cardinal Bernardin in this context. As heirs to the antitheatrical prejudice,2 however, the modern media would seem to present a vexed venue to die in and by. Like the Renaissance stage—a medium or go-between where private lives were rendered public property—the news commodifies authenticity and inwardness by putting People in our hands, an Inside Edition on our television screens. Like the Renaissance stage, the news troubles the witness to the extent that the witness acknowledges it as real—an acknowledgment limited by the fact that theatrical and journalistic media tend to reduce (even as they insist upon) the personhood of those they represent. The culpable mediacy we have seen in Skelton, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Dekker and Ford appears today in some of our more prurient talk shows, and in those who consume such sensationalism sheepishly. But those who choose to perform for the more respectable journalists face an audience less guilty than skeptical, not so much recoiling from an invaded privacy as frustrated by an impenetrable theatricality.3 Like the reporters who attempt to convince us that Samson's "way of death confirms that this man did not have two faces, one private, one public ..." ("He was inside with his outside, outside with his inside"), today's choric anchormen and women strive for the illusion of an unmediated reality—a perspicuous analysis of "that within" unbeguiled by "actions that a man might play." If the stage traffics in quotation and managed perspective, however—in productions designed for reproduction—the news similarly processes all speech into soundbites, all events into iterable images; it advertises the truth, but it can provide only a show. The caption under Newsweek's posed cover photograph of the cardinal promises "Exclusive Excerpts from His Final Testament," but our witnessing of this testimony is just as epistemologically fraught as the martyrology Milton would have us doubt wisely. That we can know the death of Samson or Cardinal Bernardin only through a representation that at once anticipates and fails to satisfy

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the spectator does not necessarily invalidate the genuine holiness of that death. But any interpretation mediated by glossed (and glossy) art, reliant upon talking heads, is liable to the suspicion Samson Agonistes requires of its reader. What does it mean to write for an audience one does not trust, to write for a world one holds in contempt? By focusing on the literary representations of a violence that itself reflects upon the violence of representation, I have shown that Renaissance poets frequently confront an early form of media ethics: ours is not the first era in which agents of the media can kill or be blamed with killing. If the culpable mediacy of Skelton, Spenser, and Shakespeare—like the "Wicked" indiscretion of Donne—occasions something like the voyeuristic guilt we experience in a supermarket checkout line, Milton's inscrutable spectacle puts us in touch with an ambivalence that is just as familiar to modern life. The movement from Shakespeare's stage to Milton's takes us from the anxiety of complicity—of having shown and possessed too much—to epistemological frustration, the disappointment of not beholding enough. The difference here reaches far beyond the revealing fact that Cinna dies as a property of Shakespeare's theater and its audience, while Samson deconstructs the theater of death in an antispectacular finale: it extends to Cicero's skeptical observation, which in Shakespeare's play speaks to an interpretive license shared by dramatist and spectator, but in Milton's constitutes an attractive error to be avoided with care. If Cinna dies as an emblem of the misconstruction enacted in and invited by Julius Caesar, Samson (whose death may well seem "the best of all possible things, the thing everyone in the play most desires") dies as an interpretive temptation that Samson Agonistes reveals as fallacious, unavailing. By representing the Danites' salivating deathwatch, Milton reminds us of the appropriative desire we bring to the drama; by representing this deathwatch critically, he has us question the desire his play stirs but never satiates. Media ethics must always negotiate between appetite and decorum; the New York Times's famous advertisement, "All the News That's Fit to Print," promises both a satisfying "all" and a discreet "fit." Like members of the modern media, the early modern poets considered in this study had to decide what to show and what not to show; what reverence to accord their subjects, and what interpretive freedom to allow their audiences; what balance to strike between the pleasing and the useful, the vendible and the salutary, the exploitative and the respectful. Perhaps the comparison seems unjustifiably assimilative, less apposite than that between Renaissance poetry and some of our industries more explicitly concerned with entertainment. I suggest the analogy in this conclusion, however, because it enables us to appreciate a historical phenomenon often obscured by anti-intentionalist and anti-authorial responses to Renaissance poetry; and because it helps us recover the strange sense of divided loyalty that sometimes marks the Renaissance poet's relation to his subject and his audience. When the antitheatricalist writer I. G. observed the guilt with which we encounter historical subjects' victimization by drama, he described a responsibility consciously shared by many Renaissance poets and their

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customers. This responsibility remains conceptually available today in those areas of modern life (such as the law or the media) where the violability of the subject is at least occasionally taken seriously. But until we recognize this violability in Jane Scrope or Serena or Cinna or Elizabeth Sawyer, we will undervalue the selfconscious violence with which Skelton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dekker, and Ford appropriate these subjects as objets d'art. And until we recognize the ambivalence with which Renaissance poets often regarded their audiences, we will fail to comprehend the conditional nature of this violence. Even the most prurient gossip columnist can do no harm until he exposes someone to untrustworthy readers. Similarly, the poets considered in this study inflict no injury without imagining a predatory and misconstructive reception for their representation. When this condition is met, however, when the artist conceives himself as a medium between an imperiled privacy and an untrustworthy public, any injury performed by his art is necessarily premeditated and complicit with the onlookers he has assumed. The preceding chapters have focused upon Renaissance poems that admit their own consequence, emphasizing both the self-consciousness with which subjects are "killed" in these poems, and the theatricality that makes the death of such subjects something of a media event. Certainly this focus could be broadened to include other areas of Renaissance public rhetoric. Sawyer's diabolic oath in The Witch of Edmonton—"If thou to death or shame pursue 'em, / Sanctibicetur nomen tuum"—suggests a cultural connection between shaming and killing through which both were conceived as a speech-act; and I have suggested the problematic nature of any encomium for poets who imagine their audience as defamatory and opportunistic. Jane Scrope's "death" differs from Cinna's, but only by the tropological degree crossed by Spenser's panegyrical cannibals. Ostensibly Skelton comes to praise Jane, not to bury her; but Phyllyp Sparowe concludes with a muffled lament for the killing it has performed, with an anxious and defensive acknowledgment of the misconstructive theater it has invoked. In Julius Caesar, the poet becomes less indefensibly defensive than absurdly defenseless in the playwright's arena: Cinna is dragged offstage as a victim of the dramatic collaboration that continues to make Shakespeare a professional hit man. The three readings that follow reconsider the singularity of Shakespeare in the larger argument of this book. Does Shakespeare's inauguration of the Globe in the years 1599-1600 coextend with an especially self-conscious exploration of representational violence and the killing power of public theater? Can this selfconsciousness properly be called guilt, or does Shakespeare's acceptance of the antitheatrical position instead mark his complicity as knowingly opportunistic? In my reading of Henry V (close companion of Julius Caesar in the new Globe), I argue that at this transitional moment in his dramatic career Shakespeare reveals himself as at once deeply fascinated by the terms of theatrical guilt, and conceptually troubled by his profession's etiolation of the subject position that guilt constitutes. In its repeated meditations upon culpability, Henry V is a remarkably guilty

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play. But in its insistence upon the incommensurability of guilt and the solitary author, Henry V dwells upon the limits of individual responsibility entailed by public theater. In an echo of chapter 3,I strongly resist the invitation to read this limitation of guilt as the kind of strategic denial offered by Gary Taylor in his reading of Julius Caesar. Instead, I treat it as Shakespeare's more anxious recognition that the playwright's author-function involves a significant loss of self— a loss of that self understood through private responsibility. Such an argument may help us make some important distinctions between Shakespeare's self-consciousness in Julius Caesar and Skelton's in Phyllyp Sparowe (where the solitary author feels compelled to answer a censuring public of his own creation), or Milton's in Samson Agonistes (where the author responds to and claims responsibility for his earlier political representations). Shakespeare's public theater, at least that which we have considered in this study, voices no selfdefense of the author because it presents no authorial self to defend. But this claim needs to be qualified with some of the important counter-examples appearing in Shakespeare's drama before Henry V. More important, this claim needs to be held up to a possible moment when, late in his life and far from the stage, Shakespeare reconstitutes that self lost in theater by elegizing a friend. Shakespeare's self-constitution involves both penitence and antitheatricalism—qualities also evident in the Milton elegy with which this study concludes. But before we see how the poetic self can be recovered in guilt, we need to consider the loss of that self through a cipher-like incapacity to experience guilt. SHAKESPEARE'S GUILT TRIP IN HENRY V "To know the author," cries a father over his mysteriously murdered son in The Spanish Tragedy, "were some ease of grief."4 Hieronimo's plaint might speak today for a scholarship often eluded by the de-centered authors of early modern plays, collaborative texts that began as productions in the theater, where their writers were not known, and many of them first appeared in print without ascription of authorship (or anonymity); they are thus 'pre-anonymous'—that is 'anonymous' only in a sense that existed before the word itself emerged with the author to describe their condition.5 To understand authorial identification as a form of interpretive satisfaction or "ease," as Jeffrey Masten observes, is to conceive an existence through the perception of a lack: "the author's emergence is marked by the notice of its absence."6 By equating "author" with "murderer," however, Hieronimo does more than indicate a nascent desire for authorship and an attendant frustration with anonymity. He also assumes a relation between authorship and punishable culpability, as the line completing his couplet makes clear: "For in revenge my heart would find relief." In one of the more influential accounts of the emergence of modern

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authorship, Michel Foucault asserts much the same relation, claiming that "Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, 'sacralized' and 'sacralizing' figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive."7 But like many other early modern plays, The Spanish Tragedy persistently refuses to provide the authentic author its forensic emphasis would seem to invoke, instead presenting "a dramatic text which is, in real terms, unauthored."8 Hieronimo's wish "to know the author" assumes a determinate identity that the play does not really provide. Rather than present this unsatisfied desire as the birth pangs of authorship, I wish to consider it as a symptom of a more pervasive concern in English Renaissance culture—a symptom rendered more palpable on a stage where authorship is not uninvented or unimagined, but the increasingly untenable answer to an increasingly self-conscious question. The cultural whole of which this stage is a part was distinguished by a crisis of blurred agency and mobile responsibility. Politically, the reason of state question had raised but not settled the issue of whether and to what extent a prince was subject to private morality; and this debate had taken place in a broader conversation about the distribution of power and accountability between prince and people.9 Theologically, questions of conformity and individual spiritual liability had been occasioned by Henry VIII's national excommunication and the bewildering reversals in official religion that followed hard upon his reign; the Reformation itself had forced its participants radically to reconceive the nature of guilt and the methods of repentance.10 And economically, an emergent market had begun to reconfigure material exchange, often complicating the terms of production and consumption with a proliferation of middlemen; correspondingly, the force of legal contract increasingly supplanted the bond of honor and the unwritten obligation. These culturally central developments appear only in the margins of my reading, but the relatively marginal institution of theater was especially well situated to engage them. And some plays were better situated than others for such reflection in that theater. In Henry V, these politically, theologically, and economically valenced crises of responsibility converge at a point in Shakespeare's career where reflection upon them coextends with dramatic reflexivity. Self-consciously aware of its hero's tenuous ethical and legal position, of the difficulties facing the onstage penitent, of the middlemen obscuring authors and authority, Henry V presents authorship itself as a synecdoche of the accountable agency that Renaissance England complicated from several sides. Structurally, the stage on which Henry V is played foregrounds the interrogation of responsibility. If in the world offstage the questions "Who is speaking?" and "Who is acting?" often resolve issues of agency and responsibility without much ado, the theater's distinction between author and actor automatically requires complex answers to these questions. In the courtroom, the perpetrator of a crime might in some cases be determined by assigning actions to an Individ-

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ual;11 but on the stage agency and actor are never entirely interchangeable, and attempts to locate responsibility are always on one level undercut by the mobilities of assigned performance. When Shakespeare's Angelo brings the courtroom into the theater, then, the ascription of guilt refracts as actor splits into legal and theatrical senses: Condemn the fault, and not the actor of it? Why, every fault's condemn'd ere it be done. Mine were the very cipher of a function To fine the faults whose fine stands in record, And let go by the actor. (Measure for Measure, 2.2.38-42)12 The proleptic pardon craved by the Chorus in Henry V would also seem to lay any responsibility for "faults" at the feet of "the flat unraised spirits" whose imperfect actions render the imperial stage an "unworthy scaffold": O pardon: since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million. And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. (Henry V, Prologue, 15-18) In what Robert Weimann has described as a contest for theatrical authority, the Chorus makes the players partly liable for their representations by making the playhouse a space of mediation and judgment.13 To do so is of course not particularly surprising in Renaissance drama, where labor is understood as divided among the company—where theatrical property and responsibility are distributed in terms that often elide authorship. Thus Shakespeare's solicitous epilogues often suggest the condensation of character into actor: with a trade unionist's solidarity, Puck pleads for charity toward the offenses of himself and his fellow (suddenly corporeal) shadows; and with a similar professional identity Pandarus, Shakespeare's anti-Puck, converts "the poor agent" of drama into a collective "endeavour" and "performance."14 In Henry V, however, such distributive maneuvers are especially interesting for two reasons. First, when compared with Angelo's simple model of a prescribed textual "fault" and its responsible "actor," determining the actors' responsibility in Henry V presents a pressing and immediate interpretive puzzle. This puzzle appears "prologue-like" in the Chorus, whose pronouns indicate his fellowship in a cry of players ("let us") while also sequestering him as a go-between and prompter of reception, the representers' legal representation ("Admit me Chorus"). This shift between third and first person, between actor and actors' agent, strikes an important keynote for the play. In the prologue this Chorus famously advertises the "cipher of a function" these players will serve in their staging of a "great ac-

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count," invoking for the first of several times the spectators' collaborative energies; and yet it is upon our "imaginary forces" that these ciphers first beg permission to "work." The Chorus's exhortations to participate actively, to "make" and "piece out" and "work," are balanced by calls "gently to hear" with a more passive "humble patience." The audience is told "'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings"; but it is also instructed to fill these thoughts with images cued by the script: "Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them." By addressing its audience as "gentles all," the Chorus indeed fashions (or recognizes) a social class largely excluded by the word "work."15 Our participation in this drama would seem to emphasize the conceptual difficulties of Eucharistic celebration—in which the performative ("Do this") conflates with the mnemonic ("in remembrance of me"), in which the participant is also the recipient of a performance ("which is given for you") that limits his role. The resultant metadramatic blurring of agency and responsibility corresponds with and indeed embodies a recurrent concern in Henry V's violent acting of history.16 Second, this play's meditation upon mediation introduces the author often elided in Renaissance dramatizations of responsibility. Cutting something of "a crooked figure" himself, "our bending author" assumes a position of dramaturgic liability that goes beyond even Prospero's epilogue—with its indirect admission of "crimes" and its suddenly solitary and diminished "strength."17 Perhaps only the epilogue of 2 Henry IV—in which a speaker desiring "a good conscience" can offer simply a speech "of mine own making"—prepares us for such a figure. What is the tetralogy's concluding sonnet but a formal example of subjective condensation, an indication of the single voice that has been performed and appropriated by so many others? And yet the third-person "author" of Henry V, like the play's Chorus, becomes elusive when blame is at issue. If in the epilogue a "rough and all-unable pen" briefly intercedes to lift the charge of representational "Mangling" from the actors' heads, the couplet invokes the history of "our stage" as authority for this history play. Like the adumbrated succession of Henry VI, Henry V would seem to be a sequel "whose state so many had the managing" that responsibility recedes into indeterminate plurality. Revealed only to be retracted and redistributed, the conceptions of actor and author glimpsed in this play inform and reflect upon its modes of characterization; by understanding these modes metadramatically, we may in turn glimpse a Renaissance conception of the subject at once enabled and delimited by its theatrical ization. "O GUILT INDEED" The play's treatment of responsibility has been noticed by several critics. In a sophisticated response to Henry Vs rhetoric of violence, Joel Altaian isolates a topical "shame attendant upon performing war and enjoying the performance." Ob-

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serving the complex emotional transactions between Shakespeare's martial play and an audience comprising largely nonparticipants in England's Irish wars, Altman explores the ways in which Henry V "evokes communal ritual and sacrifice, excites violence and its release, honors the shame consequent upon such consummation, and supplies the formal rhythms that accommodate reconciliation."18 Such a reading responds convincingly to the play's daring humiliation of its stay-at-home participants and patrons (if not types of Canterbury's "lazy yawning drone" [1.2.204] > then at least fingered by Macmorris's complaint, "it is no time to discourse .. .'tis shame to stand still, it is shame, by my hand; and there is throats to be cut, and works to be done, and there ish nothing done" [3.2.109-12]). An audience so indicted with the antitheatricalist argument for drama's military inutility can, by "participating" in the play and with its hero, partake of a socially and psychologically redemptive communion. But while I am in some agreement with Altman's argument that king and poem enact a sacramental reconciliation between heroic past and theatrical present, limiting consideration to the theatergoer's "shame" and the play's palliative ritual overlooks aspects of that ritual that themselves provoke the theatrical equivalent of a crisis of conscience. For reasons my own reading must justify, "guilt" serves as an important supplemental term in the analysis of responsibility in this play. If Henry indeed serves an expiatory function, guilt (rather than shame) would seem to be the object implied by such a function; in the case of Henry and his play, however, the transferability of guilt seems also to offer less a cathartic communion than communicable irresolution. When contrasted with the culture of shame, 'guilt' usually indicates an internalization and individuation of the public sphere; and this anthropological distinction may be relevant to Henry V's fascinating exploration of the conflict between public and private consciousness.19 In my reading, however, guilt originates in a legal category: unlike shame, guilt refers to a specifiable crime (gylt), and to an actual responsibility—subject to trial and punishment— for that crime. Literary analysis of a work such as Henry V certainly requires a flexible and figurative conception of culpability,20 but a dynamic idea of theatrical guilt—of criminal actions requiring responses if not responsibility—illuminates a self-reflexive and self-critical play. No discussion of guilt can avoid the psychological, but my primarily legal conception puts the emphasis on consciousness and action—an emphasis that calls for analytical focus upon metadrama.21 As a formal system that includes but cannot be exhausted by the level of psychology, guilt provides us with a means of assessing authorial selfhood as constituted by expression; and I will suggest that the self-consciousness revealed and enabled by metadrama provides access to this guilt in Henry V. "Conscience," in Judith Butler's recent meditation on Althusser's ghost, "doth make subjects of us all."22 What Butler calls "the movement of conscience," "a turning back on oneself"23 that constitutes identity, provides a useful model not

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only for subject formation in general, but also for authorial self-conception. Insofar as guilt designates object relations, focusing questions of Who has done What to Whom, it offers an index into the speech-acts by which authors understand themselves. While the obvious generic venue for such exploration has been lyric,24 analysis of conscience and guilt in Renaissance public drama can engage the efforts of early modern playwrights to understand their own relatively unstable authorial functions. In the complexities of such analysis lies its value: because we cannot identify in Shakespeare's drama a monovocal authorial meditation on the discursively "sinful" (Sonnet 103), we must instead consider how such guilt is conceived and distributed in the playtext.25 My analytical emphasis on guilt intersects obliquely with Foucault's claim that subjection to punishment marked a new conception of authorship that went beyond "mythical, 'sacralized' and 'sacralizing' figures." The intersection appears in the evidence 2 Henry IV provides that Shakespeare is aware of the possibility of authorial guilt and liability, evidence that concurs with the fact that this play's publication has been said to make him for the first time a dramatic author.26 But if adaptable to the Renaissance playwright, Foucault's conception of authorship fails to account for many of the facts of the Renaissance stage— the odd distributions of culpability experienced by an author, for instance, whose transgressive representatives (in the case of Richard II) might bear a responsibility that he apparently did not. By attending to guilt in Henry V, we find Foucault's idea of the author turning in the mind of a playwright who nevertheless cannot—or will not—make it correspond to the function he serves. This conscious incongruity does not fit the epistemic pattern Foucault has left us; for it is not the work of a protoauthor, but instead the meditation of a sometime author who has professionally outmoded himself. With a self-consciousness that reveals the limitations of Foucault's model, Henry V meditates an authorial guilt at once conceptually available and practically impossible. I therefore wish to avoid subscribing to the standard Foucaultian account of an all or nothing authorial selfhood passively determined by the presence or absence of individualized responsibility. In my reading, Henry V dramatizes a hollowing out of the author function in an increasingly corporate theater; but the crucial complicating element lies in the self-consciousness of this dramatization. This self-consciousness presumes an authorial self, even if that self cannot be constituted on stage and page; and the very status of that incapacity, that "cannot," is one of conscious expression rather than inescapable condition. Shakespeare's experience of his own incorporation in this play originates in a conception of the self not simply erased or made incoherent by its distribution—a self understanding its place on an historically situated stage. Such understanding does not offer an autonomous vantage on literary history, but the capacity to imagine an individual responsibility and selfhood no longer appropriate to or possible on his stage indicates an awareness (liberating as well as complicating)

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of the synapse between selfhood and artistic production.27 Coextensive with its practical impossibility, the conceptual availability of authorial selfhood enables Shakespeare both to identify the historical development of his theater and to participate in it. We might locate this conceptual availability in the formal function Duke Theseus ascribes to the epilogue: No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse. Never excuse; for when the players are all dead there need none to be blamed. Marry, if he that writ it had played Pyramus and hanged himself in Thisbe's garter it would have been a fine tragedy; and so it is, truly, and very notably discharged. But come, your bergamask. Let your epilogue alone. (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.340-45) Appearing ironically just one scene before the pleas of Robin Goodfellow's epilogue, Theseus's charitable release from dramatic responsibility records fissures that have opened wide by Henry V. "For when the players are all dead there need none to be blamed": Why does this restricted accountability spill over from character to actor?28 Why does the duke's syntax allow a darker double meaning (not only "when all the players are dead no one deserves blame," but also "when the players are all dead no one is lacking for blame")? And why does the duke himself seem unsatisfied with restricting responsibility to the players, in the next sentence fantasizing about the author's suicidal self-censorship? The duke's notion of poetic justice includes not only the actor that concerns Angelo but also the individual responsible for that actor's words and actions. Of course the comic form of A Midsummer Night's Dream largely conceals such tensions; the concluding admission of the play's need for excuse appears resolutely playful. By contrast Henry V ends with an epilogue that dwells upon the players' guilty survival of their roles—and upon the author responsible for roughly confining mighty men in little room. The rude mechanicals' materialization as Shakespeare's company in the later play has added both pressure and point to the questions raised by the duke's license. In their amplified insistence, these questions in Henry V reveal Shakespeare's shifting conception of his author function. Henry V reveals a fascinating moment of incapacitation in the acknowledgment of authorial guilt. Whereas earlier plays such as 2 Henry IV and later plays such as The Tempest present almost irresistible figures of such acknowledgment, Henry V—considered by many the Globe's inaugural play—presents a figure who renders conspicuous the lack of authorial owning up. Though we should resist the desire to induce from this aspect of Henry's character a simple and tidily correspondent narrative of his author's career, the king's drama of disowned guilt speaks importantly for the drama of a poet writing for "this wooden O" in 1599. That poet's drama involves the recognition that he is, in a sense, no longer a poet—no longer an author conventionally responsible for his words, because

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in the enactment of public theater these words are no longer his. But neither do these words absolve, instead predicating themselves on the subject Henry V refuses to provide. The guilt self-consciously meditated in the play, then, interrogates the subject and object of poetic self-consciousness. "CAPITAL DEMANDS" That the king functions as something less than Altman's "sacramental Harry as savior"29 appears in his refusal of Williams's direct and indirect requests that he serve in that role. Responsibility for those who "die in many irreconciled iniquities" is exactly what Harry abjures (4.1.143-4). Responding to Henry's charge of "abuse" for a quarrel mediated by disguise and proxy, Williams offers counterprosecution: Your Majesty came not like yourself. You appear'd to me but as a common man; witness the night, your garments, your lowliness; and what your Highness suffer'd under that shape, I beseech you take it for your own fault and not mine. (4.8.50-4) If, as Altman suggests, Henry's "suffer[ing]" under the guise of condescension is supposed to remind us of the Passion, it does so as a suspiciously studied pose.30 No fault is possessed in this scene, as no sin is expiated in the earlier condemnation of Cambridge, Grey, and Scrope—whose plot an un-atoning Henry likens to "another fall of man" (2.2.139). The king instead feebly attempts to buy off Williams's resentment with what might (as stage property) very well be the same "few light crowns" taken from the doomed traitors whose "faults are open" but not redeemed in 2.2. Iconographically, at least, the "visual palimpsest of Gethsemane"31 the play seems to offer also bears traces of counterfeit and alchemy: the "gilt" dubiously ascribed as the traitors' motive32 remains current in Henry's postwar consolidation of power. As in this emergent empire, so on the stage is gold an equal opportunity signifier.33 The same metal that represents "golden earnest" of the king's death (2.2.169) appears in his "intertissued robe of gold" (4.1.262), in his "heart of gold" (4.1.44), and perhaps in Bardolph's pilfered "pax" (or "pyx"? 3.6.40)—that fatal emblem of the play's ambiguous sacrifice or portable sacrament.34 Such ambiguity and portability define the stage property and characterize more generally the circulating capital of theater. When all crowns are by these terms "counterfeit" (1 Henry IV, 5.1.35), however, theatrical capital comes at the cost of those signs by which selfhood is performed: the "title running 'fore the King," for instance, becomes "farced" (4.1.263) when we "force a play" (2.Chorus.32); the malleable king figures himself as susceptible to being "coined ... into gold" (2.2.95). Henry V's punning equivocation of "guilt" and "gilt" (2.Chorus.26), then, repro-

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duces a traditional antitheatrical charge leveled at the ambiguous representations and mysterious economy of the stage. Producing nothing substantially real, how can the theater earn real money without transgression? How too can that strange category stage property be reconciled with Renaissance conceptions of private ownership and the legal responsibility attending that ownership? By inheritance and his own precedent, Harry enters the last play of the tetralogy utterly converted to such problematic theatrical capital, so that his claim of "uncoined constancy" (5.2.149) in the wooing of Kate resounds with what has instead been the recurrent question of his currency. This conversion commenced with what the prince announced as "my reformation," a complex process involving both the resumption of a deposed selfhood ("when he please again to be himself" [1 Henry IV, 1.2.200]) and an interposed performative "foil" that will render that self "like bright metal" whose "glitt'ring o'er my fault / Shall show more goodly" (212-3). Henry V evokes Reformation controversy and commutes this controversy to its own plot and king, thereby confronting the audience with metatheatrical versions of theological questions. With its syncretic presentation of a medieval theology in which "miracles are ceased" (1.1.68) and its opening discussion of the "stripfping]" of church lands (1.1.11—2i),35 the play resumes an earlier interest hardly effaced by writing Sir John Falstaff over the Lollard Oldcastle in 1 Henry IV. If we read the discussion of the Sequestration Bill in the first scene as an allusion to the Reformation, then the bishops' strategy of legitimizing and financing Henry's war appears an effort to export this radical social change. Coextensively, the bishops identify Henry's own conversion as a microcosmic Reformation: Yea, at that very moment Consideration like an angel came And whipped th'offending Adam out of him, Leaving his body as a paradise T'envelop and contain celestial spirits. Never was such a sudden scholar made; Never came reformation in a flood With such a heady currance scouring faults. (1.1.28-35) Such an identification merges neatly with the king's own self-presentational strategy, designed to suggest an interior grace and election that redeems a former paucity of demonstrable works. Politically, this reformation seeks to replace his father's "soil of achievement" with a crown that "falls upon [Harry] in a more fairer sort" (2 Henry IV, 4.5.189, 200). If these are the coordinates of Hal's reformation into King Henry, however, they intersect with a continued need for works that motivates the dynastic action of Henry V. As I discuss later, this ir-

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resolution reveals the conceptual difficulty encountered by a culture whose traditional means of representing and atoning guilt had been taken away with the Reformation; and it is an irresolution Henry V explores not only through character, but also through questions of authorship. This difficulty appears most obviously in Henry, however, whose reformation threatens to dissolve as the idea of the subject that is its premise disintegrates. To the bishops, the success of Harry's reformation is a mystery (though not a miracle), since they have never noted in him any study, Any retirement, any sequestration From open haunts and popularity. (Henry V, 1.1.33, 57-9) In the previous two plays, however, we have seen the semiotic difficulty with which Hal struggles to "be more myself" (1 Henry IV, 3.2.92-93), as if the selfconsciousness of his advertised reformation has contaminated with theatricality both self and its contextual presentation. Hal's promise to be "more" himself suggests that that self is quantifiable capital, responsive to the economies of a stage that will ask more of him in the course of the tetralogy. And this self cannot be adjusted without exchanges that remind us of these economies. A "precedent" appears in the prince's abuse of Francis (1 Henry IV, 2.4.31), the drawer who anticipates Hotspur, Hal's "factor" (1 Henry IV, 3.2.147). Humorous and heroic prince both require a distributed agency, a co-cast, to make themselves up. By the time his father's death is imminent, this contextually manufactured self has made the credible expression of inwardness impossible for Hal: PRINCE: What wouldst thou think of me if I should weep? POINS: I would think thee a most princely hypocrite. PRINCE: It would be every man's thought, and thou art a blessed fellow to think as every man thinks. Never a man's thought in the world keeps the road-way better than thine: every man would think me an hypocrite indeed. And what accites your most worshipful thought to think so? POINS: Why, because you have been so lewd and so much engraff d to Falstaff. (2 Henry IV, 2.2.51-63) Sarcasm aside, the dialogue records an early but lasting consequence of Henry's reformation: the self is the sum of the parts it has played, authenticity engrafted to the hypokrisis of its construction, the body cut from others only by the unsustainable violence of vivisection. Shortly after this exchange, the prince may finally convince his dying father that his absconding with the crown was only pious practice, but a less placable skepticism has been roused in the theatergoer

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Poins briefly represents. We have seen the prince in such grainy close-up that in the next play the Chorus's attempts to "digest / Th' abuse of distance" (2.Chorus.3i-32) remind us all the more that this self-crowned king can exist for us only as an actor. And it is precisely as a man of the theater—"a gentleman of a company" (4.1.39) whose doubled social position Shakespeare might well appreciate36— that Henry confronts the self's incapacitation by the stage's "capital demand." That demand is for violent actions performed for public consumption and through public participation; and that incapacity concerns the individual experience of guilt and responsibility—an experience demanded by the dramatic action but professionally impossible for the king, his actor, his playwright. The trajectory of Henry's "politics of non-responsibility"37 follows the coordinates of his self-reformation. From his first killing (Hotspur, whose death the prince allows Falstaff to own in "a lie" Hal "gild[s]" to do his friend "grace" (1 Henry IV, 5.4.157-58), Henry's agency becomes correspondingly elusive on an increasingly public stage. In Henry V, the burden of any "guiltless drops" of blood shed in France is placed on the "conscience" of the bishops who—in the king's language—"incite us" to action, "impawn our person," "awake our sleeping sword of war" (1.2.25, 31, 20, 21, 22).38 Canterbury's response, "The sin upon my head, dread sovereign!" (1.2.97), soon becomes the desired antiphon to Henry's foreign policy. "On your head," threatens Exeter as he puts the ball in the French court, will rest the widows' tears, the orphans' cries, The dead men's blood, the privy maidens' groans, For husbands, fathers, and betrothed lovers, That shall be swallowed in this controversy. (2.4.105-8) Henry himself will achieve Harfleur bloodlessly by representing an amplified version of such a scene, performed by a soldier "with conscience wide as hell," to citizens whose self-defense would exculpate the king: "What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause ...?" (3.3.43). Henry's strategy in this scene involves the threat of an agency for which he will not be responsible ("Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command" [3.3.24]), and a logic whereby the resistant French would be "guilty in defense, [and] thus destroyed" (3.3.43).39 The saber rattling in conditional futurity outside Harfleur ("The gates of mercy shall be all shut up" [3.3.10]) is that edge on which Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey have already been made to fall: The mercy that was quick in us but late, By your own counsel is suppress'd and kill'd. (2.2.79-80)

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Ideally this sword lies in the hands of its victims—or operates through an agency so diffuse, a causality so mysterious, that it decides Nym's subjunctive teleology: I cannot tell; things must be as they may. Men may sleep, and they may have their throats about them at that time, and some say knives have edges. It must be as it may; though patience be a tir'd mare, yet she will plod— there must be conclusions—well, I cannot tell. (2.1.20-25) Thus this history play presents no scenes of man-to-man mortal combat, and when death is attributable to a hand other than Henry's "God of battles" and deity of treason's discovery, we are met with narrative blurring. Shortly after Henry's command that "every soldier kill his prisoners" (4.6.37), for instance, Gower retells the episode by trying to cast the French as the final cause of their own destruction, Henry merely as an efficient cause of justice: 'Tis certain there's not a boy left alive, and the cowardly rascals that ran from the battle ha' done this slaughter. Besides, they have burn'd and carried away all that was in the King's tent; wherefore the King, most worthily, hath caus'd every soldier to cut his prisoner's throat. (4.7.5-10)40 When Fluellen's figuring compares Henry with the amicidal Alexander, reminding us of the hostess's charge that "the King has kill'd [Falstaff's] heart" (2.1.88), Gower similarly opens a space where responsibility can evaporate: "Our King is not like him in that; he never kill'd any of his friends" (47.4o-41).41 The space between affairs of the heart and a violence for which only he can be responsible becomes perilously close again in Henry's tete-a-tete with Katherine, where his "capital demand" coerces mercy with a threat of cruelty (5.2.96, 202, 203). But even here authorial agency is distributed to representatives who have "free power" to alter the text of settlement, to Augment, or alter, as your wisdoms best Shall see advantageable for our dignity, Any thing in or out of our demands ... (5.2.86, 87-89) And though Katherine is never offered assurance that she shall not die for his love, Henry's invitation to "let thine eye be thy cook" (5.2.148-49), like his dialogic venture in French, seems calculated as a prenuptial agreement for collaboration. By enjoining Burgundy to "teach your cousin to consent winking" (5.2.281-82), Henry echoes the Chorus's repeated call for our connivance. As a final "capital demand," Kate's value to Henry—like our value to the play—

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would seem to lie largely in the establishment of a credibility that also involves complicity. In the absence of an authentes (an author, a murderer), Kate cannot be won without winking.42 Psychologically, this syndrome of displacement makes sense in a character whose father has counseled his own scapegoating as a means to his son's legitimacy: God knows, my son, By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways I met this crown.... To thee it shall descend with better quiet, Better opinion, better confirmation, For all the soil of the achievement goes With me into the earth.... All these bold fears Thou seest with peril I have answered; For all my reign hath been but as a scene Acting that argument. And now my death Changes the mood, for what in me was purchas'd Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort. (2 Henry IV, 4.5.183-85,187-90,195-200) In his second and final soliloquy as king, Henry's thus becomes the difficult task of presenting himself as elect through generational purgation: Not to-day, O Lord, O, not to-day, think not upon the fault My father made in compassing the crown! I Richard's body have interred new, And on it have bestowed more contrite tears, Than from it issued forced drops of blood. (Henry V, 4.1.292—97)43 But the terms of the king's subcontracted contrition—the work of one thousand "hands" hired "to pardon blood" shed by another (4.1.299, 3O0)44—urge us to read psychodrama as metadrama. For his contrition, nullified by past succession and present success, echoes a prologue that in turn presents the play as an imperfect past: More will I do; Though all that I can do is nothing worth, Since that my penitence comes after all, Imploring pardon. (4.1.302-5)

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But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that hath dar'd On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object.... O, pardon! ... Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts; Into a thousand parts divide one man. (1.Prologue.8-11, 15, 23-24) In a private moment Henry may conclude that his epilogue-like strategy of repenting "after all" "is nothing worth," but he does not seem to speak for the economy of public drama. A chantry for a stage! And collaborative hands to distribute responsibility from a few actors and the "one man" who has prescribed their actions! If Henry IV's "crooked ways" hang darkly over both his son and his "bending author," Henry V seems also to present a means for spreading about "the soil of achievement." In our work, it would seem, lies the playwright's grace; "after all," it affords him an opportunity to succeed himself and the past. "OUR OUTWARD CONSCIENCES" And what's past, it might seem, is prologue, for a much more explicit authorial hoc est corpus meum has already issued from this stage: Be it known to you, as it is very well, I was lately here in the end of a displeasing play, to pray your patience for it and to promise you a better. I meant indeed to pay you with this, which if like an ill venture it come unluckily home, I break, and you, my gentle creditors, lose. Here I promis'd you I would be, and here I commit my body to your mercies. Bate me some, and I will pay you some, and (as most debtors do) promise you infinitely. (2 Henry IV, Epilogue, 7-16) Here, however, we must pause to recognize the different models of dramatic production that distinguish 2 Henry IV's epilogue from Henry V's prologue. The former addresses the audience as speculative investors, promising a mercantile product (or a sacrificial, bankrupt body) in return for the credit of silent partners; the latter requires the stockholder to play an active part in generating interest on his own dividends. Like the commitment to "continue the story with Sir John in it" (2 Henry IV, epilogue, 27-28), authorial debt seems to have evaporated in the "great account" of Henry V. The former play concludes with a promise of future profit, the latter with reference to payments already received in the first tetralogy. In an astounding sleight of hand, 2 Henry IV's epilogue's promise of "a better" play in the future is succeeded by Henry V's epilogue locating redemptive value ("for their sake") in what the stage has already shown. Where 2 Henry IV presents

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a solitary "body" as vulnerably responsible to the play's customers, Henry V converts our dissatisfaction into participation, our investment into production, our violence into the responsibility of ownership. If 2 Henry IV concludes with an image of the playwright as belated Orpheus, a lyric voice surrounded by the encroaching pressures of public drama,45 Henry V opens with an invitation to join playwright and actor in the maenadic division of self. New art responds to a new market while shaping a new politics: the individual "venture" of 2 Henry IV has become collective in Henry V, its author "impawn [ed]" to a project we have "free power" to "augment, or alter" as we share in its acquisition of empire. An especially significant contrast to this collaborative "free power" has appeared in the vague prediction of a dramatically imposed death for Falstaff with which 2 Henry IV concludes: —unless already a be killed with your hard opinions. For Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man. (2 Henry IV, Epilogue, 26-27) Both lines of this disclaimer—the first acknowledging the killing power of a theatergoer's interpretation, the second penitently closing off a possibility for that interpretation—work to inverted effect in Henry V's prologue. In this prologue, the distinction between actor and historical personage (these "flat unraised spirits" are not the men who affrighted "the air at Agincourt") is first admitted as a failure in need of pardon. Eagerly enlisting the spectators' "imaginary forces" to "deck our kings" (Henry V.Prologue.28), however, the prologue's concern with pardon evaporates as we assume responsibility for what we see and make. But if Henry V redefines the economy of its predecessor, and if this new economy frees player and dramatist from responsibility much as it frees the king, it also renders the individual experience of guilt unavailable to its participants. Henry's "five hundred poor," who like so many groundlings in the new Globe "their wither'd hands hold up / Toward heaven," suggest a mediation at once desirable and unsatisfying—desirable because it is through such charitable "work" (3.Chorus.25) that performances are eked out as imaginative success, unsatisfying because it can leave the self a cipher of a function. Henry's attempt to absolve himself by works—impossible both because he disclaims the fault as another's act, and because his penitence is also performed by others—represents the imaginative problem of reforming guilt, a problem crystallized on a public stage where actions cannot constitute the self and where a thousand parts cannot represent one man.46 Theatrical incorporation requires authorial dissolution, and in the negotiation of this corporate drama Shakespeare seems keenly aware that private responsibility for one's words and actions has become as structurally impossible as private ownership. Freedom from culpability requires a relinquishment of theatrical existence (ago ergo sum), its epitaph a co-owned sonnet in which the third-person self appears discursively "unable." We find the fullest exploration of

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this incapacity in a dialogue between "a gentleman of a company" and a man the Folio calls "Will."47 "Man," Ulysses has claimed in chapter 3, "how dearly ever parted" "feels not what he owes but by reflection" (Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.96,99). Before the battle of Agincourt, Henry has similarly realized the constitutive force of the theater's epistemology—through which the enemy becomes "our outward consciences" (4.1.8), the mirror necessary to feel what we "owe." If we are briefly surprised by the king's subsequent announcement—"I and my bosom must debate a while, / And then I would no other company" (4.1.31-32)—the series of intrusions in the next scene postpones that sequestration for which the play has done so little to prepare us. The debate with Williams, however, does enable Henry to "speak my conscience of the King" (4.1.118-19) in an exteriorized agon most readers find unsatisfying, logically evasive, and analogically spurious.48 What has not been sufficiently considered, however, is the reflexive function of this scene in a play that has complicated the authorial owning of actions. We are not surprised to find Harry le Roy displacing accountability from the king's "cause" (4.1.127) onto the "guilt" of the soldiers who perform it; intentionality bleeds from author to the errant actor who 'executes himself as Bardolph and the traitors have done: The King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant; for they purpose not their death when they propose their services. Besides, there is no king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to the arbitrement of swords, can try it out with all unspotted soldiers. Some, peradventure, have on them the guilt of premeditated and contriv'd murther... some, making the wars their bulwark, that have before gor'd the gentle bosom of peace with pillage and robbery. (4.1.155-66) Henry's fashioning of war as God's vengeful "beadle" (4.1.169) similarly reminds us of his strategy for deifying agency: "O God, thy arm was here; / And not to us, but to thy arm alone, / Ascribe we all!" (4.8.106-8). But the mirror Williams holds up to Henry elicits a disavowal of authorship that does more than render problematic the king's logic; it also challenges with consequence the logic of a play in which knives have many edges but few responsible hands: WILL: But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, "We died at such a place." ... I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument?... K. HEN: So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule,

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should be imposed upon his father that sent him; or if a servant, under his master's command transporting a sum of money, be assail'd by robbers and die in many irreconcil'd iniquities, you may call the business of the master the author of the servant's damnation. But this is not so. (4.1.134-38,141-43,147-55) In Williams's eschatological vision, history speaks, its violated objects of representation returning as thousand-parted men in search of the author Henry V refuses to provide. In this metatheatrical debate, Will's challenge to the conscience of "a gentleman of a company" concludes with the latter's substitution of "business" for "author." That this conclusion is unresolved appears a few scenes later, where Williams refuses the gilt of Henry's hush money. The dramatic terms of this ongoing debate, in fact, would characterize well into the seventeenth century the theorization of political contracts and covenants. In Leviathan, for instance, Hobbes considers the complication of responsibility by political contracts through the problem of adjudicating between the accountability of authors and actors.49 The business of distributing agency may require "every subject's duty" (4.1.176— 77) toward the enterprise of theater; but its consequences for the authorial self— the "Will" of the Sonnets—appear in Henry's dejected soliloquy on "Ceremony," where envy of "private men" and their "profitable labor" mourns the absence of the public man's "soul of adoration" (4.1.237, 277, 245). The mourning of a former self, and a meditation upon guilt unresolved because of the passing of that self, are the authorial concerns that find mediation in Henry V—even as that mediation distributes author and his actors across England's empire. Responsibility and the possibility of guilt, I have argued, represent for Shakespeare an important and disappearing conception of artistic creation, ownership, and existence in this play; and ascribing the terms of Henry V's fascination with distributable guilt to specific historical events outside the theater risks under-appreciating the specifically theatrical nature of this fascination. That the England imagined for this play's reception expects the return from Ireland of "the general of our gracious Empress" (5.Chorus.3o), however, points to an important correspondence between metatheater and history. For like this Caesarean general, the author of Henry Vhas the mobilizing power to call citizens from "the peaceful city" into the action of war: For who is he, whose chin is but enrich'd With one appearing hair, that will not follow These cull'd and choice-drawn cavaliers to France? (3.Chorus.22-24) And like this general, our author imagines himself and his company as in the service of an empire for the expansion of which every participant is responsible. That Essex's commissioned cause, "England's Vietnam,"50 also sheds blood that

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cries for pardon finds consciousness in Henry V. But for the problem of pardon this suddenly immobilizing play finds no self-satisfying solution, for it finally can present no self to satisfy. Instead the playwright offers us a character whose ethical evaluation is rendered both important and impossible by the fusion of authorship and history. That character, Shakespeare's Henry, articulates the unanswered questions confronting his author, Henry's Shakespeare, as he engages a history tremblingly literary. 2 Henry IV concludes with the promise of Falstaff's future stage life and possible death. The qualifications that follow provide a fascinating example of the categorically different yet imaginatively associated levels of violence we have considered in this study: —unless already a be killed with your hard opinions. For Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man. (2 Henry IV, epilogue, 26-27) This concluding "For" seems to strain between ethics and logic. In what appears at first a conventionally solicitous defense of a character from fatal reception, we read an interjected defense of the play from litigable topicality and defamation: Any resemblance between the character depicted here and a real person is entirely coincidental. But of course this "For" turns on a very strong conceptual link between the spectators' censuring gaze, capable of interpretively killing characters with "hard opinions," and the theater's representational power to harm real people, even (or perhaps especially) those already dead. In this disclaimer, we detect the liability for defamation—for injurious words directed at real persons—meditated at only a slight remove in Skelton's praise of Jane, Spenser's treatment of Serena, the dramatists' representation of Sawyer. The disclaimer itself makes two interesting and now familiarly problematic claims—that Oldcastle's manner of dying lacked soteriological ambiguity, and that "this" (character, actor) "is not the man" (that martyr just confirmed as such from the stage). Can such testimony be trusted? The simple answer is no; the theater's epistemology always invites skepticism, and declaring a martyr from the stage does nothing but draw scrutiny to the theatricality of dying. But we can now propose a more complex form of this negative answer, one directed not only at the phrase, "Oldcastle died a martyr," but also at the denial, "this is not the man." This denial is complicated, if not subverted, by the epilogue's investment of "this" with Oldcastle's mortality and vulnerability to criticism; the same "hard opinions" that threaten to kill Falstaff render him Oldcastle. Having acknowledged the audience's power to kill the fictional Falstaff into a real and therefore legally fraught identity, the epilogue's declaration "this is not the man" cannot constitute a performative speech-act or promise. The phrase merely registers a plea to those who see the play as they dislike it to content themselves with an identity other than the

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one that has presented itself to them. To state defensively in epilogue that Falstaff is not Oldcastle is to admit that he has been and—despite all efforts at postscriptive containment—that he may be. On the stage, such exculpatory gestures hang upon their untruths. All actors are in a sense labeled "this is not the man." But this label depends in part upon the contradictory claim of Renaissance dramatic representation: "this ;s (if only for a short while) the man." As we have seen, nondramatic literary forms enjoy no absolutely innocuous and convincing generic perch from which to deny that the representational "this" is "the man" or "the woman." Skelton's uncomfortable and fascinating discovery is that his Jane Scrope cannot be disassociated from the real person with that name. If Spenser's Serena is on one level not Throckmorton, then on another important level she is. But in the elegies to which I now turn the stage appears as especially antagonistic to a desired poetic defensibility. To distinguish "the man" from a "this" vulnerable to representation and interpretation is the wish of both these antitheatrical elegies. By shunning the stage and seeking an epideictic world elsewhere, both authors seek to preserve their poetic subjects from the public crime admitted in 2 Henry IV's denial vain. In so doing, these poets attempt to preserve for themselves the idea of the responsible, individual author—independent of the contingencies of theater—that we have seen elegized in Henry V. "A Funeral Elegye In memory of the late vertuous Maister WILLIAM PEETER" (1612)—ascribed to one "W. S." in its two surviving manuscripts51— continues to raise attributional controversy; but the poem winds its way into the Shakespearean canon on the strength of detailed and persuasive bibliographic research.52 My purpose in including A Funeral Elegy here, however, is not to engage the question of its authorship (I tacitly and rather imperturbably treat W. S. as William Shakespeare), but to consider how the poem's explicit antitheatricalism might relate to my earlier analysis of the killing dramatized in Julius Caesar. If read as Shakespearean, A Funeral Elegy offers important evidence by which to reevaluate the dramatist's attitude—late in his career—toward the theater of fatal misconstruction brazenly inaugurated in 1599. But I think that in this later poem the elegist's conception of the theater confirms, rather than qualifies, the claims for Shakespeare's dramatic reflections in chapter 3. The second elegy, Milton's The Passion (1630?), affords similar opportunities for retrospective analysis. Printed twice, in Milton's 1645 and 1673 volumes of Poems, The Passion bears a more complex chronological relation to Samson Agonistes than does A Funeral Elegy to Shakespeare's earlier drama. But in his self-conscious and finally self-critical attempt to elegize Christ in a theatricalized representation of His death, Milton tempts himself with a spectacular appropriation of the divine. The antitheatrical conscience with which The Passion seems to censor itself can offer an important coordinate to Milton's 1671 volume—in which Paradise Regained avoids the representation of Christ's death altogether, and in which

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Samson Agonistes challenges the spectator's expectations for a dramatic dying. My readings of both poems are heavily indebted to, at times reiterative of, the two scholars I frequently cite, Richard Abrams and R. Paul Yoder. My purpose is to connect many of their observations with the larger claims of this study. Like W. S.'s elegy, Milton's presents the epistemology of the theater as a commemorative mode at once attractive and ethically problematic. A Funeral Elegy suggests that public display can victimize the dead man by exposing him to a misconstructive and predatory spectatorship very like that figured in Julius Caesar; The Passion metadramatically reveals in its aborted encomium the arrogant error of portraying Christ's actions in a "mask" of one's own imagining. Both of these elegies have invited the charge of artistic shortfall. Even the strongest proponent of Shakespeare's authorship of A Funeral Elegy admits it is not "an aesthetically satisfying poem,"53 and this disappointment continues to provide opponents of a Shakespearean attribution with stout ammunition. The Passion has been called Milton's "one obvious failure," something of a surprise from a poet who was "deeply interested in the structure and symbolism of funeral elegies, and had been practising since adolescence on every fresh corpse in sight, from the university beadle to the fair infant dying of a cough."54 Even more surprising, coming from Milton, is the fact that this elegy advertises itself as a failure and a fragment— appearing in print twice in his lifetime with the author's own apology as a thirdperson endnote: "This subject the author finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished','55 In the short readings that follow, neither poem is meant to satisfy by the theatrical conventions it invokes. As we have seen in our analysis of Samson Agonistes, a dramatization of death that criticizes and finally subverts theatrical expectations can produce critical dissatisfaction (witness Johnson's complaint about the play's wanting middle). A Funeral Elegy will not seem Shakespearean until we acknowledge Shakespeare's ambivalence—in his drama—toward his workplace, until we allow that the antitheatrical resolution of his elegy rejects the same killing power exercised in Julius Caesar. The Passion will not appear the crucial poem it is in Milton's development until we recognize that in it the poet rejects an art he had been practicing since adolescence—the habit of making a spectacle of other people's deaths. If neither elegy satisfies, the explanation is that the theatrical conventions of the genre can satisfy neither author. W. S.'s "TEXT OF MALICE" A Funeral Elegy mourns a murder victim. On 25 January 1612, the relatively obscure life of William Peter was cut short by sword-play.56 Perhaps the murderer, Edward Drew of Killerton, took some relish in literalizing a hometown pun. Judging from the elegy's dedication to Peter's brother John, however, W. S. takes no such pleasure in the unwonted genre thrust upon him by William's death:

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Exercise in this kind I will little affect, and am less addicted to, but there must be miracle in that labor which, to witness my remembrance to this departed gentleman, I would not willingly undergo. In the poem that follows, the comparative implication of "less addicted to" becomes increasingly clear. W. S.'s true addiction, as the following occupatio suggests, is to a more explicitly dramatic "kind": But that I not intend in full discourse To progress out his life, I could display A good man in each part exact and force The common voice to warrant what I say. (lines 79-82) Richard Abrams's attention to the playhouse language in these lines is illuminating: "When 'part' is read as 'role,' the whole passage reads as the boast of a professional poet vaunting his ability to enforce vocal approbation in the public theater."57 Of course the line between conventional funeral oration and public theater could be as blurry in Renaissance England as it was in Antony's Rome. But A Funeral Elegy resists such spectacular betrayal—though generically congenial to the author and conventionally expected by the audience he imagines for his poem—because W. S. conceives both theatrical "display" and its ratifying "common voice" as accomplices to the murder he mourns. In a moment we consider why the author of A Funeral Elegy should, as Abrams claims, "connect imagination with the violence that ended Peter's life."58 But first note, as does Abrams, how this connection results in an almost Jonsonian antagonism between the potential hypocrisy and abuse of theater and an elegiac plain style similar to the rhetoric praised in Peter—who is said to have spoken "in tongue most plain" as one who "never was addicted to the vain / Of boast, such as the common breath affords" (lines 325-28). In contrast to the "glad sleights," "fond conceit," "disguise" and "affect [ation]" with which "loose mimics" utter "An empty sound of overweening passion" (lines 73, 275-77), W. S. offers Peter an epitaph of startlingly "pure simplicity" (line 350): But since the sum of all that can be said Can be but said that 'He was good'... In life thou liv'dst, in death thou died'st belov'd. (lines 531-32, 578) In contrast to hypocritical playwrights whose "plotting" concerns "which way to be great" through "popular applause and power's commission" (lines 447, 450), W. S. defiantly declares himself unmotivated by professional interest:

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Not hir'd, as heaven can witness in my soul, By vain conceit to please such ones as know it, Not servile to be lik'd, free from control, Which, pain to many men, I do not owe it. (lines 229-32) The elegist's antitheatricalism and antiprofessionalism does not come naturally (we are reminded of his dramatic addiction through imaginative lapses to the same "frailer stage" and rough magic that the poem attempts to abjure [line 127, see also lines 102,115-16]). Rather, W. S.'s attempts to purify his verse of the theatrical economy reflect a desire to imitate his untheatrical subject, who "never was addicted to" a life of show and boast. At its most rigorous, this mimesis produces a language that is unspectacular to say the least—such as when Peter is praised for a mind of "precious white" and a life of "purity adorn'd / With real merit" (lines 59, 359-6o). The aesthetic and ethic ("Not servile to be lik'd") of this encomium would seem diametrically opposed to the professional modus operandi of the author of As You Like It, and critics such as MacDonald Jackson persuasively distinguish between the playwright, whose metaphorical language "constantly stimulates ... imagination," and W. S., who "does not really think in images."59 We have seen in chapter 2 the contamination of encomium by theater that sometimes problematizes the Renaissance poetry of praise; and A Funeral Elegy may point to a neoclassical solution for an age increasingly aware of the hypocrisy of "actions that a man might play" in "the trappings and the suits of woe."60 But in the Renaissance texts we have considered, theatricalism figures not only a challenge to sincerity, but also an act of violent publicity. Like the male speaker of Phyllyp Sparowe, Spenser's cannibals may represent a poetry of praise that has become hypocritically self-interested; but the criticism self-reflexively invited in such cases—as in Shakespeare's Sonnet 103, where he considers the "sinful[ness]" of "mar[ring] the subject"—is less concerned with fictionalized representations per se than with their real victims. W. S.'s turn from the theatrical reveals an effort to protect William Peter from the imaginative collaboration and co-ownership that renders the subject a public corpse. In chapter 3 we have seen Shakespeare accept the dramatist's complicity in a process by which historical subjects are marred, even killed, by their exposure to the violent misconstructions of a public spectatorship. In contrast to the vulnerable and repentant speaker of his sonnets, and to Jonson's injured resentment toward the public's misjudgment, Shakespeare the professional playwright conspires with a world that preys upon spectacle: his drama defines him not as a victim but as an agent of victimization. Such is not the case, however, for W. S., who—like the speaker of Sonnet 112—bears upon his brow the stamp of some undisclosed "vulgar scandal" inflicted by "others' voices":

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And as much glory is it to be good For private persons, in their private home, As those descended from illustrious blood In public view of greatness, whence they come. Though I, rewarded with some sadder taste Of knowing shame, by feeling it have prov'd My country's thankless misconstruction cast Upon my name and credit, both unlov'd By some whose fortunes, sunk into the wane Of plenty and desert, have strove to win Justice by wrong, and sifted to embane My reputation with a witless sin. (lines 135-44)61 It would seem that the speaker of A Funeral Elegy is able to sympathize ("by feeling it") with the fate of those subjected to the "public view" on Shakespeare's stage. A victim of his "country's thankless misconstruction," W. S. might for once identify with Cinna the poet, and with other "private persons" dragged blinking from their "private home[s]" into the glare of the Globe. By rejecting the misconstruction by which "the world [is] accurs'd" ("It picks out matter to inform the worst" [lines 255-56]), W. S. rejects the mode by which men are apprehended in Julius Caesar: The willful blindness that hoodwinks the eyes Of men enwrapped in an earthy veil Makes them most ignorantly exercise And yield to humor when it doth assail, Whereby the candle and the body's light Darkens the inward eyesight of the mind, Presuming still it sees, even in the night Of that same ignorance which makes them blind. Hence conster they with corrupt commentaries, Proceeding from a nature as corrupt, The text of malice, which so often varies As 'tis by seeming reason underpropp'd. O, whither tends the lamentable spite Of this world's teenful apprehension, Which understands all things amiss, whose light Shines not amidst the dark of their dissension? (lines 257-72) Shakespeare's Globe requires such "imaginary forces," inviting its spectators to see presumptuously: "men may construe things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves." W. S.'s elegy prevents such "teenful apprehen-

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sion" by refusing to offer its subject as an appropriable spectacle—by exposing the "willful blindness" and "corrupt commentaries" on which a history play such as Julius Caesar depends for its hoodwinking entertainment. Rather than presenting William Peter as the plaything of interpretation—the "accents yet unknown" of predicted but unpredictable "ages hence"—W. S. attempts to sequester him from the "loose opinions" and "hidden forgeries" of "defamation's spirit" (lines 405, 417, 416). A Funeral Elegy's studied linguistic innocence—the "honest care / Of harmless conversation" (lines 17-18)—can seem vapid: "For he was truly good" (line 17). But such is the rhetorical logic of a poem that defines itself as an alternative to the image-trafficking of a nocent stage. The distinction between playwright and elegist is not always so tidy, however. W. S. would avoid producing a "text of malice" by refraining from the temptation to represent his subject in a "lofty scene" of indeterminate reception. But even at its most antitheatrical, A Funeral Elegy sometimes implicates itself in misreading by presenting us with a text that can be construed either as harmless eulogy or as hostile innuendo. In a passage seemingly in keeping with the poem's strategy of protecting its subject's image by refusing to present it, for instance, W. S. allows us to doubt William Peter's indifference to vanity: He was a kind, true, perfect gentleman— Not in the outside of disgraceful folly, Courting opinion with unfit disguise, Affecting fashions, nor addicted wholly To unbeseeming blushless vanities, But suiting so his habit and desire As that his Virtue was his best Attire, (lines 90-96) If not "addicted wholly" as Donald Foster has asked, how addicted was he? We can read similar ambivalence in the elegist's assertion that in life Peter enjoyed "short-liv'd deserts" (line 12); that he "Rule[d] the little ordered commonwealth / Of his own self" (lines 294-95); that he was a "fast friend, soon lost" (line 575). Was Peter, then, a close friend who died too soon, or a fast-living friend with merits that were themselves too short-lived? Was his commonwealth little and ordered, or little-ordered?62 To ask such questions is to join the misinterpretive "world" that, according to W. S., "picks out matter to inform the worst." But is W. S., in presenting his ambiguous text to an audience so conceived, entirely free from malice aforethought? A Funeral Elegy struggles self-consciously to define a representational mode that is appropriate but not appropriative; and the antitheatrical elegist does manage to protect William Peter from becoming a stage property. In the end, though, the elegy's antispectacular decorum affords only a limited innocence: doubting his audience, W. S. is forced to doubt (and to let us doubt) his own text.

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Each chapter of this study has considered a Renaissance poetics that places the literary subject under construction "with corrupt commentaries." Skelton's "elegy" subjects Jane to a salacious interpretation he cannot tenably deny as imputed; Spenser's cannibals mortify Serena in a thinly veiled inquest into Elizabeth Throckmorton's widely circulated shame. Shakespeare's plebeians kill a poet with the same opportunism with which the playwright renders his sources into fashionable spectacle. Dekker et al. stage-manage Mother Sawyer's conviction and death by convincing us of her guilt; Milton's art of dying submits Samson to a reading whose conventions have been soiled by history. In different ways, each of these killing poems implies a readership (or a spectatorship) prone to predatory mistaking; each registers the author's responsibility by the extent to which he cooperates with the corrupt commentaries generated by his text. In its self-reflexive ambiguities, A Funeral Elegy reveals the ethical tension Renaissance poets could experience as they represented a subject conceived as vulnerable before an audience conceived as exploitative, threateningly public. In its antitheatrical strategy, this poem directs us toward one method of resolving such tension. The Renaissance stage—adumbrated in Skelton's misreading and heretical world, implied in Spenser's representation of poetic abuse and indiscretion—has become, by the early seventeenth century, a place from which those familiar with its sacrificial audiences might wish to protect sacred poetic subjects. Of course censorship laws against libel, like those against the dramatization of many religious topics, both reflect and enhance a cultural awareness of the stage's power to injure in this period: by the time of the Globe's construction, explicit dramatic representations of one's contemporaries are almost as unproducible as Passion plays. W. S.'s antitheatrical turn also makes sense in the context of the post-Reformation skepticism toward a theatrically fashioned good death that we have considered in chapter 5. And there is perhaps a natural generic antagonism (as well as an uncomfortable imbrication) between elegy, purportedly concerned with preserving the integrity of its subject, and a drama that profits by commodifying its parts. In rejecting the theater, however, W. S. does not simply conform to cultural and generic decorum; he rejects his accustomed audience, and the temptation to offer William Peter to that audience on the theater's terms. The authorial struggle in A Funeral Elegy is therefore one between the professional and the personal, between the expectations of a public spectatorship and obligations to a private friend. If W. S. intermittently invites us maliciously to gloss this text's ambiguities, then, he does so as a dramatic recidivist. And if he fails entirely to please us with a text that resists imaginative appropriation, he may succeed in the manner of one of his contemporaries. In Christes Bloodie Sweat (1613)—a poem that, according to some scholars, borrows from A Funeral Elegy63—the dramatist John Ford tellingly instructs his reader not to expect a spectacle. Christ, he claims, "di'd indeed not as an actor

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dies / . . . / In shew to please the audience." Like A Funeral Elegy, Christes Bloodie Sweat is not altogether steadfast in its antitheatrical resolution ("The Crosse" is described as the "stage" on which Christ "plaid the part"). But like W. S., Ford seems thoroughly skeptical of the "pleas [ure]" derived from such tragic "shew": like Hamlet criticizing the histrionic Player, he dismisses visually induced tears as "the idle habit of inforced sorrow."64 If W. S. refuses to "force / The common voice to warrant what I say," Ford similarly disdains elegiac coercion. Both playwrights self-consciously serve and preserve the subjects of their elegies by resisting the power the stage provides—the power to move men with a dramatically presented death, to define the dead's ontology by the theater's epistemology. Elegizing Christ is a task far different from elegizing a relative unknown, and yet in the poem that follows the temptation of theatrical imagination confronts the elegist of Christ much as it confronts W. S. "THE INFECTION OF [MILTON'S] SORROWS" Like those who ask us to include A Funeral Elegy in the Shakespearean canon despite its aesthetic shortcomings (Foster wittily concludes, "Let us as a stranger give it welcome"),65 The Passions most appreciative reader implores us to "return this neglected poem to the Miltonic fold."66 R. Paul Yoder's nearly solitary campaign is not attributional, of course. Instead he attempts to alert Miltonists to the possibility that The Passion has the same coherence and subtlety of purpose shared by Milton's less "neglected" works, arguing that we must accordingly "recognize the 'problems' of the poem as the subject of the poem."67 This metapoetic tack, an echo of Pollock's reading of the First Anniversarie mentioned in chapter 2, is a corrective to the critical tradition of dismissing The Passion by taking at face value its appended evaluative note, a tradition illustrated by the judgment of Cleanth Brooks and John Edward Hardy: "Milton's own feeling of dissatisfaction should be a guide in our estimation of'The Passion.'"68 The subject of The Passion—Milton's only published fragment—indeed shifts from Christ's to the author's agony. Interrupting what Yoder aptly describes as "a dream of infectious potency that testifies both to the poet's ego and to that ego's impotence,"59 Milton edits himself with a critical comment that effectively defines himself against an earlier self. From a different poet a bit of juvenilia published as a fragment, and with its own palinode, might not repay analysis as a significant index into the career that followed it. But nowhere else does Milton announce himself as "nothing satisfied" with an earlier poetic performance; and the fact that he publishes this imperfect poem at the midpoint of his career, and again the year before his death, suggests that its failure serves as an important coordinate to his poetic trajectory. The failure—to put it both mildly and generically—is a dramatic one. "Drama" in this context invokes not the Renaissance public stage, but its adaptation in the

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visualizing strategies Louis Martz has identified in seventeenth-century meditative poetry.70 George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan—all wrote poems on the Passion. Yoder notes that, despite Herbert's announcement in "The Reprisall" that "there is no dealing with thy mighty passion,"71 several poems in The Temple (1633)—such as "The Agonie," "Sepulchre," and "The Sacrifice"— deal with Christ's death dramatically, as a series of "scenes." Later in the century Vaughan would in fact call his dramatic representation of Christ's death by Milton's title. Milton's divine elegy, like its Catholic and Anglican contemporaries, constructs itself as a theater of the mind. In Milton's case, however, this theater also deconstructs itself as a form of erroneous and predatory imagination. Remaining in print not only as a criticism of the idolatrous tendencies of seventeenthcentury meditative poetry, but also as a form of self-criticism and self-censorship, The Passion resonates throughout a poetic career in which death constitutes a representational problem—in which the dramatization of dying coextends with an unsettling skepticism. Everywhere the poem greets us with the conventions of Renaissance funeral elegy. The poet sets his "harp to notes of saddest woe" (line 9), finding "softer strings... more apt for mournful things" (lines 27-28); he invokes night as "best patroness of grief" (line 29), claiming that his elegiac verse deserves more than the customary share of pathetic fallacy and printshop edging: And work my flattered fancy to belief, That heaven and earth are coloured with my woe; My sorrows are too dark for day to know: The leaves should all be black whereon I write, And letters where my tears have washed a wannish white. (lines 31-35)72 While announcing itself as an elegy, however, The Passion aspires to drama: Christ is characterized as an actor and "our Most perfect hero" (line 13); the occultatio dei is described as "a mask" and "a disguise" (line 19); the poet limits his "roving verse" to "These latest scenes" of the Crucifixion (line 22). Perhaps John G. Demaray correctly argues that The Passion was originally conceived as an actual masque—a prelude to Comus (first performed in 1634, and printed with The Passion in the 1645 volume).73 If The Passion was first composed as a generic experiment, however, it was published as a generic failure—a self-conscious failure that might even interrogate the success of Comus (whose eponymous villain, as argued in chapter 2, also perverts the theatricalized poetry of praise in which Milton is himself implicated). The speaker of The Passion would represent the unrepresented, refusing the subject matter of Marco Vida's Christiad:

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These latest scenes confine my roving verse, To this horizon is my Phoebus bound, His godlike acts; and his temptations fierce, And former sufferings otherwhere are found; Loud o'er the rest Cremona's trump doth sound. (lines 22-26) As Yoder notes, the irony of this claim goes beyond the obvious fact that in the 1630 meditations on the Crucifixion "otherwhere are found" (Vida's six-book poem itself recounts the Passion); the irony extends to the fact that in rejecting Vida's emphasis on Christ's "temptations fierce" and "former sufferings," The Passion rejects the imaginative strategies by which Milton chooses to represent Christ's heroism elsewhere in his poetry.74 Published both before and after Paradise Regained, The Passion reveals a poet making a wrong artistic choice—an error requiring abusive and finally untenable imagination. The poem's last stanzas record the speaker's desperate search for a satisfactory image on which to rest his "flattered fancy." After noisily attempting to recreate Ezekiel's "holy vision" of God's chariot ("See see the chariot, and those rushing wheels, / That whirled the prophet up at Chebar flood" [lines 36-37]), the speaker turns, as it were, to view the body: Mine eye hath found that sad sepulchral rock That was the casket of heaven's richest store, And here though grief my feeble hands uplock, Yet on the softened quarry would I score My plaining verse as lively as before; For sure so well instructed are my tears, That they would fitly fall in ordered characters. (lines 43-49) The lithoidal and cynegetic senses of "quarry," like the inscriptive and acquisitive senses of "score," admit an ambiguity between elegist and predator, between elegized and victim, upon which the poem finally collapses. Searching for an appropriate image with which to elegize Christ, the speaker relies upon his formal poetic instruction to succeed ("as lively as before") the Nativity Ode. But the next and final stanza implodes upon its own vanity, revealing the hollow masque of a poem that has displaced the object of praise with imaginative opportunism: Or should I thence hurried on viewless wing, Take up a weeping on the mountain wild, The gentle neighbourhood of grove and spring Would soon unbosom all their echoes mild,

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And I (for grief is easily beguiled) Might think the infection of my sorrows loud, Had got a race of mourners on some pregnant cloud. (lines 50-56) In Lycidas Milton briefly allows "our frail thoughts" to "dally with false surmise" before unbeguiling grief with hard won truth.75 The Passions, subjunctive fictions interpose not "a little ease," but the infected fruit of elegiac parthenogenesis. Can Christ be elegized? The question invites complex and various theological answers, but also a relatively simple observation: as the symbolic capital of Christian consolation, what Milton calls the "substitute" who died "in our stead," Christ enables but cannot receive elegiac recompense.76 Yoder notes that elsewhere Milton recognizes "the subject" of The Passion will always be "above" the elegist's symbolic appropriation. In De Doctrina Christiana, for instance, Milton equates consolation with "the effect and design of the whole ministry of mediation"— "the satisfaction of divine justice on behalf of all men, and the conformation of the faithful to the image of Christ." When Christ becomes not the mediative agent but the passive object of elegy, however, the mourner is left as a lever without a fulcrum: "It cannot be explained how any one can be a mediator to himself on his own behalf."77 It is as a lever without a fulcrum—his dissatisfied imagination racing toward the increasingly insubstantial and infertile—that the elegist presents himself in The Passion. Perhaps we can follow Milton the more mature critic in attributing the failure of this poet to youth ("above the years he had, when he wrote it"); but it seems reasonable to assume that the older poet never revises his younger self because he realizes that the significance of this failure is worth recording. Yoder observes that in The Reason of Church-Government, after all, Milton claims that age is irrelevant; only an author's cooperation with divine grace determines the merits of his work: And if any man incline to thinke I undertake a taske too difficult for my yeares, I trust through the supreme inlightening assistance farre otherwise; for my yeares, be they few or many, what imports it?78 The self-critical author of The Passion never submits such a defense because the poem is radically indefensible; written not with a "supreme inlightening assistance" but with a breathtakingly uninspired willfulness, it presents itself not as intrinsically meritorious, but as intractably meretricious. The Passion remains "unfinished" as a monument to generic misconception, and to the poet Milton refused to become. As such, this elegy gives a new inflection to Burckhardt's "killing poem." We have seen other poets declare their works imperfect, of course. But Shakespeare's "accents yet unknown" vivify the literary work by giving it eternal life in the

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"mouths of men"; and in the case of Julius Caesar, this life results from the appropriation of death as a theatrically iterable scene. The critical note Milton attaches to The Passion, however, has the effect of killing the poem itself—not by complete censorship, but by declaring the text (as most of the elegy's criticism attests) a dead end. This is not to suggest that Milton kills his poem as an alternative to killing its subject. Nevertheless, The Passion does seem to censor itself for attempting to present Christ's death as a "lofty scene," subject to the construction and misconstruction of a dubious imagination. And while the idea of a divine killing poem may exaggerate, Yoder notes that Milton's elegy does explore the single method by which devotional poetry may be said to annihilate the divine: "the displacement in his poetry of the object of praise by the act of praising."79 By the last stanzas, weeping "well instructed ... tears" and indulging "the infection" of his "sorrows," the elegist has forgotten what he writes to remember. "Nothing satisfied with what was begun," he must condemn his effort at elegiac self-satisfaction. But he must also publish it, lest he forget again.

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Notes

Selected Journal Abbreviations AN&O CI EC ELN ELR HLQ JEGP JHI MLN MLQ MLR MP N&Q PQ RES RP RQ SEL ShS SP SQ STC TLS TRSL TSLL UTQ UTSE

American Notes and Queries Critical Inquiry Essays in Criticism English Language Notes English Literary Renaissance Huntington Library Quarterly Journal of English and Germanic Philology Journal of the History of Ideas Modern Language Notes Modern Language Quarterly Modern Language Review Modern Philology Notes and Queries Philological Quarterly Review of English Studies Renaissance Papers Renaissance Quarterly Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 Shakespeare Studies Studies in Philology Shakespeare Quarterly Short-title Catalogue Times Literary Supplement Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature Texas Studies in Literature and Language University of Toronto Quarterly University of Texas Studies in English Introduction

1. Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, in Prose Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 89. 207

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2. Sidney, Defence ofPoesie, 93. 3. Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 15. 4. The Romantic period offers a great deal of explicit material for my interest in artists who conceive their craft as a potentially murderous and guilty one. For an interesting study of this material and some of its contemporary permutations, see Joel Black, The Aesthetics of Murder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 5. Sidney's defense of poetry can be called Aristotelian, but with important distinctions. Sidney's "ethic and politic consideration" signifies essential aspects of "man's self," while Aristotle's politike, the end of ethics, subordinates that self to the polity. See the Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), I:2: "For though admittedly the good is the same for a city as for an individual, still the good of the city is apparently a greater and more complete good to acquire and preserve. For while it is satisfactory to acquire and preserve the good even for an individual, it is finer and more divine to acquire and preserve it for a people." Sidney's move from Aristotle's polis to the individual records an interesting move from Platonic concerns to those wrought by Renaissance humanism (and by modern liberal democracy, as suggested in note 6). 6. During times of war, hot and cold, the United States has seen remarkable restrictions, official and unofficial, on free speech; but in such cases the potential victim purportedly defended has been national security or "The American Way of Life." As a category "hate-speech" is different, in that its restriction is meant to protect distinct social groups within the polis. The premise of hate-speech is that language can harm the individuals or groups who comprise its referent; by contrast "un-American" speech falls more neatly in the Platonic categories of the dangerously seductive and the politically harmful. Of course the conceptual novelty of hate-speech is limited; it has been theoretically preceded, for instance, by slander, defamation, and accusations of witchcraft. 7. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82), 2:492. For the best recent assessment of Milton's concern, in Areopagitica, with the potential violence of language in an age of "paper bullets," see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 120 [where Norbrook quotes Milton's fear that uncontrolled books might "spring up armed men"] -130. See also William Kolbrener, Milton's Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 1. 8. In The Violence of Language (London: Routledge, 1990), Jean-Jacques Lecercle has argued that "the dominant trend in the Anglo-Saxon world, with the notable exception of Wittgenstein, is a logicist one" (267). Lecercle illustrates by showing the important work of H. P. Grice and Jurgen Habermas to be engaged in a positivist project to purify language for cooperative science and dialogic process. 9. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" trans. Josue Harari, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 108. 10. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 9. 11. Kenneth Burke, "The Imagery of Killing," The Hudson Review, 1:2 (Summer 1948), 16062 (Burke's emphases). My concern with "transformation" in this book focuses on the issue of what Michel Foucault calls "author-functions"—an author's idea of the place of himself and his art in culture. The question of "author-functions" is particularly pressing in the Renaissance, a period Laurence Manley has described as riven by acute "normative crisis." See Foucault, "What Is an Author?" 141-60; and Laurence Manley, Convention, 1500-1750 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 137. 12. James Hillman, Suicide and the Soul (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 21.

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13. For good introductions to the anthropological analysis of death, see Mortality and Immortality: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Life, ed. S. C. Humphreys and Helen King (New York: Academic, 1981); Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney and Claudia Needham (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1960); and Philippe Aries' classic study, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Vintage Press, 1981). 14. Jonathan Culler might describe the killing poem when he concedes that not all literature substantiates the death of the author, that some literary works perform violence through "a series of radical and inaugural acts: acts of imposition which create meaning" (The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981], 39). 15. In several instances Greenblatt comes very close to ascribing guilt to an artist for abusive representation. I acknowledge this most extensively in chapter 4—where I consider Greenblatt's essay "Shakespeare Bewitched" (in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993], 17-42), which suggests that the playwright might have considered witchmongering an opportunistic and potentially harmful enterprise with real victims. Greenblatt suggests that in Macbeth, however, Shakespeare criticizes such opportunism. In his recent essay "The Eating of the Soul," moreover, Greenblatt has identified in Shakespearean drama a "poetics of answerability" in which all death (even a seemingly natural one) is accompanied by a need to assign blame; he argues that in Shakespearean drama characters always appear to die as the result of conscious agency (whether their own, a killer's, or that of some superhuman force) and finds ethnographic analogies to this poetics in non-Western cultures (Representations 48 [1994], 97-116). My own emphasis on a poetics that reflects upon its own responsibility in different forms of "killing" attempts to extend what I take to be a development in Greenblatt's analysis of the consequences of self-fashioning. 16. In Journeymen in Murder: The Assassin in English Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 17-20, Martin Wiggins traces the legal history of Benefit of Clergy in Renaissance England. His observation that—despite laws that sometimes punished hired assassins more than their employers—"there was ... a moral hierarchy of guilt which ran counter to the legal hierarchy of responsibility" (15) has some relevance to my study. Only in rare cases (such as representations with libelous or treasonous reference) could a poet be held legally responsible for the fate of his subjects in the Renaissance; nevertheless the relation between an author and his literary subjects (and, if a playwright, his actors) could occasion extralegal guilt. 17. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 13. 18. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 252. 19. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10.I follow Norbrook in employing speechact theory to counter some of the passive constructions of new historicism. 20. For an excellent discussion of the continued relevance of speech-act theory and its deconstructionist critique, see Sandrey Petrey, Speech Acts and Literary Theory (New York: Routledge, 1990). 21. Here I am very indebted to Frank Whigham's introduction to Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1-21, which also cites Bourdieu and Giddens to emphasize the author's interest in cognitive faculties in the explication of social life. 22. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xvi. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge University Press, 1977).

210 Notes to Pages 8-11 23. Giddens, The Constitution of Society, xxii-xxiii. 24. Michel Foucault, ed., I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother...: A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 205-6. 25. Lawrence Buell, introducing "Special Topic: Ethics and Literary Study," PMLA 114:1 (January 1999), 12.I follow as well Buell's corollary: "More central to ethically valenced theory and criticism than the issue of authorial agency, however, is that of readerly responsibility, which indeed is often linked ... to recuperation of authoredness" (12). 26. Areopagitica, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Wolfe et al, 2:257. Here Milton cites with approval a Parliamentary order passed on 29 January, 1642 (previous to the prelicensing legislation to which Areopagitica responds). 27. Harry Berger, Jr., Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Erickson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), xiii-xiv. Berger's account of guilt and the avoidance "reflex" attempts to depart from Stanley Cavell's model in Must We Mean What We Say? Modern Philosophical Essays in Morality, Religion, Music, and Criticism (New York: Scribner, 1969), 277-78. Cavell's model is itself a bit blurry, however. In Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), he seems to claim that guilt involves the avoidance of discovery: "Guilt is different: there the reflex is to avoid discovery" (49). But his accompanying definition of "shame" as a desire to "cover up" yourself would seem to suggest a contrast with guilt—which according to Cavell can sometimes force one to confess and discover one's self. 28. Berger, Making Trifles of Terrors, xxi. 29. Berger, Making Trifles of Terrors, xxi. 30. Peter Erickson, Making Trifles of Terrors, Editor's Introduction, xxxv. 31. Hamlet, 3.1.566-71 (this and all references to Shakespeare's works appear in The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974]). 32. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 100. 33. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 103. 34. In Disowning Knowledge, 98, Cavell compares such literal responses to theatrical violence as drinking from a finger bowl. 35. Hamlet, 2.2.551-60. 36. Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Suppose We Ask the Question," Nachlass, manuscript notebook, reel 13, 42-43 (cited in Peter Hughes, "Performing Theory: Wittgenstein and the Trouble with Shakespeare," Comparative Criticism 14 [1992], 71-86). Wittgenstein's subject here differs from Hamlet's in his "I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play" speech. In Hamlet's courtroom drama, the murdered continue to speak—or at least murder speaks in a way that makes the response of the murderer compulsory; it is now the murderer who is not, cannot be, pretending when confronted with referential fiction. In Wittgenstein's account, the alternative answers to the question of whether or not people are murdered in tragedies—No, "they only pretend"; Yes, they "really die"—reveal an underlying question about acknowledged agency in scripted deaths: if the dying person is only pretending, he or she is still acknowledged to control self-representation; the category of the "real" death seems by contrast to recognize the irresistibility of plots and texts controlled by others ("at the end of the play"). 37. Joel Altman has argued that moments such as the Player's apparent loss of rhetorical control, which Hamlet criticizes in this exchange, adapt Quintilian's comparison of the orator to an actor who has "frequently been so much moved while speaking, that I have not merely been wrought upon to tears, but have turned pale and shown all the symptoms of genuine grief" (The Orator, 6.2.35-36, my trans.). In Altman's argument, Quintilian's model applies to Hamlet himself, and to many of Shakespeare's major characters ("'I am not what I am': Shakespeare's Scripted Subject," presented at the Shakespeare Association of America, Washington,

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D.C., March 1997). For a related discussion, see Terence Cave, The Cornucopia Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 127 and ch. 4. 38. With the exception of his letter to Horatio, and with the possible exception of his poetry to Ophelia (which may have been written before the dramatic action), all of Hamlet's act of writing—his interpolations in the play-within, his revision of Claudius's letter to England—predict killing. 39. Plotinus, Ennead 3.2.15, in The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, 3rd ed. (London: Faber & Faber 1956), 173. 40. Sir Walter Ralegh, "On the Life of Man," lines 9-10 (The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. Agnes M. C. Latham [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1951]). 41. From an anonymous elegy appearing in E. Nungezer, A Dictionary of Actors and Other Persons Associated with the Public Representation of Plays in England before 1642 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), 74. 42. Sidney's conceit in Astrophil and Stella and Milton's in Areopagitica exemplify a familiar phenomenon in the Renaissance—recently described by Leah S. Marcus as an attempt to humanize the relatively alien idea of print (in her lecture "Shakespeare's Computer," delivered at Vanderbilt University 22 April, 1999). 43. The Spanish Tragedy, 2.4.101. Hieronimo's response amplifies the emphasis: "To know the author were some ease of grief. . ." (2.4.102). For an interesting examination of The Spanish Tragedy's "insistent derogation, or abdication, of the author-function in favor of what might be called a 'character-function,'" see Emma Smith, "Author v. Character in Early Modern Dramatic Authorship: The Example of Thomas Kyd and The Spanish Tragedy" Renaissance Drama 75 (1994), 129-42,133. 44. Elaine Scarry, "Donne: 'But yet the body is his booke,'" in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 70-105. 45. For a brilliant study of the implications of the Renaissance assumption that representations were vulnerable to incivility, see Debora Shuger, "Civility and Censorship in Early Modern England," in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation ed. Robert Post (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 1998, 89-110). In The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 198-201, Robert N. Watson considers how, for Donne, names can represent and reconstitute an entire personal identity. For an account of the posthumous punishment of Oliver Cromwell's corpse, and of such Renaissance practices as burying suicides with stakes through their hearts to keep their spirits from wandering, see Clare Gittings, Death, Burial, and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Crom Helm, 1984), 71-73. 46. The standard account of the closing of the chantries appears in A. Krieder, English Chantries: The Road to Dissolution, Harvard Historical Studies 97 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). I discuss some of the consequences of this event in chapter 2. 47. The culture of Protestant England—from the Prayers for the Dead in numerous revised Books of Common Prayer to the postmortem abuse of Cromwell's body—produced countless contradictions to this declared doctrinal position. 48. I refer here to the 1604 Star Chamber case of Lewis Puckering, to which Debora Shuger kindly drew my attention. Shuger has also pointed out to me that, beginning in 1606, libels against the dead could be prosecuted as scandalum magnatum. 49. Sir Edward Coke, Reports 3:126v. See Robert Post, "The Social Foundations of Defamation Law: Reputation and the Constitution," California Law Review 74 (1986), 699-707. 50. In The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c.1500-c.1800 (London: Reaktion Books 1991), 55, Nigel Llewellyn observes that the "social body" of the deceased can survive biological death by retaining its offices, property, and social status; by borrowing

212 Notes to Pages 16—18 Llewellyn's phrase, I mean to suggest the distinction, in literature, of a symbolic "body" from the material body it represents. 51. In Making Trifles of Terrors, xxi-xxii, Berger writes of Shakespeare's translation of selfreflexivity from the Sonnets to the stage: "In switching from the literary to the theatrical medium he encountered a new constraint: characters can only be represented in and performed by their own speech. If the functions or powers of description, representation, and interpretation are to survive the passage from literary narrative to theater, they must be transferred to and wholly vested in dramatic speakers. The author of Shakespeare's plays seems to have met the challenge by transforming into theatrical practice the epideictic art of representing self-representation developed in the sonnets; that is, he transferred from lyric monologue to interlocutory drama an art of representing speakers who seem aware that in their words and actions they represent themselves to others, speakers who try to control the effects of their self-representation and who thus use their language the way actors do in an effort to impose on their auditors a particular interpretation of the persons they pretend to be. This hypothesis about Shakespeare's art presupposes a more general principle of reflexivity, which is that one can't represent oneself to others without representing oneself to oneself .... To recognize this is also to recognize that in dramatizing the activity of self-interpretation the plays at the same time dramatize an activity of self-evaluation...." This passage informs many of the assumptions of my own investigation, but I depart from Berger in leaving room for the author's self-representation and self-evaluation in theater. On Shakespeare's stage the powers of description, representation, and interpretation are not "transferred to and wholly vested in dramatic speakers"; their mediation suggests space for the playwright's own "activity of selfevaluation." 1. Courting Heresy and Taking the Subject 1. Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 104-5. 2. A. R. Heiserman, Skelton and Satire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 11; Ian Gordon, John Skelton, Poet Laureate (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1943), 69. 3. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 138. Stanley Fish, John Skelton's Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 117-25. Gordon, John Skelton: Poet Laureate, 132-33. F. L. Brownlow, "The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe and the Liturgy," ELR 9:1 (Winter 1979), 5-20. Arthur F. Kinney, John Skelton, Priest as Poet (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 98-116. Alexander Pope, "Imitations of Horace," in The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, 2nd ed. (London: Twickenham, 1953), 196-97. E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: AMS Press, 1 1 95 ), 139. H.L.R. Edwards, Skelton: The Life and Times of an Early Tudor Poet (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), no. Ilona M. McGuiness, "John Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe as Satire: A Revaluation," Sixteenth-Century Journal 22: 2 (Summer 1991), 215-31. 4. Kinney, John Skelton, Priest as Poet, 116. The dating of Phyllyp Sparowe is uncertain. It may have been begun in 1505, with the "Addicyon" added certainly no later than 1516 (and perhaps as early as 1508). The Garlande of Laurell was published in 1523, but Skelton began to assemble it as early as 1495. 5. See E. O. James, Christian Myth and Ritual (Cleveland: Ohio State University Press, 1963), 203-6; Brownlow, "The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe and the Liturgy," 8-10; and Kinney, John Skelton, Priest as Poet, 105-12. The parallels between Phyllyp Sparowe and the liturgy can be summarized thus: lines 1-386 follow the Officium Defunctorum; lines 387-512, the Missa pro Defunctis; lines 513-70, the Absolutio super Tumulum; lines 571-602, the Officium Defunc-

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torum again; and lines 845-1260, the Onto Commendationis Animae (see I. A. Gordon, "Skelton's Philip Sparrow and the Roman Service Book," MLR 29 [1934], 389-96). 6. Politian, "Elegia, sive Epicidion. In Albierae Albitiae immaturum exitum . . . " lines 26768, 273-74, 281-86, in An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry, ed. and trans. Fred J. Nichols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 267-69. I have slightly modified the punctuation of Nichols's text and translation, following the example of Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph, Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 90 n.13. 7. O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 113-21 and passim. Of course neither form was entirely unfamiliar to the medieval period. I briefly consider the medieval "elegy" later in this chapter. On medieval epitaphs—which usually were engraved on tombs, not composed on pages—see Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph, 51, 56, 83-84,116-17,166-67. 8. Shakespeare's Sonnet 81. 9. The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "elegy," cites Alexander Barclay in 1514 as the first usage. But John Scattergood—in an observation that would please the poet laureate—has pointed out Skelton's prior reference ("Skelton and the Elegy," Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 84 [1984], 336). 10. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 56. 11. "Epitaphe" appears in John Skelton, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). Unless otherwise noted, all references to Skelton's poetry appear in this edition; the translations from Skelton's Latin I quote are Scattergood's. Though "Epitaphe" consists of two poems, of 87 and 38 lines, respectively, each contains the iacet hic formula and encapsulated epigrams of the literary epitaph (see John Clarke's epitaph, lines 60-64, and Adam Uddersale's, lines 25-28; for a longer discussion of this work, see Kinney, John Skelton, Priest as Poet, 95-98). Skelton's Latin poems reveal a great deal of experimentation with the epigram, the epitaph, and elegiac meter. "Epigramma ad tanti principis maiestatem in sua puerice" (published by F. M. Salter [Speculum 9 (1934), 36-37]) consists of twenty lines of elegiacs. Eulogium pro suorum temporum conditione (The Complete Poems of John Skelton, Laureate, ed. Philip Henderson [London: Dent, 1964], 435-36) consists of thirtysix lines of elegiacs, followed by four lines of elegiacs that constitute an epitaph. "Elegia in serenissimae princeps et domine, domine Margarete" (ibid., 437-38) consists of twenty lines of elegiacs, followed by two lines of elegiacs and a couplet, again evoking the epitaph. "In Bedel quondam Belial incarnatum, devotum epitaphium" (ibid., 433) consists of fourteen lines of elegiacs, followed by four truncated rhyming lines, then two elegiacs and two rhyming couplets. For further descriptions of Skelton's Latin works, see Scattergood's Appendix to his edition, 521; and David Carlson, "The Latin Writings of John Skelton," Studies in Philology 88:4 (Fall 1991). 12. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 49. On the Renaissance confusion between "love elegies" and "mourning elegies," see Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 136-37. On the various names for funerary laments in the Renaissance, see Hardison, The Enduring Monument, 113. 13. In Amores 3.9.3 Ovid speaks of the "flebilis Elegia," or mournful meter. This is the distich of Catullus's funeral elegies (Poems 65-68 in The Poems of Catullus, ed. and trans. Guy Lee [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991]). But Theocritus and Martial include hendecasyllables and iambics among their elegies. 14. Both classical and Renaissance poets and critics maintained that this meter originated in funerary laments but served just as appropriately in poems reflecting seriously on love. See Georg Luck, The Latin Love Elegy, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1969), 25-26. Joannes Secun-

214 Notes to Pages 21-25 dus seconded Ovid's association of this meter with lament in the Renaissance (Elegy 3.7, in Clifford Endres, ed., Joannes Secundus: The Latin Love Elegy in the Renaissance [Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1981], 189-95). Skelton's uses of the Latin elegiac are listed in note 11, to this chapter. Another important poem in this context is his "Upon the Dolorus Dethe and Muche Lamentable Chaunce of the Mooste Honorable Erle of Northumberlande." Though much of this poem could be characterized as a medieval lament, it begins and ends with approximations of classical elegiacs; and it includes moments (such as the poet's invocation to Clio to aid him "In elect uteraunce to make memoryall" [line 11]) that this chapter will present as initiatory of the Renaissance elegy. 15. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices Libri Septem, Facs. ed. August Buck (Lyons: StuttgartBad Cannstatt, 1964), 52.D.1 (see also 169.C.2 and 169.D.2). 16. On the conventionality of Jane's lament and the medieval birdmass, see especially Kinney, John Skelton, Poet as Priest, 103-6. I disagree with Kinney's assertion that "nothing in Part I is extraneous; everything is subordinated to the devotional mind and mood that the Office itself establishes"; and I part from him in reading lines 826-44 as Jane's "elegy" (103): Jane herself says this elegy will follow "by and by." Part I does follow the general pattern of the Office of the Dead, but Jane's relation to the liturgy is improvisatory to say the least. In fact, her concession to its ritualized consolation calls into question its sufficiency—at least at the literary level on which she herself dwells in her quest for an epitaph. 17. See H. J. Chaytor, From Script to Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), 74. 18. Halpern, "John Skelton and the Poetics of Primitive Accumulation," in Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 242-43. 19. Fish, John Skelton's Poetry, 114. 20. As Scattergood argues ("Skelton and the Elegy," 336). When I scanned these "lines" myself, I found that Skelton—if he did in fact intend for us to convert his Skeltonics into distichs—failed to produce the quantities of the elegiac couplet. It is possible that in lines 82225, Jane intends to introduce her epitaph with an elegy, though "by and by" suggests the other order. 21. Joshua Scodel, The English Literary Epitaph, especially 27-49. A less plausible reading is that Skelton intends to precede his classical epitaph, in which Jane is petrified, with her ineffective and vernacular elegy (the first part of the poem). 22. Shepheardes Calender, "June" (73-80) in Spenser, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 442. 23. For just a few illustrations of E.K.'s replacement of pastoral names with canonical authority, see the glosses, in the "June" eclogue, for "Tityrus" and "Menalcas": Tityrus) "That by Tityrus is meant Chaucer, hath been already sufficiently sayde, and by thys more playne appeareth, that he sayth, he tolde merye tales. Such as be hys Canterburie tales. Whom he calleth the God of Poetes for his excellencie, so as Tullie calleth Lentulus, Deum vitae suae is the God of hys lyfe." Menalcas) "The name of a shephearde in Virgile; but here is meant a person unknowne and secrete, agaynst whome he often bitterly invayeth." 24. Consider, for instance, the final verse paragraph of Lycidas, which begins with the alienation of speaker and poet: "Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills ..." (186). Quoted from John Milton, The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London and New York: Longman, 1971). 25. The Testament of Cresseid, in Selected Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. W.R.J. Barron (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1981).

Notes to Pages 26-31 215 26. The House of Fame, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed., ed. John H. Fisher (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1989). 27. See Scattergood, The English Literary Epitaph, 344 and 89n. On the Renaissance distinction between the "female" work of needle and thread and the "male" occupation of poetry, see Ann Rosalind Jones, "Surprising Fame: Renaissance Gender Ideologies and Women's Lyric" (in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986] ,79). 28. Ovid presents Eurydice's "twin" death in Metamorphoses 10.69: "stupuit gemina nece coniugis Orpheus'' Arthur Golding translates this as the "double dying of his wyfe set Orphye in a stounde" (The. xv. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso; entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meeter, by Arthur Golding Gentleman [London, 1567], 123r. I owe my recognition of the Ovidian resonance in Philip's words to a wonderful article by Lynn Enterline, in which Eurydice's double dying under Orpheus's gaze applies to Hermione's position at the end of The Winter's Tale ('"You speak a language that I understand not': The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter's Tale" SQ 48:1 [Spring 1997], 17-44 [22]). 29. Pamela Royston Macfie, writing on a strikingly similar passage in Chapman's Hero and Leander (6.22), has noted that "the verb 'to prick' suggests a plotted concordance between the dialectical relationship that governs sexuality and that which controls language and imaginative release" ("'The voice from beyond the grave': Absence, Otherness, and Invocation in Chapman's Hero and Leander" Renaissance Papers [1994] 52). On the Renaissance distinction between the "female" work of needle and thread and the "male" occupation of poetry, see Ann Rosalind Jones, "Surprising Fame: Renaissance Gender Ideologies and Women's Lyric," in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller, 79. 30. Scattergood, "Skelton and the Elegy," 344. Indeed, Skelton's aforementioned reference to the seminal "aureat droppes" of Tagus appears proleptic when read beside the "little drops" invoked by Colin in Spenser's elegy for Chaucer (The Shepheardes Calender, "June" [line 93]). For a psychosexual analysis of such imagery, as well as an attempt to locate this notion of a poetic fons et origo in the elegist's conception of literary succession, see Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 3-25. 31. This catalogue, it should be noted, certainly seems innocent enough. Skelton says that Jane Scrope, with her gray eyes and bent brows, seems to represent Lucrece—or else Polyxena, or else Calliope, or else Penelope (not an unusual sort of list on the face of it). 32. Alexander Dyce describes lines 1116-17 as possibly defective in The Poetical Works of John Skelton, 2 vols. (1843; rpt. 1965), 2:147. 33. John Scattergood, Phyllyp Sparowe, lines1116-7n(in John Skelton, The Complete English Poems). 34. For a concise study of the conventions of blazonic idealization (such as the "myddell small" and "sydes long" described in this passage [lines 1128-9]), see D. S. Brewer, MLR 50 (1955). 257-69. 35. Feminist scholarship on The Rape of Lucrece has demonstrated that the narrator holds Collatine's words responsible for the violence done her; see, for instance, Nancy Vickers, '"The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's Lucrece" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 95-115. For a study on epideixis in Petrarchanism that focuses specifically upon its consequences for women, see Joel Fineman, "Shakespeare's Will: The Temporality of Rape," in Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare's Will (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 165-221. My own suggestion of a gendered relation in such harmful praise is, in the first two chapters of this study, less explicit and determined than Fineman's; for as I demonstrate in subsequent chapters, we should understand a continuum between the ethical

216 Notes to Pages 31 -38 tension of a potentially harmful Petrarchan poetics and anxieties marking any representation (whether of a man or a woman) subjected to an untrustworthy audience. 36. Nan C. Carpenter calls this lament "an early example of stream-of-consciousness technique" which defers our critical faculties (in John Skelton [New York: Twayne, 1967], 60). On Jane's innocent grief from a psychoanalytical perspective, see Warren W. Wooden, "Childhood and Death: A Reading of John Skelton's Phyllip Sparow" (Journal of Psychology 7:4 [Spring 1980],403-14). 37. Susan Schibanoff, "Taking Jane's Cue: Phyllyp Sparowe as a Primer for Women Readers," PMLA 101:5 (October 1986), 839-40. 38. For these references, see Kinney, John Skelton, Priest as Poet, 101. 39. The Vulgate Psalm 118.3 to which these lines refer reads domine. The earlier editorial effort to treat Skelton's modification as a misprint has been corrected by Scattergood (see his note to Phyllyp Sparowe, line 996). 40. Kinney, John Skelton, Priest as Poet, 108-14. On the language of fin amor in religious lyrics addressed to the Virgin, see Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963); and Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval Religious Lyric (London: Routledge, 1972), 56,138. Brownlow has observed that Skelton's substitution of domina for domine had precedent in St. Bonaventura's Psalter of the Virgin ("Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe and the Liturgy," 10). 41. See Poems 2 and 4 for Catullus's admiration of and elegy for the girl's sparrow. Poem 5 begins: Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus / rumoresque senum seueriorum / omnes unius aestimemus assis," and concludes "'conturbabimus illa [basia] ne sciamus / aut ne quis malus inuidere possit / cum tantum sciat esse basiorum (lines 11-13, quoted from The Poems of Catullus, ed. and trans. Guy Lee [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991]). On the enclosed world Catullus creates in this poem and elsewhere, see H. D. Rankin, "Catullus and the Privacy of Love," Wiener Studien, n.s. 9 (1975), 67-74. In "Viuamus, mea Lesbia in the English Renaissance" (ELR 9:2 [Spring 1979], 199-24), Gordon Braden extensively traces the rhetorical appropriations and adaptations of Carminum 5 by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets. 42. Ben Jonson, Poetaster, "An Apologetical Dialogue" (in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52) vol. 4:213-15. The preceding quotations from Spenser appear in Amoretti, 1.14, 86.1; and Epithalamion 24.7. 43. Alexander Barclay, The Ship of Fools, ed. T. H. Jamieson (Edinburgh: William Patterson, 1874), 2:331. For a survey of contemporary assessments of Skelton as a poet, see John Skelton: The Critical Heritage, ed. Anthony S. G. Edwards (London: Routledge, 1981), 43-53. Skelton's reputation was celebrated by humanists such as Caxton and Erasmus, though William Lily condemned him as "neither learned, nor a poet." 44. T. S. Eliot's description of Catullus's distinctive tone, in "Andrew Marvell," Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), 253. 45. James Russell Lowell, PMLA 5 (1890), 15. 46. On the tempting fallacy of classifying Phyllyp Sparowe "medieval" or "Renaissance," see Fish, John Skelton's Poetry, 26-35. 47. On the history of Petrarchism in the English sixteenth-century lyric, see William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 157-90. 48. Edmund Waller, "Story of Phoebus and Daphne, Applied," in Poems, ed. G. Thorn Drury (London: Bullen, 1901), 1:52. 49. For Stella's shame, see the "Eighth Song" in Astrophil and Stella; for Astrophil's complaint against "honor's cruel might," see Sonnet 91 and the "rigorous exile" of Sonnet 104. 50. By "minor est infamia vero" Skelton may mean simply that Jane's overscrupulous shame misses the truth of his intentions. But for the shamed, infamy is its own truth; and Skel-

Notes to Pages 38-43 217 ton's invocation of a public, objective notion of truth could hardly be expected to persuade at the psychological level. Following "Est sew," however, the phrase may have a darker implication: "It's too late (I've already written the poem anyway); her shame is less important than my idea of the truth." 51. This question appears in Latin (Si veritatem dico, quare non creditis michi?) as the final line of the poem. 52. Fish, John Skelton's Poetry, 13-26. 53. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, 135. 54. Sir Philip Sidney, "Defence of Poesie," Prose Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 89. Albert S. Cook has suggested that Sidney's "Bubonax" blends the names of Bupalus and Hipponax. In the Natural History 36.5.11, Pliny tells of a Hipponax who was publicly humiliated by his caricature in a statue carved by Bupalus and Athenis. Hipponax took revenge by writing poems that drove the two sculptors to suicide (Cook, ed.,The Defense of Poesy [London: 1890], 133). To this I would add that "Bubonax" also evokes phonetically the Bubonic plague, which Renaissance poets did not hesitate to invoke in curses of their enemies. 55. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales ("General Prologue," line 798, "Retraction," line 1086), in The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. John H. Fisher (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1989). 56. Shakespeare, The History of Troilus and Cressida, 5.10.36,38-39, 55. 57. Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 119-23. Much of my brief discussion of Skelton's methods of textual circulation is indebted to Walker's also brief but trenchant argument in these pages. 58. Collyn Clout, lines 1237-39. 59. Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? lines 1215,684,824,826,831; Epilogue, line 33. Walker notes Skelton's opportunity to circulate his texts with a wide humanist audience, and his chance to display them at St. Paul's. Perhaps Skelton even "tried to perform his works from the pulpit or in the manner of the balladeer, in order to gain them a wider hearing?" (John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s,121). 60. His very metaphor for court is the mouth. See Speke, Parott (Lenvoy Royall, line 372): Vix tua percipient, qui tua teque legent (a line in ironic agreement with Martin Luther's famous dictum, Qui non intelliget res non potest est verbis elicere). 61. In the Garlande of Laurell, lines 1261-1375 correspond with lines 1268-1382 in Phyllyp Sparowe. 62. Garlande of Laurell, lines 1254-60. 63. Garlande of Laurell, lines 1533,1551-52,1576-78. 64. Garlande of Laurell, lines 1558-59; Howe the Douty Duke of Albany, lines 510-11. 65. Hamlet, 3.3.53-54, 97-98. 66. Chapter 2, narrowed in scope to suggest the trajectory of this study, might have included a host of poems in which the Petrarchan mistress becomes a host. I have in mind here particularly Barnabe Barnes's scene of ritualistic rape in Parthenophil and Parthenope, sestine 5. But the idea of vindictive, injuring representation is developed in other directions by Michael Drayton, Abraham Cowley, and countless others in the more baroque Petrarchan tradition (see Kerrigan and Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance, 173-82; and Louis B. Salomon, The Devil Take Her! A Study of the Rebellious Lover in English Poetry [New York: A. S. Barnes, 1961]). 67. Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? lines 1044- 45. 68. Fish, John Skelton's Poetry, 5. A Replycacion Agaynest Certayne Yong Scolers Abjured of Late, Etc., appeared in 1528, a year before Skelton's death. 69. These unnumbered lines appear in the prose argument of the Replycacion.

218 Notes to Pages 43— 50 70. See J. Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation (London: Macmillan, 1908), 1:393. 71. See William Nelson, John Skelton, Laureate (New York: Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature, 1939), 216. Nelson compares the Replycacion with Thomas More's Dialogue concerning Heresies (probably written in the same year, and perhaps under the same royal patronage). The first part of More's Dialogue focuses on Bilney's case. 72. See, for instance, lines 280-91, where he claims the accused have mocked the hyperdulia (the veneration of the Virgin Mary) and dulia (the veneration of the other saints). These accusations are briefly mentioned elsewhere in the poem. 73. Thomas More, The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, ed. L. Schuster, R. Marius, J. Lusardi, and R. J. Schoeck, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 8:178. Stephen Greenblatt also quotes this passage and gives an excellent account of this aspect of More's late career in Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 11-73. 74. More, The Confutation, 176. More's response is to Tyndale's charge that "Mr More hath so long used his figures of poetry that (I suppose) when he erreth most, he now by the reason of long custom believeth himself that he saith most true" (An Answer to Sir Thomas More's Dialogue, in The Works of the English Reformers: William Tyndale and John Frith, ed. Thomas Russell [London: Ebenezer Palmer, 1831], 2:15). 75. Lines 6-8 of this coda read: "Hinc omne est rarum carum: reor ergo poetas /Ante alias omnes divine flamine flatos. I Sic Plato divinat, divinat sicque Socrates" 76. Wendy Wall, "Disclosures in Print: The 'Violent Enlargement' of the Renaissance Voyeuristic Text," SEL 29 (1989), 35-59. 77. Samuel Rowlands, STC 21409 (quoted by Wall, 49). 78. From the introduction to Gorboduc, quoted from Clara Gebert, An Anthology of Elizabeth Dedications and Prefaces (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1933), 34 (quoted by Wall, "Disclosures," 41-42). 79. Gebert, An Anthology of Elizabeth Dedications and Prefaces, 34. 80. Gebert, An Anthology of Elizabeth Dedications and Prefaces, 35. 81. Toward the end of her essay (52-56), Wall considers a parallel trope, in which voyeuristic authors configured themselves as Actaeon. 2. Spenser and the Poetics of Indiscretion 1. Noting the "stress upon [Donne's] own invention" in the First Anniversarie, Dennis Kay observes that "Elizabeth Drury... is the occasion, rather than the subject" of the poem (Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990], 104). "By occasion," appearing in the extended titles of both Anniversaries (as well as in many other Renaissance elegies, such as Lycidas), rather boldly admits the pretext of such performances: the "occasion" of an individual's death can provide Renaissance poets an excuse for speaking their own minds, as if the eternal silence of one subject enables the articulation of their own subjectivity. In Donne's case, as Barbara Kiefer Lewalski has argued, this process coextends with the elegiac subject's transformation into a text (Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973], 174-265). 2. In The Arte of English Poetry, George Puttenham distinguishes between "anniversary" and funeral elegy; Scaliger makes such a distinction in the Poetices. See O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 163; Kay, Melodious Tears, 105; and Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 136. For two formal studies that consider Donne's evocation and violation of elegiac conventions in The Anniversaries, see Rosalie Colie, '"All in Peeces': Problems of Interpretation in Donne's Anniversary Poems"

Notes to Pages 50-53 219 (in Just So Much Honor: Essays Commemorating the 400th Anniversary of the Birth of John Donne, ed. P. A. Fiore [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1972], 189-218); and W. M. Lebans, "Donne's Anniversaries and the Tradition of Funeral Elegy," ELH 39 (1972), 545-59. 3. John Donne, An Anatomy of the World, line 338. This and (unless otherwise noted) all subsequent references to Donne's poetry appear in The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Everyman's Library, 1985). Subsequent references to the Anatomy appear parenthetically. 4. In "The Cultural Function of Renaissance Elegy," Matthew Greenfield has recently argued that Donne's 'Anniversarie' poems "are the site of a painful negotiation between two accounts of the work of elegy, two definitions [public and private] of human identity" (ELR 28:1 [Winter 1998], 75-94 [94]). 5. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 72. 6. "Indiscreet" and "indiscrete" of course take a common Latin root (indiscretus: unseparated, undiscerned, undistinguished) into different directions in modern usage. Even today, however, "indiscreet" can mean both "indistinct" and "imprudent": a failure of categorization or discrimination merges with a failure of judgment typically associated with a speech-act that betrays confidence or propriety. In the less stable orthography of the Renaissance, moreover, the nexus between "indiscreet" and "indiscrete" becomes even firmer. In lines 325-38 of the Anatomy, for instance, Donne considers a "Deformitee" of "indiscreteness" ("if everything / Be not done fitly'and in proportion") while at the same time considering the violence of indiscretion, of a linguistic performance intended not "to satisfie wise, and good lookers on." Both senses can be heard in Donne's poem, where to be indiscreet is to fail to maintain crucial boundaries (such as the distinction between the poetic self and the monstrous world around it). 7. James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of "The Faerie Queene" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 694. 8. Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears, 2. 9. The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London, from A.D. 3550 to A.D. 1563, ed. J. G. Nichols, Camden Society, OS, 42 (1848), 193. Quoted by Kay, Melodious Tears, 1. 10. Kay, Melodious Tears, 1-2, 5. Kay cites as evidence for the common practice of funeral sermons Machyn's entries on pp. 201 and 211. 11. For a brief account of revisions in the Book of Common Prayer see Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Groom Helm, 1984), 40-42. 12. In Melodious Tears, 3, Kay refers to Richard Braithwait's emphasis on funereal 'decencie' in Remains after death: including divers memorable observances (1618), and in A happy husband. To which is adjoyned the Good Wife, by R. Braithwait (1618), D1r. See also Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 97-122; and Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 379, 572. 13. John Weever, Ancient funerall monuments (London, 1631), 25. 14. W. K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Threshold of Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 181. In Melodious Tears, 3, Kay quotes Hugh Latimer: "When one dieth, we must have bells ringing, singing, and much ado: but to what purpose? Those that die in the favour of God are well: those that die out of the favour of God, this can do them no good," from Sermons by Hugh Latimer, ed. G. E. Corrie, Parker Society (London, 1844), 305. 15. Renaissance Protestant culture can be surprisingly contradictory on this point. Even in the numerous revised Books of Common Prayer, for instance, we find continued devotions to the rememberance of the dead that seem to indicate spiritual advocacy.

220 Notes to Pages 53—55 16. Jonson's conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden over both Anniversaries are recorded in Timber (Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Evelyn Simpson [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925], 3:133). For an interesting effort to answer Jonson's attack by referring to "acceptable" poetic convention, see Lebans, "Donne's Anniversaries and the Tradition of Funeral Elegy," 557. 17. The first quotation appears in an apologetical letter to Anne Goodyer, the second in a letter to George Garrard (Letters to Several Persons of Honour [London, 1651], 74-75, 238-39. See also Donne's unfinished verse epistle to Lady Bedford, apparently written in response to his patroness's displeasure with the Anniversaries, which admits the apparent blasphemy of the poems (in John Donne: The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters, ed. Wesley Milgate [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967], 104). In a letter he sent to Sir Robert Carr along with "An Hymn to the Saints, and to Marquesse Hamylton," Donne provides what might be considered an epigram for the Anniversaries: "I did best when I had least truth for my subject." 18. See Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 1:163-65; John Crowe Ransom, "A Poem Nearly Anonymous," in Milton's Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C. A. Patrides (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1961), 71; G. Wilson Knight, The Burning Oracle (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 70. The problem of what we might call Lycidas's disintegrity is presented by Stanley Fish as evidenced by the poem's critical history; see his "Lycidas: A Poem Finally Anonymous," Glyph 8 (1981), 1-3. 19. Zailig Pollock, '"The Object, and the Wit': The Smell of Donne's First Anniversary" ELR 13:3 (Autumn 1983), 305. Several excellent studies have attempted to render the Anniversaries less problematic by reconstructing the rules of decorum governing the poems. See, for instance, Lewalski, Donne's "Anniversaries" and the Poetry of Praise; Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), ch. 6; Hardison, The Enduring Monument, ch. 7; and John Donne: The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes, ed. Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), xxxv. Still, Pollock convincingly argues (quoting Colie, '"All in Peeces': Problems of Interpretation in Donne's Anniversary Poems," 192) that "readings which begin by appealing to convention, whether of funeral elegy, or meditative poem, or the quaestio and responsio of medieval debate, or epideixis, or Sophia, 'do not mesh with one another in mutually valuable contributions to interpretation.' No one doubts that Donne is using various conventions, but whether he is doing so as a means of providing a familiar perspective on Elizabeth Drury's death is highly questionable" (306). 20. Pollock, "'The Object, and the Wit,'" 302, 307. 21. In "Donne's Timeless Anniversaries" (UTQ 39 [1970], 131), Carol M. Sicherman describes lines 63-76 of the Anatomy as a "desperate fiction"; Pollock describes the poem's "typical" rhetorical strategies as "chilling in their obtrusive ingenuity" ("'The Object, and the Wit': The Smell of Donne's First Anniversarie" 307). 22. See Robert Ellrodt, L'inspiration personelle et I'esprit du temps chez les poetes metaphysiques anglais (Paris, 1960), part 1, 1:453. Pollock, '"The Object, and the Wit,'" 310. This shift is most obvious in the Anatomy, lines 63-76, 435-42. 23. See Charles M. Coffin, John Donne and the New Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 266. 24. Frank Manley, Introduction, Donne's Anniversaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), 148-49. See also Pollock,'"The Object and the Wit,'" 313-15. In A Funerall Elegie, Donne makes even more clear the relation between science and imagination: "But as when Heav'n lookes on us with new eyes, / Those new starres ev'ry Artist exercise, / What place they should assigne to them they doubt, / Argue, and agree not, till those starres go out" (lines 67-70). 25. Donne claims in lines 435-43 that he has not time for proper proportion. 26. Lewalski, Donne's "Anniversaries" and the Poetry of Praise, 263.

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27. Life and Letters of John Donne, ed. Edmund Gosse (London, 1899), 1:184. C. S. Lewis has described the Anatomy as "insanity" (cited by W. Milgate, in The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes, xxxiii). This and the following citation appear in Pollock, "The Object and the Wit," 306, 305. 28. Gabriel Harvey's observations on Cambridge and England's academic culture (1580) appear in The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London, 1912), 621. Cf. Spenser's parodic but double-edged portrayal of the abusive Priest in Mother Hubberds Tale: "For read he could not evidence, nor will, / . . . Ne yet of Latine, ne of Greeke, that breede / Doubts mongst Divines, and difference of texts, / From whence arise diversitie of sects, / And hatefull heresies, of God abhor'd" (lines 382, 386-89). 29. Wendy Wall, "Disclosures in Print: The 'Violent Enlargement' of the Renaissance Voyeuristic Text," SEL 29 (1989), 35-59. Devon Hodges has related the English Renaissance fascination with rhetorical "anatomy" to the new science of dissecting cadavers (Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985]). 30. Lewalski observes that the process of abridgement is fundamental to Protestant hermeneutics and devotional poetry, and that Donne's Anniversaries, by rendering their subject a symbolic text, also subject that subject to abridgement (Donne's 'Anniversaries' and the Poetry of Praise, 75-79,174-215). We remember that the conceit signaling the hastened conclusion of the Anatomy is essentially one of abridgement and disproportion: "But as in cutting up a man that's dead, / The body will not last out to have read / On every part, and therefore men direct / Their speech to parts, that are of most effect; / So the worlds carcasse would not last, if I / Were punctuall in this Anatomy. /.. . Here therefore be the end" (lines 435-40,443). In the words of Henry V's Chorus, "Brook abridgement." 31. For a development of the metaphor of Milton's contemporaries as "the sons of Orpheus" or, in Pope's words, "the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease," see Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 185-282, especially 197-201. For a brief but suggestive discussion of the complex figure of Orpheus and its symbolic appropriation by Spenser, see Donald Cheney, Spenser's Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in "The Faerie Queene" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 57-60. It should be noted that neither of these critics suggests the ambivalence of the figure as I do in this chapter. 32. On the "pathologies" of Donne's linguistic violence, see Stanley Fish's interesting essay, "Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power," in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 223-52. For an article that suggests Donne's self-criticism in the act of poetic culpability, see Judith Herz, '"An Excellent Exercise of Wit That Speaks So Well of 111': Donne and the Poetics of Concealment," in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, MO.: University of Missouri Press, 1986), especially 5. 33. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 6.8.39. This and all subsequent references to Spenser's epic appear in Thomas P. Roche's edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1987). I quote subsequent references to this poem parenthetically by book, canto, and stanza numbers. 34. Nohrnberg, The Analogy of "Faerie Queene," 712—13. 35. Kenneth Borris, "'Diuelish Ceremonies': Allegorical Satire of Protestant Extremism in The Faerie QueeneVl, viii, 31-51," Spenser Studies 8 (1987), 175-209. 36. Following Borris I simplify ecclesiastical labels for pragmatic reasons, using "Puritan" to encompass more extreme Separatists such as the Brownists and Barrowists—whom Horton Davies has called "impatient Puritans" (From Cranmer to Hooker, 1534 -1603, vol. 1 of Worship and Theology in England [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970], 44). I use "Anglicanism" to describe the more conservative position from which the "Puritans" were often

222 Notes to Pages 59 - 61 collectively attacked in the late 1590s; and I agree with Borris that Spenser's posture, at least in the 1596 addition to The Faerie Queene, can accurately be described as theologically conservative. Spenser's Protestant affiliations are extensively studied in Anthea Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 37. See Conversations with Drummond, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 1:137. It hardly needs saying that Jonson's interpretation may have been less concerned with Spenser's intentions than with his own theological leanings. To be fair to Borris, he concludes from Jonson's comment only "that Spenser's Legend of Courtesy was open to at least semi-religious interpretation in his own day" ("Diuelish Ceremonies," 197). But Borris's excellent argument, it seems to me, is weakened by an unnecessary connection between the apparent critique of Puritanism enacted by the Blatant Beast and the cannibal episode: the savages, after all, seem to use an "altar" without Puritan antiritualism. Nor does Borris take into account the anti-Catholicism of book 5, published contemporaneously with book 6: idolatry and sacrificial liturgies are clearly criticized in Gerioneo's chapel, as they are in the cannibal scene. 38. Borris, "Diuelish Ceremonies," 199. 39. Pierre Lefranc has claimed that "'The Lie' est un poeme puritain" (Sir Walter Ralegh, Ecrivain [Quebec: les Presses del 1'Universite laval, 1968], 86-87). In Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 171-76, Stephen Greenblatt responds to Lefranc's argument, and to several contemporary readings of the poem as nihilistic or atheistical, by contextualizing "The Lie" both within Ralegh's canon and within the tradition of late-sixteenth-century satire. Greenblatt's attribution of the poem is not entirely conclusive, though it reflects the consensus of most editors and critics today, as does his dating of the poem (by contemporary notices) to the mid to late 1590s. As Greenblatt demonstrates, though Ralegh despised the Puritan as a "contentious and ignorant person clothing his fancie with the Spirit of God, and his imagination with the gift of Revelation" (History of the World, 2.5.1), he shared with the Puritan a corrosive disillusionment and "desire to expose the self-delusion and pretensions of the great" (Sir Walter Ralegh, 174). For the resemblances between late-sixteenth-century Puritan satire and medieval pessimism, see Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Scribner, 1950). For the fashion of satire in late-sixteenthcentury England, and the rhetorical similarities that often made widely disparate doctrinal positions difficult to distinguish in such satire, see Alvin B. Kernan, The Cankered Muse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). 40. Sir Walter Ralegh, "the Lie," line 74 (in The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. Agnes M. C. Latham [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951]). Subsequent references to this poem appear in Latham's edition and are cited parenthetically by line number. The OED lists Spenser as the first user of "blatant," a word apparently derived from the Latin blaterare or blatire, "to babble" or "chatter idly." "Blabbing" can only be traced with certaintly to ME roots, though like the verb "to babble," it seems to have echoic origins. An etymological link between Spenser's Blatant Beast and Ralegh's "blabber," then, cannot be claimed; but a nexus of sense can be claimed, since blatancy and blabbing both involve the divulgence of secrets, and "babbling" and "blabbing" can be used synonymously. 41. "The answre to the Lye," line 5. This anonymous poem appears in Latham, The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, 137. For a reply defending "The Lie," see "Erroris Responsio" which appears on pages 137-38 of Latham's edition. 42. A more extended discussion of state censorship in late-sixteenth-century England appears in chapter 3. In the summer of 1599, responding to the increasingly heated exchanges that followed the Marprelate controversy, church and state officials proscribed all satire. The books of Thomas Nashe, formerly a hired pen of the Anglicans, were banned by the bishops in 1599; Thomas Middleton's Microcynicon was publicly burned this same year (see A Tran-

Notes to Pages 61-67 223 script of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, ed. Edward Arber [London, 1876], 3:316). Judging from Spenser's earlier participation in the suppression of the Irish poets, it is possible he would have felt some sympathy with the state's attempts to effect literary order, though it seems less likely that the kind of satire being written in the late sixteenth century by Marston, Hall, Donne, and Jonson would have seemed dangerously seditious and censurable to him. The tension between satire and obsequiousness to the jurisdiction of the state does not seem entirely resolved in the sixth book of The Faerie Queene. 43. Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh, 174. 44. Francis Bacon, "Of Simulation and Dissimulation," The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 77; George Puttenham, TheArte of English Poesie (1589 Facsimile), ed. Baxter Hathaway (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970), 46. 45. In The Faerie Queene, 6.1.7-8, the Blatant Beast is derived from Cerberus and Chimera. In 6.6.9 he is begotten by Typhaon and Echidna. 46. The historical pessimism of the last two books of The Faerie Queene contrasts markedly with the optimism of the earlier books. See, for example, 1.7.1 and 2.8.1-2. 47. Spenser, Dedicatory Letter to Ralegh, Colin Clouts Come Home Again. This letter was probably written one year after the Letter to Ralegh prefacing the 1590 Faerie Queene. 48. For an extensive discussion of this development in book 6—one that reaches conclusions quite different from my own—see Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, 82-96. 49. See The Faerie Queene's dedicatory sonnet to Burghley, as well as 4.Proem.1. See also the earlier Hymne of Heavenly Love, 11.8-12; and Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, 11.288 - 94. Of the former passage Helgerson writes, "Nowhere else does Spenser sound quite so much like a repentant prodigal" (Self-Crowned Laureates, 85), a reference to his general argument in The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berekeley: University of California Press, 1976). My argument in this chapter seeks to qualify Helgerson's claim that in The Faerie Queene Spenser successfully moved his poetry "beyond repentance." 50. On Spenser's general attitude toward satire (an attitude complicated, but not rejected, in Colin Clouts Come HomeAgaine), see Thomas R. Edwards, Imagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 58; and Helgerson, SelfCrowned Laureates, 85n.37. 51. Borris points out that "garnering flowers for a garland was a standard metaphor for literary composition, and it was applied to sermons" ("Diuelish Ceremonies," 182). This is a brilliant observation and, like most of his argument, well supported; but we cannot ignore the self-reflexive aspect of the cannibal priest's crown of laurels—a much more conventional figuration of poetic activities in Renaissance literature. For the classical background of the conception of poesies as poesis, see Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 269. 52. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), especially 24-43, 49-58. 53. Cheney, Spenser's Image of Nature, 106. 54. Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato, 2.18.39-40; cited by Cheney, Spenser's Image, 105. See C. S. Lewis, "Spenser's Irish Experiences and The Faerie Queene" Review of English Studies 7 (1931), 84. 55. In the seventeenth century, Velazquez presents perhaps the most apposite examples in such works as Las Meninas and the royal portrait (self-portrait?) famously frontispieced and discussed by Michel Foucault in his book Les mots et les chases (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 56. Elizabeth Fowler makes this point in an essay that brilliantly considers the breakdown of Spenser's ethical project as a result of tensions arising largely from the Irish campaign. See Fowler, "The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser," Representations 51 (1995), 47-87.

224 Notes to Pages 67-69 57. "Crime" is itself a resonant word in Spenser's conception of erotic poetry as appropriative. In Acrasia's Bower, the male singer's ode on the carpe diem motif is disturbed by the "crime" that such transactions entail (2.12.75). 58. Theresa M. Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 11. This excellent study discusses motifs of privacy and penetration in The Faerie Queene by adducing scenes of violated secrets in Virgilian and Ovidian sources. 59. Richard Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, !993), 91. Kent Van den Berg has much more extensively considered Mercury's disquieting function in the poem as a figure of the artist; see his "The Counterfeit in Personation: Spenser's Prosopopoia" in The Author in His Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism, ed. Louis Martz and Aubrey Williams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). In Hidden Designs: The Critical Profession and Renaissance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986), 55-56, Jonathan Crewe has suggested that the Fox and the Ape are not presented without sympathy in Mother Hubberds Tale, but instead that their poetic rapaciousness is a response to a disfunctional literary and poltical system. 60. Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career, 120-21. Thomas H. Cain has also noted the surprising omission of royal encomium in book 6 (Praise in "The Faerie Queene" [Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1978], 155). 61. In the "Aprill" eclogue, Elizabeth occupies the central, sovereign position of the fourth Grace here assigned to Colin's lady. 62. Truancy from epic is not only Colin's concern in 6.10. The narrator himself asks at the beginning of this canto, "Who now does follow the foule Blatant Beast.. .?" For mirrored concerns in Spenser's lyric, see Amoretti, Sonnets 33 and 80. All references to Spenser's poetry, other than those to The Faerie Queene, appear in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 63. For a reading of Colin's "countrey lasse" as the Rosalind of The Shepheardes Calender, see Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career, 122-23. 64. As a "go-between" negotiating the demands of the court and the allures of the countryside, Calidore would seem to have more autobiographical resonance for Spenser, in the mid-1590s, than more fully sequestered characters such as Meliboee, Tristram, and the Salvage Man. Calidore has for some time been read as a representative of such figures as Sidney and Essex (see The Works of Edmund Spenser, a Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin A. Greenlaw et al. [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932-49], 9:349-64). 65. Harry Berger, Jr., "The Prospect of Imagination: Spenser and the Limits of Poetry," SEL 1 (1961), 94. 66. For a skeptical reading of Calidore's behavior in 6.3, see Richard Neuse, "Book 6 as Conclusion to The Faerie Queene" ELH 35 (1968), 329-53. For suspicion toward the motives and apologies of this intrusion, and toward Calidore's spying on Mt. Acidale, see Cheney, Spenser's Image of Nature, 196-200; Berger, "A Secret Discipline: The Faerie Queene, Book 6," in Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Nelson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 35-75; and Dorothy Gulp, "Courtesy and Fortune's Chance in Book 6 of The Faerie Queene" MP 68 (1971), 254-59. 67. In Gazing on Secret Sights, 222-40, Krier argues strongly against the thorough skepticism that Calidore receives from most readers today, contrasting his intrusions with the "invidious eye" that characterizes other violations of privacy in book 6. Her analysis does not take into account 6.10.11.line 7, however, in which Calidore is said to gaze on the dancers with such pleasure "That euen he him selfe his eyes enuyde"—a line Rambuss aptly describes as a "solipsistic figure for a scene of spying on the fantasy of someone else" (Spenser's Secret Career, 122).

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68. Krier argues that Calidore learns especially from Colin's explication of the Graces (6.10.21-27), and through a resolution of the "male wish for access to self-contained feminine life" (Gazing on Secret Sights, 233, 239-40). Humphrey Tonkin similarly argues that Calidore undergoes an education in true courtesy on Mt. Acidale (Spenser's Courteous Pastoral [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972], 111-55). 69. I quote here from Wyatt's "They fle from me," line 5 (Poem 37 in The Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969]). 70. Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career, 116-17. For a similar observation see Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconodasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 231. 71. Cheney, Spenser's Image of Nature, 194. 72. A passage that Borris persuasively compares with the Puritans' reliance upon selfjustificatory providence ("Diuelish Ceremonies " 179). 73. Cheney, Spenser's Image of Nature, 107. See John Upton in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., 8 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932-57), 6:235. 74. Compare The Faerie Queene 6.8.42: "Her tender sides, her bellie white and clere, / Which like an Altar did it selfe vprere, / To offer sacrifice diuine thereon." Spenser's allusions to the Song of Songs in his presentation of Serena were first noted by Israel Baroway, "The Imagery of Spenser and the Song of Songs," JEGP 33 (1934), 35-6. See also Carl Robinson Sonn, "Spenser's Imagery," ELH 26 (1959), 156-70; Cheney, Spenser's Image of Nature, 108-16; and Nohrnberg, The Analogy of "The Faerie Queene" 714-15. 75. Spenser's description of his "thoughts" as "guests" offers a host of etymological delicatessens: guest can mean not only "stranger" but also, through hostis, "enemy." Hamlet's remark on his father's apparition, "let us as a stranger give it welcome," hints at the ambiguity of Spenser's guest-thoughts in this context. On Spenser's avoidance of explicit reference to the fruit of the Fall in Amoretti 77, see Cheney, Spenser's Image of Nature, 115. 76. Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, 55-100. 77. For a discussion of the vocational threats posed to Spenser by Acrasia and the Bower of Bliss, threats "contained" by their destruction, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 157-92. 78. The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J.W. Hebel et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1931-41), 2:334. For an other interesting poem, by Drayton, on the potential violence of a theater that admits the "profane vulgar," see "The Sacrifice to Apollo." Perhaps referring to Ben Jonson's club room in the Devil Tavern, this poem articulates some of the concerns with the public theater's audience that I ascribe to Jonson in chapter 3. 79. For Harvey's argument that comedy, in particular, "hath been the usual practice of the most exquisite and odd wits in all nations, and specially in Italy, ... to show and advance themselves," see Variorum, 10:471-72. Spenser's most concise comments on the contemporary degeneration of comedy and tragedy appear in The Teares of the Muses, lines 115-234, where like Drayton he laments the admission of the profane vulgar. 80. Hymne of Heavenly Love, 11.11. 81. As suggested in chapter 3, such a reading presents itself especially in Arthur Golding's handling of the Orpheus myth. See Shakespeare's Ovid: Golding's Translation of the "Metamorphoses," ed. W.H.D. Rouse (London: Centaur Press, 1961), 11.17-19. In the Ars Poetica, Horace presents Orpheus as a figure of harmony and civilization (caedibus et victu foedo deterruit Orpheus [line 392]). See also Natalis Comes, Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, ed. Vincenzo Romano (Bari: G. Laterza, 1951), 1:244-247. 82. Donald Bouchard, Milton: A Structural Reading (Montreal: Queen's University Press, 1974), 24-

226

Notes to Pages 74—78

83. John Milton, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, line 549. This and subsequent references to Milton's poetry appear in John Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1968). On the image of interior virtue as it is developed in Milton's Masque, see Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 198-209. 84. In Inwardness and Theater, 199, Maus suggestively compares the Lady's rhetoric with Milton's in Prolusiones VI. The Lady's Orphic threat may also be compared with King Richard's similar pronouncement in Shakespeare's Richard II, 3.2.3-26. James Holly Hanford considers the connection between the Lady in Comus and Milton's Cambridge sobriquet in John Milton, Englishman (New York: Crown, 1949), 63-64. 85. The title-page motto of the 1637 edition of Comus—"Eheu quid volui misero mihi! floribus austrum I Perditus" (from Virgil's Eclogue 2)—has often been read as Milton's regret for publishing the piece. 86. For a fascinating interpretation of Spenser's figurations of Orpheus as representations of threats (specifically female threats) to his vocational cursus, see Joseph Lowenstein, "Echo's Ring: Orpheus and Spenser's Career," ELR 16:2 (1986), 287-302. See also Thomas Cain, "Spenser and the Renaissance Orpheus," University of Toronto Quarterly 41 (1971), 24-47. For a different perspective—ultimately nearer to my own view that Spenser becomes critical of his self-identification with Orpheus—see Harry Berger, "Orpheus, Pan, and the Poetics of Misogyny: Spenser's Critique of Pastoral Love and Art," ELH 50 (1983), 27-60. 87. See The Teares of the Muses, lines 14-15, where Spenser substitutes the Palici (twins of Jupiter and the nymph Thalia) for Orpheus. For Spenser's genealogical claims to Orpheus elsewhere, see Cain, "Spenser and the Renaissance Orpheus," 28-29. 88. In The Teares of the Muses, Clio (Muse of History) speaks first, followed by Melpomene (Muse of Tragedy), Thalia (Muse of Comedy), Euterpe (Muse of Pastoral), Terpsichore (Muse of Dance), Erato (Muse of Lyric Poetry, specifically Love Poetry), Calliope (Muse of Epic), Urania (Muse of Astronomy and Religious Poetry), and ninth, Polyhymnia (Muse of Rhetoric). If we assume that this order implies a hierarchy, there is some precedent for beginning with Clio; and other minor conventional positions can be observed, such as the "higher" status of Urania and Polyhymnia. But the low placement of tragedy here is certainly unusual, perhaps indicating an antitheatrical prejudice. For a discussion of generic hierarchies in the Renaissance, see Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 213-54. 89. Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 3:37. 90. "And Eulogies turne into Elegies": in this context the sense of generic transformation here is relatively straightforward—eulogia, or the fine language of praise, yields to the language of loss. Yet when we compare this reference to blazonic praise with the cannibals' parody of it, "Eulogies" becomes more ambivalent. Eulogia can refer not only to the Eucharistic Host but also to bread—blessed but not consecrated—that is given to noncommunicants at Mass. The process elegized in The Teares of the Muses, and dramatized in The Faerie Queens 6.8.31-46, is one in which the poetic host is prophaned in the mouths of the unholy. 91. Borris notes the latter etymology, but not the connection with traducement ("Diuelish Ceremonies," 183). 92. Compare Culex, lines 268-96. In Georgics 4.485-91, Virgil tells the story with pity, noting that Orpheus's "frenzy" is "meet for pardon": "iamque pedem referens casus evaserat omnis, / redditaque Eurydice superas veniebat ad auras, / pone sequens (namque hanc dederat Proserpina legem), / cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem, / ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes: / restitit, Eurydicenque suam iam luce sub ipsa / immemor heu!" Spenser comes closer to this Virgilian sympathy in Virgils Gnat, 473-80, with lines 475-

Notes to Pages 78-83 227 76 almost directly translating Georgics 4.489 (evidence, perhaps, that the pseudo-Virgilian Culex was not his only source). 93. In van der Noot's work, this twelve-line poem appears among Spenser's first publications as Epigram 6. Later expanded into a sonnet in The Visions of Petrarch, this poem translates Rime 323, lines 61-72. 94. See, for example, Cheney, Spenser's Image of Nature, 201. 95. See Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), ed. D. C. Allen (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1933), 283. William Jaggard printed the two sonnets (138 and 144) in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). On the "ownership" of Shakespeare's poems, see Arthur F. Marroti, "Shakespeare's Sonnets as Literary Property," in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 143-73. 96. Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career, 94. 97. William Ponsonby, "The Printer to the Gentle Reader," quoted from The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Smith and De Selincourt, 470. 98. See Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career, 84-94; Ronald Bond's introduction to Complaints in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems, 217; and John D. Bernard, Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 107. 99. Thomas Middleton, The Black Book (1604), in The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen (London: John C. Nimmo, 1886), 8:31. 100. Debora Shuger presented this reading of Calidore in a fascinating paper she delivered in a panel, "The Poetics of Guilt," I organized for the 1999 Renaissance Society of America conference (March, Los Angeles). 101. Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, 100. In context, the main point here seems to be Spenser's self-differentiation from the repentant "prodigals" who pursued an admittedly purposeless poetry, full of "solace," but devoid of "sentence." 102. Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, for instance, had just been printed (again by Ponsonby) the preceding year. The Shepheardes Calender had been printed in London in several editions by 1596. 103. "Serena" is the name by which Ralegh addresses Elizabeth Throckmorton in "To his Love when hee had obtained Her," and in the Taverham and Folger manuscripts of "Nature that washt her hands in milke." See The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. Latham, 118-19. Walter Oakenshott writes of a copy of The Faerie Queene that belonged to Ralegh's son Carew and in which a hand he identifies as Elizabeth Throckmorton's identifies Ralegh with Timias and Serena with herself ("Carew Ralegh's Copy of Spenser," The Library 5th Series 26 [1971], 1-21). To read Serena as Elizabeth Throckmorton in book 6, however, requires some flexibility; for earlier in Spenser's epic Amoret seems to figure Ralegh's lady. Still the most extensive study of the complex relation between Spenser and Ralegh as it is meditated in The Faerie Queene, Katherine Keller's "Spenser and Ralegh" (ELH i [1934], 37-60) illuminates Timias-Amoret-Belphoebe episodes in books 3 and 4 as spin-control on Ralegh's secret marriage. See also Patrick Cheney, "The Laureate Choir: The Dove as a Vocational Sign in Spenser's Allegory of Ralegh and Elizabeth," HLQ 53:4 (Autumn 1990), 257-80; and William A. Oram, "Spenser's Raleghs," SP 87:3 (Summer 1990), 341-62.I am particularly indebted to Gram's article in this chapter. 104. The gory details of this drama are supplied by A. L. Rouse, Sir Walter Ralegh: His Family and Private Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 158-69. 105. The Shepheardes Calender, Januarye (in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems, 34). 106. Carmel Gaffrey, "Colin Clouts Come Home Againe" (Diss. Edinburgh University, 1982), first connected Bregog with Ralegh, Mulla with Throckmorton, and Old Mole with the queen (Throckmorton's aged guardian). See also Oram, "Spenser's Raleghs," 360-62.

228 Notes to Pages 84-88 107. Donald Cheney has observed the tension between private love and a more public literary role in Spenser's later poetry ("Spenser's Fourtieth Birthday and Related Fictions," Spenser Studies 4 [1983], 6-9). 108. See Oram, "Spenser's Raleghs," 356-58; and his "Elizabethan Fact and Spenserian Fiction," Spenser Studies 4 (1983), 39-45. See also Michael O'Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser's Faerie Queene (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 118. 109. Ralegh, "Sir Walter Ralegh to the Qveen" ("Our Passions are most like to Floods and streames"), lines 23-26 (in The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. Latham). no. For Ralegh's disclaiming of Elizabeth Throckmorton, and his protestations of love for Elizabeth I, see Ocean to Cynthia, lines 336-43; and his letter to Cecil of 10 March 1592 (considered by Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh, 75-78). See also Lefranc, Sir Walter Ralegh, Ecrivain, 135-40; and Donald Davie, "A Reading of The Ocean's Love to Cynthia," in Elizabethan Poetry, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 2 (New York: St. Martin's, 1960), 71-89. 111. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 5.2.8. Earlier in the play, Hamlet (like Horatio) has made an absolute virtue of discretion; see, for example, 3.2.15-6. 112. Harry Berger, Jr., Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Erickson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 123. In this passage and throughout this collection of essays, Berger remains more interested in the complicities of the observer than in those of the author. I try to show that these complicities are often the same. 113. Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 269. 3. The Properties of Shakespeare's Globe 1. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London: 1582), C8v. 2. All references to Gosson's works in this chapter appear in Arthur Kinney's edition (Markets ofBawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson [Austria: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1974]). I have modernized the spelling but retained the punctuation of this edition, and I cite subsequent references to it parenthetically in my text, using Professor Kinney's page numbers; unless otherwise noted, all references to Gosson appear in Playes Confuted in Five Actions. 3. Samuel Daniel, "A Funerall Poeme Upon the Death of the Late Noble Earle of Devonshire" (The Complete Works in Verse and Prose, ed. Alexander Grosart [London, 1885-86], 1:173). Grosart prints these lines, which appear only in manuscript, in a footnote to his edition of the poem. 4. Daniell, "Funerall Poeme," 353-62. 5. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, ed. Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland, 1973), B4r. 6. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, in Prose Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 12 (my italics). 7. An Apology for Poetry, p. 24. 8. See Playes Confuted in Five Actions, 161. 9. For a clear analysis of the pro- and antitheatricalist debate on drama's motivational effect on the audience, see Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 74-75. 10. Gosson specifically objected to the recent arrival of the public stage, noting that even "modest" and "good" plays are "not fit for every man's diet: neither ought they commonly to be shown" (The Schoole of Abuse, 97). 11. A formulation of Michel Foucault's containment model appearing most influentially in Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renais-

Notes to Pages 88-92 229 same England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). See especially the chapter "Invisible Bullets," 21-65. 12. For an excellent discussion of the state's attempts to control topical references on the Renaissance stage, see Paul Yachnin, "The Powerless Theater," English Literary Renaissance, 21:1 (Winter 1991), 49-74. 13. Some editions have Proteus rather than Procrustes here (see Playes Confuted in Five Actions, ed. Arthur Freeman [NewYork: Garland, 1972], D5r). Gosson's classical allusions are notoriously bizarre, and it seems likely that in this passage he may have substituted, at the expense of his metaphor, a commonplace antitheatrical figure (Proteus) that makes little sense in a context calling for Procrustes. 14. The Life of Henry the Fifth, Prologue, 12, 19-20. All references to Shakespeare's dramatic and non-dramatic poetry in this chapter appear in The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974). When it is possible, I cite subsequent references to this edition parenthetically. 15. For an insightful analysis of the ambiguous status of prophecies and omens in this play, see Avraham Oz, "Julius Caesar and the Prophetic Mind," Assaph: Studies in the Theatre, 1:1 (Section C, 1984), 28-39. 16. An Apology for Poetry, 45. 17. Marjorie Garber, '"What's Past Is Prologue': Temporality and Prophecy in Shakespeare's History Plays," in Renaissance Genres, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 301-31. See also Sharon L. Jansen Jaech, "Political Prophecy and Macbeth's 'Sweet Bodements,'" Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), especially p. 291; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Macmillan, 1971), 392-423; and W. Russell Mayes, Historian of the Future: Edmund Spenser and Elizabethan Prophecy (diss, University of Virginia, 1996). In "'Aztec' Auguries and Memories of the Conquest of Mexico" (Renaissance Studies, 6: 3-4 [1992], 287-305), Felipe Fernandez-Armesto considers how the Spanish imperialists exploited and fictionalized historical omens (including, perhaps, several gleaned from Plutarch) in their self-mythologized conquest of the Americas. 18. Richard Hosley, ed., Shakespeare's Holinshed (New York: Capricorn Books, 1968), 48 (Chronicles, 1587 ed., 180). 19. Francis Bacon, "Of Prophecies," in Essays, ed. Edwin A. Abbott, (London: Longmans, Green, 1881), 2:20-21. 20. Following Garber, "What's Past Is Prologue," 311n.15,1 borrow this term from Hayden White's Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 6-7. 21. Henry V, 2. Chorus. 31-32. 22. An Apology for Poetry, 68. Plutarch himself refused the title of "historian," choosing instead to relate and evaluate the "lives" and "minds" of his subjects (see Lives, 5:164-65). North also freely employed culturally determined evaluative license; for a comparison of his Plutarch with the original, emphasizing North's recalibration of the heroic ideal by which the subjects of the Lives were measured, see Reuben Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the GraecoRoman Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 205-17. 23. Plutarch's Liues of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. Sir Thomas North (London, 1579), intro. George Wyndham, 6 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 6: 69-70, 201. 24. Gary Taylor, "Bardicide," in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991, ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 343. Regardless of our response to such claims, we must dismiss as specious Taylor's assertion that the scene also presents "a theatrically impossible dismemberment" (p. 334). The stage directions indicate Cinna is to be dragged offstage for his fate. Moreover, false limbs for such

230 Notes to Pages 92-94 scenes appear in the few extant lists of Elizabethan stage properties, and the illusion of onstage dismemberment seems not to have been impossible in such plays as Doctor Faustus and Titus Andronicus (see Philip Henslowe's inventory of March, 1598, in C. Walter Hodges, The Globe Restored [New York: Coward, McGann, 1953], 71-72. On pp. 73-74, Hodges demonstrates Elizabethan "stage machinery to produce the illusion of a beheading"). 25. Taylor, "Bardicide," 338. 26. Taylor, "Bardicide," 341. 27. The plebeians in Julius Caesar compare unfavorably with both those of his other Roman plays, and the lower ranks presented in his English histories. See Brents Stirling, The Populace in Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949). 28. See North's Plutarch, 6:15. In The Life of Brutus, no mention is made of Brutus's oration; in The Life of Caesar, no mention is made of Antony's. 29. Such is at least the ostensible authorial stance in Venus and Adonis, the epigram of which exhorts, "Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo I Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua" (from Ovid's Amores, 1.15.35-36). The subsequent dedicatory epistle to Henry Wriothesley also distinguishes between the unimportant censure of "the world" and the all-important pleasure of Shakespeare's patron. 30. Arthur F. Marotti remains one of the more vocal proponents of this view. See his "Patronage, Poetry, and Print," Yearbook of English Studies, 21 (1991), 1-26; and his "Shakespeare's Sonnets as Literary Property," in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and SeventeenthCentury English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 143-73. 31. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), ed. D. C. Allen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1933), 283. William Jaggard printed the two sonnets (138 and 144) in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). 32. In "The Politics ofAstrophel and Stella," Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass reveal that the distinction between literary courtship and public courtiership was often blurred in late-sixteenth-century England's "publicly intimate" poetry (Studies in English Literature, 24:1 [Winter 1984], 53-68). For further demonstrations of the difficulty of maintaining privacy in the Elizabethan and Jacobean patronage systems, see Annabel M. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); and David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), especially 109-56,195-234. 33. Taylor observes this fact only to conflate what I am suggesting are the increasingly divergent roles of the patronage poet and the "theatre-poet" in late-sixteenth-century England ("Bardicide," 345n.8). 34. As Katharine Eisaman Maus has demonstrated, James I continued to blur the lines between poetry and politics in his pose as poet-prince, and in his appropriation of theater— particularly the masque—as an institution of self-display (Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], 40,102-10). See also Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), and his Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). 35. Quoted in J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584 -1601 (London: Cape, 1965), 2:119. King James would echo his predecessor in Basilicon Doron: "A King is as one set on a skaffold, whose smallest actions and gestures al the people gazingly doe behold" (The Basilicon Doron of James VI, ed. James Craigie [Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1944], p. 162). For excellent discussions of the ambiguity of both royal pronouncements, see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 88-115; and Stephen Orgel, "Making Greatness Familiar," Genre, 15 (1982), 47.

Notes to Pages 94-97 231 36. The queen's comments were recorded by William Lambarde. See the Arden edition of Shakespeare's King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), Ivii-lxii. 37. The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 3. The queen's claim that Richard II was played outside the Globe prior to or during the Essex rebellion has not been substantiated and may have been intended as the metaphor Greenblatt develops. 38. This self-identification differs from that intended by the de casibus didacticism of a work such as The Mirror for Magistrates. Essex's theatrical propaganda, at least as it was conceived by Elizabeth, sought to change others' perception of her; it was a mirror for the world. In the didactic tradition, artists sought to amend or validate the sovereign's own selfperception and behavior. This is not to say, of course, that artists operating within this tradition could not intend political consequences beyond those desired by the sovereign; or that they could not render the sovereign's image ambiguous and subject to subversive interpretation. But in objecting to Essex's Richard II, Elizabeth objects to his treasonous interpretation itself, not to an artist's Aesopian representation: she objects to an act of audience response that violates her own theatricalized conception of history and her place in it. 39. In one of the best of many recent readings of Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, Charles Harrison describes its anamorphic effect as an intrusion of historicity upon essentiality, "the carefully achieved illusion of its instantaneity, its 'presentness,' damaged beyond repair by the representation of its contingency" ("On the Surface of Painting," Critical Inquiry, 15:2 [Winter 1989], 324). If Shakespeare, like Isabel in Richard II (2.2), indeed conceded such anamorphosis as unavoidable in theater, an interesting contrast—one I attempt to develop in a different context later in this chapter—appears in Ben Jonson's sonnet "In Authorem" which attempts to center the reader's shifting perspective upon an immutable and conclusive "line." 40. Between 1597 and 1599, the Chamberlain's Men probably performed at the Curtain while the Theatre at Shoreditch was being razed and its timber used to build the Globe at Bankside. See Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 1300-1660, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). 41. See Gary Taylor, "Canon and Chronology," in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 121; and Julius Caesar, in The New Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. Marvin Spevack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1-5. 42. From the postmortem inventory of Sir Thomas Brend (16 May 1599). Cited by S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 209. 43. This Privy Council order (enacted 22 June 1600) further specified that there would be only one playhouse allowed "in Surrey in that place which is commonlie called the Banckside or there aboutes" and records that the Chamberlain's Men had chosen the Globe to be that one (see E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923], 2:416). The "inhibition" mentioned by Rosencrantz, in Shakespeare's most extended discussion of the Renaissance stage, is often glossed as an allusion to this order (see Hamlet, 2.2.33n, in The Riverside Shakespeare). 44. This and the preceding quotation of Allen appear in C.W. Wallace, The First London Theatre: Materials for a History Nebraska University Sudies, Number 8, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1913), 278-79. Allen's case did not go to court until 1600, so we have no way of assessing the direct influence of his charges upon Julius Caesar. 45. Hamlet, 2.2.401. 46. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 93.

232 Notes to Pages 97-98 47. Everyman Out of His Humour, 4.3.68. This and all subsequent references to Ben Jonson's drama are taken from Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52). 48. Poetaster, 1.3.7. 49. See Katharine Eisaman Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind, 91,106. In Poetaster, poetry and statecraft indeed merge, as Augustus proclaims: "CAESAR and VIRGIL / Shall differ but in sound" (5.2.2-3). 50. Poetaster, "The Third Sounding," 6,9. Like the other playwrights involved in the War of the Theaters, Jonson imagines an audience that includes antagonistic playwrights and actors bent upon adulterating his text (see "The Third Sounding," 18-20, and Envy's speech, "After the Second Sounding"). One effect of the theatrical war, then, is to literalize the subjective and deliberately misconstruing audience—the audience-turned-actors—which I argue is a source of concern in Julius Caesar. 51. John Michael Archer has convincingly shown that "the paranoid construction of Jonsonian authorship," which "sought to control audiences and readers as well as performers through the authority of the text," was a product of his fear of intelligencers among his own actors and audience (Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], 94 -120). See also Stanley Fish, "AuthorsReaders: Jonson's Community of the Same," Representations, 7 (1984), 26-58. 52. Thomas Dekker, Satiro-Mastix, ed. Josiah H. Penniman (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1962), "To the World," 15-17. 53. Maus, Ben Jonson and The Roman Frame of Mind, 92. 54. Jonson, "To the No Less Noble, by Virtue than Blood: Esme, Lord Aubigny," 7-10. 55. Indeed, Sejanus provides many targets for Taylor's program of exposure. The indictment of Cremutius Cordus in act 3, for instance, presents an untenable claim for the disinterestedness of historiography, a disingenuous denial of contemporary relevance, in a history play judged treasonously implicated by the Privy Council in 1603. For Jonson's ambiguous employment of the humanist sense of historical distance from ancient cultures, see Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 264-93. For the contemporary political resonance of Jonson's Roman tragedies, see especially Annabel Patterson, "Roman-cast Similitude: Ben Jonson and the English Use of Roman History," in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P.A. Ramsey (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts, 1982), 381-94. 56. For Jonson's fully articulated desire for a "blind audience," see the Prologue to The Staple of News. For a discussion of the antagonism between spectacle and word that developed with some continuity throughout Jonson's career, see D. J. Gordon, "Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel Between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones," in The Renaissance Imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 77-101. 57. Ben Jonson, "Epistle to Pembroke." 58. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1968), 7:26-28,31-32. 59. Just as the play's genre is an early topic of debate, so its earliest stage history is contested by the 1609 preface, which advertises Troilus and Cressida as "a new play, neuer stal'd with the stage, neuer clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulger"; the Stationers' Register, which records its existence in February 1603; and the quarto title-page (first state), which advertises the play "As it was acted by the Kings Maiesties seruants at the Globe." 60. The prologue appears only in F1. Pandarus's epilogue appears in Q, but there is evidence in F1 suggesting that he originally made his final exit in 5.3, and that his re-entry to speak the epilogue was a later addition. Otherwise, but for a few superficial variations between Q and F1,the following claims I make for Troilus and Cressida are unaffected by textual problems. On the question of making such textual claims for this play, see Philip Williams, "Shake-

Notes to Pages 99-102 233 speare's Troilus and Cressida: The Relationship of Quarto and Folio," Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950-51), 131-43; and E.A.J. Honingman, The Stability of Shakespeare's Text (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). 61. See, for example, The Schoole of Abuse, 92-93, and Playes Confuted in Five Actions, 194-95. 62. A Refutation of the Apology for Actors..., by I.G. (1605). Quoted in Herschel Baker, The Race of Time: Three Lectures on Renaissance Historiography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 80. 63. James L. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 136. See also his "Appalling Property in Othello" University of Toronto Quarterly, 57:3 (Spring 1988), 353-75 (357). 64. William Caxton's Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, the first product of England's first press, was just one of Shakespeare's available sources. Others include translations of Homer by George Chapman and Arthur Hall, Ovid's Metamorphoses, John Lydgate's Troy Book, Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, and several recorded Elizabethan plays (now lost) concerning the story. A possible influence lies in Euripides' multiple dramatic revaluations of the Troy legend—especially Orestes which, like Shakespeare's play, mixes genres to provide a stubbornly relativistic comment upon the realism beneath epic. The diverse literary heritage of Shakespeare's Troilus material is further traced in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 6:83-111. 65. In an important essay on the play, Carol Cook considers these same issues, though from a Lacanian perspective; see "Unbodied Figures of Desire," Theatre Journal, 38 (March 1986), 34-52 (especially 44-46). 66. If the self-conscious meditation upon the kind of theatrical violence I discuss here indeed has a trajectory in the seventeenth century, it is tempting to find its zenith in 1650, when Andrew Marvell revisited the metaphor of the clapper-claw in a poetic response to regicide: That thence the royal actor born The tragic scaffold might adorn: While round the armed bands Did clap their bloody hands. (An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland [53-56]) 67. See especially Paul Cantor, Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 108-10. 68. This epistemology is developed more fully in the exchange—part of which we have considered—between Achilles and Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.95-111. 69. A similar claim might be made for the earlier Titus Andronicus (1593-94), in which rape and dismemberment render Lavinia's body an annotated text, a silent emblem submitted to others' reconstructive reading. See Douglas E. Green, "Interpreting 'her martyr'd signs': Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus" Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), 317-26. 70. Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.49-62, 208-21. 71. Coriolanus, 3.3.134; 5.3.36; 4.7.42; 5.6.120; 5.2.65-66. Earlier Coriolanus seems to recognize that it is death that submits one to other-fashioning, life that grants the temporary privilege of maintaining one's self-conception: While I remain above the ground you shall Hear from me still, and never of me aught But what is like me formerly. (4.1-51-53)

234

Notes to Pages 102-106

72. David Kaula has found a pattern of eucharistic allusions in the ritual attending Caesar's murder in "'Let Us Be Sacrifices': Religious Motifs in Julius Caesar" Shakespeare Studies, 14 (1981), 197-214. 73. See especially Mark Rose, "Conjuring Caesar: Ceremony, History, and Authority in 1599," in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 264. 74. Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 3-21. 75. See Richard Macksey, "Last Words: The Artes Moriendi and a Transtextual Genre," Genre, 16 (Winter 1983), 508. It is true that Plutarch, though writing in Greek throughout, makes a point of saying that Caesar spoke in Latin to Casca; and we cannot expect that Shakespeare would have been aware of Suetonius and Dio's earlier accounts, which had Caesar saying "Kai su, teknon?" as Brutus stabbed him. But my point here is that "Tu quoque, mifili" and "Et tu, Brute" are later reports, the second a theatrical invention apparently already becoming a convention by the time of Shakespeare's play (in Every Man Out of His Humour, 5.6.79, Jonson would parody it as a cliche). 76. See, for example, Julius Caesar, ed. A. R. Humphreys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 80-81. 77. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 46. 78. A much more extensive and persuasive account of Shakespeare's operation within the patronage system has recently appeared in Alvin Kernan's Shakespeare, The King's Playwright in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). It may be ill advised and unfair for me to quarrel with Kernan's weighty argument in this essay: he considers later drama, written for a different court, performed by a different company, and his emphasis differs greatly from mine. But while Kernan certainly demonstrates aspects of the patronage system in Shakespeare's Stuart drama, his seems to me an overstated case, one that ignores some of the performative issues considered here. 79. Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 7:51-52. Alexander Pope also speaks of Shakespeare's original manuscripts being "cut" and "divided" into the "Piecemeal Parts" of the "Prompter's Book" ("Preface to 'The Works of Shakespear'," in Eighteenth-Century Essays on Shakespeare, ed. D. Nichol Smith [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963], 54). For a more recent description of the Renaissance theater's treatment of dramatic manuscripts, see H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1603-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), especially p. 61. 80. See Twelfth Night, 4.2.89. Like Shylock, Malvolio leaves his play less assimilated than "propertied" by the comedy's reestablished social order. Both characters are exemplary objects of other-fashioning: Shylock is forced to resign his religious and ethnic identity by converting to Christianity; Malvolio is forced to participate in a satire of his Puritanism. Such coercion certainly appears elsewhere in Shakespeare's comedies and romances; but the appropriation of individuals as stage spectacle—as James Calderwood has argued—is essentially a tragic device, a problematic ethos comedy and romance must finally transcend or absorb. See his "Appalling Property in Othello" 353-75. 81. For an excellent history of the political interpretations of Julius Caesar onstage, see John Ripley, "Julius Caesar" on Stage in England and America, 1599-1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). One need only consider the different assessments of Caesar's death in Plutarch, Appian, Dante, Michelangelo, Fulbecke, Sidney, and Milton for a sense of its interpretive possibilities. Significantly, Shakespeare himself seems to meditate on the reiterability and malleability of this scene again in Hamlet, 3.2.103-4, where we learn that Caesar's part has been played by (of

Notes to Pages 106-110 235 all people) Polonius. That the words and actions of a historical figure can be food for even Polonius's mannered histrionics and dubious interpretations seems an awareness already present in Julius Caesar. 82. Sonnet 81, line 10. 83. Coriolanus, 4.7.49-50. 84. Taylor, "Bardicide," 334-38. 85. James Calderwood comes very close to ascribing such a reading to Shakespeare elsewhere, arguing that in Titus Andronicus Shakespeare explores a tension between lyric and dramatic genres suggested in the eleventh book of Golding's Ovid, lines 17-19 (Shakespearean Metadrama, 28-30). In the Renaissance, of course, the Orpheus myth was overdetermined, and frequently interpreted with much more sophistication that the simple treatment of Orpheus as archetypal poet. In Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished (Oxford, 1632), 387, for instance, George Sandys would later allegorize the death of Orpheus as the beginning of an age of civil discord. Such a political and historicized interpretation, in fact, is suggested by the curse Antony prophesies lighting "upon the limbs of men" (see Julius Caesar, 3.1.261-75). 86. Kenneth R.R. Gros Louis, "The Triumph and Death of Orpheus in the English Renaissance," Studies in English Literature, 9:1 (Winter 1969), 63-80. Elizabeth Sewell has claimed that Shakespeare "trusts poetry, if Orpheus is undivided, if poetry and dreams and shadows and the theater are taken as a means toward learning and even toward science" (The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960], 110). 87. Tamburlaine the Great, Parti (Prologue, 1-8), in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 88. Technically, and with a verb that recalls Jane Scrape's needlecraft and Philip's complaint in chapter 1, Antony "pricks" these names by punching holes in the paper on which they already appear. 89. In his reading of Richard II as a dramatization of "the interpretive efforts of the listener," Keir Elam considers Sir Pierce of Exton's construction of Bolingbroke's ambiguous utterance (5.4.1-2, 7-9) as the nexus between an undetermined illocutionary speech-act and perlocutionary action (The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama [London: Methuen, 1980], 164-65). 90. Playing on the double meanings and homophonic alternatives of "cobbler" (11, 19), "soles" (14), "out" (16), "awl" (21), and "withal" (23). 91. For discussions of this first scene and its contemporary religious and political import, see Richard Wilson, "Is this a holiday?': Shakespeare's Roman Holiday," ELH, 54 (1987), 31-44; and Mark Rose, "Conjuring Caesar: Ceremony, History, and Authority in 1599," 256-69. 92. The plebeians' transformation from passive spectators to furious actors inevitably recalls Ovid's account of the death of Orpheus. Murellus calls them "blocks," "stones," "worse than senseless things" for their unreflective devotion to Caesar (1.1.34). In Ovid's account, Orpheus draws the trees, beasts, and stones to follow him, but these same stones become involuntarily "reddened with the blood of the singer" only when the Maenads hurl them at the poet (Ovid's Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955], 259). Antony seems to contrast the plebeians to such passivity, however, when he declares in his funeral oration, "You are not wood, you are not stones" (3.2.142). It would seem here that the semi-autonomous plebeians resemble the bloodthirsty Maenads themselves rather than their inanimate instruments. Shakespeare's Ovidian allusions in Julius Caesar, however, provide little symmetry. The ominous "bird of night" that sits "Even at noon-day upon the market-place / Howling and shrieking" (1.3.26-28), for instance, may recall Ovid's description of the Maenad's attack on Orpheus: "they came thronging / Like birds who see an owl, wandering in daylight" (p. 260). Thus the owl

236 Notes to Pages 111-114 in 1.3 may figure Caesar, soon to be set upon by the conspirators (as Maenads/birds of prey). But if the conspirators are likened to the Maenads here, then reading the plebeians as "stones" turned against the conspirators by Antony's oration, or as Maenads themselves in the dismemberment of Cinna the poet, seems dubious. However, both Caesar and Cinna die like Orpheus, "who stretched out / His hands in supplication, and whose voice / For the first time, moved no one" (p. 260). I would argue that Shakespeare's allusions to the death of Orpheus are in fact overdetermined in Julius Caesar, and that this reflects the play's bifurcation of the tragic victim (Orpheus) into Caesar and Brutus. This bifurcation pivots on the death of Cinna. Thus Antony, the conspirators, and the plebeians are described with reference to the Maenads. 93. Henry V, prologue, 24-25. See also act 3. Chorus. 34-35: "Still be kind / And eke out our performance with your mind." 94. In Macbeth, to cite an extreme Renaissance instance of this conceptual distinction, Macduff's Caesarean birth elides even the conventional agency of the mother (because he is "untimely ripped" from her womb and from the natural birth process, he is considered "not of woman born"). 95. See Michael Dobson, "Accents Yet Unknown: Canonisation and the Claiming of Julius Caesar" in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. Jean I. Marsden (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 11-28.1 am indebted to Dobson's suggestive essay, which I discovered late in the composition of this chapter, in much of this paragraph. He traces the simultaneous canonization and ideological appropriation of Julius Caesar by Royalists (including Jacobites) and by Whigs of various degrees of libertarian leaning. 96. Printed in [Pierre Bayleetal.], A General Dictionary. . . (London, 1734-41), 9:189. This and the following passage from Theobald are quoted by Dobson, "Accents Yet Unknown," 23-24. 97. London Daily Post and Advertiser, 12 April 1739. 98. In Shakespearean Constitutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 70, Jonathan Bate has claimed that "Shakespeare's 'classic' status is a function of both his infinite appropriability . . . and his occasional intractability." In the case of Julius Caesar, the important second half of Bate's formulation still obtains, of course; but as the willful misconstructions in the play (and the egregious misconstrue!'ons of the play—in the eighteenth century and today) demonstrate, little is intractable if one is willing to commit violence: "Exeunt the plebeians, dragging off Cinna" 4. The Witch of Edmonton and the Guilt of Possession 1. I suggest that Thomas Heywood's and Richard Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches may have influenced the trial on which it was based because the play was actually performed before the verdict of this trial was delivered. Any argument directed toward this drama's influence on the judicial process is complicated, however, both by a lack of critical consensus on the play's attitude toward witchcraft, and by the ultimate pardon that the "Lancashire witches" received from Charles I. For accounts of the Lancashire trials of 1634, see George Lymman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 270-71; Wallace Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1911), 146-60; and A. M. Clark, Thomas Heywood (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), 122-26. In Etta Soiref Onat's summary (The Witch of Edmonton: A Critical Edition [New York: Garland, 1980], 47-48): Although the jury was convinced of the guilt of seventeen of the accused, the judges had doubts about the matter and reported the case to the King and the Privy Council. The London authorities then brought in seven of the convicted—among them

Notes to Pages 114—115 237 Margaret Johnson, Frances Dicconson, and Mary Spenser, who appear in our play—to be questioned by Dr. Bridgeman, Bishop of Chester. .. After an examination for witchmarks by a committee headed by the King's physician, Harvey, which produced negative results, Charles I granted pardons to all those surviving; there had been no executions, but three or four had died in prison. Finally the young instigator of the scare confessed that his story had been a fabrication, so that he would not be punished by his father for some disobedience. 2. Such causality is of course difficult to prove in any analysis of "media ethics" (witness even the much debated cause of Princess Diana's recent death). If The Late Lancashire Witches influenced the jury that moved to keep the "real" Lanchasire witches in prison, however, then we have an actual case in which Renaissance drama was directly involved in killing its object of representation—since "three or four" of the supposed witches died in prison. In Big-Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996), 192, Michael Bristol cites an example of racist murder possibly indebted to Othello's discourse of sexual bewitchment. 3. Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (quoted by Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988], 116). In Shakespearean Negotiations, 94-128, Greenblatt considers Harsnett's skepticism, his banishment of exorcism to theater, and Shakespeare's exploitation of the resources of exorcism. In a separate essay, Greenblatt traces the development of skepticism toward witchcraft through Scot ("Shakespeare Bewitched," in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993], 17-42). 4. Onat, The Witch of Edmonton: A Critical Edition, 51-52 (quoting A. W. Ward, Cambridge History of English Literature [New York: Macmillan, 1910], 7:118-19) 5. In Saint Joan (1924; rpt, New York: Random House, 1956), 24, George Bernard Shaw offers one of the more famous defenses of Shakespeare's representation of Joan by claiming that Shakespeare, after attempting to fashion her as "a beautiful and romantic figure," "was told by his scandalized company that English patriotism would never stand a sympathetic representation of a French conquerer." E. M. W. Tillyard, acknowledging the "queer reluctance to allow Shakespeare to have written ill," and designating "the way he treats Joan of Arc" as "the chief reason why people have been hostile to Shakespeare's authorship [of 1 Henry VI]," finds such hostility analogous to "arguing that Shakespeare could not have written King John because he does not mention Magna Carta" (Shakespeare's History Plays [London: Chatto and Windus, 19481,162). Recently Kathryn Schwarz has taken this critique further in a brilliant reading of the ideological disintegration that has Joan at its epicenter: The gesture that defines Joan la Pucelle as 'not Shakespeare's' is not merely a defense of chivalry or good historicism but a symptomatic reproduction of the play's own logic, logic that identifies the familiar through the power of the contrary example: if idealized Englishness is constructed against France's Joan, then the idealized Shakespeare, in controversies over the authorship of this play, has been constructed against a Joan who belongs to someone else entirely. By this logic, to allow Joan into the canon is to endanger the most important bond of all—that which links Shakespeare to his readers and thus to the "Shakespearean." In metatextual negotiations, as with those that take place onstage, the terms in which Joan is defined suggest the fragility of privileged systems of connection ("Fearful Simile: Stealing the Breech in Shakespeare's Chronicle Plays" Shakespeare Quarterly 49:2 [summer 1998], 152).

238 Notes to Pages 115—117 For discussions of 1 Henry Viand some of the problems and motivations of assigning authorship, see Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 51-105; and Gary Taylor, "Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part I" Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 7 (1995), 145-205. 6. In the Arden Macbeth (New York: Random House, 1962), 4.1.43n, Kenneth Muir complains of this passage: "It is to be hoped that this song was altered for Macbeth, as some lines are relevant only to the plot of Middleton's play. But the 1673 edition of Macbeth prints them without alteration. No exit is marked for Hecate and the spurious witches; but the sooner they depart the better." In "Shakespeare Bewitched" (41n42), however, Greenblatt persuasively argues that this moment seems "a deliberate quotation, a marking of the demonic as theatrical"—and, I would add, a marking of the theatrical as appropriative. 7. Janet Adelman, "'Born of a Woman': Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth" in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance (English Institute Essays), ed. Marjorie Garber (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 103. 8. Greenblatt, "Shakespeare Bewitched," 20-21. 9. Greenblatt, "Shakespeare Bewitched," 31. 10. Greenblatt, "Shakespeare Bewitched," 21,31. 11. Greenblatt, "Shakespeare Bewitched," 20. In a note to this essay, Greenblatt suggests more subtly that "the most powerful theatrical acknowledgment of the weakness and vulnerability of witches is in Dekker's Witch of Edmonton, a play that nonetheless stages without protest the witch's execution" (38n15). It is interesting to note that the ethical distinctions made between Shakespeare's and Dekker's play in this essay seem to have collapsed in Greenblatt's subsequent General Introduction to the Norton Shakespeare, where he writes, "It is sobering to reflect that plays like Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606), Thomas Middleton's Witch (before 1616), and Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley's Witch of Edmonton (1621) seem to be less the allies of skepticism than the exploiters of fear" (Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt [New York: W. W. Norton, 1997], 29). 12. The play was written by Dekker, Ford, Rowley, and perhaps one or more others—since the 1658 title page follows this trio with an "&c" (John Webster has also been proposed, though without consensus). Dekker is usually assigned to the witch plot, Rowley to the comic clown scenes, and Ford to the romantic plot—though more recent scholarship has preferred blurring these generic lines. See Gerald Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941-68), 3:269-73; and Onat, The Witch of Edmonton: A Critical Edition, 98-154. 13. Greenblatt, "Shakespeare Bewitched," 22, 36. By the end of this essay, Shakespeare occupies "the position neither of the witchmonger nor the skeptic" but instead "the position of the witch" (36). In what may be an unintentionally mystifying transformation, the potential "evil" of Greenblatt's opportunistic and persecutorial playwright has been displaced by the persecuted and harmless enchanter whose illusions have no identifiable consequences. The preceding logic of this essay, though, has identified in Macbeth currents of both skepticism and witchmongering, two positions taken in the legal and theological discourse of the Renaissance; to then identify Shakespeare with the subject of this discourse is to move from an analysis of the social function of his art to a figurative description of the technique of that art. Greenblatt's earlier questions about Macbeth being "evil," however, are not entirely siphoned off in this essay—though it is interesting to note here that the contrast with The Witch of Edmonton serves to identify a more culpable black magic against which Shakespeare's play looks more benign. But I think that for Greenblatt such questions linger as the honest response of a reader for whom the ethical problems of Shakespeare's dramatic opportunism remain suspect and unresolved. My effort in this chapter is to locate such responses within dramatic texts. 14. I borrow here from Harry Berger, Jr., Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Erickson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). As I sug-

Notes to Pages 118—120 239 gest in my introduction, my difference with Berger lies in my assumption that dramatic "acknowledgment" and "complicity" includes not only the audience but also the playwright. 15. In Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury 12001800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), Thomas Andrew Green distinguishes between the Renaissance legal systems of France, Italy, and Germany, where judges decided the question of guilt or innocence, and that of England—where the judges were restricted to "finding law" (determining the relevant precedents and statutes), while the jury "found fact" (delivered a verdict on the individual case). See also Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 106-7. 16. In Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, 106, Maus notes that in the rest of Europe the execution was typically presented as public spectacle, while the judicial deliberations leading up to it were kept secret; by contrast England publicized the trials of capital cases but typically kept executions "relatively unspectacular affairs." 17. Even today the label "convicted" designates a real change in the legal status of the formerly "accused"—a change wrought by the consensus of juries and judges. As Mother Sawyer's first soliloquy in The Witch of Edmonton reveals, legal "conviction" can also involve convincing the accused that she is what her accusers say she is; in this speech, the causal relation between epistemology and ontology is represented in a scene of method acting by a person who is a spectator of herself. 18. John Gaule, Select cases of conscience touching witches and witchcraft (London, 1646), 194 (this and the following passage from John Cotta are quoted in Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, 112,114). 19. John Cotta, The triall of witch-craft, shewing the true methode of their discovery (London, 1616), 18. Cotta's call for a "curious view" recalls for me the alternative skeptical warning of Horatio, who warns Hamlet against considering "too curiously" the avenue by which a king might be digested by a beggar. 20. Henry Goodcole, The Wonderful Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a Witch, Late of Edmonton, Her Conviction and Condemnation and Death (in Onat, The Witch of Edmonton: A Critical Edition, 381-400 [381,399]). This and future references to Goodcole's The Wonderful Discoverie appear in Onat's edition and are henceforth cited parenthetically by page number. 21. In Goodcole's account, the words I place in parentheses are actually a marginal gloss. Here as throughout his account, Goodcole attempts to preempt frequently voiced skepticism toward witchcraft and possession. For the skeptical position specifically addressed here—that possession is simply psychological delusion—see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 100-106; and Sydney Anglo, "Melancholia and Witchcraft: The Debate Between Wier, Bodin, and Scot," in Folie et deraison a la Renaissance (Brussels: University of Brussels, 1976), 209-28. The possibility that witchcraft might be produced by self-delusion, or by the "phantasms and illusions of demons," appears as early as Reginone of Prum's tenth-century De Ecclesiasticis Disciplinis. 22. See the meeting of Solon and Thespis in Plutarch's Lives, ed. A. H. Clough, 5 vols. (New York: Bigelow, Brown and Company, 1911), 1:209. 23. The word authentic derives from the Greek word authentes, which can mean "murderer" or "one who does something himself" (I further discuss this word in my introduction). In "Hamlet: Equity, Intention, Performance," Luke Wilson has brilliantly discussed the complex ways in which Shakespeare's play achieves performative authenticity by appealing to early modern conceptions of intention as understood in classical and Renaissance theories of legal interpretation; his analysis includes a discussion of The Mousetrap, to which I am indebted (Studies in the Literary Imagination, 24:2 [Fall 1991], 91-113 [98]). 24. The play's 1658 title page is reproduced in Onat is critical edition, 171. According to this title page, the play was "never printed until now," a claim that if true speaks for a cultural need

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Notes to Pages 120-121

for the theatrical representation of witches that survived the official closing of the theaters; indeed this play may have been printed to satisfy that need. 25. The date of this revival is debated. Bentley (The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 1:251-52) assigns it to 1635 or 1636, but Onat (The Witch of Edmonton: A Critical Edition, 162,281) argues for a date as early as 1634. The prologue refers to the anonymous play The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1603?), ascribed to Dekker, Drayton, and Heywood (and sometimes Shakespeare). 26. It is surprising that this reflexive reference to the Cockpit theater in Drury-lane goes unremarked by Onat and other commentators. After the 4 March, 1617, sacking of the Cockpit by London apprentices celebrating Shrove Tuesday, the theater reopened as the Phoenix. But the 1658 title page describes this 1621 play as acted "often at the Cock-pit," and the name Cock-pit clearly continued, after 1617, to refer to the theater renamed the Phoenix. In an indirect but powerful way, however, The Witch of Edmonton's reference to "the Cock-pit" may refer us to the potentially destructive social energies—those of cockfighting, if not those that destroyed the Cock-pit—that must "beat out" the witch if the theater (and the community represented by the morris) is to survive. 27. This detail also appears on the 1658 title page: "Acted by the Princes Servants, often at the Cock-Pit in Drury-Lane, once at Court, with Singular Applause." 28. As James VI of Scotland, the king had become involved in the great prosecution of 1590-1597. For a long time scholars have believed him responsible for fanning the flames of witch belief in England (in 1604 Parliament passed a statute against witchcraft even more severe than that of 1563), but Kittredge "has ... effectively shown that James was not responsible for the passage of the Act, and that the witch-mania did not mount in intensity when the author of the Daemonologie came to the throne of England" (Onat, The Witch of Edmonton: A Critical Edition, 7). In fact there were more executions for witchcraft in the last twenty-two years of Elizabeth's reign than during the twenty-two years of James's reign. The Daemonologie, moreover, is far from a simple defense of persecution; it devotes much of its space to skeptical attacks on "impostures," and to exposures of farcical legal proceedings. As with Goodcole's account of Elizabeth Sawyer's trial, however (and as with The Witch of Edmonton for that matter), the incorporation of skepticism can strengthen the legitimacy of "valid" witchcraft trials. For analyses of potentially subversive energies given "license" in the Book of Sports, see David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 63-68; and Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 7-8, 22; Marcus's study also addresses James's attempt to moderate the prosecution of witches (90-92, 280). 29. Philip Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses (1583), ed. Furnivall, 1:147. 30. In the margin of The Wonderful Discoverie, 396, Goodcole returns to this complaint when he asks Sawyer if the devil has visited her in prison: "I asked this question because it was rumoured that the Devil came to her since her conviction, and shamelessly printed and openly sung in a ballad, to which many gave too much credit." Goodcole's concern to disprove the rumor that Sawyer was possessed "since her conviction" seems designed further to authenticate her testimony against herself. 31. Goodcole's dismissal of the ballads circulating after Sawyer's execution actually aligns him with skeptics such as Harsnett—who in response to a fraudulent exorcism complains that ballads serve to popularize and further mystify the fiction by spreading it to the credulous masses (see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 102). The skepticism allowed and even encouraged in Goodcole's homiletic account is genuinely surprising, but each concession serves to mask and strengthen his underlying polemical position; consider, for example, his first admission: "The publication of this subject whereof now I write, hath been importunity [sic] extorted from me, who would have been content to have concealed it, knowing the di-

Notes to Pages 122-126 241 versity of opinions concerning things of this nature, and that not amongst the ignorant, but among some of the learned. For my part I meddle here with nothing but matter of fact..." (Wonderful Discoverie, 381). 32. Again I am indebted in a rather oblique way to Wilson's observation of the concordance between law and dramatic script (as initial intentions), equity and performance (as anticipated "supplemental" intentions), in "Hamlet: Equity, Intention, Performance" (especially 91-99). 33. Hamlet, 2.2.603-4. In Goodcole's narrative the Justice, Arthur Robinson, is carefully distinguished from the more "slight and ridiculous" aspects of Sawyer's examination. Throughout the trial he is the one pushing for more "empirical evidence" (see, for example, The Wonderful Discoverie, 386-87), and it is fair to say Goodcole identifies with him as a voice of reason and judgment. 34. Anthony B. Dawson, "Witchcraft/Bigamy: Cultural Conflict in The Witch of Edmonton" in Renaissance Drama 20, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 84-85. Dawson is right to point out that madness and witchcraft were rarely directly associated in the Renaissance (see Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study [London: Routledge, 1970], 183). However, Mother Sawyer's "madness" (4.1.153) is a source of interest in The Witch of Edmonton. The play similarly conflates demonic possession and witchcraft, topics with a complex relation in the period (see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971], 470-85). 35. When Sawyer informs Ratcliff she is a lawyer, Ratcliff begs, "Let me scratch thy Face" (4.1.181). This antilegal satire also reflects a witch belief held well into the nineteenth century: a victim of witchcraft was thought to be able to free herself from a curse by drawing blood from the witch "above the breath." 36. Anne's madness and its apparent causal indeterminacy have aroused critical interest. David Atkinson observes that "the play does not make it entirely clear whether or not the witch really is responsible for the death of Anne Ratcliff," suggesting that "the episode was probably imperfectly assimilated from the source" ("Moral Knowledge and the Double Action in The Witch of Edmonton" SEL 25:8 (Spring 1985), 431. Michael Hattaway writes: "The text makes it legitimate to conjecture that [Anne's] madness arose independently of the devil's action," the "motives for action aris[ing] out of social transactions" that leave the "chains of causation ... incomplete" ("Women and Witchcraft: The Case of The Witch of Edmonton" Trivium 20 [May 1985], 53). I think that this debate can be accommodated by my argument that the question of causality and responsibility is a product of the playwrights' revision of their legal source—a revision that makes the play itself a responsible party to Anne Ratcliffe's manner of dying. 37. Berger, Making Trifles of Terrors, 103. 38. Onat, The Witch of Edmonton: A Critical Edition, 158. Onat notes that the titles of Goodcole's two surviving pamphlets "suggest that they were calculated to appeal to the readers' sensations"; and that "it is not unlikely that he, like the Prince's men, desired to capitalize on the events [of Sawyer's execution] by publishing a pamphlet for which there was an ample reading public." 39. Reginald Trevor Davies has claimed that the play's late publication date reflects its advocacy of witchmongering policies held in check (through print-censorship) by the Stuarts but supported more firmly by the Protectorate (Four Centuries of Witch-Beliefs s [London: Methuen, 1947], 112-17). Onat (The Witch of Edmonton: A Critical Edition, 157-58) points out the obvious flaws in this argument, but it is worth noting that the play-text did have relevance and commercial value in the Protectorate period—despite any skepticism and anti-Puritan satire we detect in it. The play's appearance as a text may respond simply to the unavailability of public theater in this period, but the ways in which that text is interpreted (for publication advertisement) are nonetheless significant.

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Notes to Pages 126-128

40. On the play as homiletic drama, see Henry Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy 1575-1642 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 141; Andrew Clark, Domestic Drama: A Survey of the Origins, Antecedents and Nature of the Domestic Play in England, 15001640 (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1975), 1:209-10; and Viviana Comensoli, "Witchcraft and Domestic Tragedy in The Witch of Edmonton," in The Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jean R. Brink, Allison P. Coudert, and Maryanne C. Horowitz, (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1989), 43-60. The tragicomic note is struck at the play's conclusion by Old Cartwright's attempt to balance Frank's execution with the promise of marriage: "So let's every man home to Edmonton with heavy hearts, yet as merry as we can, though not as we would" (5.3.167-69); and by Winnifred's Epilogue, which acknowledges her widow status but looks forward with "modest hopes" to a figurative second marriage that will be affirmed by the "noble tongues" of a "gentle" audience (Epilogue, 5-6). 41. Samuel Harsnett, A Discovery of the Fraudulent Practices of J. Darrel. . . concerning the pretended possession and dispossession of W. Somers, etc. (1599), 142 (quoted in Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 186ng. For Harsnett's comments on witchcraft and its relation to exorcism, see A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London: lames Roberts, 1603), 135-36. In any discussion of Harsnett's skepticism and its relation to a play such as The Witch of Edmonton, it is important to realize that Harsnett rarely if ever expresses sympathy with the "victims" of theatrical fraud. In "Shakespeare and Harsnett: 'Pregnant to Good Pity'?" (SEL 38:2 [1998], 251-64), Amy Wolf argues that sympathy with the "victims" of exorcism is a Shakespearean contribution to Harsnett's skepticism (which tends to treat the exorcised as conspirators). This distribution applies equally well to any sympathy with Sawyer we find in The Witch of Edmonton: though it may come from Scot, it does not come from Harsnett. 42. See Harsnett, A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, 150; and A Discovery of the Fraudulent Practices of J. Darrel, 142. 43. John Fletcher, "To the Reader," The Faithful Shepherdess (in The Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976], 3:497). Cyrus Hoy argues of Fletcherian tragicomedy that its weakness "lies in the formal arbitrariness of the definition" (The Hyacinth Room: An Investigation of the Nature of Comedy, Tragedy, and Tragicomedy [New York: Knopf, 1964], 210). But Alastair Fowler notes that Fletcher "certainly knew that Shakespeare's plays and his own explored more subtly and pervasively mixed actions containing apparent or virtual deaths, of a sort hardly covered by the popular definition he offers" (Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982], 188 [see also 26,31,185-87, 244]). For an example of a quasiFletcherian witchcraft tragicomedy, see Thomas Middleton's The Witch. For a discussion of Harsnett's idea of tragicomedy and its relevance for the Renaissance stage, see Herbert Berry, "Italian Definitions of Tragedy and Comedy Arrive in England," SEL 14 (1974), 179-87. 44. Before the prologue of The Witch of Edmonton, "The whole Argument" of the play is presented in "this Dystich": Forc'd Marriage, Murder; Murder, Blood requires: Reproach, Revenge; Revenge, Hells help desires. Much of the play's criticism responds to the tenuous connections between bigamy and witch plots. Dawson's article, "Witchcraft/Bigamy: Cultural Conflict in The Witch of Edmonton" goes the farthest toward exploring the "semantic assymetries" in this distich, the connective gaps and leaps in the play's structure—and the complex social negotiations they perform. 45. This pamphlet survives in the British Museum. I quote its title from Onat, The Witch of Edmonton: A Critical Edition, 158.

Notes to Pages 128—131

243

46. Stage directions from The Tempest (after 5.1.171), and The Winter's Tale (after 5.3.20). Paulina's advice to Leontes—that he "awake" his "faith" and "resolve" "For more amazement"—requires that she deny occult powers (5.3.86-91, 94-95). 47. The Winter's Tale, 5.3.94-95. 48. Dawson notes that "none of the other witch plays of the period display the witch in the process of turning to witchcraft" ("Witchcraft/Bigamy: Cultural Conflict in The Witch of Edmonton," 80). 49. Dawson, "Witchcraft / Bigamy," 81. 50. Sawyer's "possession" by her role in this play can be distinguished from the "otherfashioning" investigated in Julius Caesar: in the case of Sawyer, possession requires the subject's partial acceptance of her representation, while in the case of Cinna the poet, no cooperation is necessary from the victim of theatrical appropriation. "Other-fashioning" works to convince spectators of the malleability of a silenced subject; "possession" at least partly works to convince the subject as a spectator of itself. In Sawyer's case, "credit" is seductive because it offers her the transgressive and vengeful power of cursing her enemies "to death or shame." 51. Dawson, "Witchcraft / Bigamy," 94. 52. The illustration on the title page of the 1658 edition of the play suggests that Young Banks's comic subplot balanced any tragedy produced by the witchplot: in the lower left-hand corner of the illustration, Banks stands waist-deep in a pond (a victim of the Familiar's fairly benign fooling), exclaiming, "Help help I am Drownd"—a quotation of 3.1.90. In the upper left appears the black Dog, speaking his first line to Sawyer in the play ("Ho haue I found thee Cursing"). In the upper right corner, Mother Sawyer repeats the oath the Familiar teaches her. This illustration suggests a reading that the text largely supports: that the Banks subplot is much less consequential than that of the main plot. The seriousness of this main plot would have rested, for a Renaissance audience, in the power with which oaths and curses were invested in the period. 53. Dawson reaches his insight by applying Alan Macfarlane's observation that most witchcraft accusers in the early modern period had acted against the unwritten rules of charity by refusing the accused a gift or donation (Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study, 150-55,195-97). Citing other historical sources, Viviana Comensoli makes a similar point in an article published the same year as Dawson's ("Witchcraft and Domestic Tragedy in The Witch of Edmonton" [above, n. 40]). 54. Dawson, "Witchcraft / Bigamy," 83. 55. Dawson, "Witchcraft / Bigamy," 91. Even in the second quotation, Dawson seems uncertain about intentionality; the sentence reads, "The text's support for the morris (like that of the society it represents) can in fact be read as a gesture aimed at assuaging social guilt" (my emphasis). 56. Leah S. Marcus, "Politics and Pastoral: Writing the Court on the Countryside," in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (London: Macmillan, 1994), 159. Marcus supports her argument, which does not explicitly address Dawson, by observing that the play represents moral turpitude in James's bucolic countryside; and by showing that the ambiguous morris does not apparently reintegrate the community according to the Jacobean program announced in the Book of Sports. 57. K. M. Briggs has suggested a possible source for Frank Thorney's murder of Susan in a ballad published between 1640 and 1655 (see Pale Hecate's Team [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962], 96. This attribution, if correct, further reflects the playwrights' contamination of their "legal" source with the "lewd Balladmongers" Goodcole condemns. 58. Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Complete Works, ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas J. Wise (London: [W. Heinemann,]1926), 12:395. 59. As Dawson has shown, the very tenuity of the play's connection between witchcraft and bigamy provides the necessary space for a social criticism to which Swinburne here seems deaf.

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Notes to Pages 132—140

60. Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, 197,507,3,172,9 (quoted in Greenblatt, "Shakespeare Bewitched," 24-25). While I am indebted to Greenblatt in this part of my paragraph, I disagree with his assertion that Scot's wordplay "ironically re-enchant [s] what he most wishes to disenchant." I would agree, however, to such a reading of a dramatic work like The Witch of Edmonton, which marks witchcraft off as metaphor only to literalize it. 61. William Rankins, A Mirrour of Monsters, ed. Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland, 1973), E.i. Like Stubbes, Rankins may be investing the theater with a literally demonic power here; writing just a few years after the publication of Scot's Discoverie, however, Rankins seems to be appropriating the figurative disenchantment of skepticism for his own antitheatricalist argument. 62. Diabolical powers of divination were conventionally ascribed to witches capable of such perspicuous charges, but I think it is more interesting to read Clarington's response as an anxious and gendered reaction to Sawyer's threatening category of "Men-witches." 63. On the cultural conception of the familiar in Renaissance England, see Barbara Rosen, ed., Witchcraft in England, 1558-1618 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 17-18; and Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 530-31. Onat devotes some time to the question of whether Dog was represented on two or four legs, and reminds us that The Witch of Edmonton's audience "did not think of the devil-dog onstage as either a real dog or as a real devil" (The Witch of Edmonton: A Critical Edition, 308). The play clearly has some fun with the implausibility of an actor playing a dog; in 4.1, for instance, Young Banks questions his father's identification of Dog's barking as "the voice of a dog": "The voice of a Dog? if that voice were a Dog's, what voice had my Mother?" (247-48). Young Banks then proceeds to imitate Dog's barking, claiming to have produced the barking his father heard. For accounts of twentieth-century productions of the play that describe the portrayal of Dog, see Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 27-28. 64. Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, 1.1.81 (ed. Irving Ribner [New York: Odyssey Press, 1966]). 65. Dawson describes Sawyer as innocent on the "natural" level, but guilty on the "supernatural" level ("Witchcraft/Bigamy," 83). For a discussion of natural and supernatural categories of action, see Peter Stallybrass, "Macbeth and Witchcraft," in Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge, 1982), 206. 66. See Twelfth Night, 5.1.378. 67. In Goodcole's narrative, the prayer is "Sanctibicetur nomen tuum," and Sawyer goes on to declare herself ignorant of any more Latin (Wonderful Discoverie, 395). In the play, the quarto's various spellings of the prayer also suggest an imperfect grasp of Latin, though in one instance the playwright's intriguingly show Sawyer parrying with Dog in passable Latin, and declaring, "I'm an expert Scholar; / Speak Latine, or I know not well what Language, / As well as the best of'em" (2.1.177-79). 68. There is nothing inherently problematic or noteworthy, that is, in Samson's offstage death. Here Milton had the precedent not only of Greek tragedy and of Renaissance neoSenecan closet drama, but also (as Gordon Braden has pointed out to me) of the contemporary French stage. From Prometheus Bound to Garnier's La reine d'Escosse, Milton had several models for his closet drama's offstage catastrophe. And of course an onstage death, such as Hamlet's, hardly resolves interpretive questions for those who survive as spectators. 5. Samson's Death by Theater and Milton's Art of Dying 1. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G. R. Potter and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953-62). 2. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.4.11-12 (in The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974]); and ThePoetical Works of Robert Browning, ed. Ian Jack and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983-88).

Notes to Pages 140-141 245 3. John Milton, Samson Agonistes, line 1579. This and all subsequent references to Milton's poetry appear in Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1968); subsequent references to this edition appear parenthetically in my text with the conventional abbreviations: SA for Samson Agonistes, PL for Paradise Lost, and PR for Paradise Regained. 4. Stanley Fish, "Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes" Critical Inquiry 15:3 (Spring 1989), 556-86. 5. For an extensive survey of the various regenerationist, typological, and skeptical positions (and bibliographies) against or within which "anyone who would join—or rejoin—this critical debate at this juncture should declare his or her assumptions at the outset," see Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, "Milton's Samson and the 'New Acquist of True [Political] Experience,'" Milton Studies 24 (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 233-52 (especially 23334 and nn. 1-4). Though Lewalski's essay demonstrates the vitality "this critical debate" still enjoys, anyone familiar with the last two decades' scholarship on Samson Agonistes will recognize her fulfillment of at least two of the generic expectations of the contemporary Samson Article: the rehearsal of the regenerationist and skeptical debate itself, and the introductory mention of the central site of this debate—Samuel Johnson's observation that Milton's play "must be allowed to want a middle." This expectation, at least, I have met. A fine example of the regenerationist position appears in Albert C. Labriola's essay, "Divine Urgency as a Motive for Conduct in Samson Agonistes" (Philological Quarterly, 50 [1971] 99-107). Labriola's argument anticipates the skeptical reading of the play by confronting the problem that Samson seems just as convinced that the "intimate impulse" that occasioned his first marriage "was of God" as he is of the authenticity of the "rousing motions" in the temple. Labriola also anticipates my application of the ars moriendi to this play when he compares the first stage of death delineated in De Doctrina Christiana with Samson's "slavish subjection to sin and the devil, which constitutes ... the death of the will" (104); indeed, Labriola stops just short of applying the art of dying conventions to this play when he analyzes Samson's stages of temptation and inspiration (especially 105-7). Other critics who have considered the role of visitants in the play through the "good temptation" defined in De Doctrina include Ann Gossman, "Milton's Samson as the Tragic Hero Purified by Trial," JEGP 61 (1962), 535-36; John Steadman, '"Faithful Champion': The Theological Basis of Milton's Hero of Faith," Anglia 77 (i959). especially 25-26; William O. Harris, "Despair and 'Patience as the Truest Fortitude' in Samson Agonistes" ELH 30 (1963), especially 120; and Paul R. Baumgartner, "Milton and Patience," SP 60 (1963), 208-14. Without mentioning the art of dying explicitly, these studies have illuminated for me its presence in Milton's play. The skeptical revision of the play appears in Stanley Fish, "Question and Answer in Samson Agonistes" Critical Quarterly 11 (Autumn 1969), 237-64; most provocatively in Joseph A. Wittreich, Interpreting "Samson Agonistes" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); and perhaps most influentially in Fish's "sequel," "Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes." 6. The generic label ars moriendi originates with the anonymous fifteenth-century Tractatus artis bene moriendi (sometimes appearing as Speculum, arris bene moriendi). The phrase ars moriendi can be traced as far back as the moral essays of Cicero and Seneca, however, and my focus on Protestant adaptations of the art of dying in this chapter should not leave the extent of the tradition unnoted. For what remains the most exhaustive bibliographic study of the tradition, including its classical and medival predecessors, see Sister Mary Catherine O'Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). For a more analytical survey of the chief examples of the genre in Renaissance England, see Nancy Lee Beaty, The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the Ars Moriendi in England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). The Reformation's important intellectual and literary influences upon the genre are examined by Beaty, 108-270,

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and by David W. Atkinson, "The English ars moriendi: Its Protestant Transformation," Renaissance and Reformation, Renaissance et Reforme, New Series 6:1 (Februaruy, 1982), 1-10. 7. Samuel Johnson, Rambler 139 (Tuesday 16, July 1751), in The Complete Prose Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 4:376. 8. Thus Milton enigmatically and perhaps wryly concludes his cryptic discussion of Aristotelian structure in "Of That Sort of Dramatic Poem Which Is Called Tragedy": "It suffices if the whole drama be found not produced beyond the fifth act." He says nothing of beginnings and middles in this "epistle," and his definition of mimesis as "passions well imitated" might similarly be read as an adaptation of Aristotelian expectations for a poem devoted to the representation and analysis of dying. 9. The Visitatio infirmorum constituted the liturgical foundation of the ars moriendi. See O'Connor, The Art of Dying Well, 24,172-73; and Beaty, The Craft of Dying, 2-3, 237- 40, 246. 10. The relation between the ars moriendi and this morality play is explored by Donald F. Duclow, "Everyman and the Ars Moriendi: Fifteenth-Century Ceremonies of Dying," FifteenthCentury Studies 6 (1983), 93-113. 11. Fish, "Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes" 556. 12. Cherrel Guilfoyle has noted that by the mid seventeenth century, "to agonise" could mean "to die" in England ("'If Shape it Might Be Call'd That Shape Had None': Aspects of Death in Milton," Milton Studies 13 [Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979], 49 and n.52). Moriens becomes the generic name of the subject of the art of dying in the anonymous fifteenth-century Ars Moriendi, Editio Princeps (the most accessible copy of which appears today in the Holbein Society's facsimile of the British Museum's manuscript [ed. W. H. Rylands, London: Wyman and Sons, 1881]). In 1490 William Caxton published a translated and abridged prose version of this work, the "Art & Crafte to Knowe Well to Dye" (see O'Connor, The Art of Dying Well, 1-10). 13. In Ryland's edition of the Ars Moriendi, for instance, the ninth folio page (labeled "Temptacio dyaboli de auaricia") presents three demons surrounding the bed and tempting Moriens with wine, horses, his wife, and other emblems of domestic ease. 14. Atkinson, "The English ars moriendi," 2-6. The Protestant arts of dying of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries questioned the efficacy of deathbed repentance and the viaticum, predictably emphasized faith rather than works, and sought to replace the hora mortis as a key to salvation with a narratable life as an index into election. 15. David E. Stannard's phrase in The Puritan Way of Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 73. 16. The Sicke Mannes Salve appears in Becon's Workes (STC 1710), vol. 2, fols. ccxviivcclxxxiii.v All references to the Salve in this paper are taken from Prayers and Other Pieces of Thomas Becon, S.T.P., ed. Rev. John Ayre (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), 87-191 and are cited parenthetically by the page numbers of this edition, abbreviated as Salve. For the immense and enduring popularity of this work in Protestant England, see Beaty, The Craft of Dying, no. At least eleven editions were printed between its first appearance and the end of the century, and at least seven more were printed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Becon's was also the most imitated art of dying in the Renaissance, with countless subsequent titles (such as William Perkins's A Salve for a Sicke Man) attesting to its influence. 17. As elsewhere in Becon's work, Philemon serves as the author's principal raisonneur (Becon used the name as a pseudonym). Beaty (The Craft of Dying, 113-14) traces the biblical referents of this and the rest of Becon's dramatis personae; and she is certainly right in claiming that these names are "appropriate less for their historical references than because they all suggest types of godliness," as she is right in describing the comforters as "almost completely

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undifferentiated" (indeed, like a Chorus). Eusebius, however, would become a historically significant name for Foxe: the extended 1570 edition of Acts and Monuments includes the period of Roman persecutions described graphically by Eusebius of Caesarea. 18. The blurring of death in life is a central image in Paradise Lost (see, e.g., PL, 10.1028). In the context of my argument that Samson is portrayed as a type of Moriens, however, we might look farther back for analogues. In his initial encounter with Satan, for instance, Dante hovers between life and death as Virgil arms him with fortitude (Inferno, 34.20-27). 19. See Samson Agonistes, 176-77. In The Sick Man's Salve, Epaphroditus complains of his failing tongue, senses, and memory (94). 20. See Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death, 72-134; and Arthur Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942), 169 and passim. 21. Camille Wells Slights, The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 292. Slights discusses two casuistical works at length in her discussion of Samson Agonistes: William Perkins's A Case of Conscience and Jeremy Taylor's Ductor Dubitantium. Perkins, as we have seen, authored A Salve for a Sick Man (1595) in obvious imitation of Becon; Taylor's Holy Dying (1651) is generally considered the pinnacle of the ars moriendi tradition (see Beaty, The Craft of Dying, 197-270). References to Holy Dying in this chapter appear in Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, 2nd edition (London: Printed for R. Royston, 1652). 22. Slights, The Casuistical Tradition, 262. 23. Slights, The Casuistical Tradition, 294. 24. Fish, "Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes" 571. In this formulation, of course, Fish's skepticism and any argument that would refute it fall outside the realm of dramatic criticism: his elusive "confidence" requires either a literal theophany or faith in things not seen (both difficult effects in the theater, even closet drama). A fairer paraphrase of Fish's general argument in this essay, however, might be that there is no way to be confident that Samson's reported motions signify what he perceives as a communication between himself and God (though Milton's Argument makes it clear that Samson understands his summons to the temple, at least, as "from God"). 25. Though Slights seems to suggest one possibility in her comparison of Milton's "ode" (SA, 667-709) with an ode in Antigone (The Casuistical Tradition, 272-74). For an analysis of classical and Hebrew models of consolation in Samson Agonistes, see Lynn Veach Sadler, Consolation in Samson Agonistes: Regeneration and Typology (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1979), 8-43. 26. For the syncretic effects of humanism and the classical way of death upon the Renaissance ars moriendi, see Beaty, The Craft of Dying, 54-107. 27. G. W. Pigman III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 28. Jeremy Taylor, Holy Dying, 81,106. 29. Though Epaphroditus reveals that his motions are contemporaneous with Philemon's "godly communication," the relation is not necessarily causal; it seems instead as though the dying man has been participating in two conversations at the same time. For a discussion of the retrospective search for causes and temporal origins occasioned by Samson's motions, see Fish, "Question and Answer in 'Samson Agonistes,'" 255-27. 30. A word specifically associated with the Calvinist ars moriendi in such works as Edmund Bunny's Resolution (1584), an appropriation of Robert Parson's Jesuit Christian Exercise (see Beaty, The Craft of Dying, 158-9). Hamlefs "native hue of resolution" is just one of many instances in Renaissance drama where the word is associated with the "action" of dying (3.1.84,88). 31. George Herbert, "Affliction (I)," 55-56, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941).

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Notes to Pages 150—153

32. For the most complete discussion of this passage and its possible authorial intentions, see Stephen B. Dobranski, "Samson and the Omissa," SEL 36:1 (Winter 1996), 149-69. 33. William Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Trinity Press, 1963), 142. In Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994, 42-66), Laura Lunger Knoppers compares Samson's suffering and death with the execution of the regicides in 1660, claiming that for Milton their death represented a contemporary martyrdom. 34. The nature of Samson's death, an apparently suicidal act of vengeance in the Judges account, was a traditional exegetical question. In Biathanatos, John Donne apologized Samson's death as "intended ... accidentally" (Ernest W. Sullivan II, ed. [London: Associated University Presses, 1984] ,141). 35. For the centrality of reported gestures in Foxe's treatment of the Marian martyrs, see John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563-1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 9. 36. John Day entered The Sycke Mans Salve for publication in the Stationers' Register in 1558, though the earliest extant copy of the book is dated 1561. Foxe's reference to Becon's persecution appears in Actes and Monumentes, ed. S. R. Cattley (London, 1837), 6:610. For further discussion of the connection between Foxe and Becon, see John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 112-13,116-17. 37. Fish, "Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes" 586. 38. These phrases appear in Othello, 3.3.360 and King Lear, 1.2.92, respectively. 39. The verb agein (the etymon of agonist, "actor") further suggests agonistikos, "contender in athletic games." See also the definition of actor in Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words (London, 1658). 40. Richard Macksey, "Last Words: The Artes Moriendi and a Transtextual Genre," Genre 16 (Winter 1983), 493-516. 41. For an excellent discussion of the relation between the contemplatio mortis and the ars moriendi tradition in Renaissance dramatic conventions, see Michael Flachmann, "Fitted for Death: Measure for Measure and the Contemplatio Mortis" ELR 22:2 (Spring 1992), 222-41. 42. Henry Vaughan, "Rules and Lessons," 125-6, in Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 196. 43. See Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Cromm Helm, 1984); Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (New York: AMS Press, 1964); T.S.R. Boase, Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgment, and Remembrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 102,106, 109; Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 74-75; and Henriette s'Jacob, Idealism and Realism: A Study of Sepulchral Symbolism (Leiden: 1954), 46-47. 44. For the Renaissance conflation of ars moriendi and ars vivendi, see Beaty, The Craft of Dying, 101-4, 204-20. 45. See De Doctrina Christiana (in The Cambridge Milton, 15:203-20); and Cherrell Guilfoyle, '"If Shape It Might Be Call'd That Shape Had None': Aspects of Death in Milton," 35-40. 46. Essais, I:2o. For an analysis of Montaigne's "evolutionary" attitude toward death, arguing for its increasing equation with the work of life, see Donald M. Frame, Montaigne's Discovery of Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 30-48. 47. See Fish, "Question and Answer in 'Samson Agonistes,'" 252-55; and "Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes" 574-79. 48. I have further traced the verbal and situational similarities between Caesar's interview with Decius Brutus and Samson's exchange with the Philistine officer in "Shakespeare's Rome

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in Milton's Gaza? Echos and Presences in Samson Agonistes"ELN 34:4 (June 1997), 1-10. Caesar is hardly an arbitrary figure to consider regarding representations of either Charles or Cromwell, or the ambiguity such representations often recorded and caused. In An Homtian Ode Caesar functions with famous overdetermination, figuring both king and protector; similarly, Charles's collection of Mantegna's sequenced paintings, The Triumphs of Julius Caesar, subsequently appeared in Cromwell's Hampton Court. 49. Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 82. 50. Ben Jonson, Eastward Hoe, 2.2.7. All references to Jonson's drama in this chapter appear in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52). I modernize the spelling and hereafter cite references parenthetically (by act, scene, and line number). 51. For a study that locates Milton's play within mid-seventeenth-century controversies over providence (and the heightened skepticism directed toward providential historiography), see Robert Wilcher, "Samson Agonistes and the Problem of History," Renaissance and Modern Studies 26 (1982), 108-33. 52. The Oxford editors (9:645) assign the preceding passages to Jonson, though authorial attribution for Eastward Hoe (which Jonson wrote with Marston and Chapman) must always be followed by a question mark. 53. Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 15:291. 54. Milton and Jeremy Collier read passages of Acts and Monuments skeptically. Collier's objections, in The Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (1702), are discussed by George Townsend in The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe (New York: AMS Press, 1965), I:179-87. John R. Knott has demonstrated Milton's iconoclastic skepticism toward Foxe's individual "portraits," particularly those of the early martyrs, in Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 15631694,154-57In OfPrelatical Episcopacy, Milton objects to the Foxean method of misleading credulous readers with dramatized "fragments of old Martyrologies, and legends" (this and all later references to Milton's prose appear in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, et al., 8 vols. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82]; subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically by volume and page number). 55. David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 58. 56. Ernest B. Gilman, Iconodasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 2. Milton wrote no poetry in the decade following the publication of Eikonoklastes, and Thomas Corns has argued that even his prose following this work eschews complex image patterns (in The Development of Milton's Prose Style [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982], 43-65, 83-103). 57. Richard Helgerson, "Milton Reads the King's Book: Print, Performance, and the Making of a Bourgeois Idol," Criticism 29:1 (1987), 1-25. Helgerson's central argument is that Milton's deconstruction of the royal "idol" enabled his construction of an authorial "image"—the distinction between idol and image being dubious. Unfortunately, Helgerson does not really consider Samson Agonistes in this argument, suggesting instead (in juxtapositions similar to my own) that in the explicitly autobiographical portions of Paradise Lost (such as the proems to Books 1, 3,7, and 9) the rhetoric of the King's Book and the imagery of Marshall's frontispiece subtly appear (see pp. 18-19). While I do not accept Helgerson's portrait of a Milton complacently appropriating the king's iconography, the method of analysis in this essay has greatly illuminated for me the possible relations between Eikon Basilike, Eikonoklastes, and Milton's poetry. Partic-

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ularly insightful is Helgerson's observation, on p. 14, "In the process of assuming the polemical stance required by his encounter with the king, Milton had to divide himself from himself." 58. See William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix. The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragaedie (London, 1633), fols. 562v, 558.v 59. Mary Ann Radzinowicz, "The Distinctive Tragedy of Samson Agonistes" Milton Studies 17 (1983), 267-69; Laura Lunger Knoppers, HistoricizingMilton, 42-66,142-63. Charles Carlton has argued that Charles read Foxe during his final imprisonment (Charles I [London: Routledge, 1983], 347). 60. The subtitle apparently added by John Gauden. On the question of the collaborative authorship of Eikon Basilike, see Francis Madan, "A New Bibliography of Eikon Basilike," Oxford Bibliographical Society 3 (1950), 126-63. 61. The Samson story of Judges 13-16 afforded Charles obvious biblical coordinates for his own martyrdom: the Parliamentarians could be figured as Philistines, Parliament itself as the Philistine temple, the vacillating Royalists as Israelites ("my friends and loving subjects being helpless spectators"), and the apocalyptic "confusions" predicted after his death as Samson's ruinous and vengeful last act of theatrical display (Eikon Basilike, 173,175,178). Yet some of Charles's less obvious—indeed perhaps unintentional—evocations of the Samson story seem to furnish Milton with images for his dramatic elaboration. An example is Eikon Basilike's twenty-first chapter, "Upon His Majesty's Letters Taken and Divulged," which complains of the treacherous publication of his domestic epistles—entrusted to a secretary—in terms similar to Samson's charge that Dalila has published his "secrets" (SA, 879-81,946-48); in Judges, Dalila's betrayal of Samson is confined to the divulgence of his Nazarite "secret," but both Eikon Basilike and Samson Agonistes expand this image of betrayed exposure to represent a protagonist "sung and proverbed for a fool," victimized by the textual glozings of political enemies. 62. This portrait is reproduced in the Yale edition of Milton's prose, 3:150. Several critics have noted the irony in the fact that this frontispiece was designed by the same engraver, William Marshall, who portrayed Milton on the front of his 1645 volume of poetry. See, for instance, Helgerson, "Milton Reads the King's Book," 15. 63. On one level, at least, Charles's strategy was successful: the carefully orchestrated drama of his execution, which Cromwell staged as a public confirmation of his rule, produced a mob that had to be dispersed by Parliament troops when the commoners unexpectedly sympathized with the king. Like Milton's Chorus, this mob was seeking relics. For contemporary accounts of the execution and the early reception of the King's Book, see Christopher Wordsworth, "Who Wrote Eikon Basilike?" Considered and Answered (London, 1824). 64. John Cook, King Charls, His Case, or An Appeal to all Rational Men (London, 1649), 5. 65. These phrases appear in Andrew Marvell's An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, 53-54. 66. An Horatian Ode, 57-60. 67. This portrait, which represents Charles's gazing upon a crown (inscribed with Gloria and superscribed with Beatam et A Eternam) that is visible through an upper right-hand window, exteriorizes his meditation by depicting two beams of light that connect him with the heavens: from the upper left, a beam inscribed with Clarior e tenebris descends from dark clouds to the top of Charles's head; from his eyes, a beam inscribed with Coeli Specto reaches to the crown. 68. See the extended conceit in The Reason of Church-Government, 1:858-59. 69. The most obvious example of this substitution appears in Milton's response to the king's penitential meditations (Chapter 25). Here Milton answers Charles's references to David's Psalms with biblical examples of feigned repentance, such as Cain's, Esau's, Balaam's, Saul's, Ahab's, and Jehoram's (3:553-54).

Notes to Pages 161-166 251 70. As Milton's Dalila notes, perspective and political alliance determine whether an act is treasonous or heroic: Charles' "betrayal" by the Scots (who handed him over to Parliament) parallels Samson's betrayal by the men of Judah (who handed him over to the Philistines); yet the former act is celebrated by Milton, the latter emulated by Dalila. 71. Elsewhere in Eikonoklastes Milton specifically represents Charles as Circe (see 3:488,582). 72. As the Chorus' much debated Phoenix simile has Samson attaining a fame that is both glorious and eternal (surviving that of "a secular bird" by "ages of lives" [1706]), moreover, the frontispiece represents Charles looking at a heavenly crown labeled Gloria and Beatam et AEternam. 73. It will be obvious that I treat Samson as a Restoration play—downplaying the significance of its (possibly much earlier) date of composition—under the sensible if unsophisticated bibliographic assumption that the date of publication (during the author's lifetime) determines a work's primary historical meaning. Much of my argument depends upon the possibility that significant portions of Samson might actually respond to Eikon Basilike (and to the earlier response of Eikonoklastes); but this argument can accommodate the claim (made most persuasively by John Shawcross) that Samson was composed in the early 1650s (see The Complete English Poetry of John Milton, ed. John T. Shawcross [New York: Doubleday, 1963]; and Shawcross, "The Genres of Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes," Milton Studies 17 [1983]: 225-48). The skeptical revisions and multiple perspectives born of Milton's encounter with the King's Book, then, could well have begun shortly after 1649; in 1671, though, Milton chose—for what may have been historical reasons—to put an end to further revision by publishing his text as it sttod and stands. While this flexible argument would need to be qualified if new evidence emerged to establish an even earlier date of composition for Samson, however, I still believe that the most compelling case for an author's intended meaning—in a work published with his or her consent—must privilege date of publication over date of composition. Certainly intentions can change during composition, but during this process revision is itself an intent; a work like Samson might have had many different meanings for Milton before and during the Civil War, but the meaning he gave to it (and to us) was decided in part by that moment at which he decided to place it in history. 74. Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historidzing Milton, 63. Knoppers also refers to Northrop Frye's recognition that the biblical Samson story and its aftermath would have offered Milton a dubious analogy on which to pin his Restoration hopes (in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976], 222). 75. Edward Burrough, A Testimony against a great Idolatry Committed and a True Mourning of the Lords Servant Upon the Many Considerations of his heart upon the 23 day of the ninth month (London, 1658), 2 (quoted by Knoppers, Historidzing Milton, 65). 76. First Defense, 4.402. 77. Paradise Lost, 1.2. Taste and touch were often used interchangeably in the Renaissance, their meanings meeting in the former's etymon (taxare). Milton's interesting conflation of the two words in his epic, however, probably relates to his synesthetic interpretation of the Prohibition in Genesis 2.17. For Milton's "almost indifferent" use of touching and tasting in this sense, see Fowler, ed., Paradise Lost, 9.651n. 78. See Carey, ed., Samson Agonistes, 136n; and Merrit Y. Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), Samson Agonistes, 136n. The Oxford English Dictionary seems to concur with these glosses, citing Samson's "insupportably" as the first adverbial form of the word meaning "in an insupportable degree or manner; insufferably; irresistibly." Yet there is some latitude even in this definition; and the OED further records the introduction, in 1649, of insupportable in the sense of "untenable" or "unjustifiable" (see OED, s.v. insupportable, 1b). 79. See Wittreich, Interpreting "Samson Agonistes" 220.

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Notes to Pages 166-167

80. The Judges' narrator asserts that Samson's marriage was "from the Lord" (14.4), and that "the Spirit of the Lord rushed on him" as an incitement to his revenge in Ascalon (14.19). For some of the rabbinic commentary that dwells on such passages without self-satisfying solution, see Avrohom Fishelis and Shmuel Fishelis, The Book of Judges: A New English Translation of the Text, Rashi, and a Commentary Digest, ed. A. J. Rosenberg (New York: Octagon Books, 1987), 109-35. For the ambiguity of the text itself, see Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: AMS Press, 1981), 61-62,101-5,117. McDonald notes that in this episode, as in several others, Milton exacerbates narrative silences and ambiguities already present in Judges—perhaps amplifying them through rabbinic uncertainty over the Halachic legitimacy of Samson's actions ("A Long Day's Dying: Tragic Ambiguity in Samson Agonistes" Milton Studies 27 [1991], 268-70). For a compelling regenerationist argument for a distinction between the "evil," "intimate impulse" that has moved Samson toward his first marriage (SA, 223) and the genuinely renewing "rousing motions" in the temple, however, see Labriola, "Divine Urgency as a Motive for Conduct in Samson Agonistes," 99-107. Labriola argues that the earlier "impulse" is from God but not of God—a legitimate temptation of the kind Milton explores in De Doctrina Christiana. By this argument, the fact that the characters in the play seem to credit the "intimate impulse" is not cause to be skeptical toward the later and genuine "rousing motions"; it is instead dramatic irony. 81. Wittreich, Interpreting "Samson Agonistes" especially 53-115,174-238. 82. Lancelot Andrewes, The Wonderfutt Combate (for Gods Glorie and Mans Salvation) betweene Christ and Satan (London: Printed by John Charlwood, 1592), 69. 83. Consider, for example, Northrop Frye's observation that "in the Book of Judges, the account of Samson is immediately followed by another story about the Danites in which, after appearing in a most contemptible light as idolaters, thieves, and murderers, they vanish from history" (Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society, 222). 84. Wittreich, Interpreting "Samson Agonistes," 120-21. Raymond Waddington remains one of the more influential regenerationist readers of the play (following such important critics as Una Ellis-Fermor); for his own observation of "the modulations of difference" that complicate the typologies on which such readings are based, see "Milton among the Carolines," in The Age of Milton: Backgrounds to Seventeenth-Century Literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and Raymond B. Waddington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 352. 85. Wittreich, Interpreting "Samson Agonistes," intro, x. Dr. Johnson's critique appears in The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Henry John Todd (London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1801), 4:347. 86. In Areopagitica (2:527), Milton personifies the inauthentic selfhood constituted by a thoroughly theatrical text as "a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions." By applying these words to Milton's Samson, I do not imply that his character lacks "free choice"; to do so would involve questions other than those I am asking. Certainly analysis such as I attempt here, focusing on intertextuality and transferable conventions of language and image, tends to hollow out—or at least ignore—a literary character's "self." Indeed one line of my argument holds that Milton's Samson does not own his own language; that several aspects of his "self" have already been played by an other. But the reference to "artificial Adam" does not aim at a radically robotic Samson, nor do I deny the possibility that at some level Milton grants Samson all the free choice that a dramatic character in a familiar story can enjoy (in the Argument, for instance, Milton speaks of Samson being "persuaded inwardly" that the call to the temple was "from God"); rather, I suggest here that at another level of representation Milton intends for Samson's role-playing (or referentiality) to be discernible. Perhaps the most apposite comparison is to the "genuine" Adam whose original and altogether unambiguous regeneration appears in the divinely guided art of dying that is the conclusion of Par-

Notes to Pages 167-169

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adise Lost. In "Milton's Lazar House," (ELN forthcoming March, 2001), I have argued that Paradise Lost employs, the conventions of the ars moriendi, and specifically Taylor's Holy Dying, to much different effect from their use in Samson Agonistes. If Samson illustrates the etiolation of these conventions, Paradise Lost records their etiology; Samson invites skepticism toward the art of dying, whereas Paradise Lost represents its ideal form. In Areopagitica, the "artificial Adam" appears as a disingenuous product of censorship; and if such an Adam functions in this chapter as an analogy to Samson, I mean the analogy to suggest the extent to which Samson is himself a product of Milton's self-censorship—a self-censorship appearing in Samson Agonistes' dialogue with Eikdn Basilike and Eikonoklastes. 87. The title page of Milton's 1671 publication reads, "Paradise Regain'd, a poem in IV books, to which is added Samson Agonistes" The intertextual communication between these two "companion pieces" has been discussed by Balachandra Rajan, '"To Which is Added Samson Agonistes—,'" in The Prison and the Pinnacle, ed. Balachandra Rajan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 82-110; and John T. Shawcross, "The Genres of Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes: The Wisdom of Their Joint Publication," Milton Studies 17 (1983), 225-48. John Guillory has briefly suggested that Samson instead stands as a destructive "coda" to "the completed edifice of [Milton's] oeuvre" in "The father's house: Samson Agonistes in its historical moment" (Re-membering Milton: Essays on the texts and traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson [New York: Methuen, 1988], 171). 88. Here I summarize Fish's argument in "Things and Actions Indifferent: The Temptation of Plot in Paradise Regained," Milton Studies 17 (1983), 163-85. 89. Jonathan Culler has famously proclaimed the supremacy of theory over interpretation in our own critical moment: "One thing we do not need is more interpretations of literary works" (in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, and Deconstruction [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981], 6). 90. Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1957), 766, 768. 91. Elizabeth Southwell's account of Queen Elizabeth's death suggests the symptoms, and the validity, of this concern: afraid to take her sickbed—as if doing so would cross the ontological boundary between political player and political property—the queen struggled fiercely to control the fate of her remains and the interpretation of her death. Upon her quietus, however, she was subjected to an unauthorized autopsy—and to its literary equivalent, as commentators (including Southwell) contested the official version of her godly end. See Catherine Loomis, "Elizabeth Southwell's Manuscript Account of the Death of Queen Elizabeth [with text],"ELR 26:3 (Autumn 1996), 482-509. 92. McDonald, "A Long Day's Dying," 282. 93. The Renaissance rarely imagined death without an agent other than the dying. In conventional personifications of Death (with scythe or dart), for instance, the dying man was still figuratively "killed"—still subject to a narrative not of his own determination. Thus "selfkilling" (Donne's translation of suicide in Biathanatos) affords one the opportunity to finish the story of one's life; such radical autonomy merges, however, with the social and psychological strategies of the preparatio mortis (which could entail the preparation for imposed or natural death). Indeed Charles's political strategy in Eikdn Basilike could be understood as an effort "to die" rather than "be killed." Though most of the analysis in this chapter has concerned the ways in which Samson should be understood as preparing for death, the actual terms of his death—in Samson and in other Renaissance texts such as Biathanatos—hover between suicide and accident (not unlike Hamlet's death). This liminality nicely reflects both the conflicting representations of Charles's killing/death and Milton's own response to the execution of a king who refused to be killed.

254 Notes to Pages 169—173 94. See Henry V, 2.3.11,16. Hostess Quickly's claim for Falstaff's last words, that "'a babbl'd of green fields," is an emendation of F1's "a Table." Since Theobald, editors have justified this emendation by noting that Quickly's religious education is defective (at 2.3.9, she seems to confuse Arthur with Abraham). Thus she may be describing the "green pastures" Falstaff would have mentioned if reciting the twenty-third Psalm in preparation for death (Psalm 23:5 also gives thanks for a spiritual banquet table). But one would not be surprised to find the appetitive knight thinking about a more secular table in his last moments, and the passage has not seemed reflective of a regenerate death to some readers. For the argument that Falstaff's death represents a "satiric martyrdom" (and thus a satire of Oldcastle), see Alice-Lyle Scoufos, Shakespeare's Typological Satire: A Study of the Falstaff-Oldcastle Problem (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979), chapter 10. For a reading that finds Falstaff's death a parody of the art of dying tradition, see Katherine Koller, "Falstaff and the Art of Dying," MIN 60 (1945), 383-86. An effort to rehabilitate Falstaff's way of dying appears in Christopher Baker, "The Christian Context of Falstaff's 'Finer End,'" Explorations in Renaissance Culture 12 (1986), 68-86 95. "On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester," 10-13. 96. From an anonymous letter in London Burning (1667), in James P. Malcolm, Londinium Redivivum; or, An Ancient History and Modern Description of London (London: J. Nichols and Son, 1807), 4:80. See Knoppers' extended account of Samson Agonistes' relation to the events of 1665 and 1666, in HistoricizingMilton, 142-63. 97. Matthew Griffith, The King's Life-Guard: An Anniversary Sermon (London: William Godbid, 1665), Epistle Dedicatory, 1, 14; Edward Sexby, Killing, No Murder (London: n.p., 1659), 9-10; The Souldiers Pocket Bible (London: Printed by G.B. and R.W., 1643), 2- 4; Thomas Fuller, "Strange Justice: Judges 19.30" (1655-56), in The Collected Sermons of Thomas Fuller, ed. John Eglington Bailey and William E. A. Axon (London: Gresham Press, 1891), 2:527, 537. 98. Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, De Oratore, trans. Robert Hinkleman (New York: Odyssey, 1975), 32. 6. Guilt and the Constitution of Authorship in Henry V and the Antitheatrical Elegies of W. S. and Milton 1. Kenneth L. Woodward and John McCormick, "The Art of Dying Well," Newsweek (November 25,1996), 66, 63. This article is immediately followed with an excerpt from Cardinal Bernardin's posthumously published memoir, The Gift of Peace (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1996). On page 66, Woodward and McCormick briefly mention Steven Cook's allegations that the Cardinal had sexually abused him: "Cook later recanted; his 'recovered memory' of abuse turned out to be false. And in 1994, when Cook was dying of AIDS, Bernardin said mass for him and annointed him in a tearful reconciliation. More than that, he restored his accuser's dignity." 2. I here refer to the central argument of Jonas A. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Anyone familiar with this important study will recognize its pervasive influence on my own conception of the guilt and censure occasioned by the Renaissance killing poem. 3. A recent survey conducted by the Roper Center reveals that over the last twenty years public faith in the media has dissolved strikingly. Paradoxically, moreover, real concern for reporters' violations of privacy and decency concurs with concern that reporters are not uncovering enough. Of those polled in the national survey, 82% "think reporters are insensitive to people's pain when covering disasters and accidents"; 60% "think reporters too often quote sources whose names are not given in news stories" (quoted from a survey of 1500 individuals from around the United States, conducted in January 1997 by the Roper Center in Storrs, CT; commisioned by Newseum, the survey results are available at http://www.newseum.org).

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4. Thomas Kyd (?), The Spanish Tragedy, 2.4.102. The connection between authorship and murderous crime is a major interest of the play (see, for instance, 1.1.87,2.4.101,4.4.146,4.5.48). 5. Jeffrey Masten, "Beaumont and/or Fletcher: Collaboration and the Interpretation of Renaissance Drama," in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 363. 6. Masten, "Beaumont and/or Fletcher," 361. 7. Michel Foucault, "What Is An Author?" in Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 108. 8. Emma Smith, "Author v. Character in Early Modern Dramatic Authorship: The Example of Thomas Kyd and The Spanish Tragedy',' 132. (cited in the introduction, note 43). Smith demonstrates how this play insistently derogates or abdicates the author function in favor of a character function, in fact establishing Hieronimo as the play's author until 1612— when Kyd's name was first associated with The Spanish Tragedy (131). Several characters within the play assume the title "author," including Hieronimo, Lorenzo, Andrea's Ghost, and Revenge. Jonson's expansions of the play after Kyd's death extend the process of authorial displacement and substitution already meditated in its text. Smith also cites Masten (133) in her argument for a different category of anonymity in the Renaissance—one defined by the supplanting of author by character. In this chapter, I am more interested in the authorial tensions between playwright, actor, and spectator. 9. This debate was stimulated (but not begun) my Machiavelli. Quentin Skinner offers the best history of the reason of state issue; see especially "The Context of Hobbes" Theory of Political Obligation," in Vere Chappell (ed. and intro.), Thomas Hobbes (New York: Garland, 1992), 233-66. See also J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), especially ch. 10. 10. In this chapter I join a current emphasis on Protestantism's complication of expiation, but I do not mean to forget that expiation was far from theoretically trouble-free for many early modern Roman Catholics. As a post-Reformation play that locates many of the conceptual difficulties with culpability and expiation in recognizably Catholic forms, Henry V would seem in fact to present us with a kind of ecumenical or catholic skepticism; but this skepticism is itself the product of a history that includes the Reformation. 11. The suborned criminal, such as an assassin, more nearly approximates the qualified responsibility of a stage actor for his actions. A skeptic might note that by having the bishops justify his war and indeed phrase his undertaking as an imperative, Shakespeare's Henry V seeks a role similar to the assassin. 13. Robert Weimann, "Bifold Authority in Shakespeare's Theatre," SQ 39 (1988), 401-17. 14. Troilus and Cressida, 5.10.36, 38-9. 15. I quote here from Henry V's Prologue, lines 23, 25, 34, 33, 8, 28, 26. Warren D. Smith ("The Henry V Choruses in the First Folio," JEGP 53 [1954], 38-57) and G. P. Jones ("Henry V: The Chorus and the Audience," Shakespeare Survey 31 [1978] 93-104), have taken literally the Chorus's address to the audience as "gentles," arguing that this indicates a performance at Whitehall. These arguments have been refuted on persuasive historical grounds, however (by Robert Adger Law, "The Choruses in Henry the Fifth" The University of Texas Studies in English 35 [1956], 11-21; and Gary Taylor, Modernizing Shakespeare's Spelling, with Three Studies in the Text of 'Henry V [Oxford: Clarendon, 1979], 78). The form of address is much more interesting if contrary to fact, a version of King Henry's promise that any loyal participant in battle, "be he ne'er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition" (4.3.62-63). But if "gentles" were understood socially as nonlaborers in Renaissance London, in the theater as on the battlefield gentles were often more participatory and collaborative: my claim that this word indicates an exhorted passivity, then, must acknowledge the historical activity of gentle (especially

256 Notes to Pages 179-180 aristocratic) audiences on and around the stage. A less complicated conceptual blurring of active and passive theatergoer appears in the Chorus's vacillation between addressing spectators and addressing auditors. 16. It might be objected that my emphasis upon the Chorus's emphatic apology—"O, pardon!"—ignores the obvious conventions of humility and inexpressibility topoi that appear in each choral pronouncement. I do not mean to ignore these conventions, nor to distort their tone. But I argue in this chapter that the self-consciousness with which such conventions appear in Henry V is significant because it points to a more fundamental concern in the play. In "Henry V: King, Chorus, and Critics" (Shakespeare Quarterly 34:1 [1983], 27-43) Lawrence Danson describes the tone of the play's Chorus as witty and confident; he then proceeds to counter skeptical readings of the Chorus by arguing that it operates as an accurate guide to our interpretation of the play, soliciting our collaboration just as the king asks for the help of his fellow soldiers. I would agree that one's attitudes toward Henry help determine the degree of skepticism one levels at the Chorus, but Danson's interpretive parallel between king and Chorus also serves to justify my link between the Chorus's concern with pardon and the king's: one cannot be simply playful and the other serious; the relation is instead heuristic and implicated, raising questions meant to be asked. 17. The Tempest, Epilogue, 19.2. Prospero's claim, "what strength I have's mine own," recalls the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV, where the speaker's defense is "of mine own making" (Epilogue, 4-5). 18. Joel B. Altman, '"Vile Participation: The Amplification of Violence in the Theater of Henry V," SQ 42 (1991), 1-32 (17,3). So sensitive is this essay to the play's contours and historical context that brief summary leaves too much unsaid. In his analysis of England's ambivalence toward the Irish campaign, for instance, Altman complicates his larger argument for reconciliation; his reading of Henry's execution of the French prisoners also destabilizes (before noting the dramatic recuperation of) Henry's heroism. 19. The guilt/shame model has been criticized and revised by anthropologists, and I do not really find it a useful analytical dichotomy—despite the brilliance of Ruth Benedict's employment of Nietzsche's description of it in Beyond Good and Evil. For an introduction, see Friedrich Ohly, The Damned and the Elect: Guilt in Western Culture, trans. Linda Archibald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Jean Delumeau's Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, Thirteenth-Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin's, 1990). For psycholinguistic theories of guilt drawing from Freud and Norbert Elias, see Daniel Merkur, "The Discharge of Guilt: Psychoanalytic Theories of Ritual," Journal of Ritual Studies, 5:2 (Summer 1991), 15-32; and Denise Riley, "Is There Linguistic Guilt?" Critical Quarterly 39:1 (Spring 1997), 75-109. By remanding guilt to its legal, externally constituted sense, I mean to suggest the inextricability—in the Renaissance—of guilt and conscience as both inward and outward, subjective and objective experiences; on the issue of this inextricability in the seventeenth-century political imagination, see Anthony Low, "'Umpire Conscience': Freedom, Obedience, and the Cartesian Flight from Calvin in Paradise Lost" Studies in Philology 96:3 (Summer 1999), 348-365. 20. The word "culpability" reflects the meeting of law, religion, and culture—as well as the coextension of crime/sin (culpa) with blame (culpare). Of course, shame can also coextend with crime: Canterbury's "lazy yawning drone" is, after all, subject to the executioner—a fate not unknown to Elizabethan draft dodgers. 21. Thus W. L. Godshalk's interesting thesis in "Henry V's Politics of Non-Responsibility" (Cahiers Elisabethains 17 [1980], 11-20)—that Harry's displacement of responsibility neurotically symptomizes guilt for inheriting a usurped crown—appears in my own argument as an emphasis on Harry's (and Shakespeare's) conscious response to such transgression. Similarly, Alvin Kernan's important reading of the tetralogy's "psychological terms" as "a passage from

Notes to Pages 180-183 257 a situation in which man knows with certainty who he is to an existential condition in which any identity is only a temporary role" ("The Henriad: Shakespeare's Major History Plays," The Yale Review 59 [1969], 3) appears in my argument as the specific object of Shakespeare's professional reflection. 22. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 106-31. 23. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 11. 24. Lyric verse, and especially confessional poetry of the seventeenth century, has provided traditional sites for Renaissance inwardness. In an illuminating recent article, Camille Wells Slights has located authorial reflexivity in the "conscience" of early modern lyric poetry, arguing that "these lyrics represent an experience of subjectivity that was emerging in late sixteenth-century England and that the concept of the conscience is the key to understanding it" ("Notaries, Sponges, and Looking-glasses: Conscience in Early Modern England," ELR 28:2 [Spring 1998], 231-46 [233]). 25. For this analysis to reveal an author's self-conception, it must focus upon the problematic literary category of conscious guilt. Besides Berger, Stephen Greenblatt has ventured such analysis in his reading of Macbeth in "Shakespeare Bewitched" (in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993], 17-42). The more familiar approach has been to consider Shakespeare's penitent attitude toward the stage and its dyer's hand as articulated in the Sonnets; an interesting variation on this approach appears in Richard Abrams's reading of "A Funeral Elegye In memory of the late vertuous Maister WILLIAM PEETER," which casts what may be a late Shakespearean poem (1612) as a palinode on the vicious misrepresentation of the public stage ("W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s Funeral Elegy and the Turn from the Theatrical" [SEL 36:2, Spring 1996], 435-60). 26. For a relentless defense of this assertion, see Douglas A. Brooks, "Sir John Oldcastle and the Construction of Shakespeare's Authorship," SEL 38:2 (Spring 1998), 333-61. Brooks notes (336) that previous to 2 Henry IV Shakespeare's author-function had been typographically restricted to terms such as those on the title page of the first quarto of Love's Labour's Lost (1598): "Newly corrected and augmented / By W. Shakespere" Two years later, the title page of 2 Henry IV makes the claim (for the first time): "Written By William Shakespeare." Brooks calls this "the first instance of an unambiguously authorial attribution to Shakespeare on the title page of any early modern play." 27. I might contrast this argument with Kernan's trajectory for the Henriad—during the course of which "necessity forces man out of role into reality [and then] necessity forces man back out of reality into role" ("The Henriad: Shakespeare's Major History Plays," 32). In Kernan's analysis of character, unmediated selfhood and role exist as two positions of a toggle switch; but in my analysis of authorship, both positions (substantial self and discontinuous role) are available to the dual and diachronic vision of the playwright. 28. One simple answer to this question (a frequent cause for staged concern in production) is that the rude mechanicals have consistently collapsed the distinction between roles and actors in an attempt to avoid frightening the audience. Similarly, Theseus's jump from players to playwright seems to assume the blurred occupational lines illustrated in the mechanicals' collaborative troupe. 29. Altman, "'Vile Participation,'" 30. In his reading of this passage on p. 31, Altman seems to back away from Christological suggestions by acknowledging Henry's refusal to own the sins of others: "Like a hidden god, Harry has been mistaken and abused in the flesh; like a god, he does not acknowledge that as his fault. Instead he pardons and rewards, and Shakespeare siphons off Williams's resentment onto Fluellen." I am uncertain what theology is implied here; whether Old Testament or generic deity, however, this god-likeness fails to acknowledge

258

Notes to Pages 183-186

a fault most readers ascribe to Harry, instead scapegoating in an arbitrary way—expiating with a "gilt" that may remind us of the traitors' putative motive in 2.2. 30. Of course the genuine and authentic Passion involved conceptually complex and much debated delegations of responsibility in the Renaissance—from Father to Son, and from believers to their redeemer. Gethsemane therefore might be understood to offer an originary scene in which responsibility and guilt become strangely mobile; and this mobility presented post-Reformation England with divisive doctrinal aftershocks. In Altman's essay, the Communion is presented as a sacrament of communal solidarity—but the sacrament of atonement involves a mystery of delegated responsibility that appears much more problematic in Henry V. 31. Altman, "'Vile Participation,'" 25 and n. 62. 32. So ascribed by the Chorus (2.26) and by Henry himself at 2.2.89 and 169. Henry attributes the revolt of Cambridge in particular to mercenary motives (motives the condemned man qualifies [155-57]), perhaps in an effort to delegitimize his claim to the throne by typing him as a Judas. 33. And in the words of Lucrece, "O opportunity, thy guilt is great" (Rape of Lucrece, 876). But for Canterbury's hive (1.2.187-220), no sustained image of nonmartial labor appears in Henry V; instead, all the mention of stealing and looting reveals what I take to be an uncomfortable consciousness of the playhouse's poorly articulated economy. While this chapter concentrates primarily on the theater's institutional distribution of agency and responsibility, the market (like the state and the church) presents yet another such institution—an institution in which Henry V is obviously implicated. 34. In Holinshed, it is a pyx (a box containing the sacramental wafer). It would require another study to ponder the possible significance for this ambiguity, which may relate to Henry V's early allusions to Reformation doctrine. Here I will simply note Shakespeare's fascination with the ambiguity of symbol and Presence. 35. The bishops' discussion of the bill that threatened to convert church lands to private property appears in Holinshed, but Shakespeare's decision to begin his first scene with this issue is significant nonetheless. 36. Henry identifies himself as "a gentleman of a company" in direct response to Pistol's social probing—"art thou base, common, and popular?" (4.1.38)—a question pertinent not only to the prince of "open haunts and popularity," but also to a playwright whose social status was under siege. On 20 October 1596, John Shakespeare received a Grant of Arms. In 1602 Ralph Brooke, York Herald, readied charges against those who granted arms to a group of "mean" individuals who included the (then deceased) father of William Shakespeare. Brooke sketched this coat of arms in a manuscript now in the Folger Library (MS. 423.1, p. 28), writing beneath it "Shakespear ye Player / by Garter [i.e. Dethick]." Shakespeare "Ye Player" signed himself "gentleman" until his death. In a scene with a biographical resonance strikingly similar to Henry V 4.1, Lancelot Gobbo plays at being Master (the son of a gentleman) who in fact has a social status independent of his father (The Merchant of Venice, 2.2.40-56). Interestingly, Lancelot's pretensions to gentility directly follow a passage in which he has chosen to turn away from his conscience (2.2.1-25). 37. Godshalk's phrase in "Henry V's Politics of Non-Responsibility," where several of the examples offered in this paragraph appear (see especially pp. 11-14). 38. James Calderwood comes near my argument in his reading of this scene: "Taken metadramatically, Canterbury's speech might be seen as an apologia for the playwright who, claiming a kind of divine authority, nationalizes his literary themes, suppresses internal dissent, and tailors his characters and actions to a partisan pattern" (Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad 143). I agree less with Calderwood's larger argument (p. 149) that in Henry V Shakespeare writes a play that dutifully meets the expectations of his audience; my argument is that

Notes to Pages 186-191 259 these expectations, as they are recoverable in the play, indicate a fascinating shifting of responsibility that is the conscious strategy of the playwright. 39. E. A. Raughut, in "'Guilty in Defence': A Note on Henry V 3.3.123" (SQ 41 (1990), 5557), adduces Alberico Gentili's De lure Belli Libri Tres to argue that Henry's position was established by military rules of conduct; interestingly, one of Gentili's illustrations of such a position was Alexander the Great (see De lure [1612], 2 vols., trans. John C. Rolfe [Oxford: Clarendon, 1933], 2:214). In his Arden edition of Henry V (London: Methuen, 1954), J. H.Walter also quotes Gentili (p. 66). Karl P. Wentersdorf, however, has pointed out that the refugee Gentili's position was not necessarily impartial or representative in England ("The Conspiracy of Silence in Henry V" SQ 27 [1976], 265n.2). See also Godshalk, "Henry V's Politics of Non-Responsibility," 15. 40. Altaian ("Vile Participation," 27) and others have noted that Gower's version of this episode in Shakespeare substantially departs from Holinshed, where Henry kills the French prisoners in a less justifiable moment of rage—responding not "worthily" to a massacre of English servants, but in frustration with French resistance. Gower's wording in Shakespeare may acknowledge this slippage, however, since "wherefore" does not clearly refer to the slaughter; it may only refer to the vandalized luggage. 41. Presumably Gower's "friends" also exculpates Henry from any deaths suffered by the "dear friends" he has led into battle. 42. Originally, an authentes was one who does something himself, a category extended in usage to murderer. Henry's appeal that Kate mock "mercifully" (5.2.189-90)—which resembles the Chorus's calls for our gentle reception of dramatic implausibility—draws attention to all that she must overlook: not only his rough approximation of her language, but his physiognomic record of his father's "civil wars" (5.2.211), and his violation of "nice customs" (5.2.250) not unlike the neoclassical unities. 43. Compare the prince's declaration to his brothers in 2 Henry IV: "And, princes all, believe me, I beseech you, / My father is gone wild into his grave; / For in his tomb lie my affections" (5.2.122-24). 44. We must not underestimate the capacity of Protestant theatergoers in Renaissance England to appreciate sympathetic representations of the Roman Catholic doctrine of their ancestors; nor should we overestimate the degree of doctrinal orthodoxy in Protestant England. Still, Henry's method of penitence here touches upon some of the most serious soteriological "abuses" in Reformation controversy. For Shakespeare, frequent invoker of his audience's "indulgence," subcontracting salvation seems to present an analogue to the problematic liabilities of the stage; as Duke Theseus might counsel, the only escape would seem to be the replacement of works with grace. 45. I have argued in chapter 3 that the Orphic image of the embattled poet surrounded by Furious persecutors offers a euhemeristic account of lyric's dispossession by drama. If 2 Henry IV presents the playwright in a pose of potential Orphic victimization, Henry V urges us to take "part" with him in the Maenads' division of others. 46. Since each of the five hundred poor presumably holds both hands towared heaven, this collective act of prayer for the individual king neatly corresponds with the prologue's division of one man into one thousand parts. 47. In the 1600 Quarto, Williams's character is identified merely as a soldier. On Sig i2v of the Folio, the character is called Williams; but on Sig i3 his name becomes 'Will.'; interestingly, this name change occurs immediately after the king's longest speech of royal apology (4.1.13972), though most editors assign the uncharacteristically acquiescent speech immediately following this passage (4.1.173-76) to Bates. Williams's unabbreviated last name, of course, also spells out William S. I am nearly tempted without occupatio to read Michael Williams's full name as a Shakespearean messenger.

260

Notes to Pages 191-192

48. An important exception is Lawrence Danson, who in "Henry V: King, Chorus, and Critics" (Shakespeare Quarterly 34 [1983], 27-43) claims that the Chorus's apologies for the stage should in general present an unproblematic guide to a charitable reception of Harry, and that Williams, not Henry, reasons spuriously: the spiritual suffering of those killed in battle is a red herring that the king convincingly dismisses. But Williams's hint at the king's soteriological responsibility is more subtle than Henry and Danson acknowledge: Williams suggests that at the Last Judgment the king will have a heavy reckoning when confronted with maimed bodies, poorly left families, and those who died in debt; it is Henry who infers a clear charge of responsiblity for the damned from Williams's speech, and Henry who goes on to argue that spiritual responsibility is a private affair. The jump from material concerns (suffering, financial debt) to spiritual allows Henry to produce a convincing defense, but it is important to recognize that this jump-perhaps suggested by Williams's image of the dead "swearing"—is really Henry's. It is also important to recognize that in certain early modern cases, such as formal execution, one could be held responsible for the spiritual well-being of those who do not die well. The uncomfortably comic scene of Barnardine's deferred execution in Measure for Measure, for instance, illustrates a genuine concern with killing those not properly "fitted" for death: "A creature unprepared, unmeet for death, / And to transport him in the mind he is / Were damnable" (Measure 4.3.59-61). And of course there's Hamlet's meditation over his kneeling stepfather. 49. In Leviathan, Hobbes might be taking up the questions raised by this debate when he considers the distribution of responsibility between "actor" and "author": "Of persons artificial, some have their words and actions owned by those whom they represent. And then the person is the actor, and he that owneth his words and actions, is the AUTHOR: in which case the actor acteth by authority. For that which in speaking of goods and possessions, is called an owner, and in Latin dominus ... is called author. And as the right of possession is called dominion; so the right of doing any action, is called AUTHORITY. So that by authority, is always understood a right of doing any act; and done by authority, done by commission or license from him whose right it is.... When the actor maketh a covenant by authority, he bindeth thereby the author, no less than if he had made it himself; and no less subjecteth him to all the consequences of the same.... No man is obliged by a covenant, whereof he is not author. When the actor doth any thing against the law of nature by command of the author, if he be obliged by former covenant to obey him, not he, but the author breaketh the law of nature; for though the action be against the law of nature; yet it is not his: but contrarily, to refuse to do it, is against the law of nature, that forbiddeth breach of covenant. And he that maketh a covenant with the author, by mediation of the actor, not knowing what authority he hath, but only takes his word; in case such authority be not made manifest unto him upon demand, is no longer obliged: for the covenant made with the author, is not valid, without this counterassurance. But if he that so covenanteth, knew beforehand he was to expect no other assurance, than the actor's word; then is the covenant valid, because the actor in this case maketh himself the author. And therefore, as when the authority is evident, the covenant obligeth the author, not the actor; so when the authority is feigned, it obligeth the actor only; there being no author but himself" (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott [London: CollierMacMillan, 1962], 125-26. 50. R. B. Outhwaite, "Dearth, the English Crown, and the 'Crisis of the 1590s,'" in The European Crisis of the 1590s; Essays in Comparative History, ed. Peter Clark (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 32. I use Outhwaite's phrase conscious of its anachronism; reading the wars dramatized in and surrounding Henry V through more recent conflicts has been a long and fascinating tradition in the play's criticism. Altman's reading of Henry V's recuperation of shame might in fact be read as a brilliant facet of a generation's complex response to the problem of draft-dodging; my own emphasis on guilt considers the perspective of the authors of

Notes to Pages 194-199 261 such participation (or nonparticipation). If the play offers itself as a kind of Eucharistic celebration, I have tried to show how such an offering complicates the act of participation. 51. The quarto text of A Funerall Elegye in memory of the late vertuous Maister WILLIAM PEETER, by W.S. (London: G[eorge] Eld [for Thomas Thorp], 1612) seems to have had a small private printing. But only two copies survive—one in the Bodleian Library, the other in the Balliol College Library. My own references to this poem are to Donald W. Foster's critical edition, which appears in "A Funeral Elegy: Wfilliam] S[hakespeare] 's 'Best-Speaking Witnesses,'" PMLA 111:5 (October 1996), 1095-1104.I cite these references parenthetically by line number. 52. The most persuasive proponents of Shakespeare's authorship of A Funeral Elegy are Donald W. Foster and Richard Abrams. Foster's Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1989) and, more recently, "A Funeral Elegy: W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s 'Best-Speaking Witnesses,'" have set forth the most compelling and imposing bibliographic evidence for this attribution. In "W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s Funeral Elegy and the Turn from the Theatrical" (SEL 36:2 [Spring 1996], 435-60), Abrams argues for Shakespeare's authorship in terms to which I am indebted. The ongoing debate for and against Shakespeare's authorship can be traced in the following: James Knowles, "WS MS," Times Literary Supplement (29 April 1988), 472+; E. A. J. Honigmann, Review of Foster, Elegy by W.S., N Q 34:4 (December 1990), 465-67; Richard Abrams, "Breaching the Canon: Elegy by W.S.: The State of the Argument," Shakespeare Notes 45:3 (Fall !995), 51-54; Richard Abrams, "In Defence of W.S.," Letter, Times Literary Supplement (9 February 1996), 25-26; Brian Vickers, "Whose Thumbprints?" Times Literary Supplement (8 March 1996), 16-18. See also: William H. Honan, "A Sleuth Gets His Suspect: Shakespeare," New York Times (14 January 1996), A1+; and Joseph Sobran, "The Problem of The Funeral Elegy" Online, World Wide Web, 11 July 1996, available at http://www.Shakespeare-oxford.com/sobran.htm. I offer as evidence of A Funeral Elegy's emerging Shakespearean canonicity the fact that it has appeared in several of the most recent mainstream editions of Shakespeare, such as The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997). 53. Foster, "A Funeral Elegy: W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s 'Best-Speaking Witnesses,"' 1082. 54. Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 126,125. See also Cleanth Brooks and John Edward Hardy, "The Passion," in Poems of Mr. John Milton: The 1645 Edition with Essays in Analysis (New York: Scribner, 1951), 109. 55. This note appears after line 56 (the final line) of The Passion. All references to The Passion appear in Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London and New York: Longman, 1968). I cite subsequent references parenthetically, by line number. 56. For an account of the murder and subsequent trial, see William Martyn, "Desposicons and examynacons of Wittnesses," Book 6oB, letter 145, Exeter City Archives, Devon Record Office, Folios 110-20. 57. Abrams, "W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s 'Funeral Elegy' and the Turn from the Theatrical," 441. 58. Abrams, "W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s 'Funeral Elegy' and the Turn from the Theatrical," 439. 59. MacDonald Jackson, Review of Foster, Elegy by W.S., Shakespeare Studies 43 (1991), 259, quoted by Abrams, 441. 60. Hamlet, 1.2.84, 86. 61. A Funeral Elegy provides little details about this defamation, though it suggests Oxford as a site of intrigue and implies sex as the topic of gossip (see, e.g., lines 511-14). 62. In an electronic mail conversation, Donald Foster pointed out to me a further ambiguity that verges on bawdy innuendo. W. S. reports William Peter "was friendship's rock: / A rock of friendship figured in his name . . . / . . . and he discharg'd the same / In every act of

262

Notes to Pages 200-205

perfect amity" (320-24). Elsewhere in Shakespeare's canon, "discharge" is used to connote both farting and ejaculation, and "perfect" in Shakespeare can mean not just "ideal," but "consummated." "Rock" (as "distaff") was a familiar Elizabethan euphemism for penis. 63. See Foster, Elegy by W. S., 178-79; and his "A Funeral Elegy: W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s 'Best-Speaking Witnesses,'" 1086-87. See also Abrams, "W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s 'Funeral Elegy' and the Turn from the Theatrical," 458-59 nn. 8-11. 64. See John Ford, Christes Bloodie Sweat, lines 889-94, in The Nondramatic Works of John Ford, ed. L. E. Stock, et al. (Binghamton, N. Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts, 1974). 65. Foster, "A Funeral Elegy: Wfilliam] S[hakespeare]'s 'Best-Speaking Witnesses," 1092. 66. R. Paul Yoder, "Milton's The Passion"Milton Studies 27 (1991), 19. 67. Yoder, "Milton's The Passion," 17. Yoder notes two predecessors who have anticipated this reading: John A. Via, "Milton's 'The Passion': A Successful Failure," MQ 5 (May 1971), 1-6; and Philip J. Gallagher, "Milton's 'The Passion': Inspired Mediocrity," MQ 11 (May 1977), 44-50. 68. Brooks and Hardy, Poems, 107. Yoder traces this uncritical evaluation back to the eighteenth century (Milton's The Passion, 16-17). 69. Yoder, "Milton's The Passion" 3-4. 70. See Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 167-68. 71. George Herbert, "The Reprisall," line 2, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), quoted by Yoder, "Milton's The Passion" 12. 72. In Joshua Sylvester's Lachrimae Lachrimarum (1612), the title page is in fact printed all black, with only the letters left white. The more usual custom was to edge elegies with a dark boarder. 73. John G. Demaray, Milton and the Masque Tradition: The Early Poems, "Arcades," and "Comus" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 41-42. 74. On Milton's avoidance of the Crucifixion as a poetic topic throughout his career, see James Holly Hanford, John Milton, Poet and Humanist (Cleveland: University of Ohio Press, 1966), 39. 75. Lycidas, line 153. 76. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82), 6:444. This and the following two passages from Milton's prose are quoted by Yoder, "Milton's The Passion" 8. 77. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 6:443, 6:218. 78. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 1:749; quoted by Yoder, who also compares this passage with the critic's note in The Passion ("Milton's The Passion" 15). 79. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 197; quoted by Yoder, "Milton's The Passion" 3.

Index

Abrams, Richard, 195-196, 257 n.25 Adelman, Janet, 238 n.7 agency, 5,7, 8,13, 28,30,119,123,127,134, 152,168,169,177-178,179,185-186, 187,191,192, 209 n.15, 210 nn.25-26., 253 n.93 Alter, Robert, 252 n.8o Althusser, Louis, 180 Altman, Joel, 179-180,183, 210-211 n.37, 256 n.18, 257-258 n.29, 258 n.3o, 259 n.4O Andrewes, Lancelot, 166 Anglo, Sydney, 239 n.21 antitheatricalism, 15-16,36, 45-46, 72, 73, 75, 86-88, 91, 95-97, 99,102,106-107, 109-110,115,132-133,137,155,173-174, 176,184,197, 200-201, 254 n.2 Archer, John Michael, 232 n.51 Aries, Philippe, 209 n.13 Aristotle, 208 n.5 ars moriendi (art of dying), 140-155,157,159, 161-162,164,170,172, 200, 245-246 n.6, 246 n.9, 246 n.12 Atkinson, David W., 143, 241 n.36, 246 n.6 Austin, J. L., 7 Bacon, Francis, 61, 91 Barclay, Alexander, 35-36, 38, 43-44, 46, 53, 213 n.9 Barish, Jonas A., 254 n.2 Barker, Arthur, 247 n.2o Bate, Jonathan, 236 n.98 Beatty, Nancy Lee, 245 n.6

Becon, Thomas, 143-152,155, 246 n.16, 248 n.36 Benedict, Ruth, 256 n.19 benefit of clergy, 7, 209 n.16 Bentley, Gerald, 238 n.12, 240 n.25 Berger, Harry, 9-10, 68, 85,117,125, 210 n.27, 212 n.51, 226 n.86, 228 n.112, 238-239 n.14, 257 n.25 Black, Joel, 208 n.4 Borris, Kenneth, 59-64, 223 n.51, 225 n.72, 226 n.91 Bouchard, Donald, 74 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 209 n.21 Braden, Gordon, 216 n.41, 216 n.47, 244 n.68 Briggs, K. M., 243 n.57 Bristol, Michael, 237 n.2 Brooks, Cleanth, 201, 261 n.54 Brooks, Douglas A., 257 n.26 Brower, Rueben, 229 n.22 Brownlow, F. L., 17 Buell, Lawrence, 8, 210 n.25 Bullough, Geoffrey, 233 n.64 Burbage, Richard, 12-13, 96 Burckhardt, Sigurd, 4,11,14, 85,103, 204 Burke, Kenneth, 6 Butler, Judith, 180, 257 n.22 Calderwood, James, 100, 233 n.63, 234 n.8o, 235 n.85, 258-259 n.38 Cantor, Paul, 233 n.67 casuistry, 32,140,146-152,161,165,170 Catullus, 21, 29,31,35-36, 213 n.i3, 216 n.41 263

264

Index

Cave, Terence, 211 n.37 Cavell, Stanley, 9-10, 210 n.27 censorship, 5, 6, 8-9,13, 47-48, 60-61, 65, 81, 87-88, 95, no, 167-168,194, 200, 202, 205, 222 n.42, 229 n.12, 253 n.86 Charles I,115,155-164,168-170, 236 n.1, 249 n.48, 250 n.59, 250 n.61, 250 n.63, 250 n.69, 251 n.70, 253 n.93 Charles II, 170 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 22, 24, 25, 26-27, 29, 39-41 Cheney, Donald, 65, 71, 221 n.31, 227-228 n.107 Cheney, Patrick, 227 n.103 Cockpit Theater, 240 n.26 Colie, Rosalie, 218-219 n.2 Comensoli, Viviana, 242 n.4o, 243 n.53 conscience and authorship, 181-185 as constitutive of the subject, 9-12,145, 156,175,180-183, 257 n.24 see also guilt Cook, Carol, 233 n.65 Corns, Thomas, 249 n.56 Crashaw, Richard, 202 Crewe, Jonathan, 224 n.59 Cromwell, Oliver, 164,170, 211 n.47, 249 n.48 Culler, Jonathan, 209 n.14, 253 n.89 "culpable mediacy," 118,173 Daniel, Samuel, 87 Danson, Lawrence, 256 n.16, 260 n.48 Davie, Donald, 228 n.110 Dawson, Anthony, 124-125,129-130, 241 n.34, 242 n.44, 243 n.48, 243 n.59, 244 n.65 Dekker, Thomas, 97-98,113,116,175, 200 Demaray, John G., 202 Diggs, Dudly, 3,15, 42, 79 Dobranski, Stephen, 248 n.32 Dobson, Michael, 111-112, 236 n.95 Donne, John, 14,35, 50-58, 61, 64, 67, 83, 85, 86,139,152,174, 201, 248 n.34, 253 n.93 Drayton, Michael, 73 Edwards, H. L. R., 17 Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes, 142, 155-164,169,173, 250 n.61 Elam, Keir, 235 n.89

elegy and funeral poetics, 12-16,18-25, 28-29, 37, 42, 50-58, 69, 74, 75-79,148, 194-205, 213n.11and 213 n.13, 262 n.72 Eliot, T. S., 216 n.44 Elizabeth I, 20, 94-95, 97,102, 231 n.38, 253 n.91 Enterline, Lynn, 215 n.28 epideictic rhetoric, 21, 25,35, 37, 45, 51, 53, 54, 57, 65, 68, 74, 77,175,194 Erickson, Peter, 9 Essex, earl of, 95, 97,192, 231 n.38 ethical criticism, 4, 5, 8-9,13, 56, 67, 84, 115-116,117,129 ,193, 210 n.25, 238 n.13 Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe, 229 n.17 Fineman, Joel, 215 n.35 Fish, Stanley, 17, 23,142,147,151,159,167, 205, 220 n.18, 221 n.32, 232 n.51, 245 n.5, 247 n.24, 248 n.47, 253 n.88, 262 n.79 Fletcher, John, 127, 242 n.43 Ford, John, 200-201, 262 n.64 formalism, 6,10,17, 24, 41,72,115,131,150, 182 Forster, E. M., 17 Foster, Donald, 199, 201, 261n.51, 261-262 n.62, 262 n.63 Foucault, Michel, 6, 8,104,177,181-182, 208 n.11, 228 n.11, 234 n.77 Fowler, Alastair, 213 n.12, 218 n.2, 226 n.88, 242 n.43 Fowler, Elizabeth, 223 n.56 Foxe, John, 143,150-151, 248 n.35, 249 n.54 Frame, Donald M., 248 n.46 freedom of speech and First Amendment, 4-6, 208 n.6 Freud, Sigmund, 155, 249 n.53 Frye, Northrop, 251 n.74, 252 n.83 Garber, Marjorie, 91 Giddens, Anthony, 7-8, 209 n.21 Oilman, Ernest, 155, 249 n.56 Gittings, Clare, 248 n.43 Globe Theater, 15, 88-100,109,111,169,175, 182,190,198, 200 Gorboduc, 48-49, 73 Gordon, D. J., 232 n.56 Gordon, Ian, 17 Gosson, Stephen, 86-90, 91-92, 97,102,104, 115, 228 n.10, 229 n.13 Green, Douglas A., 233 n.69

Index Green, Thomas Andrew, 239 n.15 Greenblatt, Stephen, 6-7, 46, 94,114-117, 122,132,172, 209 n.15, 222 n.39, 225 n.77, 228-229 n.11, 231 n.37, 237 n.3, 238 n.6, 238 n.11, 238 n.13, 244 n.6o, 257 n.25 Greene, Thomas, 232 n.55 Greenfield, Matthew, 219 n.4 Grice, H. P., 208 n.8 Guillory, John, 253 n.87 guilt anthropological distinction with shame, 179-185, 210 n.27, 256 n.19 and audience, 7-11,12,13-14, 34,38, 57, 88,99 and authorship, 4-7,10,12,13-15, 27, 32, 34, 38, 54, 57, 78, 88, 99,116-117,175-193, 257 n.25 and Reformation, 177,184-190 see also conscience Gurr, Andrew, 97 Habermas, Jurgen, 208 n.8 Haller, William, 150, 248 n.33 Halpern, Richard, 22 Hanford, James Holly, 226 n.84, 262 n.74 Hardison, O. B., 19, 213 n.7, 218 n.2 Hardy, John Edward, 201 Harrison, Charles, 231 n.39 Harsnett, Samuel, 114,126-128, 240 n.31, 242 n.41 Harvey, Elizabeth, 221 n.32 Harvey, Gabriel, 56-57, 73, 221 n.28, 225 n.79 hate-speech, 208 n.6 Haydn, Hiram, 222 n.39 Helgerson, Richard, 72, 82,155, 221 n.31, 223 nn.48-49, 227 n.101, 249-250 n.57 Henry VI, 179 Henry VIII, 46,177 Henryson, Robert, 25,32 Herbert, George, 149-150, 202 heresy, 42-49, 51, 54-65 Heywood, Thomas, 87, 236 n.1 Hillman, James, 6 Hobbes, Thomas, 192, 260 n.49 Hodges, Devon, 221 n.29 Holinshed, Raphael, 91 Hoy, Cyrus, 242 n.43

265

intentionality, 6, 8,18,28, 42,43, 47, 87, 93, 98,109,111,174, 239 n.23, 241 n.32, 243 n.55, 248 n.34, 251 n.73 interpellation, 11-12, 24 intertextuality, 114-138,140-170, 252 n.86 Jackson, MacDonald, 197 James I and VI, 120,130, 230 n.34, 240 n.28 Johnson, Samuel, 54,104-105,142,166-167, 245 n.5 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 215 n.27, 230 n.32 Jonson, Ben, 20,35, 41, 53,59, 97-98,104-105, 107,153-155.196-197- 225 n.78, 232 n.55 Kay, Dennis, 52, 218 n.1 Kernan, Alvin, 222 n.39, 234 n.78, 256-257 n.21, 257 n.27 Kerrigan, William, 216 n.47 Kezar, Dennis, 248-249 n.48, 253 n.86 "killing poem," 3-16, 28,39, 42-43, 48, 112,138,169-170,190, 200, 204-205, 209 n.14, 254 n.2 Kinney, Arthur, 17-18, 33, 214 n.16 Knoppers, Laura Lunger, 155,164, 248 n.33, 251 n.74, 254 n.96 Knott, John R., 248 n.36, 249 n.54 Kolbrener, William, 208 n.7 Krier, Theresa M., 67, 69, 84, 224 n.67, 225 n.68 Kyd, Thomas, and The Spanish Tragedy, 13, 51,176-177, 211 n.43, 255 n.4 Labriola, Albert, 245 n.5, 252 n.8o law and theater, 15, 86-89, 97-99,102-104, 106-108,113,118-126,134-135,151, 177-178, 210 n.36 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 208 n.8 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 55,141, 218 n.1, 221 n.3o, 245 n.5 Lewis, C. S., 17, 36, 65, 221 n.27 Llewellyn, Nigel, 211-212 n.50 Loomis, Catherine, 253 n.91 Low, Anthony, 256 n.19 Lowell, James Russell, 36 Lowenstein, David, 155, 249 n.55 Lowenstein, Joseph, 226 n.86 Luis, Kenneth, 107 Lucrece (as figure of poetic victim), 29,31, 49,73 Luther, Martin, 44

266

Index

Macfarlane, Alan, 241 n.34 Macfie, Pamela Royston, 215 n.29 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 255 n.9 Macksey, Richard, 152, 234 n.75 Manley, Frank, 55 Manley, Laurence, 208 n.11 Marcus, Leah S., 130, 211 n.42, 238 n.5, 240 n.28, 243 n.56 Marlowe, Christopher, 102,108-109,133-134 Marroti, Arthur, 227 n.95, 230 n.3o Marshall, William, 157,159-160,163, 250 n.62, 250 n.67, 251 n.72 Martz, Louis, 202, 262 n.7o Marvell, Andrew, 159, 233 n.66, 249 n.48, 250 n.65 Masten, Jeffrey, 176 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 98, 221 n.32, 226 n.83, 226 n.84, 227 n.95, 228 n.9, 230 n.34, 232 n.49, 239 n.16 McDonald, Henry, 169, 252 n.8o McGuiness, Ilona, 17, 46 media ethics, 172-175, 237 n.2, 254-255 n.3 metapoetry and metadrama, 9-10,12-13,54, 72, 88, 91, 99,103,107,109,116,119-120, 124,126,129,130,136,137,164,169, 179-180,184,188,192, 201 Metcalf, Peter, 209 n.13 Middleton, Thomas, 81,115, 227 n.99 Milton, John Aereopagitica, 4-5, 8-9,13,167, 208 n.7, 210 n.26, 211 n.42, 252-253 n.86 De Doctrina, 152, 204, 245 n.5, 248 n.45 Eikonoklastes, 155-174,173 First Defense, 164 "Lord General Fairfax," 169 Lycidas, 98,172, 204, 214 n.24 Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 74-75, 202 Nativity Ode, 203 Paradise Lost, 98,144-145,152,165,167,170, 247 n.18, 251 n.77 Paradise Regained, 167,194, 203 Passion, 194-195, 201-205 Prelatical Episcopy, 249 n.54 Reason of Church-Government, 204, 250 n.68 Samson Agonistes, 15,137-138,139-171, 172-174,194-195, 200, 246 n.8 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 168 Montaigne, Michel, 139,153,161, 248 n.46

More, Thomas, 46 Muir, Kenneth, 238 n.6 Mullaney, Steven, 230 n.35 Nohrnberg, James, 51, 59 Norbrook, David, 208 n.7, 209 n.19, 230 n.32 O'Connor, Sister Mary Catherine, 245 n.6 Onat, Etta Soiref, 115,118, 236-237 n.2, 241 n.38, 241 n.39 Oram, William A., 227 n.103 Orgel, Stephen, 230 n.34 Orpheus (as figure of poetic violence), 28, 49, 5l, 57, 72, 74-8l, 98,107,110-111,190,

226 n.86, 226 n.87, 235 n.85, 235-236 n.92, 259 n.45 "other-fashioning," 87-91, 94,95,100,101, 103-104,106-107,111,129, 234 n.8o, 243 n.50 Ovid, 21, 97,107, 213 n.13, 215 n.28 Panofsky, Erwin, 248 n.43 Parker, Patricia, 153, 249 n.49 Patterson, Annabel, 65, 230 n.32, 232 n.55 Perkins, William, 146 Petrarch, 19, 21-22,35-37, 65, 78, 217 n.66 Petrey, Sandrey, 209 n.2o Pigman, G. W, 148 Plotinus, 12-13,169 Plutarch, 92,112,138, 229 n.22 Pocock, J. G. A., 255 n.9 Poliziano, Angelo, 18-20, 51 Pollock, Zailig, 54-55, 201, 220 n.19 Pope, Alexander, 17, 54, 221 n.31, 234 n.79 Post, Robert, 211 n.49 poststructuralism, 7 practice theory, 7-8 Prynne, William, 250 n.58 psychoanalysis, 6,115,180,188, 256 n.19 Puttenham, George, 20-21, 61, 218 n.2 Quintilian, 210 n.37 Radzinowicz, Mary Ann, 155, 250 n.59 Rajan, Balachandra, 253 n.87 Ralegh, Walter, 12, 60-61, 63, 66, 81-83, 84 Rambuss, Richard, 67-68, 70, 80, 224 n.63 Reformation, 14, 43-49, 52-60, 62-64, 82, 143-144,146,177,184-186,190, 200, 245 n.6, 255 n.10, 258 n.34, 259 n.44

Index republicanism, 90,105,111,160,164,169-171 restoration, 251 n.73 Rose, Mark, 234 n.73, 235 n.91 Rosen, Barbara, 244 n.63 Rowland, Samuel, 48 Sacks, Peter, 51, 215 n.3O Sandys, George, 235 n.85 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 21 Scarry, Elaine, 14 Scattergood, John, 28-29, 30, 213 n.9, 214 n.2o Schwarz, Kathryn, 237 n.5 Schibanoff, Susan, 32 Scodel, Joshua, 213 nn.6, 7 Scot, Reginald, 59,114,128,132-133 self-consciousness and reflexivity, 4, 6-9,16, 18, 37, 53-54, 65, 72, 91, 92, 95,104,112, 117,124-127,129,136,137,167,177, 181-182, 212 n.51 Sexby, Edward, 170 Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra, 101-102 As You Like It, 197 Coriolanus, 102,106, 233 n.71 Funeral Elegy, 16,194-201 Hamlet, 10-15, 42, 47, 67, 85,94,101,103, 112,114,119,123,139,141,153,172,197, 201, 210 n.36, 211 n.38, 231 n.43, 234-235 n.81, 247 n.3o 1 Henry IV, 139-140,168-169,184-185,189 2 Henry IV, 179,182,184-186,189-190, 193-194,257 n.26, 259 n.43 Henry V, 16, 89, 91-92, 95,111,118,175-193, 254 n.94 1 Henry VI, 115, 237-238 n.5 Julius Caesar, 15, 72, 85, 86-113,138,152-3, 169-170,174-175,194-195,198-200, 205, 248-249 n.48 King Lear, 11, 248 n.38 Love's Labour's Lost, 257 n.26 Macbeth, 72,111,115,116-117,140, 209 n.15, 236 n.94 Measure for Measure, 14,124,139,151,178, 260 n.48 Merchant of Venice, 105,135, 258 n.36 Midsummer Night's Dream, 118,178,182 Othello, 10,151, 248 n.38 Rape of Lucrece, 258 n.33 Richard II, 94-95, 97,109,181, 231 n.39

267

sonnets, 19-20,72,79-80, 93,105,106,181, 192,197, 204-205 Tempest, 168,179,182, 243 n.46, 256 n.17 Titus Andronicus, 233 n.69, 235 n.85 Troilus and Cressida, 36, 40, 98-100, 178,191 Twelfth Night, 33,105,135, 234 n.8o Venus and Adonis, 93, 230 n.29 Winter's Tale, 128, 242 n.46 Shaw, George Bernard, 237 n.5 Shawcross, John, 251 n.73, 253 n.87 Shuger, Debora, 211 n.45, 211 n.48, 227 n.100 Sidney, Sir Philip Astrophil and Stella, 37, 82, 211 n.42, 216 n.49 Defence of Poesie, 3-4,13-14,39, 61, 76, 87, 89-90, 92,208 n.5, 217 n.54 Skelton, John Agaynst the Scottes, 38 Collyn Clout, 40 Garlande of Laurell, 17, 41-43 Phyllyp Sparowe, 15,17-49, 50-51, 53, 63, 71,112,175,193,197, 200 Replycacion, 43-49, 62 Why Come Ye Nat to Court? 40-41 Skinner, Quentin, 255 n.9 Slights, Camille Wells, 146-148, 247 n.21, 257 n.24 Smith, Emma, 177, 211 n.43, 255 n.8 "social body," 15 speech-act theory, 7, 8,10,38, 53,109, 209 n.2o Spenser, Edmund, 15, 50-86 Amoretti, 35, 68, 71,79-80 Colin Clouts Come Home Again, 83, 227 n.102 Epithalamion, 35, 68, 75-76, 79 Faerie Queene, 49,51,58-86,112,138,193,197 Mother Hubberds Tale, 67, 81, 83-84 Shepheardes Calender, 24-25,33, 82, 214 n.23, 215 n.3o Teares of the Muses, 73, 75-78, 225 n.79, 226 n.88 Virgil's Gnat, 78-79 Stallybrass, Peter, 230 n.32, 244 n.65 Stannard, David, 246 n.15, 247 n.20 Steadman, John, 245 n.5 Stirling, Brents, 230 n.27 Stubbes, Philip, 240 n.29 Swinburne, Algernon, 131-132,133

268

Index

Taylor, Gary, 92-94, 98,104,107,112, 229-230 n.24 Taylor, Jeremy, 148, 238 n.5, 247 n.21, 253 n.86 Tertullian, 171 Theocritus, 21 Thomas, Keith, 229 n.17, 244 n.63 Tillyard, E. M. W., 237 n.5 Tragedy and appropriation, 103-106, 234-235 n.81 and authorial responsibility, 4-7,13, 51, 90 and authorship, 10,12,14 and spectatorial responsibility, 10, 88, 90 Tyndale, William, 46 Underdown, David, 240 n.28 Upton, John, 71 Van den Berg, Kent, 224 n.59 Vaughan, Henry, 152, 202 violence and representation defined against ethics of mimesis, 3-4,11, 12-13, 87,197 and early modern culture, 3-7,13,14, 40, 43, 54, 87,174 and historicism, 6, 8,12,117 and interpretation, 7,9,10,11,13, 72,174

and modern culture, 5, 208 n.8 and Romanticism, 4,93,208 n.4 Waddington, Raymond, 252 n.84 Wall, Wendy, 48-9, 56, 218 n.81 Walker, Greg, 40, 217 n.57, 217 n.59 Waller, Edmund, 37 Watson, Robert, 211 n.45 Weimann, Robert, 178, 255 n.13 Whigham, Frank, 209 n.21 White, Hayden, 229 n.2o Wiggins, Martin, 209 n.16 Wilson, Luke, 239 n.23, 241 n.32 Wilson, Richard, 235 n.91 Witch of Edmonton, 15,113,114-138,175, 200 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 11-13, 208 n.8, 210 n.36 Wittreich, Joseph, 166-167, 245 n.5, 251 n.79, 252 n.85 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 35, 69 Yachnin, Paul, 229 n.12 Yoder, R. Paul, 195, 201-202, 203, 204, 205, 262 n.67, 262 n.68 Zwingli, Huldreich, 59